Harvest (17 page)

“
Quite. It’s just that
science hasn’t reached a level where such phenomenon can be studied
or understood. It’s like a medieval alchemist, or whatever their
equivalent of a scientist might have been, trying to understand
electricity. They might think it magic or witchcraft.”

Kelly shrugged. “How do you
explain ghosts then?”

“
I like to keep an open
mind. It will make it easier for me to accept any explanations when
this phenomenon is finally understood. Not that I think that will
happen in my lifetime, or yours. The theory that I like and that I
like to think is most probable, (because it fits what we already
know of human biology and chemistry) is that ghosts are a residue
of the energy that we all have inside us.”

“
So ghosts are like
radiation?”

Rachel turned her mouth down at
the corners in an impression of sadness. “Yes, not very romantic is
it. Our energies, biological, chemical and psychic make us who we
are in the spirit world, giving us our appearance, memory and
personality in the spirit world. And just like when they were
living, the spirits like to be somewhere familiar and around the
people they love, so their energy might be focussed on homes or
workplaces and around the people they have left behind, or like the
living they might find it difficult to let go of the past and are
haunted by the experiences they had in life, and they replay those
events over and over as we do now in our heads. This energy might
linger for a long time or it might dissipate over time.”

Kelly had a look of
concentration her face like that of a child that had just been
captivated by a bed-time story. “Dissipate? And where do you think
that energy go?” She said with a renewed scepticism edging her
voice, as if her mind had suddenly realised she was going along
with it and switched into denial.

“
I hope
for them that they go wherever their faith sends them.” Rachel
shrugged. “Then we get onto the biggy don’t we...
Afterlife!
If there is one I will
come back and tell you about that when or if I get
there.”

They both laughed and turned to
the soft light from the monitors that flickered ahead of them. They
had two views of every room in the Chambers flat, except the
parents’ bedroom and the bathroom. One monitor showed normal view,
while the other showed the green screen of infrared.

Rachel operated the zoom on
Amy. Her sleeping face filled the screen as the close up settled on
her, and they watched her as she lazily brushed hair away from her
eyes in her sleep.

“
She’s a cutie...” Rachel
whispered broodily.

“
I know. She looks so
peaceful.”

“
Peaceful
dreams.”

“
I hope they
are.”

Rachel caught her forlorn gaze
at the monitor. “You don’t have children?” she skirted
cautiously.

Kelly smiled grimly. “No,
afraid not.”

“
Not met the right man
yet?”

“
Hmmm.
Thought I had
.
I was
wrong.”

Rachel sympathetically patted
Kelly’s hand that supported her upright where she sat. “There’s a
Mr Right out there for everyone.”

“
So
what about you?” she deflected, her voice sounded choked.
“
Kids?”

“
Once, yes...” Rachel
answered, shifting her eyes from the sleeping girl to the surface
of her drink. “That was a long time ago.”

Kelly didn’t probe further.
“How about Mr Right, then?”

Rachel’s spirit lifted slightly
and a dry smile drew across her lips. “Okay; blow my reassuring
advice out of the water!” She took a deep breath, thick with
sadness. “Mr Right, turned into Mr Wrong and he left.”

“
Bastard. Leaving you
with a kid.”

“
Don’t judge him. It
turned out that neither of us could give each other what we wanted.
We saw each other from time to time but the situation gradually
made meeting up awkward,” Rachel spoke kindly, remembering how
Malcolm had found himself the family that Rachel had been unable to
provide, and Rachel had found Helen.

“
Sounds sad.”

Rachel nodded. “Oh, I think we
both have a sad story to tell. You don’t see your Mr Wrong
anymore?”

She shook her head. “He
wouldn’t know me now. I have changed a lot since then.”

“
As long as you haven’t
changed so much and become Mrs Wrong for any Mr Right that comes
along...”

Kelly looked away and
Rachel saw that she had hit a nerve, but Rachel was instantly
distracted by the monitor: “Do you see that?” Staring at the screen
she reached out with her drink for where she hoped the table was,
not daring to take her eyes from the image. “The lamp has just come
on in the lounge...” Rachel whispered pointing to the lamp that
burned like a flare on the green screen, overexposing an area of
the light sensitive infra-red feed. “There you go; first possible
sign of activity. Classic sign!”
she stated excitedly
and with a measure of triumph.

Rachel turned her attention to
Amy’s bedroom monitors, seeing the pitch-black normal feed, she
turned to the revealing infra-red screens that replaced the
darkness with a grainy green image. She used the joystick to move
the camera out from the close up on Amy to view the rest of the
room. Then she operated the camera in the lounge and made it pan
360 degrees. There was no one in the lounge to have turned on the
lamp.

Amy was still asleep, and the
door from the lounge into the master bedroom was still shut. There
didn’t seem to be anyone else on the monitors, nor any movement or
shadow – nothing to explain the lamp now being on. The family slept
on unaware of the strange activity. The hairs on her neck
prickled.

Kelly caught Rachel’s operating
arm and jerked the camera’s attention back to Amy who was now
sitting up in bed scanning the darkness, her iris’s glowing like
floating bright white orbs in the hazy green infra-red image. Eyes
wide and burning with fear.

A soft voice crackled
shakily through the tinny speakers. “Mr Sparky’s coming!” It was a
voice choked with terror, a level of fear Rachel never thought she
would hear from a child:
The fear of
death
.

There was a sound of
susurration from the speakers that built into a roar of a thousand
tormented infants. The noise broke down into a lancing squeal of
static feedback. Amy reacted to the noise in her room by swinging
her legs over the side of the bed and diving out from under the
covers seconds before a bright light overexposed the green
infra-red screen with its intensity. The normal feed monitor showed
a burst of bright green light glaring out of the darkness of the
room, briefly blotting out the view on the screen.

Chapter
Twelve

Craig struggled in the depths
of sleep. A noise disturbed him, disrupted his slumber. He became
aware of the lack of dreams, the emptiness of his unconscious world
as he balanced on the brink of waking. The blackness that
surrounded him shifted in the wake of an undefined shape that
snaked past him. A shape that, as he focussed on it, became a hazy
green ribbon of diffused light, an entropic pattern barely
distinguished from the void around him. It stayed ahead of his
search, writhing slowly, haunting him from the edge of his
perception. Sleep tugged at him as he swam after the shape, pulling
him into a descent towards a deeper rest, one he knew would claim
him for hours. It was as if the light was trying to lead him to
that state; luring him back to sleep. He pulled away and for a
moment he was sure it screamed with a multitude of infantile
voices, but the voices faltered and merged and became one
monotonous sound; the high-pitched whining noise that had first
infringed on his physical senses. The ghostly green tendril faded
and his eyes fluttered open and his dream world collapsed. In that
brief moment of transition into the waking world an anonymous spike
of anger lashed out from within his dream world in frustration that
Craig had woken.

The motion sensors sounded the
high-pitched wail that had pulled Craig from sleep, he opened and
closed his eyes in exaggerated blinks and lay motionless for a few
seconds. He watched David smacking away the taste of sleep from his
lips and roughly shoving his glasses on as he lurched forward to
the bank of monitors and controls. Craig followed as he tuned into
the rising anxiety within the room.

The camera view in Amy’s room
panned automatically to face the disturbance and movement. The
noise built to a howl over the speakers, the voices Craig
recognised from his sleep. At the zenith of the blaze of light the
sound was abruptly stopped. As quick as it appeared the light was
gone and the infra red view was restored, showing the grainy green
image of the beds blankets and pillows tumbling back onto the bed
as if swept up and dropped by an unseen force. Amy scrambled
hurriedly across the floor sobbing and whining.

Craig dived down beside Kelly
at the monitor while David blearily began examining the equipment,
switching off the sharp noise of the bedroom motion detector with
trembling hands.

“
Where are the parents?
What are they doing?” Kelly raced urgently.

The lounge sound sensor
registered a noise and directed the camera, focussing in on the
source of the sound. The parent’s bedroom door filled the screen as
the creaking of stressed wood crackled and groaned through the
speaker.

The hall motion detector
wailed, activated by Amy’s flight from her room. The camera
attempted to track her but she overtook its slowly panning lens,
clipping the camera in her haste, causing the picture to flicker
and shudder as the camera staggered on its tripod.

The lounge motion detector
sprang into life, grating the air in a shrill monotone before Amy’s
arrival could trigger it. The camera panned toward the ceiling in
search of the stirring in the air that had activated it. David
cursed trying to keep up with the multiple reactions of his
equipment and quickly silenced the sounds of the hallway and lounge
motion detectors that jarred their nerves, clearly struggling to
keep up with the action unfolding on the monitors.

On one of the green infra-red
screens Amy rounded the corner into the lounge, looking about her
warily as the unearthly sound started again. The image rolled and
broke up as Amy crashed into the camera and it fell roughly onto
its side. The picture restored itself, offering a ground level view
of the room before the camera adjusted and used the motion sensor
to focus back on the disturbance in the room. Amy stood in full
view, still framed by the lens, her hair wild around her face in an
impossible gale. Thuds from the parent’s room sounded like distant
thunder as Brian and Claire called desperately for Amy and hammered
at the door that refused them access to their screaming daughter.
The camera jerked, caught between the commands of its sound and
motion sensors.

A flash of bright light
blanched the infra-red camera’s transmission and Craig’s eyes
flicked to the monitor with the normal view. Amy recoiled from the
brilliant light, stepping closer to the lens of the camera that
rested on the floor behind her, her lower legs and ankles filling
the screen. The light receded as suddenly as it had appeared and
Amy’s feet jerked up out of sight with it. Amy’s scream joined the
cries that haunted the influx of rushing air and then all sound
ended with the dying light, as if the camera had entered into the
eerily calm eye of a storm.

“
Where’s she gone? –
Where’s she gone!”
Kelly gasped hysterically.

Each of them glanced from
monitor to monitor, before desperately returning to the picture of
the lounge. Amy didn’t appear in any of the views. With the absence
of any movement the cameras stare was drawn to the parent’s bedroom
door by the sound of Claire and Brian pounding frantically on the
wood and calling with increasing desperation and futility for their
daughter.

In the basement the black hole
glowed with a dim throbbing green. The dull but energetic light
cast the thick chips and carved teeth around the mouth of the hole
in soft light and shadow, giving the impression of movement that
made it appear the hole was gnawing at the blackness within.

The mound of rancid meat and
flesh within began to move slug-like across the ground. Slither by
slither, strip by strip, it crawled in its decay, carried by the
writhing bodies of the maggot’s as they burrowed into the meat in
gluttonous feasting.

The carcasses and waste crossed
the uneven scorched ground and rubble towards the skeletal remains
of the undertaker, Albert Taylor. The ragged white and dark meats
reached his bones, crawling and weaving, wrapping his exposed
skeleton, sliding up the shafts of his legs, filling the cracks of
his finger joints, spreading in to cover his wrists, and knees. A
tide of flesh moving relentlessly inward, knitting together through
his ribs and curling around the spine like some grotesque crawling
ivy. Tendrils of decomposing flesh took hold of the entire
skeleton.

It watched from the corner of
the room feeling stronger from its weeks of feeding, but not yet
sated – not yet ready... It allowed part of its consciousness to
divide and brake away in a crude shape of light that rushed forward
to the ragged blob of congealed fats and festering meats that clung
to the skull, and channelled that part of itself into the empty eye
sockets.

The cadaver of carcasses
lurched violently into a sitting position. Its jaw wrenched open
crudely as an inhuman scream howled out from its maggot ridden
lips. Its screech cut the air like ragged glass, the echoing shrill
scream chasing up the stairwells and along corridors, hauntingly
teasing those that heard it. A cry of new life from the darkness in
the depths of the concrete tower.