Harvest (37 page)

On one of his visits Ruth had
asked him to do something bad, and when he had refused, it was as
if she hadn’t asked at all, but it was another voice. Because of
what it asked he had ignored that voice too, until he came to
realise that it spoke in scripture, and it was the voice of God. He
was a child of God and he could only obey, even if the abomination
it demanded dead was just a girl in a coma.

Harry knuckled his forehead and
paced back and forth in frantic confusion. Why had he run? He could
have explained the dog as something he had found. He stumbled over
his own feet and struck his shin against the toppled coffee table.
He yelped but it was lost in his manic sobs of fear and madness.
Tears tracked through the grime of his face as if his very skin was
running away.

He could hear his Deirdra
talking to him; her soft voice was sweet to his ears but like a
memory of something lost that could never be had again. Harry
punched the air as he saw her coffin in his mind. It had been so
small. All that had been Deirdra, all that had been that loving
woman, that wife, that companion of forty-four years ended in a
wooden box.
Yet she had been talking to
him?
Now; just then.
Hadn’t
she?

She had been talking to him for
weeks, and despite the strangeness of the things she had asked him
to do, or the ideas he had in her presence, he did them. He had
made the hole in the wall in the basement, and dug up the ground
beyond even though the exertion had nearly killed him, he had
unearthed the dried up leathery sack beneath. That thing scared
him, because when he touched it with his bare hands it had felt
like a layer of his skin had been burned away, but strangely his
fear and anger had been smothered. Deirdra took all the pain, fear
and confusion away. The strange rigid cocoon of unrecognisable
bones and calcified organs had engendered nurturing feelings within
him, and with the encouragement of Deirdra’s voice he had brought
it food. He would shower the thing with decaying animal waste
scavenged from the rubbish, and when he returned with more the
previous supply would be gone and the sack would be more supple and
bloated.

Deirdra had made him feel
like a king again and that overrode every contradictory feeling.
Oh, she had worshipped him, and he had loved her so much.
So much.
She had been everything to
him, and she did everything for him. When she had gone he couldn’t
function without her.
When she had
gone?
She had gone.

She was dead, it couldn’t
have been her. Could it?
Was this
madness?
Everyone he met thought he was already
mad;
perhaps his mind had given in to popular
opinion?
He could see something rushing round him,
just out of his vision it flickered and darted, like a movement in
the air. He flailed his arms as if repelling a swarm and cursed the
air about him. He cursed Deirdra’s voice and then silenced himself.
He had never said such words in front of her – to her!
Never!
Anger swelled within him and
he clawed at his face as his reason crashed against his mind.
“She’s DEAD!”

Suddenly he experienced
an overwhelming sense of freedom, but he had the unnerving feeling
of something standing behind him, always just out of view no matter
how much he turned and span. It made his skin bristle. As if
something had released him and was now watching the results. He
became still, and without the blinkering soft voice of his Deirdra
and the vivid memories of a life he no longer had, reality
descended upon him. The fantasy-memory of the old house with its
gay floral wallpaper and well-kept furnishings was suddenly gone.
The marriage house was gone and he was back in his flat. He froze.
He hardly recognised the charnel house room as his own. The walls
were stained and lost in streaks of red and brown, the carpet was
mushy and seeped a black red sticky sludge underfoot.
Blood.
So much blood!

Harry remembered. His eyes
widened. The sights and sounds of the last few weeks came rushing
in like water on a sinking vessel: the nauseating soft popping of a
cats spine being twisted and broken, the feel of the sweaty warm
knife handle in his hand that had worn blisters into his palm from
so much work, the heat from blood up to his wrists, the smell of
evacuated bowels and the gasses from a ruptured stomach, the
tension in his arms as his blade dragged between resistant muscle.
The look in his social workers eyes as he gagged on his own blood
and slid to the ground dying.

He remembered the silent man in
the top hat with the ragged face. Harry lured those foolish enough
to trust him to this undead undertaker. Harry had accepted that
thing so easily within his illusion, his fear masked it, his fear
of the monster and his stronger fear that if he didn’t accept the
creature then reality would return and deprive him of Deirdra.

The guilt writhed in his guts
like the maggots that lived in the undertakers face and he vomited
suddenly and violently in reaction to his own sins. It was so
sudden he barely shielded himself and he caught a handful of acrid
smelling oil and digested sludge. It was red, blood red, with
scraps of raw flesh sliding through the liquid. He realised that by
vomiting he hadn’t separated himself from his actions but produced
a product of his work to haunt him. “What have I been doing?” he
cried. He didn’t understand. Didn’t understand why and how this was
all happening; as if it was all some nightmare that he couldn’t
wake from.

Harry wailed loudly and
knuckled his head again, his pounding fists seemed to boom like
explosions until he realised the sounds were from the front door.
The door with the bloody handprints that his social worker had left
shook with each crashing sound. They were coming for him. That
policewoman. They knew. They would arrest him. A voice filled his
ears and his fear allowed him to believe it was Deirdra; “They are
going to take you away. You can’t explain your way out of this. The
monster told me to do it? The voices in my head told me to do it?
They think that this is all your fault. They won’t just think you
are a criminal they will think you are mad too. They will lock you
up and throw away the key.”

The door creaked, and with a
loud snap the wood of the doorjamb split from top to bottom, but
the door held. “What shall I do, love?”

“
Run, Harry. They will
take you away from me and I will be all alone. You know how painful
it is to be alone, don’t you? You don’t want that for me do you?
Don’t let them take you away from me. Run. Run away with
me.”

A split-second after she
had answered him his attention was snatched by the large carving
knife at rest on the grimy worktop as if it had been thrust in his
face as a suggestion. She didn’t ask, she never would, but these
ideas always came when she was with him. Before he could decline,
the doorjamb broke free of the wall and clattered to the floor and
in fright he snatched the knife up. “Run,” Deirdra cried.
“RUN!”

Between the first and second
plea he had broken into a stride with the knife held before him.
The plain-clothes policewoman, her companion and a uniformed
colleague, tumbled through the door then stumbled back over each
other as Harry charged at them with an anguished cry. With every
step he took he expected to be tackled and pulled to the ground,
and it was with disbelief that he reached the fire exit. The only
sensible direction was down, to get out and away to escape his
captors, and it was this clear understanding in the chaos of his
situation that made his choice to go up so disturbing to him. In
the same way that the knife hadn’t been a conscious thought, going
up had not been a consideration, he seemed to be under the
influence of some other will. Although it had Deirdra’s voice, her
feel, it was not her force of persuasion. It was not his Deirdra,
it never had been. “I’m so sorry, Deirdra.” He sobbed to the memory
of his Deirdra, the real Deirdra that would never have asked for
any of the things he had done. “I’m so sorry. What have I done.
What have I done!”

He couldn’t afford to turn
back, he could hear heavy footfalls behind him, so he pressed on
and committed himself to his direction, knowing that when he broke
back onto a corridor he could make his way to the other fire escape
and down, if his body would allow him to maintain his pace and his
lead.

His feet punched the stairs
away one after the other like pistons pumping him further and
further away from the carnage of his ruined life. Tears streamed
down his face and he howled apologies to his Deirdra as he ran, his
voice growing to a crescendo as his speed increased.

He passed landings, determined
he would turn into a corridor at the next one, but each time he
would let it go. Panting, his heart a jack-hammer at his ribs, his
feet numb, his legs burning with the fire of his exertion, he
arrived at the final landing and to his horror he didn’t even break
pace and pressed on. He accepted that in his weakened state there
was only a slim chance of escape, but he didn’t want to give up and
be caught, which is why his choice of heading to the roof where
there was no escape whatsoever terrified him.

Harry burst through the fire
exit door and onto the roof, and was instantly dazzled by the
brilliant sun low in the sky ahead of him. The tarmac roof was soft
underfoot from the suns heat and the different terrain broke his
pace, seeming to reflect the doughy feeling he now realised in his
trembling leg muscles. The breeze was wild around him, pulling him
in different directions, while the panorama of Camden spread out
around him far below and dizzied him further. The blood raced
tangibly around his body from the shock of running up seven floors
and his exhaustion caused flickers of light to play in his eyes.
Except the light was green and he had seen that before. It was the
illusive ‘thing’ at his back. The sense of Deirdra being with him
was even stronger, and although she didn’t say anything, her
presence increased his awareness of the knife in his hand.

The two police officers
piled through the fire exit and stopped. The man looked angry while
the woman looked scared. Harry thought it strange that she didn’t
appear scared of him, but scared for him. Despite the courage of
their arrival on the roof they were both cautious in their
approach, holding out placating hands. Speaking quietly and calmly,
although the male officer called him names, called him names that
were true. Harry
must
be sick.
Harry
was
a psycho. The woman
told the man to shut up. Harry remembered her; Kelly had been kind
to him many times, cautioned him when his sense hadn’t kept up with
his actions and taken him home when he had been lost. She spoke to
him softly, pleading with him to give up, to put the knife down. He
was startled to find he was holding the carving knife before him,
stabbing it threateningly in the policeman’s direction and then in
hers.

Images cascaded into his mind,
mental pictures of him flashing his knife at the two officers, not
just to get back to the door, but to wound them so much they
wouldn’t be able to follow. To wound them so much they wouldn’t
survive.

Pain. White-hot pain cleared
the images from his mind. He pulled the tip of the knife from his
palm and watched the blood run from the wound. The images were
gone. Deirdra’s voice was gone. The puppeteer was still at the back
of his mind. It had driven him up here. It didn’t want Harry to
escape, he had been found out by the police, he was no use to the
thing at his back. It didn’t want him to talk. It didn’t want him
anymore.

He would do part of what
he knew it wanted, not to please the thing, but to be with Deirdra.
The real Deirdra. He ran his legs that were crooked with
exhaustion. Ploughed them back into work. Racing forwards, the
knife held forth. The air rushed around Harry as his legs still
pumped away uselessly with no ground to pedal like he had seen an
outsmarted
Wil E. Coyote
do
so many times
. The feeling of someone watching over
him was gone. The thing had left him. He had been
released.

“
DEIRDRA, I’M COMING!
PLEASE FORGIVE ME!” His tears were like ice on his face, sobered
and chilled by the updraft of air that whipped at his skin and
ripped at his clothes. Wild panic gripped him and shook him into
madness as he saw the landscape of buildings rush into a blur about
him. The communal green below widened rapidly to catch him. The
path grew from obscurity into gritty concrete detail. “I LOVE YOU
DEIRD – .” Harry’s head split open like a melon. He lay there for a
few moments, wondering if he could move anything, he was sure his
fingers were flexing. He thought it funny that he couldn’t feel any
pain. Then he stopped thinking.

Alec Jacobs trudged across the
basement and fumbled with a cluster of keys and unlocked a metal
cabinet. He squinted in the half-light that the few remaining
flickering strip lights offered and found the tube of filler and
clattered the door shut and locked it. He flicked the lights off
and felt his way back towards the lifts, he fingered the lift call
button and waited in the dark, only it wasn’t as dark as it should
have been.

There was a dull green glow to
the darkness that lingered between two lockers that blocked access
to the basements of the abandoned shops. The lift doors opened and
the stark light of its interior was enough to cancel out the weak
green light. It was his eyes fooling him; some residue of light on
his cornea, possibly imagination, but uncertainty fluttered in the
back of his mind. He let the lift doors slide shut and again the
darkness rushed in on him and claimed the room except for the green
ghost light.Alec moved hesitantly to the gap in the lockers. He
unlocked one of them and pulled a torch out then stepped through
the opening. The darkness had the musty sour smell of damp, dust
and expired meat. He snapped the torch on and waved the shaft of
light around the room beyond, thick shadows danced around the beam
of light like black amorphous moths as it travelled the walls and
debris, until the coronet of light vanished. Panic took hold of
Alec with the thought of his torch failing him in a part of the
building he had never thought to venture, but he felt instant
relief as he jerked the torch and the spotlight returned to the
wall. With his senses settled he realised that he hadn’t lost sight
of the dust motes lit up by the torches shaft of light, but had
only lost the spot of light at the end of the beam. He passed the
torch back across the same part of wall and once again the circle
of light vanished.