Harvest (52 page)

“
Mum,” she managed to
croak. “Mum.” The tears came hard and fast, streaming down her
face. This was the first time she had cried so wildly in front of
her mother since her mother had asked her to be strong for her. She
surrendered now. She didn’t care. “Oh, mum...”

There was the tiniest
pressure on her hand and her mothers deep eyes flickered open.
“Kitten – my head feels empty,” her voice flashed into a stunted
giggle that her body couldn’t maintain. It was the morphine; they
had been increasing it. The drug would be poisoning her by now,
killing her quicker than the Cancer. Sucking her into a painless
sleep.
‘Sleep?’
She laughed
bitterly at her romantic sentimentalism – Not sleep.
Death!

“
You shouldn’t be here,”
Cat’s mother whispered.

It was true, she hadn’t been
there, and she had lived with guilt and torment ever since. Now it
would be different. She would have closure and Rachel would be the
one to miss saying goodbye. “You have always been here for me.” She
managed over the tightness of her throat. “I want to be here for
you.”

Her mother turned away from her.
“I’m so sorry I’m not going to be here… I don’t want to leave you.”
A tear tobogganed down the crease of her cheek and caught like a
crystal in the hairline at the side of her face.

“
Don’t,” Cat pleaded
softly.

“
Rachel is going to be
here for you,” she breathed weakly. “Let her be your mother. She
has so much love for me and you – you couldn’t want for anyone
else.”

“
I don’t
want anyone else.
I want
you.
”

“
Don’t.” Her weakened
state reduced her conviction to a fragile plea. “I didn’t have to
ask her to be there for you, she cares so much. You know you’re the
daughter she never had. It came so naturally to her to be there for
you when I couldn’t.”

Cat stood over her mother and
watched the gentle rise and fall of her chest. She was right;
Rachel had always been there for her, it had been like having a
second mum in replacement for the dad she had never known. It had
always been her mother and Rachel for as long as she could
remember. All Rachel had in the world was Helen and Cat, and all
Cat ever had was her mum and Rachel. She experienced a sickening
plunge of guilt at the thought of taking Rachel away from her
mother’s side. “Do you want me to get Rachel?” It had to be close
now. 3.40 am had been the time. She probably had minutes at that.
The clock ticked, hacking the seconds away. She knew things were
different this time, but she felt that death would still be
punctual and be the constant that endured in this alternate
experience.

“
Get her and then come to
me,” her words seemed strangely surreal, as if there was a
conspiratorial motive beyond wanting to say goodbye.

Cat frowned at her own
sudden inappropriate suspicion and dismissed her paranoia. Rachel
appeared in the doorway, sentinel, waiting –
waiting
or guarding?
Guarding what?
The insecurity clambered heavily
up her body like some zombie from the earth. Rachel seemed to fill
the door, blocking her exit – but why would Cat think of
escape?
Why should she?
Cat
wanted this moment with her mother. She had played this fantasy of
events in her head a dozen times every day since her mother died.
She wanted nothing more than to say goodbye.

The underlying menace that
writhed in her gut was out of place, as if her head was firing
false signals to all her senses. Rachel moved to the bedside and
her warm smile disarmed her. Cat couldn’t hate her anymore. They
could share this. She saw Rachel’s open hand reaching out for her.
She could take it, face her mother’s death with Rachel and let the
transition of losing one mother and gaining another be seamless.
Smother pain with comfort, douse grief with love. Let go and move
on. All she had to do was lower her defences.

A fire extinguisher ripped
through the air before Cat and struck Rachel full in the chest. The
white of the hospital room shattered with the impact of the
extinguisher as if the room was a reflection on a mirror fracturing
into a spider web of darkness, its black strands expanding until
the white hospital room and Rachel and her mother were replaced
with blackness.

Cat found herself surrounded by
disorientating darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom in time to
see the undertaker folding into the shadows under a blow to its
chest from the extinguisher that Jason had swung into its chest.
The extinguisher clattered to the floor and Jason snatched Cat’s
hand and tugged it roughly.

Startled and confused Cat
held her ground, she searched the patch of shadow where the
undertaker had toppled but couldn’t see any sign of movement. Her
head raced with confused thoughts. Jason tugged at her, pulling her
away, his face desperate and full of fear, wincing in the
undertaker’s direction, expecting another attack. She was drunk
from the vision of her mother and Rachel, and living the memory of
a time when it was easy to love Rachel. She took some staggered
steps with Jason before she understood that
‘it’
had gotten into her head. The thing that
lived in the fabric of the dark knew her hidden desires, wishes,
fears, and most crippling memories, and had used them against her,
leading her to betray herself to it. The realisation stunned her
and she relaxed into Jason’s persistent direction.

As she tumbled through
the dark a gradient in the colour of the shadows became apparent.
In the direction the undertaker had been luring her there was a
broad circular patch of darkness infused with a faint shade of
green. The association of that colour with the thing that stalked
them lashed her into matching Jason’s deliberate pace. The
encounter Jason had saved her from had shaken her determination to
face the thing alone, yet the fighter inside her needed to see it,
to see what
‘it’
truly was, to
finally see the true face of the enemy that toyed with them and
tormented them from beyond the veil.

Cat slowed her pace and twisted
her wrist from Jason’s grip. She ran toward the pool of green that
seemed to hover unanchored in the dark. She realised it was a hole
in the wall and leaned into the void looking for the source of the
light.

She saw it.

The diffusion emanated from a
luminescent green mass, crudely angular like an obelisk, it was
difficult to gauge the scale in the gloom, but it looked at least
three feet taller than her.

The breath was forced
from her as Cat was yanked roughly backwards. Jason had returned
for her and was determined to escape with her. She had seen enough.
The obelisk, despite its crude architectural shape was strangely
organic, with a frame of gnarled bone under a stretched covering of
fleshy translucent skin. Some-
thing
unrecognisable incubated within.

Her mind strained to extract
more details from what she had glimpsed but she hadn’t lingered
long enough and her concentration was dominated by navigating the
uneven floor of broken masonry. That was until suddenly she could
see the floor in detail as it was lit by a surge of green light
that sent shadows scurrying into hiding amongst the recesses, and
flickering and writhing from place to place from an oscillating
light.

The light drove the pair to a
narrow gap that Jason darted through while Cat staggered to
sidestep through. In her half-turn she saw that the hole in the
wall had become a caldera of fierce green light split by the jagged
blade of the undertaker’s silhouette rising from the ground. Its
shape was blunted as it repositioned its tall flat-topped hat, then
lurched towards her in lunging strides, a splinter of the green
energy that controlled the undertaker filtered from its eyes and
ragged mouth like a possessed Jack-o’-lantern.

Leaving its chrysalis and
incubating form, the entity boiled out of the hole with a rush of
pungent air, taking the form of a symmetrical Rorschach of
perpetually moving swirls and eddies of power, urging its undead
stalker in for the kill. The undertaker drew its blade while the
light blazed around the marionette corpse in a threatening
irreverent aureole as the entity in both its forms closed in.

Poised mid-motion Cat hesitated
between the lockers that narrowed the doorway. She was on the
threshold of retreat but her hate of this thing fortified her
resolve into belligerent defiance of the thing that had infected
her mind, imprisoned her in a coma, and toyed with her most painful
memories. Her longing to make a stand against this thing ached in
her chest, yet the seamless way it had put her in a fantasy world
frightened her.

Cursing the thing and her fear,
she complied with Jason’s desperate tugs and they raced across the
residential basement of The Heights. The shadowy gloom was
dispersed by the green light pouring itself through the gap in the
lockers, and she could hear the undertaker’s even steps at their
backs as it stalked after them. The fire door was dead ahead, but
it didn’t take much of a calculation for her to realise that by the
time they reached it, stopped to pull the door open and take their
turn to dash through it, the things would be on them.

She wouldn’t make it through the
door.

Her hesitation at the
lockers had cost Cat her escape, and if Jason wouldn’t let her go
then it would undoubtedly cost him his too. She cursed herself for
her recklessness and at the futility of their escape attempt, but
her impotence collapsed under the weight of a desperate anger and
hatred within her skull for the thing that would claim them at any
moment, for the thing that altered her, imprisoned her, tormented
her;
used her mother!
For the
thing that would kill them.

The mental sphincter around the
thing in her head relaxed, eager and wide, and the power within
exploded out of her in a volcanic release of rage, radiating
invisibly out from her as a shockwave.

Jason pulled the door
open and with euphoric disbelief they both made it through. In her
haste to escape she shook off the brief wild stab of pain in her
head. Cat and Jason didn’t stop running until they reached the
sanctuary of the small grassy common in the middle of the three
high-rise towers and the seeming safety of daylight life. She
pulled Jason to her, as much for relief and comfort as for thanking
him. Shaking and panting heavily she thanked him. “You’re a little.
Short for a.
Stormtrooper
.
Aren’t you?” she joked as she tried to compose herself. She read
his baffled expression at her
Star
Wars
quote and she waved it away. “Don’t worry. I’m
mad. With shock!”

She let go of him and dropped to
her knees while she tried to regain her breath, Jason sat in the
grass with her. “Did you. Follow me?” She panted.

He struggled to breath and talk.
“Yeah, I saw you sneak out this morning. So I gave you a head start
and followed you.”

“
Why?”

He frowned and angrily shoved
her shoulders. “I told you I need all of your help, but I think we
need you the most, I wasn’t going to let you walk out on us.”

She pushed him away and he fell
onto his rear and didn’t return to his attack. “I’m sorry.” The
disappointment in herself swamped her. It was a feeling she had
felt often since her mum had died, usually when her thoughts
strayed to Rachel. “How come you didn’t stop me from going down
into the basement?”

“
I thought it was a stupid
thing to do, but I didn’t know whether you were going down there to
try and kill it by yourself, or whether you were reporting to it or
something.”

She shoved him in the chest this
time. “You thought I might be in with that thing?”

“
You don’t even understand
what it did to you, what it is that you can do. I saw your face at
the hospital when you used your powers on Malik and again at
Rachel’s last night when you turned them on Kelly, it didn’t seem
like you had much control and you looked just as frightened of your
powers as everyone else was. It’s hard to trust something, or
someone, you don’t understand.”

Cat nodded, she had only met him
yesterday but it was the second time she found herself questioning
whether he was a very small adult or an adult in disguise as a kid.
“Either way you took a big risk in following me down there.”

“
I had to
know.”

“
And now?”

“
I trust you.” There was
conviction in his voice. “But I still don’t think you know whether
to trust yourself or the power you have.” Jason looked up into her
face questioningly, but his smile faltered and his face adopted a
worried expression.

Following his stare at
her face, her fingers felt for the focus of his concern. There was
a warm wet slick under her nose and she found her fingers were wet
with bright crimson blood. She remembered the pain in her head
after releasing the thing in her mind, the adrenaline of her escape
had masked it, but the aching discomfort was still there. She had
only let go of the power for an instant, and that had only stalled
the things in the basement, yet it had done this to her.
How much would she have to let go to release
enough power to kill the thing, and what would be left of her
afterwards?

Chapter
Thirty Nine

Zoe Sampson wheeled the elderly
Peter Sinclair down the ramp from the high rise in his wheel
chair.