Harvest (21 page)

She stood before Cat’s
door and didn’t give herself the chance to change her mind. She
rapped the knocker. The sound echoed outwards, clattering and
resounding off all the other doors, reaching the end of the
corridor before being choked and silenced. Rachel became aware of
the spy hole that faced her, staring with its beady cyclopean eye,
lit from the light within the flat. She waited for the eye to blink
as Cat came to the door.
It was a bold move for
Rachel, but she accepted it was possibly futile as it was unlikely
Cat would open the door to her.

She wasn’t purely
indulging her painful longing for reconciliation and closure on an
issue that haunted her, Rachel knew Cat had talents like her own.
To her knowledge she had never used them but if this activity had
spread out within the building, then Cat might have experienced
something similar to t
hat strange dark entity of
energy and raw emotion
that Rachel had encountered in
Amy and Emily’s bedroom
.
Rachel shook the
memory of that experience from her mind, for it seemed to squirm
within her mind as if the remembered event had a life of its
own.

The eye in the door had yet to
blink, or the door to pull open.

Rachel knocked again,
concern dawning on her as she noticed six inches of splintered wood
running along the edge of the door where the lock met the doorjamb.
Rachel fingered the raw chewed wood that was
exposed
from the white gloss of the doorframe
.

“
Can I help
you?”

Rachel spun round to the
short, older stern looking woman, who leaned from a neighbouring
doorway. “Just calling for a friend...”
Rachel
carefully eyed the who looked decidedly odd in a knee length
cardigan and a colourful crocheted hat. She looked dark, scruffy
and dishevelled against the crisp clinical creams and whites of the
corridor.

“
There’s no one there...”
The old woman eyed her in return with an arched eyebrow. “You a
friend? You know where the girl is, don’t you?” She asked
accusingly.

“
I was hoping she would
be here. She hasn’t moved?”

“
You aren’t close then...
If you don’t know where she is... Unless no one has contacted you?
Doesn’t seem like she had much in the way of friends or family...”
The woman openly weighed the level of trust she could place upon
Rachel. Her thin puckered lips pursed as she stopped, apparently
unfinished in making her judgement.

Rachel decided to step in and
tilt the balance in her favour. “I am as close as she has to
family. I was checking in on her. We haven’t spoken in a while.”
She delivered the bare truth and waited for the woman’s
verdict.

The rag-like lady seemed to
warm slightly, her sharp expression softening. She emerged from her
flat and leaned on the wall. “I hate to tell you. The girl had to
go to hospital.”

Rachel suddenly thought of
Helen, the promise she had made to her and her heart became a lead
weight in her chest.

The older woman seemed to pick
up on Rachel’s shock and shifted uncomfortably on her feet,
bringing herself out from the wall. “I have heard that she
stabilised. She hasn’t woken yet though, that was what I last heard
from the hospital.”

Her face flushed with the shame
in claiming to be as close as family, yet not knowing what had
happened to the girl. The girl she had said that she would care for
as if she were her own child. “What happened?”

“
I remember; it happened
in the morning. I heard all this crashing and bashing around. I
came out to see what was going on. I could hear the girl screaming.
She wouldn’t answer her door. So I called the police. She must have
had some kind of ‘mental episode’. Or drugs…” The small lady
paused, but Rachel suspected she was fishing for gossip. “She
ruined her flat. She was out cold when they found her. She’s in a
private room at the hospital if you want to visit her. Actually,
you could do the girl a favour,” the woman resolved as she fished a
small bunch of keys from her pocket. “And it would be helping me
too. I don’t get out much you see, legs aint what they used to be
now, nor my head for the outside either. You could take her some
things?” She smiled hopefully, revealing a maw of black and yellow
teeth eroded into pins. She held up the key. “Alec, the caretaker,
changed the locks for her ‘coz the police busted her door in. He
fixed it up well though. She has been in hospital for three weeks
now and I’m sure she could do with some fresh things.” Taking
Rachel’s smile as acceptance of the job, she rattled a key in the
lock. “Shame I haven’t been able to help more. Don’t know her
really, kept herself to herself, but she seemed nice
enough.”

The woman pushed the door open
but it momentarily resisted her, a rush of air hit against them as
if the door had been hermetically sealed and the air pressure had
changed with its opening. The woman managed to force the door from
the grip of the wind that howled louder from within the flat now
the door had opened. The cold air bit viciously at them both while
the noise of flapping plastic lashed at their ears like the
flapping of some dread bird. Rachel followed the old woman’s
example of pulling her clothes close to her as she entered. She let
Rachel enter first; herding her through the flats claustrophobic
hall with its doors off to the bedroom, and the bathroom, and into
the lounge.

The lounge walls were a crisp
lime green, while the furniture seemed to be an ash colour, but it
was hard to gauge what kind of home Cat had made for herself since
she had left Rachel’s because the room looked like a tornado had
swept through and shredded the room into debris and a scene of
carnage.

“
Looks like a bomb hit
it, doesn’t it...?” the woman clicked disapprovingly. She smelt of
pear-drops.

Rachel dared to take a few
steps through the mess. There was a crushed sideboard to her left,
the sides pulped with its chipboard bared from beneath the wood
grain-laminate in ragged cracks and splits. The contents of the
draws; papers, bills and letters were spread about the room like
confetti. The wall behind the remains of the furniture was
indented, the centre of it caved inwards to reveal the back of the
plasterboard wall for the bedroom beyond. The couch that looked as
though it had originally been arranged further out into the room,
was sagging with it’s back broken and the hard wooden frame pressed
against the green fabric, the bulk of the sofa now rammed into what
was left of a large bookcase with an impact that had demolished
several of the shelves, spilling their burden.

Rachel was puzzled at the
extreme extent of the damage. “You’re saying Cat did this?”

The lady shrugged. “I didn’t
see anyone else come out. There was no one else in here when they
came in.”

Rachel focussed her
attention to the sideboard with its back forced through the
plasterboard wall. On the wall leading away from her a
picture-frame was embedded flush with the plaster, the glass
fractured into a splintered web. She noticed other items of debris
embedded into the walls as if pressed in by a great expanding
force. She looked to the jagged yawning spaces that were once
windows, their glass gone leaving sharp sparkling teeth. The holes
were taped over with clear plastic that rippled and flapped in the
wind. “It’s hard to believe that one person could do...” Rachel
surveyed the devastation in incredulous shock, “
all this.”

The woman grunted in a
disdainful way communicating that she believed anyone capable of
anything.

Rachel stepped closer to the
middle of the room, it was from this vantage point she observed
that the debris radiated out around her in a blast pattern, as if a
bomb truly had gone off in the middle of the room, blowing
everything outwards. Rachel made a full 360-degree turn in
surveying the pattern of the damage.

A psychic blast slammed
violently into her mind. Her perspective shifted from the middle of
the lounge where she stood to a view from the edge of the room,
looking in at the area where she should have been. The room was
restored to its original undamaged state.

A noise forced itself into her
head like a train whistle exploding in a tunnel, screaming through
her mind, its crescendo lashing her senses with hot pain. Green
light blazed into the room with albescent intensity at its core
that paled her surroundings into obscurity. Her eyes adjusted to
the light in her mind’s eye and within that fire she saw the
slender figure of Cat in her nightclothes. Cat was snapped from her
feet and suspended mid-air at the heart of the light over the very
spot where Rachel had stood.

Cat’s face was a contortion of
pain and defiance as if the very air about her menaced and tortured
her. The fall of her shoulder length red hair was disturbed into
wild writhing Medusa strands. Light exploded from Cat’s head in a
shockwave that rippled through the air, blasting the contents of
the room to the walls. Rachel cowered from the vision of the
powerful blast that played within her mind. The anguish faded from
Cat’s face and she sank to the floor as if time itself had slowed
to a torturously lethargic crawl. Cat sprawled, crumpled and
motionless on the floor like a discarded marionette.

“
You
alright, love?” the lady asked with a distrustful tone and puzzled
expression.
“You should be careful in here, could do
yourself an injury with all this stuff.”

The vision of Cats assault was
over and she found herself staring at the beige cord carpet
glittering with its sprinkling of broken glass, Cat was gone and
Rachel was restored to her physical position in the middle of the
room. Rachel tried to reassure the woman with a smile despite the
sting of hot tears pressed into her eyes by the wrench of seeing
and feeling Cat in so much distress. She dabbed a balled up tissue
against her face as she fought to contain her shaken will. “
Cold
in here...
” she excused her watering eyes and nose. Rachel
clambered to make sense of what had just happened. The flash of
emotion and power had been similar to the experience within Amy and
Emily’s room, except this time there had been a defined image of
the event that had occurred.

Once again her clairsentience
had helped her pick up the trace or the memory that the burst of
psychic energy had left within the room at the point she had
stepped into. Rachel was well aware that concentrations of
electrical conduits, bad rewiring or faulty electrical equipment
could create powerful electromagnetic fields that could
subliminally affect the senses, inducing nausea and hallucinations,
it was thought to be the most common cause of suspected paranormal
activity, but mostly it was mild, nothing as overwhelmingly
powerful or clear as the potent nightmare she had just experienced.
It was quite evident that something had happened to Cat far beyond
a ‘mental episode’, but there had been something
else
beyond
her senses of sight and sound… The wordless-screaming-noise seemed
to leave a wake echoing within her mind, like an unformed thought
lacking clarity or mental voice; primal, raw and aggressive. A
residue of a sentient entity, just as there had been at the
Chamber’s flat, only this time it had been more intense and
powerful. Within this anonymous thing she had sensed in the lounge
there had been a caldera of emotions, fear, curiosity, confusion; a
madness of jumbled intense feelings that were at once satisfied and
harmonized into menace and intent.

Rachel crunched back across the
debris but before she could agree to the old lady’s request of
taking Cat some belongings she noticed a glint of silver behind the
open door. She crouched and found three photo frames protruding
from the debris. She pulled at the buckled silver frame that had
drawn her attention, careful of the blades of glass that flowered
outwards, and studied it, recognising the picture instantly.

Helen.

Rachel had the same photograph
on her mantle-piece at home.

She liberated the second frame.
It held a photo of Helen holding a six-year-old-Cat’s hand on a
pebbly beach, the breaking surf frozen in time. Rachel remembered
the daytrip to Brighton. The edge of the photograph ran close to
Helen’s shoulder disturbing the symmetry and balance within the
framing of the image. Helen had once been the centre of the
picture, flanked by Cat and Rachel. Rachel fingered the edge of the
photograph where it had been trimmed. Rachel had been holding
Helen’s other hand before a blade had sheared through the
photograph. The reminder of the hate and bitterness that Cat held
for her cut her deeply.

The last frame was in two
pieces. With a trembling hand Rachel slipped the photograph from
the pile of broken glass and shook the glittering slithers from it.
It was a more recent one of Cat taken within the flat when it had
been in order. It confirmed the accuracy of her vision. More
significant was that in the photograph Cat was holding a kitten
nuzzled to her face.

A small black and white
cat.

The old lady interrupted her as
she saw the picture. “Oh, Lord! I clean forgot about that. She had
a cat. It ran out when the police bashed in. I took it in and cared
for it. I like cats, but haven’t had one for a while. The poor
thing must have had the scare of its life in here when all this
happened. The thing ran off when I opened my door one day. I tried
to chase it. But – well. Needless to say, it moved faster than I
could. I hope the little thing didn’t come to any harm. Cat’s are
quite independent though, I’m sure it has found itself a few homes
by now.”