Harvest (23 page)

“
Claire told my mum they
have ghosts, and they took Emily and Amy.”

“
Oh? And what does your
mum think?”

“
It’s weird because mum
and Claire have been best friends since before I was born, they
have known each other since they were at junior school together,
but mum doesn’t believe her, she thinks Claire isn’t thinking
right, she’s worried about her. I thought that coming from Claire
she would believe her.”

“
People have different
ideas about things. Different beliefs. Sometimes people just don’t
agree with each other. It doesn’t mean they care any less for each
other though. People find it difficult to believe in some things
until they experience it themselves.”

“
So ghosts are
real?”

There was a hopefulness riding
the end of his question. “To me they are, yes.”

“
Don’t you get frightened
of them?”

“
No.” She lied. They
never used to, her ability and her understanding of the spirit
world had led her to believe that danger only existed in the living
world, but now she wasn’t sure. Although she didn’t want to admit
it to herself.

He frowned. “and monsters are
real too?” His question burned intensely in his eyes.

She now knew that in the
land of the dead that existed alongside the land of the living
there
were
undead monsters to
fear
and her talent suddenly frightened her for the
first time. “Yes.” It felt wrong to admit it to a child and she
felt guilty instantly, but she could see from the relief on his
face that her answer had somehow relaxed him from some inner
turmoil.

“
You were there last
night weren’t you?”

“
Yes.”

“
Claire told my mum that
at first even you weren’t sure whether to believe her. I heard mum
tell her friend that she thinks you were only there to keep Claire
happy, or you were there to make money out of them.”

Rachel sensed a deep adult vein
through his physical youth from his gentle coercion for her to
justify her involvement. “I couldn’t accept payment for my time on
this occasion, and I certainly wasn’t humouring her.” He shrugged
off her reasons and she suppressed some frustration with him; she
wanted him to believe her. “Claire simply needed someone else to
experience what she had experienced.”

“
Did you? Experience or
see anything?”

She bit her lip. He was good,
getting her hot under the collar by challenging her character and
motives, weakening her for a question he must surely know she would
be reluctant to answer honestly to him. She had already said more
than his mother would be happy with; maybe children needed the
comfort of their parents’ institutional disbelief in the
irrational. “No. Nothing,” the lie sat uncomfortably between
them.

“
If it makes you feel any
better I think my mum was wrong. I think you were there to find out
what was happening and you wanted to help.”

“
Thank you.”

To Rachel’s relief the lift
landed with a gentle bump and the doors opened onto the lobby of
the ground floor. “Well this is our floor.” She said as a prompt to
bring on the goodbyes. She wanted out of this awkward conversation,
but more than that, since she had woken up that morning in Craig’s
flat she had experienced an underlying urgency to get away from the
building. Somehow the place seemed different, smaller, and
claustrophobic – suffocating; as if the very building was looming
in around her, intimidating her into leaving as Harry had attempted
when she had first arrived. Being so close to the main door and the
safety and freedom beyond, the feeling intensified, hounding her
resolve.

The boy held his hand out and
Rachel looked at the adult gesture for the oddity that it was. She
took it gently and Jason introduced himself. She gave her name in
return and left the lift expecting the boy to follow, but instead
he lunged for the button of another floor and flopped back against
the wall. His eyes were sad. Before the doors could close fully he
called after her: “Please help.”

The lift whined away leaving
her alone in the lobby but for his oppressive words. She was
distracted from her misery by an intense sense that she was being
watched. Instinctively she knew where to look and found a shadow
cast face staring back at her from behind the reinforced glass of a
fire escape door marked “NO ENTRY”. Harry watched her intently from
the gloom.

Unnerved by his determined
stare Rachel turned away and rifled through her bag in a play of
distraction while surreptitiously keeping the door in her periphery
vision should it open. She walked quickly to the main door,
breaking her wary surveillance to focus on opening it, his unknown
intent pressed menacingly against her back.

Rachel was certain she heard
the fire door pull open in her wake. The hairs on the nape of her
neck bristled in alarm and she hastily clamped her bags under her
arms to free her hands to open the main door. She yanked the door
open as Harry’s presence bore down on her. He felt so close she
expected the door to be forced from her grip and slammed shut
before she could escape. She prematurely dived through the gap that
was barely wide enough for her, bashing both elbows painfully in
her clumsy desperation to escape. She slammed the door closed
against Harry.

Seized by the euphoric
reassurance of public exposure Rachel gulped her hammering heart
back into her chest, and with the safety of the heavy door firmly
shut between them she dared herself to pause in her escape and
study her stalker through the glass, but found the lobby was
empty.

Rachel had been so absorbed
with thoughts of Amy, Harry, the boy she had met in the lifts, and
all the strange and disturbing encounters she had experienced at
the Heights, that she found it hard to recall her bus journey to
the Royal Free hospital, but upon entering the hospital her
thoughts had concentrated upon seeing Cat again and her worry for
her condition. Anxiety at this reunion, even when Cat would be
unaware of her, heightened Rachel’s awareness of the world around
her and the corridors of the hospital provided a bewildering array
of stimulus.

The vending machine coffee that
she held in her hand had a rich pungent wake, some of the patients
that passed her were stale and unwashed, and occasionally there was
the faint but noxious smell of urine and faeces from clinical waste
areas. The bright fluorescent lights pressed down their glare on
her tired and sensitive eyes and splashed back at her from
distortions and depressions in the glossy linoleum flooring. The
clusters of bold coloured signs crowded in on her like insistent
railway signals jutting into the corridors and jostling for her
attention and direction, each new sign threatening to derail her
memory of the directions given to her by the reception staff. She
leapfrogged from one landmark to the next trying in vain not to
hinder visitors, porters, doctors and nurses who travelled with her
or intersected her path or came at her from opposite directions in
a bewildering demand on her concentration, coordination and
awareness. Normally her senses could have been selective in what
they processed, but in this place the dread in her head and the
remembered grief in her heart left her at the mercy of her
environment.

This drab concrete building,
with its high-rise design that was just as brutal and hard in
appearance as The Heights, had been the last place Rachel had seen
Helen alive.

It had borne silent
dispassionate witness to their last words together and the promise
that Rachel had been unable to keep. That time and Rachel’s failure
teetered on the brink of memory, but she couldn’t allow it to
descend upon her as each pertinent sign shortened her path to
Cat.

Rachel cautiously headed
into the ward. She stopped and gave way to two porters manoeuvring
a bed that held a sleeping patient. A nurse walked alongside
wheeling the patients intravenous drip stand before her. Rachel
stood fixed, stalled by the tragic youth of the girl on the
bed
.
An elderly couple
accompanied in her wake like pallbearers. Rachel was unsure if they
were living or spirit. The man flashed Rachel a pained smile of
empathy as they followed their relative who, whether they were dead
or alive, couldn’t be reached.

That’s what Cat will be like.
Despite being in the same room together, Cat would still be out of
reach.

Her resolve broke momentarily
and a sob wracked her body in one jarring spasm. She dowsed her
sudden surge of emotion and regained control. She swiped an errant
tear from her face and shakily filled her lungs with air that was
too warm and stiflingly thick with clinical smells to provide any
refreshment for her spirit. She followed the wards corridor through
the soft noise of people and hospital equipment until she reached
the nurses station.

As she spoke to the short stout
female nurse she became disembodied, experiencing reality from the
depths of a muffling fugue. The bright-eyed nurse’s cheerily
bobbing voice writhed sluggishly in her ears as the woman
acknowledged her request to see Cat, but warned her that although
she was breathing independently she might be startled by the sight
of Cat being nourished and hydrated by intravenous drip and
toileted by her catheterization. She reassured Rachel that Cat was
receiving physiotherapy to maintain her joints, muscles and
skin.

“
The tests of her blood
chemistry came back normal, and the EEG scan showed no trauma to
the brain; nothing that currently indicates why Cat is in a
coma.”

The world moved at half-speed
as Rachel processed the information. The nurse pointed down the
corridor ahead of them to Cat’s private room. Rachel’s
consciousness snapped dizzyingly back to reality at the sight of a
tall man staring into her room through its glass wall. Most of the
figure was wrapped in a large dark and unseasonable winter coat,
while his head was topped by a broad brimmed black hat that
shadowed his features. He stood a dark shape, almost a silhouette
in contrast to the sun exposed room beyond the glass.

“
In fact Cat has
curiously high brain activity for someone in a coma.”

The nurse failed to register
her prompting expression of curiosity regarding the watcher and
Rachel was forced to stop her and mouth her question to her. “Who
is that?”

The nurse leaned closer to
Rachel and whispered discretely. “Vicar or priest; says he’s
watching over her. Been here every day since she arrived I think.
He says he’s praying for her. He must be a good friend of hers to
spend all his time here. I’m starting to wonder if he ever leaves!”
She widened her eyes theatrically and used up the last of her
breath from her talking in a fleeting laugh of exclamation, but it
failed to distract Rachel from this man’s discomforting devotion to
his vigil.

Rachel studied his back
as they approached and considered the nurses words:
A good friend?
She wondered if she
could claim to know Cat anymore than this stranger might. Did he
have more right to be with Cat than Rachel did?
If he
was a priest then it was unlikely.
Cat and
God?
Cat had hardly been the kind to turn to religion,
but then it had been over a year since she had seen Cat – she could
have changed;
God knows she had needed
to.
Cat had been against religion since Helen had...
died. It was still difficult putting Helen in the same sentence
with death.

Rachel squinted through
the slats of the Venetian blind, trying to glimpse Cat beyond the
glass wall.
The nurse opened the door for her and
Rachel thanked her.
As she crossed the threshold she
stole a sideways glance at the man who kept vigil. She started at
finding his attention had shifted onto her with eyes glaring hard
and penetrating from a jaundiced bone-tight face. With her subtle
glance exposed Rachel tried to smile at him, but the gesture
withered and died under the repellent stare of his waxy feverish
face. She shut the door behind her and deliberately avoided looking
back at the glass wall, knowing his eyes were still bearing in on
her.

The July sunshine broke through
the window and into the plain white room and fell as an ethereal
dust hazed spotlight on the bed that dominated the room. The light
was blindingly scintillant along the large chrome cot-sides and the
sunlight’s brightness over-exposed the colour of the wires that led
into the bed from the equipment mounted on a trolley. Rachel
registered the sound of the heart monitor with its reassuringly
steady rhythm as she followed the cables toward Cat, but she found
she couldn’t complete the journey and her eyes ran a coward’s
retreat to the bedside cabinet. It was clear of well-wishing cards
and the vase was empty of water or flowers. There was no sanctuary
at the cabinet; it only served as a reminder that without Rachel
Cat only had the concern of the strange man outside her room.

Rachel allowed her eyes
to fall upon the small frame within the covers. Cat looked slight
against the large bed, almost obscured by the sheets neatly pulled
up to her shoulders. The shock of auburn hair fanned out on her
pillow like a fall of autumn leaves swept around a tree. Her
alabaster arms were laid by her side on top of the sheets, one was
fed with the intravenous drip while a finger on the other hand was
clipped to the heart monitor. Rachel blanked out the instruments
and apparatus and focussed on the fresh smooth skin of her face
that was blank of expression like virgin snow.
She was beautiful.
Rachel gripped Cat’s bag and
fought from crying. She knew that had Cat been conscious Rachel
would not be standing there but would have been retreating from a
torrent of abuse. Despite Cat being comatose there somehow seemed
to be a disturbed atmosphere of enmity between them that left
Rachel believing that even now her presence offended Cat and was
unwelcome.