Harvest (40 page)

“
Just think of me as a
self-treating St Bernard.” Rachel replied to Craig’s arched
eyebrow. “Despite fourteen floors to Cat’s flat,” she swallowed a
breath. “The lift didn’t appeal.” Rachel eyed Craig and his new
injury. “I see you have traded in your sling for a crutch. You
might want to stop throwing yourself at things!”

“
You’re a couple of hours
too late; all the jokes have been had.”

“
Oh that is a shame.”
Rcahel’s face became serious. “And how are you, dear?”

Kelly nodded. “I’m okay. It
shook me up like I said to you earlier on the phone, but I’m
okay.”

Kelly prompted Craig to tell
Rachel about his experience with Cat outside Harry’s flat. When he
did Rachel looked grave and sombre.

“
It would seem that I am
right to push Cat for answers. I had better go to it. I don’t want
to leave Jason too long. Not fair to leave him worrying about me. I
better get this over and done with and climb the rest of the way up
there.”

Kelly’s mouth briefly drew down
at the corners. “Well, good luck. She has a spy hole in her door
like everyone else here so she might not even answer to you.”

“
I know, but I have to
try.”

“
Yeah, because if Cat
doesn’t help, or doesn’t have any information then we are just back
to waiting for something else to happen. The only way I can see us
getting answers at the moment is for something to happen to us.”
Neither women answered him and he realised that they hadn’t thought
of that.

“
Yes, quite. It’s late, I
better go. I don’t want to leave Jason too long so I won’t call in
on the way back down. Going down is easier anyway. I will ring you
when I’m safe at home and fill you in or arrange to meet up with
you tomorrow or something.”

Kelly agreed and saw Rachel out
and then returned to Craig’s side. “Are you okay?”

“
Me?” Craig felt his face
flush.

“
You gave a grim
summation of our situation a second ago. I didn’t quite realise it
was like that until then.”

He thought of Vicki and
his frustrations poured out. “What has been happening in this
building. What happened at the hospital. The thing with Harry. None
of it makes any sense.
There’s no explanation to be
found in any of it. When are we going to get some
answers?”

Kelly glanced down into
her glass, clearly unsure at how to respond to his outburst. “We
are closer to anyone else on this. Hell, we are on top of it.
We
will
work something
out.”

Craig sighed and rested his
head on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes.

He felt the leg of his jeans
being tugged at the hem. “You want to sleep?” Kelly whispered.

“
No.”

“
You were
asleep.”

“
I was?”

“
I thought you were
thinking then your breathing changed.”

Craig liked the idea of someone
watching him sleep. He would prefer watching Kelly sleep though.
That was one of the things he had liked about being in a
relationship when he had been with Lisa back at uni; someone
feeling comfortable enough with you to fall asleep beside you. “I’m
sorry, it’s nothing personal. Sleep has a way of sneaking up on me
lately.” He widened his eyes as if he could prop them open with
everything he could see, but he could feel the tiredness like some
invisible creature squatting on his chest. “Yeah, maybe I should
call it a night. Sad, isn’t it. I’ve been tired for days, maybe
weeks.”

“
Not sleeping?” Kelly
asked as she dragged a quilt from behind the sofa. She perched on
the arm of the chair and looked down on him. “It’s not surprising
really after all that’s been happening.”

Craig looked up into Kelly’s
face as he considered his words, unsure if he wanted to tell her
what he had been experiencing. “I sleep, but I dream a lot.”

“
Bad dreams?”

“
The worst. Not like any
nightmares I have had before. They are so vivid, so graphic.” He
watched Kelly’s face as he considered telling her more. Her
concentration hadn’t faltered. “There are really intense emotions;
pain and terror. It’s all so raw and real.”

Kelly slipped from the arm of
the sofa onto the seat. “I have had dreams I thought were real
before.” Kelly read Craig’s discomfort and prompted him.
“What?”

Silence crept in around them in
the gloom before Craig could say what he needed. “You don’t
understand. The things I dream about – They feel intense and real…”
He paused. “Because they are real.” Craig emptied his glass into
his mouth and was relieved at having told someone.

“
Memories?”

He cringed at having to spell
it out to her. “I have had some dreams of quite specific events.
Then later, hours or days later, I hear about something that has
happened or I find myself coming across something and I find that
what I dreamt has happened for real.”

Kelly looked a little scared.
Of him? “Coincidence?” She suggested.

“
I have been down that
road too. I dreamt that old guy that drowned in his bath. I dreamt
the woman gutting her husband at breakfast.” It was clear Kelly
didn’t know what to say. “I have dreamt other things too; people I
don’t know about. Horrible things that I haven’t heard about yet.
Things that haven’t been discovered maybe. I dreamt something about
Vicki that I can’t or don’t want to remember and now I can’t get
hold of her, and no one at her office has seen her even though she
had a hot story from here.” Kelly took his hand, and although her
touch felt good he had to pull his hand away and move to the edge
of the sofa to break the connection between them as her kindness
might cause him to break down. “When I sleep I worry that someone
will die.”

“
Craig, I don’t know what
to say. I don’t understand any of what’s happening, my brain just
isn’t wired that way, but I have relied on you to help me believe,
so I believe you. What I can believe though is that you can’t look
to yourself for any blame for what’s happening here.”

“
I know. But I can’t get
away from the fact that if I sleep something might happen to
someone.” He could feel the tiredness draw on his words, as if
talking about his dreams was an incantation that summoned him into
that world. “Do you dream?” He asked quickly, desperate to avoid
falling asleep again.

Kelly swept a swathe of hair
from her face and looked away for a moment. “Yeah, I used to. After
I left Ian I had bad dreams all the times. I would dream that I
went back to him, or I hadn’t left and things were better. Or I
would dream that I end up alone. Not quite like your nightmares but
as you can imagine it created a lot of doubt, fear and anxiety when
I didn’t need it.”

“
There are lots of things
to be frightened of. You don’t need monsters for a
nightmare.”

“
Yeah. So I don’t dream
anymore. Not since I started taking sleeping tablets anyhow.” She
shrugged.

“
Ungh! Uninterrupted
sleep! I could do with that. I just don’t want to dream anymore.”
he murmured, losing his battle against the darkness behind his
eyes.

“
I don’t know that you
should take any of my sleeping tablets.”

“
No, best not
to.”

He was woken up by the rolled
up quilt slamming into him. “Hey! I could keep hitting you with
this to keep you awake.”

“
You could.” She swatted
him with it again. “Yes. That could do the trick.”

“
Craig.” Her tone was
serious. “You are going to fall asleep, you already have. You
aren’t going to be able to avoid it. I’m going to get myself ready
for bed and read in my room, if Rachel calls me with any news I
will come and wake you. Even if she doesn’t I will come and check
on you in a bit and see if you are okay.”

“
It’s not me that I’m
worried about.” Craig cuddled the quilt sausage. “Yeah, you’re
right I know. Okay then.” He thanked her for letting him stay and
began arranging a bed on the sofa. “Twenty four and I’m going to
bed at ten. Sad,” he harrumphed.

Kelly looked caught by
something but he didn’t know what. His age? Or was she just as
disappointed by the end of their evening together as he was?

“
No stamina obviously.”
She had recovered from whatever it was.

If Vicki had made a comment
like that he would have made a crude comeback, but he held back
with Kelly as he wasn’t sure how she would take it, yet somehow
that buzz of anxiety that came with daring himself to say something
was just as exciting as flirting itself. They said goodnight to
each other. He slipped out of his top and jeans and pulled on a
pair of jersey pyjama bottoms and climbed in under the duvet. He
checked his phone in the hope that he had missed a text from Vicki.
He hadn’t. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stay awake long and it
was the end of the evening but he didn’t want to be on his own. The
electricity was back in his stomach. He tossed the cover aside, got
up and went to Kelly’s door. He hesitated for what felt like
forever in the darkness, willing himself to knock.

He was startled when the door
opened and he could see his shock mirrored in Kelly’s face.

“
What are you doing!”
Kelly gasped.

“
Not what it looked
like!”

“
Listening at my door you
mean?”

“
I was going to knock,
but you beat me to it.”

“
I guess I can be
grateful you didn’t grab one of my breasts like you nearly did when
we first met.”

All Craig could do was
laugh and burn up. “Seriously, you said something back there and it
got me thinking. You said you could check on me, well this is going
to sound very much like a line from
Nightmare on Elm Street
but I was thinking if
you were going to read for a bit you could sit in the lounge and
watch over me too. If you see me looking a bit restless you could
wake me up.”

Kelly looked everywhere but at
him and took her time to answer, probably recovering her wits from
his scaring her, and seemingly doing everything not to look at his
bare chest. Would she even like what she saw? “You are going to
have to sleep properly sometime, but yeah, sure I can do that.” She
turned back into her room and the door drifted open fully. It was
lit by two small table lamps, each on a bedside table. Craig didn’t
get much of a look at the room before Kelly returned to the door
with her quilt bundled into her arms, but he noticed the surfaces
were neat and uncluttered while the furnishings, the velvet
headboard, the scatter cushions, the fur rug, were plush and cosy
looking.

“
Where
were
you
heading when you
caught me lurking anyway.”

If she picked up on his
flirtatious insinuation she ignored it. “I had left my book in the
lounge and was coming to get it.” Her face flushed. She wasn’t
going to bite, but at least he had got her heart racing a bit. They
didn’t talk much more after this except for another goodnight, but
snuggled under his quilt he took comfort in having Kelly in the
same room watching over him as he waited for the nightmares to
begin.

Chapter
Thirty

Rachel entered the staircase
and glanced upwards at the remaining four flights of stairs that
zigzagged from landing to landing to the fourteenth floor. Cat’s
floor. She glanced over the glossy black banister looking for
encouragement from the floors she had already conquered, but the
sheer drop that yawned below her seemed to stretch and the landing
retract, pitching her forward, as if the great throat of the
building had swallowed.

A dull ting of metal on
concrete grounded her vertigo.

She held her position and
listened intently, her senses chasing the memory of the sound while
she looked about her for a visual clue to its cause. Nothing.
Rachel swallowed the discomfort that had gripped her chest from
peering over the banister. “Don’t look down.” She instructed
herself. She glanced around her warily then continued her
ascent.

Scraaaatch. The sound of metal
dragging lightly across stone rang out again, and was then
silenced. Rachel’s head snapped upwards, and instantly homed in on
the direction of the sound. The shadowy angles of the stairs
offered no sign of movement, but whatever had made the sound was
above her and out of sight, and her journey to the top would take
her to it.

On the fourteenth floor
at the end of the corridor seven doors down from Cat’s flat, a
fluorescent tube fluttered winked then blinked out, casting Neil
Harris’ door into darkness. Within the flat Neil stood in his
kitchen and sloshed hot water onto the coffee granules in the two
mugs on the worktop. The rich smell of the coffee gave no comfort.
All he could think of was Jane in the other room and what he could
say to her. He stirred a sugar into each mug, and then cursed
–
Karen
liked sugar,
Jane
didn’t. He quickly tipped it
away and poured another cup. As he tucked a flank of his shoulder
length hair behind his ear he found his hands were shaking with
apprehension. He heard her voice call to him.

“
Are you growing that
coffee?”

He quickly explained his
mistake, but didn’t mention Karen.

“
Typical, two years and
you can’t remember what I take in my drink!”