Spawn (6 page)

He felt tired, needed to sleep and something told him that this was the safest place to spend the night. Even
they
would not find him in this place, he was certain of that. He stretched out his arms and yawned.

Something cold touched his right hand and he almost shouted in surprise.

He spun round, crawling away but simultaneously trying to see what his hand had brushed against. He listened for sounds of movement but there was nothing, just the hammering of his heart against his ribs and, gradually, he regained his composure. The moon, spilling through one of the many cracks in the roof, fell onto the cold object and, eyes fixed on it, Harvey got slowly to his feet.

It was a sickle.

Stuck into a straw bale, it protruded from the rotted bundle, its rusty blade still wickedly sharp. Harvey reached out and grasped the handle, pulling the sickle clear. He hefted it before him, tracing the curve of the blade with his forefinger. He grinned and swung it through the air, the swish disturbing the solitude of the silent barn. Harvey chuckled throatily, excited by his discovery as a child would be with a new toy. He wiped the wooden handle on his trousers in an effort to remove the dampness which seemed to have penetrated the wood. His stomach rumbled noisily and, once more, he was reminded of the craving gnawing deep inside him. He gritted his teeth and swung the blade at a nearby bale of straw, watching as his powerful blow hacked off a large chunk of it. He rubbed his belly with his other hand and grunted irritably.

The big man turned the sickle over in his hand, his eyes drawn to the cutting edge. He rubbed it with his thumb, pressing just a little too hard and a small globule of blood welled from the cut. He cursed and sucked the wounded digit. He grunted. So sharp. His father used to have an open razor and occasionally, as a child, Harvey had watched the man shaving with it. It always remained in its wooden case at other times, on a small ledge in the bathroom. The strop hung next to it. Harvey remembered the strop well, its smell. That cloying odour of oiled leather which he had come to hate.

And he remembered how it felt.

A vision swam into his mind and it brought almost physical pain with it. The vision of a small child being beaten by a raging drunken man who laughed as he brought the strop down across the boy’s pale body.

Across Harvey’s pale body.

He swung the sickle through the air, slicing off more of the straw bale. The memories of his childhood were burned indelibly in his mind like a brand. A festering sore which would always be there to torment him.

He was an only child. There had never been brothers or sisters for him to share his miserable world with. His mother, Elizabeth, had seen to that. Harvey had been a breech birth. The labour had been long and agonising and, after it, his mother had vowed never to go through that hell again. Eventually she came to deny Harvey’s father intercourse so great was her fear of another pregnancy. But Richard Harvey was not a man to be refused. In the beginning he had sought solace in drink, turning in three years from a large muscular man to a dark, haunted, shadow. When he drank, it seemed a part of himself was sucked into the bottle.

Harvey could still remember the night he had come home, drunk as usual, but this time raving, demanding that Elizabeth allow him what he said was rightfully his. Young Harvey, then just four years old, had heard them rowing in the room next door. He had heard the words turn to shouts and finally to screams and at that point he had climbed out of bed and padded along the landing towards the sounds of the screams and curses. He had pushed the door open and stood watching as his father tried to hold Elizabeth down, forcing her legs apart with one rough hand. Attempting to guide his own puny erection towards her with the other and, when she screamed, he would butt her with his wrinkled forehead until finally, he broke her nose and they were writhing on the bed like bloodstained puppets. Their movements jerky and uncoordinated.

Young Harvey had turned to leave but his father had roared at him to stay. And he had obeyed. Quivering helplessly, watching in bewilderment as his mother moved painfully beneath his father who finally achieved his climax and rolled off the bed, leaving Elizabeth almost unconscious. Richard Harvey had grabbed his son by the shoulders and rasped some whisky soaked words into his face, then he had dragged him to the bathroom and beaten him with the strop until the skin had risen in welts all the time screaming at him that
he
was to blame for what had gone wrong between his parents. If
he
had not been so difficult to bring into the world then things might have been different.

His mother had left the next day.

But for Paul Harvey, the nightmare had just begun. His father’s drinking had grown worse. He would drag Paul out of bed at nights and shout and curse at him. Telling him that it was
his
fault Elizabeth had left.

And there was always the strop.

But, even as he grew older, Harvey was forced to put up with it because it became his accepted way of life. Abuse, both physical and verbal became commonplace for him and he stayed with his father in that tiny house in Exham where he had lived his life because he knew nothing else. He had no friends, no relatives he could go to and, somewhere, beneath that hatred which he felt, there was something akin to pity for this shrivelled-up piece of humanity which was his father. For perhaps Harvey had come to believe that he
was
responsible for the break-up of his parents’ marriage. Maybe the punishment
was
deserved.

His father had died three years earlier and Harvey’s world had collapsed around him. What remained of his self-control and esteem had died too.

Freed from the living hell in which he’d grown up, alone in a harsh world where there was no one he could turn to for solace, he had snapped.

He didn’t know how to make friends. He was spurned by the people of Exham, and treated with ill-disguised scorn, for everyone had known what Richard Harvey had been like. Why should his son be any different?

Paul Harvey had taken a fearful revenge. He had killed two of them those three years ago. They had not spoken to him but he had sensed, behind their eyes, the disgust which they felt for him. And he had killed them. For that he had been locked away but now things were different. He was free once more and the people of Exham would be made to pay.
They
would not find him. Not until it was too late.

He smiled crookedly and hefted the sickle before him.

There was movement below him.

He froze, listening to the sound. A steady but cautious sound which wafted up from below on the reeking air. Harvey dropped to his knees and peered through the gaps in the beams, trying to see what was making the sound. Could
they
have found him already? He gripped the sickle tighter.

There was more movement.

He spun round, his heart pounding.

This time it was in the loft.

Harvey struggled to his feet, squinting in the gloom. He gripped the sickle tightly, ready to defend himself.

The moon was suddenly enveloped by clouds and the barn plunged into deep, impenetrable darkness. Harvey felt a strange mixture of fear and anger. He sucked in an anxious breath.

Something brushed against his leg and he shrieked.

He heard a rustling sound from behind him and turned, blind in the darkness, striking out helplessly with the sickle. Something else touched his leg and he jumped back, twisting his ankle in the gap between two beams. He fell forward and a foul smell filled his nostrils. Something rubbed against his face. Something wet.

At that precise moment, the moon broke free of the enveloping cloud and cold light flooded the barn once more.

Harvey found himself staring into the cold black eyes of a rat. There was another one behind him. It had been their scratchings and scurryings which he’d heard. He got to his knees, grinning, watching the rat as it sat on its haunches nibbling at something it held between its forepaws. Harvey kept his eyes fixed on it, then, with a devastatingly quick movement, he brought the sickle down. Before the rat had a chance to move, the lethal point of the blade had pierced its back, the steel itself ripping through its tiny body until it thudded into the beam beneath. The rat squealed and Harvey grabbed it by the head, ignoring its feeble attempts to bite him. He pulled it free of the sickle, ignoring the blood which dripped onto his trousers. The big man held it in one huge hand, thick streamers of saliva dripping from his mouth. The rat felt so warm. So warm. The gnawing in his belly seemed to become a raging fire.

So warm. . .

He bit the creature’s small head off with one powerful bite, chewed twice, feeling bones splinter and then swallowed. With his bare hands he tore the rat open, chewing on the raw flesh, tugging the matted fur away with his teeth, swallowing the jellied pulp of intestines. He even chewed on the tail before tossing the remains away. His stomach glowed, despite the fact that he thought, for a second, he was going to be sick. But, nevertheless, he wiped the rat’s blood from his chin and, sickle in hand, went looking for another of the furry creatures. As he grabbed a second one he decided not to eat the head and lopped it off with the sickle. Blood spurted from the tiny arteries and Harvey giggled childishly for a second, watching the headless animal bucking spasmodically in his huge hand.

He ate that one too.

By the time the gnawing in his belly had been quelled, he felt drowsy, ready for sleep. He was even more satisfied now that this place was safe.
They
would not find him here. Not yet anyway and even if they did, it didn’t matter. He touched the blade of the sickle and smiled.

Besides, he had other things on his mind.

He went to sleep with the vicious blade held in one hand.

Harold Pierce brushed away an imaginary speck of dust from the sleeve of his white overall and swallowed hard. He was staring at the floor of the lift as it descended, listening to the steady drone as it headed for the next floor. On the other side of the cramped enclosure stood Winston Greaves. He glanced across at Harold, his eyes straying to the disfiguring scar which covered half of his companion’s face. He looked at the burn with the same hypnotic fascination as a child stares at something unusual and he felt all the more self-conscious because of this. He tried to look away but couldn’t. Only when Harold raised his head to smile sheepishly did Greaves suddenly find the ability to avert his eyes.

Harold knew that the other porter was looking at him. Just as he had felt the stares and sometimes heard the jibes of others, so many times before. He could understand their fascination, even revulsion, with his own disfigurement but their prolonged stares nevertheless still made him feel awkward.

For his own part, Greaves had only succeeded by a monumental effort of will from openly expressing his horror at the sight of Harold’s face. He told himself that, in time, he would come to accept it but, at the moment, he still found his attention drawn to the red and black mess. His eyes fastened like magnets to the vision of tissue destruction. And yet, he had been a hospital porter for over fifteen years, he had seen many appalling sights during his working life. The road crash victims (one of whom, he remembered, had been brought in DOA after taking a dive through his wind-screen – when Greaves and another man had lifted the body from the gurney on which it lay, the head had dropped off, so bad were the lacerations to the man’s neck), the injured children, other burn victims, casualties of modern day living such as the victims of muggings. The youth who had staggered into casualty trying to push his intestines back through a knife wound which he’d sustained in a gang fight. The woman who had been so badly beaten by her husband that, not only had her skull been fractured, part of her brain had been exposed. The child with the severed hand, a legacy of playing near farm machinery. The old lady with a cut on her hip which had been left unattended for so long there were actually maggots writhing in the wound.

The list was endless.

Small wonder then that Greaves’s black, wiry hair was shot through with streaks of grey. They looked all the more incongruous against his black skin. He was a small man with large forearms and huge hands which seemed quite disproportionate to the size of his body. He was a hard worker and good at his job which was probably the reason, he thought, why he’d been saddled with the task of showing Harold the ropes.

For the first week, until he became accustomed to hospital procedure and proficient in his duties, Harold was to be under almost constant supervision by Greaves. Now he looked across at his black companion and smiled again, conscious of his scar but trying not to hide it. Greaves smiled back at him and it reminded Harold of a piano keyboard. The black man’s teeth were dazzling. It looked as if someone had stuck several lumps of porcelain into his mouth. His eyes however, were rheumy and bloodshot but nevertheless there was a warmth in that smile and in those sad eyes which Harold responded to.

He had arrived at Fairvale Hospital just the day before. Phil Coot had driven him there from the asylum and helped him unpack his meagre belongings, moving them into the small hut-like dwelling which was to be his new home. The small building stood close by the perimeter fence which surrounded the hospital grounds, about 400 yards from the central block, sheltered by clumps of beech and elder.

Fairvale itself consisted of three main buildings. The central block contained most of the twelve wards and rose more than eighty feet into the air, each storey bore an A and B ward, both able to maintain over sixty patients. The children’s wing was attached to the ground floor part of the hospital and connected to it by a long corridor, thus it was effectively classified as a thirteenth ward. Also separate from the main building was an occupational therapy unit where a small but dedicated staff helped the older patients, and those recovering from debilitating illnesses, to regain some of the basic skills which they had possessed before being admitted. It was here that the previously simple task of making a cup of tea now seemed like the twelfth labour of Hercules. Also attached to this wing was a small gymnasium where patients with heart complaints were encouraged to undergo mild exercise and those with broken legs or arms underwent rigorous tests to regain the proper use of their damaged limbs. Also separate from the main building, accessible only by a brief walk across the car park, were the red brick buildings of the nurses’ quarters.