Harvest (60 page)

“
And don’t forget about
being a published writer.”

“
It was only a short story
in a collection.” Craig had spent so long struggling it was hard to
take praise.

“
You were chuffed enough
when you got the acceptance letter. Didn’t you get about a thousand
pounds for it?

“
Yeah, I am proud of it.”
Craig felt himself flush. His career seemed to be going well, but
it was Kelly that made him most happy. He wasn’t going to admit
that to Jason though. “I get the thousand when it has gone to
print, the whole thing could fall through in between now and then,
but it does look pretty promising. Have you heard from
Cat?”

Jason took a drag on his shake.
“Only on MSN. She still seems tweaked too.”

“
She has taken it all
pretty hard, but if she’s as tough as she acts she will be okay.”
Craig thought about asking how Jason was after Rachel’s funeral,
but he had already asked him online a little while ago and he said
he was doing okay, plus Craig couldn’t take today being too
heavy.

“
I guess were all gonna be
scared of the dark for sometime now.”

“
Not to mention having a
serious phobia of spiders.” He wasn’t sure why the thing had chosen
a spider body, but he had read since then that the form of a spider
was a Jungian archetype; something that was commonly thought of as
evil and to be feared across different cultures. Maybe the entity
played on that fear. He could feel the direction of their
conversation and his thoughts slipping back to what had happened.
He didn’t want that. “Your mum okay?” he blurted.

“
She’s not happy at
granddad’s place. She says it’s got too many memories. She wants to
move to a different part of London. She was even going on about
getting out of the city, maybe even the countryside!”

“
Really? That’s a big
change.” After what had happened Kelly managed to extend her break
from work and she had stayed with him back home, she had loved Bath
and she had said she wanted them to seriously consider moving out
of London when she had sold her flat. Craig had experienced his old
reluctance at giving up on his London life, but it had been pretty
miserable, and being home hadn’t been as bad as he had thought. It
was actually nice to have mum fuss over him and it had been great
to have a few drinks with Darren. It felt good to be part of a
family. “You okay with that?”

Jason’s shoulders dropped and he
cast his eyes down on his shake and toyed with the straw. “Not
really. I don’t want to move into the country. So I played the ‘But
I have just started a new school’ card and she agreed to think
about it more. She hasn’t been very well. Got some sickness thing,
she keeps being sick all the time, says she hasn’t been like it
since she was pregnant with me. She thinks its stress from losing
granddad and all the trouble she’s having selling the flat.”

Not to mention his mum having to
watch her best friend lose her kids one after the other, then lose
her mind and consequently her husband too. He hoped for Jason’s
sake that his mum didn’t make a clean break of things, he
remembered how disruptive such moves had been to him at school and
with making friends. “Sorry to hear that buddy. Say ‘hello’ to
her.”

Jason looked up at Craig with
arched eyebrows. “Er, texts and X-box death matches are one thing
but telling her you met me from school and bought me a shake? I
think not.”

It was easy to forget that the
only thing that bridged the age gap and connected them was what had
happened to them, and no one knew about that. The last thing he
needed was to look like he was grooming Jason. “Good point. Give me
the shake back.”

He laughed. “Hey, I don’t have
any problems. Even if you were to buy me some fries next time it
would be fine by me.”

Craig gave him a little
shove. He was a cheeky fucker. Craig remembered Kelly was trying to
get away from her association with being the ready meal cook and
cook something from scratch tonight. “You want to grab a bite now?
My treat.” Jason nodded, and he steered the boy towards Kentish
Town. “Actually I was thinking that I can do much better than fries
when we catch up again;
Star Wars
is playing at the 02 in Finchley Road as part of their
classics series, you and Kelly need an education in all that is
good about
Star Wars
so I
thought as Cat is a fan we could all have a bit of a reunion over
popcorn or something.”

“
Did you know that film is
twice my age?”

“
Shut up.”

Kelly paced backwards and
forwards in the small and cluttered lounge while she waited the two
minutes out. She surveyed the mess and longed for the call that
would tell her that her flat was sold and they could move out of
their rented one. Every room had towering stacks of boxes from
Kelly and Craig’s old places, it wasn’t worth unpacking, and she
didn’t want to get comfortable. She was keen to get a new place
with Craig and start their lives over again.

But what if...

No. She topped herself. She had
been Miss Sensible and made them have the conversations about the
age-gap about what they wanted from life. They were compatible she
reminded herself. They wanted the same things.

They had become lovers straight
away. It was a passion she hadn’t felt in a long time, it didn’t
have the tenderness of first love or the staleness she associated
with marriage but they ached for each others bodies and it was
exciting and fun. She no longer had the empty hunger for love and
affection, she would reach for him or more often than that he would
reach for her. There was none of the desperation she had felt in
marriage. She had never felt so safe.

She checked her
watch.
One minute and thirty
seconds.

The last three months had
changed things in a way Kelly had never thought possible. Kelly,
Craig, Cat, Jason and Rachel had had to change, to do things they
had never thought themselves capable of; to stand up to nightmares,
to destroy demons physical and spiritual. She dwelled for a moment
on the thought of Rachel. She hadn’t seen her fall, but she had
seen her body in the dirt and flames. She sucked in a deep breath
and busied herself in tidying up after Craig. So many had died at
The Heights; consumed and transformed by that
thing.
She caught sight of her reflection in a
mirror propped against a wall and was startled by her haunted look,
it was the same look she had seen on Craig’s and Cat’s face on the
three occasions they had met for a drink in the last two months and
talked about The Heights.

Craig’s future looked good. He
hadn’t told his family yet but he had two other short stories being
considered for publishing and he was half-way through a rough draft
for a novel. He was pouring himself into his computer hour upon
hour. It was probably cathartic. The novel wasn’t a direct
retelling of what they had experienced, Craig didn’t think he could
do that, he didn’t want to be seen as profiteering from the tragedy
but his works were definitely inspired by those events. The short
story he was getting published was about losing someone and the
burden of being the only one to miss them and keep them alive in
memory. It was about Vicki.

One minute.
One minute?
She listened to her
watch tick. It hadn’t stopped.

Some of the other residents at
the tower would have their own stories, but the media had moved on,
and so had the topic of talk for the locals. It was difficult
having experiences that no one else would entertain outside of
fiction. How many horror novels had been inspired by real
experiences? Maybe the genre itself was born from trying to get the
weird and the frightening accepted and believed.

The last time her patrol car had
taken her past the flats she had seen a ten foot graffiti mural of
a death-like undertaker sprayed on a patch of the ground floor
wall. Perhaps some of the teenagers that had survived the flats and
knew the truth were finding their own way to spread it and keep it
alive in people’s memory. Maybe Camden would get its own urban
legend.

Thirty
seconds.
She wanted to be sick. She didn’t know if it
was anxiety or the nausea she had been feeling for
weeks.

Kelly rarely saw people she
recognised from the flats, most of the familiar neighbours at The
Heights had gone. Too much had happened. Too many people were gone.
There was a hole in the community there. There were too many
questions that demanded answers for people to feel comfortable
living there again. It seemed she was not alone in wanting to move
on and find somewhere new to rebuild. Kelly had heard rumours that
The Heights were no longer being considered for the protection of
becoming listed. Possibly because of the negative associations, but
Kelly wondered whether the magical influence that Rachel had
suggested, had dissipated and the significance of ‘three’ no longer
needed to be preserved within the landscape. Kelly smiled at
herself, Rachel lived on in her. She would be so proud.

Kelly had changed in so
many ways now. She had even made the effort with work colleagues
and was waiting for there to be a night out planned so that she
could make herself go to it. She wanted to fill her life up. She
checked her watch. The two minutes were up. She returned to the
bathroom and peered at the plastic stick that sat on the toilet
cistern.
Now she just had to tell Craig that she was
pregnant.

Cat removed the dried flowers
from the railing and they crumbled in her grip. She tied a fresh
bunch in their place and a bitter wind wracked them, flapping the
leaves and prying at the delicate petals. She didn’t know how long
she would keep up these visits. She didn’t really know what she
wanted by coming to The Heights. To prove to Rachel, if she was
still there, that she thought of her? She wished her love for
Rachel had been stronger than her anger for her mum’s death. Not
only was she haunted by the relationship she had lost with her mum,
but she was also haunted by the relationship she could have had
with Rachel. Rachel could have eased her grief. Two words were all
Cat would have had to have said in those precious few moments
before going down into the basement. “I’m sorry.” She said to the
flowers. “I’m sorry.”

The tower served Rachel’s memory
well. As epitaphs went The Heights were pretty impressive ones. The
tower loomed above her, stark and grey, but it was just concrete
and glass now. She had beaten back the life that had once possessed
it. It looked more drab than she remembered; dark stains from
weathering and pollution ran from ledges and orifices, making each
ridge in the moulding look like a bared rib on an emaciated body,
each window looking like an eye in a sunken socket. The building
looked sick. Graffiti had begun to weave its way onto the walls
like weeds crawling out from behind the dying and diseased looking
holly bushes quicker than they could be whited out. Maybe it
wouldn’t make such a good memorial after all. Two more months and
the real grave stone would be ready. Cat had gotten her ashes
interred with her mum and a new stone engraved for them both. It
was the least she could do.

The tower had the feeling of
decline. She couldn’t face going back there to live after they had
killed the thing in the basement. She was staying at Rachel’s flat
and was looking for a place where she couldn’t see The Heights on
the horizon. Somewhere closer to university. She had negotiated a
couple of month’s extension of her course because of the trauma’s
she had experienced and planned to go back after Christmas. She
wasn’t the only one that had wanted to get away from the tower. The
urge to move on seemed to have infected a lot of the residents of
the tower. If you went into a local estate agent you could
practically pick the floor of your choice and the direction you
would like to face there were so many flats for sale in the
building.

Away from the tower it
had been easier to force back whatever it was that the
thing
had left in her mind. She
treated it like a bad memory and walled it up in her head as she
had done with so many other things and she left it alone. When she
returned to The Heights she worried about the strength of that
barrier. She felt a fear and anxiety, which although she guessed
was natural at returning to a place where there had been so much
danger and loss, she knew that somehow the feelings came from the
part of her mind she dare not go. It wasn’t
her
fear. She ignored the feeling as much as she
could even though it shaped her thoughts. Leave. Go
home.

LEAVE NOW!

It was ridiculous, the only
thing she had any reason to fear and flee had been blown to pieces
and crushed and then those remains burned into ash in the inferno
that had raged in the basement. Despite winning the battle there
was something within her that was bitter and defeated, and again
they were not her feelings; a secret side to her psyche that
contradicted her relief at overcoming the evil.

Having secured her flowers she
decided to give into the anxious urgings. The door to the tower
opened and a woman struggled through with a double-pushchair. She
recognised her but didn’t know her. Cat skipped up the steps and
held the door open and guided her wide load through. The girl
walked as if she was pregnant and as she stood back from her
struggle and blew out a sigh she saw she was showing through her
top. The girl thanked her and Cat nodded acceptance, but her hasty
retreat was halted by the girl calling out after her.