Harvest (24 page)

With Cat before her the
wounds she had inflicted on Rachel’s heart were meticulously
remembered as a fresh experience.
The regrets poured
out of her with an arterial energy:
If
only things had been different, to have only been there when Cat
needed her, to have been able to fulfil the promise to Helen, to
care for Cat as only Helen had done.

“
Cat,” she announced,
conscious that there would be no reply. “I know you don’t want me
around. But I heard you were here and I was scared for you. I
brought you some things.”

Announcing her presence made a
hole in the silence which began to yawn uncomfortably without a
reply. Rachel stepped to the bed and set the cup of hot coffee down
on the bedside cabinet, imagining Cat’s rage and abuse flailing and
thrashing in the depths, trying to free herself from the coma’s
overpowering gravity to respond. She hesitantly placed the bag on
the bed wondering if her presence would be the shock that would
wake a sleeper. She unzipped the bag and started to empty it and
decided to fill the gaping silence with a commentary of the items
she had brought.

As her fingers found the
plush body of the next item in the bag she bit her lip against the
emotion that strummed it into a quiver. She brushed the battered
cuddly toy against Cat’s hand. “Remember Terrence Ted?” She
disguised the fluctuation of her voice with a throaty shallow
laugh. “
You kept him all this
time
. I saw him on your bed at the flat. He must be
nearly twenty years old!” Rachel braced herself against the
determination of her emotion by scrunching her grip on the bear’s
body. “
I bought him for you from the gift shop in this
very hospital. When Helen...
When your mum – when she
w
ent into labour with you.
”
The weight of misery for Helen and Cat crushed
her resolve. “Why did you push me away?
All I ever wanted was to be there for you. Your mother wanted
to know someone was looking out for you.
It’s
what
she
wanted.
”

A deep personal need for
atonement sobered her from her indulgent grief. Ignoring the tears
cooling on her cheeks she drew a chair to the side of the bed.
“Well. I guess I had better make the most of you not fighting me.”
She grinned falsely with a determined old-school hockey sticks
stoicism bolstering her words. “I’m here for you until you wake. So
that gives you incentive to open your eyes and tell me to bugger
off.” Putting any thought of rejection aside she gripped Cat’s hand
firmly in hers. “So don’t be stubborn. Wake up!”

Cat declined the order like an
obstinate top hat failing to produce a rabbit after an abracadabra.
The exclamation of silence gave way to the calm of the back-ground
noise of the ward and brought with it a heightened awareness of the
watcher on the other side of the glass wall. She refrained from
looking in his direction but the thought of him and his constant
glare wore down the barricade she had erected against his presence.
Something about him ate at her instincts; the way he looked at
her... There was a familiarity in his stare: A menace she felt
acquainted with.

Rachel sought her coffee to
distract her senses only to have her fingers gnashed at by bitter
coldness. Her hand recoiled and the radiance of the cold burn
subsided as quickly as it had ignited, studying her fingers she
found there were slithers of delicate ice dissolving and sliding
from her finger tips. She wiped the water on her sleeve before
tentatively poking the drink. It was heavier than it had been when
she had put it there, inexplicably weighted down.

Rachel peered into the cup and
discovered a glistening fractured black crystalline surface.
Needing confirmation that the drink was indeed unexplainably frozen
she poked the cup harder, but with a caution reserved for
retrieving something from a venomous snake.

She jumped as Cat’s heart
monitor panicked with a pernicious squeal that crammed its jagged
sound into her ears. Rachel’s shock jogged her cautious touch into
a shove and the cup tipped over, she instinctively righted the cup
only to be scaled by a slop of coffee that was hot and fluid again.
She turned her attention to the heart monitor machine, its
electronic blurt had lasted only a second or two and left a buzzer
droning in its place. Cat’s eyes flickered as if she would wake and
Rachel sat forward and grasped her hand, despite the eerily strange
change to her coffee her focus narrowed to following the sporadic
twitches of life that played across her face.

Rachel’s concentration was
shattered by a resonating bang and she snapped round to see the
wall of windows reverberating from the strike of the man’s palms on
the glass. He glared intensely at Cat. Rachel followed his stare
and found Cat’s face was motionless, her apparent struggle to break
from the murky surface of her coma had been defeated by determined
undercurrents dragging her back into the depths of sleep. Rachel
sagged back into her chair exhausted from the white-knuckle shocks
and waited for the flickering charge of energy in her chest to
dissipate.

A swarthy dishevelled porter
entered the room with a machine on a trolley, his loose blue tunic
and trousers sailed about him as he glided purposefully to the bed
and apologised for his intrusion, seemingly having missed the
disturbance Cat’s spectator had made. “Don’t worry.” He nodded his
head to the heart monitor. “The noise just indicates the equipment
is playing up.” Which seemed good enough reason to worry. He
casually groomed a lock of his shoulder length hair away from his
face before silencing the machine. He unplugged it and disconnected
Cat from it with the same casual efficiency he held for the other
sockets and connections.

Rachel half-listened to his
further explanation, more concerned with what had just happened to
Cat and her coffee.

The porter persisted. “She have
trouble with electrical gear at home?”

A silence pressed itself
insistently against her thoughts and Rachel suddenly realised the
porter’s unanswered question. She quickly constructed the
half-perceived sentence and politely asked him to elaborate.

“
Well, this is the
twelfth machine she has had. There’s never anything wrong with
them. They work again after a few hours. At first we thought it was
the electrics in her room.”

“
But?”

“
But... This is her third
room. Now we just keep swapping the machines over.”

The porter connected Cat up to
the replacement machine he had brought in and wheeled the faulty
machine out. As she watched him leave Cat’s watcher dominated her
field of vision from the frame of the glass wall. Her skin tensed
from an icy plunge of realisation as the mask of the man fell away
and she recognised his glare of grim purpose that had haunted her
with its familiarity. It was the same fierce intensity she had seen
in Harry’s face.

Chapter
Nineteen

The door to Craig’s flat opened
and Kelly was surprised by the gloom.

“
Are you
budgeting?”

Craig studied her blankly for a
few moments before appearing to register her meaning. “Oh... I just
woke up. It was light when I nodded off.” He snapped the light on
but Craig still looked grey. “You just woke me up actually.”

“
Sorry. I had to work
late and Rachel hadn’t called so I thought I would pop in on the
way up and see if she had called you.”

Craig rubbed his eyes slovenly
and stepped aside for her to enter and shut it behind her.

“
Still sleeping off last
night then?” She held her ground, pressed against the wall in the
hall waiting for him to take the lead and move into the flat. He
didn’t. “Has Rachel called you?”

“
No, I haven’t heard from
her yet. You worried?”

“
A little I guess,
although I am not even sure what I should be worried
about.”

“
You heard from your
people, the police, at all?”

“
No, but I’m on edge the
whole time expecting them to call.”

“
How is
the arm?” She needlessly pointed to his injury and wished that
asking after his injury had been her first question.
“By the way…”
She added rolling her
eyes at her thoughtlessness.

“
That’s okay. It’s
actually not too bad,” Craig huffed his words on the tail of a
yawn. “Might try without the sling tomorrow. Fancy a
tea?”

Kelly deliberated over the
offer, and realised she had taken a discomforting amount of time to
decide. “Yeah, that sounds good.” It might be the first time they
spent any time alone together socially but it wasn’t a marriage
proposal. “I’ve had a rough day. I need a good cuppa!” The events
of the previous night had changed things; they had experienced
something disturbing together, an event that she only accepted as
fact due to it actually being a shared experience. She needed to be
around Craig and Rachel to help her make sense of things. She
didn’t dare to call him a friend, but he was no longer a stranger
to her, or a predatory threat. They walked through to the kitchen,
which still caught a little of the dying light of the day.

Craig stood at the sink filling
the kettle. “They gave you a difficult time about last night didn’t
they?”

Kelly sagged against the
doorframe, slouching within her uniform that had been uncomfortable
all day after the lecture she had received from a fraught Bill
Harris, her sergeant, over her involvement with the Chambers. She
released her hair from its tight knot and let it fall where it
wanted to. “I got a dressing down. I got ribbed. But, I think I
have been my own worst critic. Been beating myself up all day for
getting involved – for what happened.”

“
Don’t.”

“
Easily said, I have a
monopoly on neurosis. Why did I get myself involved?”

Craig shrugged. “Well, I would
blame me.”

“
I
might just do that.” Strangely, it had been because of him. She
rubbed her face confounded by how it was most likely her own agenda
to get involved with Craig, but she didn’t want to dwell on that.
That conflicted dramatically with some very conscious life
decisions regarding involvement with men. “So weird...
Ugh!
Things are so
weird!”

Craig flicked the kettle on. “I
know – I keep trying to sort it all out in my head. I mean where do
you go with a train of thought that involves kids going missing and
ghosts? How do you possibly follow that up?”

“
I
know. I know. I would doubt it too if I hadn’t seen it and been
half-terrified myself. Accepting it at face value doesn’t even
help, because what do we do now? Get a mad medium like Derek Acorah
or an Indian spirit guide…” her words raced to keep up with her
outpouring of frustration, “…
or the
bloody
Ghostbusters!
”

Craig sat at the table and he
motioned for her to join him. “Well we already have the mad
medium.”

Kelly laughed, but felt
slightly defensive of Rachel. “She is nice though.”

“
Yeah, I know. She’s
harmless enough. I feel bad about doubting her intentions now.”
Craig looked at her searchingly. “You still worrying something has
happened to her?”

Kelly fingered the edge of the
wooden tabletop. “No. I don’t know. Just after last night, not
knowing what happened or how, it makes it hard to know if we or
others are safe or not.”

He seemed to recognise her
discomfort with her openness and got up to make their drinks. “It’s
hard to feel safe. Whatever is going on is happening here, so
Rachel is probably okay. Although I guess we don’t even know what
we are dealing or whether it is confined to this place, let alone
how to deal with it.”

“
Are you suggesting we do
nothing?” She bit her lip as soon as she heard the bite in her
tone.

“
Hey, I’m all up for
getting to the bottom of this thing, but unless you know what’s
going down, there isn’t much we can do.”

Craig met her gaze and
held it until his reason overpowered her misdirected frustration.
“Sorry… I wasn’t getting at you.” Kelly raked her hair from her
face. “
‘Going down?’ ”
she
quoted him with an arched eyebrow.

“
Yeah, that was a bit
street wasn’t it?” he conceded as he returned to his seat and slid
her drink over to her.

“
Maybe for the nineties.”
She rested her face in her hands.

“
You don’t like feeling
out of control do you?”

She wrestled with not wanting
to be understood, especially by a man. “No, but then who does?” She
admitted reluctantly as she looked up.

“
Yeah, but it seems that
more frightening to you. The uniform you wear… What you stand for
in the force must make you feel a sense of security. Yet now the
Police can’t deal with what’s happening.”

“
I know… Did you sugar
this?” she avoided.

“
One and a half just as
you like it.”

Talking with Rachel the night
before had been the closest she had come to talking about her past,
and here she was with her fragile nature exposed again. “I seem to
be very transparent lately.”

“
I only remembered how
many sugars you took…”

Kelly grinned. “That’s not what
I mean.”