Harvest (35 page)

Coincidence. Kelly needed to
say but couldn’t bring herself to.

“
The most disturbing was
a vision that I experienced here, Cat’s face screaming at me, then
her face changed into that man’s, Malik’s, face. It gave me the
idea that he has some kind of hold over her. It startled me so much
that I spilt my coffee and it spelled out ‘HELP ME’ as it ran and
made a puddle.”

Ridiculous. If it wasn’t
for other people being affected by equally strange events, and
witnessing one herself then she would be questioning Rachel’s
mental health. Unless it was
folie à
deux?

Rachel’s university
friend David had recorded what she had seen, when he eventually got
his recordings back there would at least be physical evidence to
support the strange lights she had seen at the Chambers. Even
though her instinct was to dismiss Rachel there was a nagging
insecurity behind it. If only it
was
mass hysteria. There was something happening
at The Heights and Kelly could not dismiss that so
easily.

As if realising Kelly’s
struggle Rachel deflated and sunk resignedly in her chair. “Oh, I
know how much this is to take in, but it happened. I was definitely
awake. I don’t expect you to be able to explain any of this but you
must see why I think there’s more than mere coincidence at work
here. There is a connection!”

Kelly was distracted from
Rachel’s delivery of yet more mystery by stern voices muffled by
the wall of glass. She shushed everyone and scooped a curtain of
her hair away from her ear and listened close to the blinds. After
a few minutes she looked up and whispered what she had heard to the
others. “A nurse has just got security to remove Malik… I think
he’s gone…”

The door burst open an inch
from Kelly’s face. A petite blonde nurse stood in the doorway
looking as startled by Kelly as Kelly was by her.

With a hand on her flat chest
to steady her nerves, the nurses questioning eyes flicked over each
of them. “We do try to limit visitors to one or two… Are you all
relatives?” she sounded cautious, but Kelly had just heard her
being firm with Malik, and she could see red blotches on her face
and neck from her frustration.

Rachel stood up. “I am a
relative of Cat’s, not blood, but I am the closest she has to
family.”

The nurse seemed to step down
her wariness. “Even so we do prefer just two visitors per patient
at any one time.”

“
These are some people
that know her from where she lived.” Rachel flustered. “I hoped
that familiar voices might get a reaction… Silly
really.”

The nurses resolve softened
fully. “No of course not, the hearing is thought to stay
receptive.” She winced, “you’re probably appealing to the only
sense available to her at the moment. I was just taken aback by
there being so many people in here. Do you know the man that was
outside this room a moment ago?”

Rachel shook her head. “I’m
glad you mentioned it. I felt a little uncomfortable with him
always being here, I’m quite sure Cat didn’t know him, and you hear
such grim stories these days.”

Rachel could think on her feet,
Kelly was impressed.

“
Well, rest assured, we
take the security of patients very seriously,” the nurse pressed.
“I will leave you to it.” She withdrew and closed the door behind
her.

“
Well Malik’s gone now
anyway,” Kelly stated. “My ‘I’m-a-police-officer’ line installed no
leverage in that situation. I would have thought Malik would have
bolted.”

“
Perhaps you need the
uniform. Yes. Definitely the uniform.”

Kelly laughed, blushed and was
flattered and conscious of herself all in one go at Craig’s
remark.

“
Well, that proves it. If
describing myself as being the closest Cat has to family doesn’t
wake her, then nothing will.”

“
She really has no one
else?” Jason’s quiet voice seemed to surprise everyone.

Rachel pursed her lips. “No. It
was only Cat and her mum, and then her mum died.”

Rachel yelped, and Kelly found
herself startled again. At first glance Kelly didn’t register what
had happened, but then she saw the pale hand clamped to Rachel’s
wrist. Cat’s hand.

Rachel was momentarily
transfixed by it and then composed herself and looked up at the
others as if to check that they saw what she saw. “Cat? I’m talking
about your mum. Think about your mum. Remember your mum. You had
each other. She loved you so very much.”

Rachel continued to talk to Cat
about her mum and their affection for each other and Cat’s eyelids
fluttered in response, as if her very words were teasing her out of
the coma’s mire.

Cat sprung upright from the
bed, her eyes snapped open and she drew in a deep wheezing breathe,
she registered Kelly and the others and scrambled up to the head of
the bed. She saw Rachel at her side and released her arm the
instant she realised she had it in her grip. Kelly found the blinds
at her back and realised that in her surprise at the sudden
eruption of activity she had leapt backwards. The lads looked
equally startled, but none so much as Rachel who had slumped back
in her chair and was nursing the arm that Cat had snatched at from
her deep sleep.

Suddenly registering the
flimsiness of the gown and her nakedness beneath, Cat tugged at its
hem to cover her legs before making a grab for the bedcovers,
pulling them around her and up to her chin. Her attention darted
from face to face in wild panic. “What the fuck are you doing
here?” She stared at Rachel then snapped back to Kelly and the
others. “Who the fuck are you?” Her voice had been slow to form but
the word ‘fuck’ and the anger behind it seemed to help her voice
return. “What the FUCK am I doing here?” She screeched like a mad
dog yapping at the moon before her mouth snapped shut, animal fear
wild in her eyes.

The look of sheer terror on
Rachel’s face was greater than it had been when they had watched
Amy disappear off of the monitors, it was clear she wasn’t going to
be able to pull herself together quick enough to settle Cat down.
Kelly stepped forward, patting the air before her in a gesture for
Cat to calm down. “Hey, hey. You are okay. Just settle yourself
down. You are okay.” Cat fixed Kelly with a vicious stare that left
her wondering if she should be holding a chair before her
lion-tamer-style to fend her off. Kelly halted and held her hands
up in surrender. “You are okay. You are in hospital…”

“
No shit, Sherlock! I
kind of fucking got that!” Cat hissed. She yelped as she snatched
the IV needle out of her hand, it was followed by a pulse of blood
that leapt onto the white sheets. She pulled the heart monitor clip
off her finger and a shrill alarm lanced from the bedside
monitors.

“
You had some kind of
episode at your flat. You have been here for a few weeks. In a kind
of coma. You can hear that alarm…” She pointed to the unknown
instrument on the trolley making the noise. “Well, I’m sure a nurse
will be coming in any minute. So let us just relax.”

The door of the room ripped
open and slammed against the wall, fracturing a glass panel opaque
with a crunch. She saw the large butcher knife first, then saw that
it was Malik who brandished it. He ran at Kelly, but somehow Kelly
knew she wasn’t the intended victim, and he was taking the most
direct route to Cat – through her. He was on Kelly before she could
rush at him and cancel out his force with her own momentum, and she
staggered backwards under his charge. Her trainers squeaked against
the linoleum. She gripped at his scrawny arms and forced them up,
keeping the knife away from her and shoved him away.

Craig cautiously sheltered
Jason in the corner and from there he made a move to tackle Malik,
but stopped himself as Malik’s knife arm flailed out in his
direction as he stumbled backwards from Kelly’s push. She didn’t
allow Malik to recover but charged in with a jab from her right
fist that connected hard with the ridge of his bony cheek. His face
snapped away from the blow and cast a ribbon of blood from his
mouth that dashed against the blinds. She lifted her foot for a
kick at Malik’s shins, but in mid-swing Kelly’s head rocked and the
side of her face erupted in a storm of pain as Malik lashed out an
arm to balance himself and caught Kelly fully in the face.

The force of the blow and the
shock of it coming unbalanced her and sent her following the swing
of her leg. Instead of a kick she had to stamp that foot to the
ground to stabilise herself, but Malik had recovered and shoved at
the back of her head pitching her into Craig.

Craig caught her with one arm,
yelped then let go of her and she realised he had caught her with
his bad arm. She fell against Craig and he went down with her in
what must have been an attempt to cushion her fall. She ended up
draped against Craig, leaving the whole of her back prone to
Malik’s knife.

The knife didn’t come.

Despite her face being mushed
uncomfortably into Craig’s shoulder, she saw from the corner of one
eye that Malik had decided to press on with his attack, and was
advancing on Cat, his knife raised. Cat squealed and floundered,
apparently caught up in the sheets she had cocooned around herself
only moments ago. Kelly regained her bearings and balance, pressed
her hands flat to the ground, sprang herself from Craig and flopped
to the floor bridging the gap between her and Malik. He shifted his
weight to one leg so that he could pitch his weight into a stabbing
arc. Kelly kept herself low, and she hoped out of striking distance
of the knife, and tugged sharply at his other leg. Unbalanced, his
swing broke from a strike into another flail. Cat’s legs found
their way free of the covers and bunny-kicked over the side of the
bed, connecting forcefully with Malik’s side sending him careening
across the room and crashing against the Venetian blinds. Jason
took his chance to escape and dashed past him through the door, and
hung back in the corridor shouting for help.

Kelly clambered onto all fours
and Craig was at her side helping her up, shakily she stepped one
foot then the other to the ground and stood up herself, she briefly
took her eyes off Malik to check on the two women and found that
Rachel was the other side of the bed, still in her chair but with a
blank stunned look, while Cat was half-standing and half-propped
against the wall several feet away from her. Suddenly a dark shape
charged into Kelly’s peripheral vision, Rachel cried out from her
stupor and Cat went rigid as Malik charged across the room with his
knife ready to thrust.

A sound split the air in a tone
that cancelled out the whine of the heart monitors alarm. It was
like the choral wail of inhuman voices that built and peaked
uncomfortably in Kelly’s ears, and in a second it was gone leaving
only a ringing wake. A current of air followed on the last dying
note of the cry, and the briefest of seconds later it was followed
by a crash so loud that Kelly felt the room shake beneath her
feet.

Cat was still propped up
against the wall. Rachel was still seated. But no Malik. Kelly
thought it strange that she could see all of Rachel instead of just
the view of Rachel’s torso as she had had moments ago, then she
realised that the hospital bed that had obscured her view was now
gone. Craig staggered away in an uncoordinated fashion, clearly
startled by the wail and the crash, but it was only as he moved
away that she gained a clear view of the other side of the
room.

Malik was pressed against
the glass wall with blood bubbling from his mouth. A Venetian blind
had come loose from the window and hung off one of his shoulders,
and it revealed the toughened safety glass fractured into a fine
sparkling web. The whole glass wall and its splintered wooden frame
seemed to bow into the corridor from behind Malik. It was then that
Kelly registered the hospital bed jutting out from Malik’s middle.
Seeing the scene as a whole it appeared that
somehow
and with
some
-
force
the bed had been sent across the room with
enough momentum to sweep Malik off his feet and slam him into, and
very nearly through, the glass wall at the opposite side of the
room.

The petite nurse skidded back
into the doorway flanked by two rakish porters. She froze and
blinked as she took in the scene of impossible devastation. A
broken Malik slumped forward onto the bed and one of the blinds
punctuated the quiet by falling noisily from the wall and onto the
bed before clattering to the ground.

The nurse said it for everyone:
“What the fuck…”

Kelly rested on a bench several
doors down from the room where the two porters were sweeping up
glass from the aftermath of the skirmish. While she waited with
Craig and Jason for Rachel to emerge from Cat’s room they had
watched Malik being carefully removed from the room. Taken away for
emergency treatment for his mangled legs. Even with her distance
from Cat’s private room she could still hear Cat shriek the
occasional obscenity at the Doctor and nurse that were probably
attempting to persuade her to stay for observation and tests. She
couldn’t hear Rachel, but then Rachel had withdrawn within herself
since the fight, although Kelly suspected it was the shock of the
return of Cat’s spite and not the sudden outbreak of violence that
numbed her: Rachel was enduring a crushing rejection from Cat.

Craig dropped to his haunches
before her. “Let’s see what the damage is.”

“
It’s nothing.” She
shrugged.

It didn’t deter him and he held
a wave of her hair from her face and studied her. She was instantly
uncomfortable and conscious of their prolonged look into each
others face and she averted her eyes. She was grateful to have
Jason sitting beside her. With him there the touch couldn’t
possibly be anything more than a demonstration of concern. She
probed the inside of her mouth with her tongue and found stinging
lumps on the inside of her cheek where her teeth had raked at the
flesh.