Harvest (15 page)

Scott soft footed after Harry
until he reached a large door that was slowly drifting closed on
its automatic arm. It identified itself by a sign containing bold
letters:

‘
BASEMENT. STRICTLY NO
UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.’

Scott caught the door and
hesitantly pulled it wide and considered the consequences of
disobeying the sign. Scott rationalised that his minor trespass
would be wavered considering he was on Council business.

The basement was large
and gloomily lit by emergency lights, some of the fluorescent tubes
blinked and flickered creating a gentle strobe effect in their need
to be changed. Scott found the light switch in the murkiness but
decided the main lights would ruin his attempt at stealthy
discretion. The dim light gave vague definition to the large room
and the chain link lockers that ran the walls, securing the
supplies and tools required in maintaining the building. The lifts
were to his right and directly ahead of him on the far wall was
another door leading to the main stairwell that
the
residents used
. In the gloom ahead of him Scott could
see one of the lockers was pulled out from the wall at an
angle,
as if it had been dragged aside.

Scott neared it
cautiously. The shelves carried dusty mildewed boxes, abandoned
tools and several bottles of cleaning fluids. The fluids were
gently lapping the sides of the bottles that contained them,
snatching at the dim light in their movement. They had only
recently been disturbed. Scott peered behind the shelving into a
wall of blackness. The lockers seemed to cover a disused doorway.
Scott scanned the shelves and was relieved to find a club-like
torch. He snapped it on and blinded himself momentarily. He angled
the torch away from his face, blinking away the painful white ghost
of light lodged in his eyes.

Scott shone the torch
into the gap and squeezed himself in. On the other side of the
shelving was a double doorway with its heavy metal doors flung open
wide into the space beyond. He found himself in a large room, the
walls charred and blackened with thick soot while damp mould filled
any crevice and corner. The floor was cluttered with debris and
what seemed to be cremated furniture. The room was a black hole of
melted shelving units and twisted carnage. Shadows danced and leapt
in the air from the torches beam like scattering bats.
Scott surmised that it was one of the basements for the shops
in the parade within the base of the high-rise. The shops having
been burnt out about a decade or so ago, never
reopening
.

There was a large hole in one
wall and before it there was a large pickaxe half-buried in rubble
but untouched by dust or the shroud of soot from the fire,
suggesting that this was a new addition to the room, and that the
hole was recent. Scott approached the hole warily, knowing there
was no other place in the room Harry could have gone.

The hole was over a metre round
and where the concrete had been chipped and cracked with the axe,
its fresh grey and chiselled white exposure resembled teeth around
the large black mouth. There was movement within, accompanied by
the rustling of a bag, a brown object barely discernable from the
darkness, moving up and down like a thick brown tongue hungrily
writhing in the black maw.

Scott leaned closer and shone
the torch into the void. The torch ignited the tongue-shape and lit
Harry up like a flare, his face snapped round and he snarled
viciously through a mask of grease and grime, the crust flaking as
his face erupted in an angrily startled sneer. Scott started and
the beam bounced around the hole and strobed aspects of the room
into view. Scott glimpsed something behind Harry in a crater, a
gelatinous mass that he couldn’t identify, but seemed to radiate a
faint green glow, before he could dwell on the strange shape he was
sure was writhing or pulsating, his attention was drawn to the
refuse sack that Harry was shaking vigorously despite being
disturbed.

The beam of light darted to
chunks and slithers of putrefying flesh and carcasses that fell and
flopped to the ground from the bag, landing on a larger pile of
scavenged flesh. The maggots squirmed and the flies roared as the
rain of dead meat fell through the air onto black fabric. Scott
picked out the details of the material with the torch and found it
was a pair of trousers topped with a large black tail coat. At the
hem of the trouser legs he saw shoes. He tracked the thin frame
that held the items of clothing together and was met by the
consuming empty sockets of a blanched white skull, crowned with a
black top hat draped with matching black crepe.

Unable to formulate words to
address the scene he instinctively grabbed Harry and yanked him
roughly out of the hole. Harry stumbled back into the main room
with him and Scott sent the beam of light back to the mound of rank
meat which rested on the skeleton dressed as an undertaker, trying
to understand what he had walked into and what responsibility Harry
might have for the body. The grim skull grinned mockingly and
inanely through a misaligned jaw. Completely stripped of flesh the
light reflected off the polished yellowy bone, burning the
overexposed image of the ghostly face into his mind.

Harry turned and bolted while
Scott coughed on bile as the stench of the rancid meat hit the back
of his throat and choked him. Scott broke into a run, half in chase
and half in retreat from what he had seen.

Kelly walked by Craig’s side
from the lift towards his flat. She took one of his two shopping
laden bags while he rooted in his pocket to get his key.

Both turned sharply in unison
as Harry crashed out of the fire door at the end of the corridor,
panting and jogging shabbily to his own door beside Craig’s. Having
only ever seen him in a slow meditative dawdle they both looked at
each other in a mixture of surprise and bafflement at Harry’s
haste. Craig asked if he was okay but received no reply. “There was
a Scott something looking for you, a social worker...” Harry dived
into his flat and slammed the door.

“‘
Really? Oh, thanks for
telling me, Craig.’ – No problem Harry, any time...” Craig shot
Kelly a wry smile. She shook her head frowning and laughing in
return and they both dismissed the encounter. Craig gestured for
Kelly to go ahead of him into the flat and he closed the door
behind them. “I would give you the tour, Miss Mason,” Craig started
in a clipped posh voice, before finishing in an exaggerated common
swagger. “But being that my flat has the same layout to yours it
aint worth it.” Craig kicked off his trainers in the hall. “Hi
kids,” he called to David and Rachel in his lounge. “We’re home...
Sorry about the wait for munchies, there was a big queue down the
shops – must be lots of people planning a long night ghost hunting
and nibbles tonight.”

Kelly watched as Craig breezed
into the lounge and broke Rachel from a serious stare at nothing.
Since Rachel had come back from the Chambers Kelly had watched her
drift in and out of what appeared to be very distracting thoughts.
She was worried, but only ever said she was okay if Kelly
asked.

“
I hope you have
chocolate!” Rachel chirped enthusiastically. The introspection
gone.

“
Chocolate? I believe
that is the major food group I purchased: I have caramel and
chocolate, mint-chocolate, and the best: Chocolate and hazelnut.”
Craig shook the bags in the air. “Oh, and chocolate and chocolate
for the purists among us.”

“
Right then, I’m with the
boy with the chocolate...” Rachel marched him through to the
kitchen opposite the lounge and helped him unpack and make the
first of many mugs of tea for the night.

Kelly found herself abandoned
in Craig’s lounge. She had been there earlier after Craig had
called in to walk her round, but she had been busy helping move
equipment to take in the new environment properly. There were two
sofas draped with tie-dyed and Celtic patterned throw-overs and
scattered with mismatched cushions; the room had a student feel to
it but seemed homely. It was hard to get an idea of what the room
would normally look like with the a bank of uniform monitors on the
coffee table and thick wires trailing to what seemed to be a small
transmitter aerial, beside that there were five other smaller boxes
of varying shades of grey and different sizes with flashing LED’s
and displays with quivering metronome needles. “Looks like mission
control on a bad day in here...”

David looked up at her.
They had been introduced earlier over a tangled mess of cables.
“It’s all pretty technical, but basically I have set cameras up in
every room of the flat except the toilet and the master
bedroom...
This isn’t Big Brother, we
want to leave them some place to go and have ‘rumpy
and
dumpy’ in privacy.” Kelly would have like
him to smirk or wink to dispel his crudeness but he didn’t. She
couldn’t work out whether he was humourless or he had a Jack Dee
deadpan face. “The images all get transmitted to this receiver –
hopefully without broadcasting it to every TV in the building. All
the cameras have switchable or alternative spectrums like thermal
and infra red as we are doing dark filming. Then we got all these
little boxes of tricks... They measure temperature of the air –
signal any cold spots, hot spots. This one detects air movement or
displacement to check for small movements or breezes. This little
baby triggers when there is large movement and we have more
sensitive ones for the lounge and kitchen which will be unused in
the night. We have other sensors for EM (sorry; electro magnetic
fields), and a few other tricks.”

Kelly took it all in, not
quite remembering the purposes of the individual boxes, but
impressed at the technical side. It really wasn’t all just sitting
in the dark eagle-eyed in the hope of catching something elusive.
That was
if
they would
actually catch something. Now it wasn’t just the Chamber’s
that were affected she could see even less point to this whole
exercise, but then she couldn’t tell Rachel and David about the
other disappearances. Despite that Kelly still couldn’t quite work
out if she could bring herself to believe in ‘ghosts’.

Scott lumbered up the
last few steps, his heart pounding in his throat, the rush of blood
coursing through his veins making a hollow sound in his head. He
staggered through the fire door and panted to Harry’s flat. He
rattled the door-knocker, but decided not to wait for Harry to
ignore him. Scott’s thoughts tumbled like a rock slide in his head
as his mind tried to figure out w
hat Harry had been
doing with all the rotten flesh, and what the corpse was doing
hidden in the basement.
Harry could be in a lot more
trouble than Scott could deal with.
Scott produced the
key for Harry’s flat and rammed it home.

Harry stood in his
kitchen pacing. His mind focused on his actions with a clarity he
hadn’t experienced for weeks; the meat, the body, the scavenging of
bin bags, the skeleton, the strange husk that had gradually become
moist and alive with his visits and deliveries of rancid meat. It
all lurched at him from the foggy dream world that had somehow
separated him from what he had been doing. ‘Why? Why did he do
it?’
He knuckled his forehead, his fingers sliding in
the grease that coated his face. Tears welled in his eyes as he
desperately tried to regain control of his thoughts and think what
had been happening to him...

It stared at
the man-creature that answered to the name of Harry, circling
around him, knowing that this agitated him further. It had lost
control of Harry in the basement. Harry’s shock of being discovered
had fractured his thoughts and
It
had lost its control; lost its
ability to strike back at the intruder through Harry. Too weak to
attack directly, It needed Harry: Needed to get back inside him,
inside his mind.

The focus of Harry’s mind
shattered with the sound of the door-knocker rattling... Harry
looked down, startled to find his arm had moved without his
volition and had grasped a large carving knife. He dropped it onto
the work-top in fright. He could feel the soft voice teasing at his
mind again; Deirdra’s voice, his loving wife’s voice. It didn’t
seem to matter that she had died ten long years ago. Just that she
was there with him, speaking to him again. The voice carried him
off to a time before the forgetfulness and the apathy for his own
life and his surroundings, before he started thinking like a child
lost without love, before he forgot how to live like a human and
started living like an animal, scavenging and foraging for
food.

“
Pick
up the knife, Harry” she asked. “To carve the roast,” the voice
whispered –
Deirdra’s voice.
For a moment
he slipped into the past. It would be a Sunday if she was asking
him to do that ritual. They would have been to church and he would
have just woken from a light afternoon sleep in his armchair in the
lounge of his home. She would wake him, and in his Sunday suit he
would head to the kitchen following the aroma of chicken or beef,
to the large carving knife.

The key noisily chewed into the
door and it flew open.

Scott fell into the room
panting, the smell of bodily waste and decay crammed his nose and
squirmed in his belly as he gulped down sickening mouthfuls of vile
air in his exertion, he gagged on his own bile as his gut rejected
the atmosphere dragged into his stomach by his heavy breaths.
Suddenly Harry filled his vision and he was startled by a flash of
silver between them. Scott gagged again as his throat closed in
reaction to something hard striking his neck. Instinctively his
hands leapt to his mouth to stifle an expected surge of vomit. Hot
liquid gushed onto his hands before he could reach his mouth.
Darkness closed in around his vision as the nerves in his mouth and
lips told him nothing had passed that way. In that moment within
his panic he knew something was wrong. He wasn’t being sick;
it wasn’t vomit.
His crimson covered hands
suspended him within a sickeningly enlightened moment. He tried to
scream but his voice didn’t come from his lips, instead it gargled
from his exposed larynx in a prolonged stridor from his slashed
windpipe filling with blood like a submerged snorkel.