Black Harvest Read online

  And there was something else. At the risk of waking Oliver he switched the main light on. He had to be sure. Mixed with the farmyard smell there was a mustiness in the room that reminded him of a cellar, and it was coming from his bed. Then he saw why. The edges of his sheets and pillowcase were softly edged with grey, and a greenish fuzz was starting to form in patches over them.

  He put out a shaky hand and touched it. The cobwebby strands fell away and became a green cloud, dispersing slowly into the clammy air. It was decay.

  Just for a second Colin felt like screaming. Some strange atmospheric condition must be causing all this heat and stench, making a mould form on everything in the room. What he needed was a gust of cold fresh air. He ought to fling the windows wide open, but he just couldn’t bear that smell from the fields.

  At least he could open the door. He stumbled past Oliver’s bed and stubbed his toe on something hard. The sudden pain made him plump down abruptly on to the carpet. His cousin turned over, muttered a jumble of words, but slept on. Colin pulled out something that Oliver had been trying to hide with his bedspread. It was a large glass bottle, the kind used for making home-brewed beer; Mum had discovered six of them at the back of a kitchen cupboard. Oliver had filled the bottle with green leaves, already chewed to tatters by some striped insects that were crawling about inside. There were dozens of them.

  Colin didn’t like beetles much. He noticed with relief that the top of the container was firmly corked and sealed, but in a way the mad activity of the tiny creatures gorging on potato plants in the middle of the night made him feel less panic-stricken. So this was what Oliver had been up to in the afternoon, creeping around secretively, even more silent than usual, shutting himself up in the bedroom with his insect books. What on earth was he playing at?

  His face was very close to Oliver’s bedspread. It too felt damp. There was no sign of the green must he’d found in his half of the room, but he could still smell the mouldiness, mixed up with that sickening rotten smell.

  He knew he would be awake till daylight came so he opened the door and lay down flat on the strip of carpet between the beds, taking slow, deep breaths, trying desperately to calm himself. Having the door open made no difference at all. Heat hit him in the face like the sting of boiling water. He lay there in panic, hating everyone in the house for being fast asleep.

  Prill was asleep, but dreaming. The small green field that sloped away from her window had turned into a vast sweep of dark earth and it was raining. She knew it was autumn, from the trees.

  In the distance someone was moving about, not walking upright but crawling over the soil, like an animal trying to reach its hole. In the dream Prill didn’t move, but suddenly the scene was jerked nearer and she could see everything clearly, right up against her face. The field was planted with some crop that was rotting as it grew. The stalks were bright green but the leaves had turned slimy and dark. The whole field was black, as if a fire had swept over it.

  The crawling figure was a woman, with arms and legs like sticks. She moved painfully, rooting among the scorched leaves, clawing at the soil, putting what looked like clods of earth into her mouth then spewing them out on to the slime of the furrows.

  Prill closed her eyes, willing the picture to go away, but when she opened them the woman was outside the window, her mouth open in a scream and the wet soil dripping out of it. Her ridged yellow fingernails plucked at the pane, and Prill saw her face, with its high, domed forehead, its cloud of reddish hair, the prominent cheeks from which all the flesh had dropped away.

  She was crying out, but Prill heard nothing. She was helpless, cut off, sealed away behind a thick wall of glass through which the woman moved and implored her, bobbing and jerking about like some ghastly marionette.

  She shouted in her sleep and woke up suddenly. She was out of bed and standing by the open window breathing in great lungfuls of air. It was getting light. The small green field was misty, the air fresh and cool. The countryside and sea were very peaceful in the early dawn.

  In the quietness she heard a light click on and then the baby started crying. She had been yelling on and off all night. Prill went down the hall to the kitchen and found Colin there, talking to his mother. He wore nothing except his blue pyjama trousers and his face looked hot. Mum had just stuck a thermometer into his mouth. She looked relieved to see Prill.

  “Oh, hello, love. So you couldn’t sleep either. Now we’re all awake, except Oliver. I’ll have to get a doctor to look at Alison. She’s only had about two hours’ sleep all night. Just look at her.”

  She looked. The baby wasn’t pink, like Colin, she was turkey red and her whole body was tense. Prill picked her up and tried to slip a finger into the tiny hand; she loved it when the little fingers curled tightly round her own. But Alison wouldn’t respond. Both her hands were clenched up into hard little knots, and she was wailing.

  “Has she been eating?”

  “Yes. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s not as if she’s hungry. How can she be?”

  “Perhaps she’s got what I’ve got,” Colin mumbled, removing the thermometer and reading it. “I feel most odd. Oh, that’s funny. My temperature’s not up, Mum.”

  The electric kettle clicked off. “Let’s have some tea,” Mrs Blakeman said wearily. “When in doubt have a cup of tea.” She was trying to sound cheerful but Prill wasn’t fooled, she looked so tired and strained, not a bit like her usual self. She didn’t panic easily. “Do you drink Oliver would like some?”

  “Oh, he’s still dead to the world,” Colin said. “I should think he’s the only one who’s had a good night’s sleep, lucky devil!”

  Prill took the milk jug out of the fridge. The smell made her wrinkle her nose up. “Ugh! We can’t use this, Mum. It’s off.”

  “It can’t be. The O’Malley boy brought it straight up from their dairy. It was chilled. Anyway, I used it at supper, Oliver had some Ovaltine.”

  “Well, it’s off now.”

  Colin took the large brown jug and sniffed, then he carried it to the sink and looked more closely under the electric strip light. The contents of the jug had solidified completely, they were now greyish, and a fine hair was forming on the thick, wrinkled skin.

  He upturned the jug into the sink and a slimy gel plopped out on to the stainless steel. There was a sharp, bitter smell.

  “It must be the fridge,” Mum said, more concerned about the whimpering baby. “Perhaps there’s a lemon. We could have that with our tea.”

  “The fridge light’s on,” Colin said numbly. “And the motor’s going, listen. It’s working all right.” In the quietness they could hear the motor humming gently.

  “This fridge is brand new,” Prill pointed out. “Look, they’ve not even taken the label off it.”

  Colin carefully washed the stinking mess down the sink. Prill came up and looked over his shoulder. “I wish Dad was here,” he muttered, out of the side of his mouth so Mrs Blakeman couldn’t hear him. “I think Alison looks awful.”

  Prill was trying to convince herself that the woman outside the window had been a nightmare. She did not succeed, no more than Colin succeeded in persuading himself that he’d imagined that fuzzy growth on his pillow.

  “It’s this house,” she whispered back. “I wish we’d never come.”

  Chapter Five

  BUT AS THE earth warmed up and birds started singing, Alison, exhausted by her night’s bawling, fell asleep abruptly in her mother’s arms. Mum crept to the kitchen door and mouthed, “I’m going back to bed for a bit.”

  “Good idea. I’m going too,” Prill told Colin. “I feel as if I’ve been awake all night.” She was thinking, Dad’ll be phoning at ten o’clock and I’m going to ask him to come back. I can’t bear it here.

  Colin sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, looking out over the sea. He felt quite cold suddenly, but it was going to be another beautiful day. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the stillness in the air promised another scorche
r. He still had hunger pains so he made himself some toast and another mug of lemon tea. Then he found the sleeping bag that Dad had stuffed under the stairs, unrolled it over the damp mattress and fell soundly asleep.

  At eight o’clock they were all still sleeping, except Oliver. He got up at seven, dressed stealthily, and crept round the kitchen looking for something to eat. Jessie whined and nosed at his feet. He refilled her bowl with fresh water, holding it at arm’s length in case she bit him. He was frightened of dogs. Then he went outside, selected a spade, and started to dig his hole. His uncle David had told Colin on the phone that he was allowed to dig, provided he left the earth in a tidy pile.

  The other two didn’t get up again till half past ten and by then Colin was ravenous. He sat at the kitchen table eating cornflakes, toast, eggs and bacon. All the windows were wide open. They could hear Oliver scraping away at his hole and talking to Kevin O’Malley who’d walked down with the milk. Mixed with the smell of fields was the tang of the sea.

  “There’s not much wrong with you,” Prill said. “I don’t know how you can eat all that.”

  “I was hungry,” Colin said simply. “It woke me up in the night.”

  “Was that all that woke you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you were in the kitchen at five o’clock.”

  “So were you.”

  They stared at each other, Prill with a look that said, “You first”. Colin pressed his lips together. Prill was nervous sometimes. When they were little he used to get into awful rows for jumping out at her and making spooky noises. She still slept with the landing light on.

  “What was the matter?” she asked him.

  He hesitated.

  “Come on, Colin!” her voice was strained, almost angry. It wasn’t like Prill. He was supposed to be the moody one.

  “Well, it sounds so stupid… It was weird. I woke up because I was too hot, and my bed felt terribly damp, and… there was a kind of, well, mould all over it.”

  “Mould?”

  “Yes, honestly, and it smelt peculiar too, horribly musty.”

  She stood up. “Show it to me.”

  “It’s no good, Prill, not now. Sit down, will you? I can’t. It wasn’t there when I woke up just now. Everything had, well, you know, gone back to normal. The sheets are a bit dirty, that’s all. I was probably dreaming.”

  She was silent. A wave of fear rose inside her then ebbed away, leaving her numb and cold. “That makes it worse,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fact that it’s all so…ordinary this morning. It’s like that smell on the beach. It was there. But you just said I must have imagined it.”

  “You didn’t imagine it. I could smell it too, last night. I was nearly sick.” He paused. “What woke you up, the same thing?”

  “No… no. It was Alison, yelling her head off. Then, when I did get to sleep, I had a kind of nightmare. It was about Donal Morrissey but he’d, sort of, turned into a woman. She looked more like a skeleton. Ugh, it was horrible.”

  She wouldn’t say any more. Shaking her head violently, as if this would shatter the picture in her mind of the woman crawling over the field, she went to the wall-phone and started dialling.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Phoning Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “But he’ll ring us, before he starts painting. You know that’s the arrangement.”

  “Well, it’s gone eleven and he’s not phoned yet.” She put the receiver to her ear and listened.

  “Is it ringing at the exchange? They’ll take ages to answer.”

  “No,” she said flatly. “And it isn’t going to ring either. It’s completely dead. No wonder Dad can’t get through.”

  Oliver had marked out where he was going to dig with four sticks and tied string at each corner. He hadn’t got down very far because he kept finding things. His treasures were neatly arranged on a plastic tray he’d found in the kitchen. Prill sat outside miserably and fingered them. There were some pieces of china, a halfpence piece, and several bits of white tubing with holes through them.

  “What are these, Oliver?”

  “Bits of a clay pipe, I should think.”

  He went on digging, puffing in the heat; he was still wearing a long-sleeved sweater even though it was seventy degrees and getting hotter.

  “Why don’t you wash the soil off?”

  He leaned on his spade like a little old man and said witheringly, “You don’t wash things like this, Prill, they might disintegrate. That’s what the toothbrush is for. You have to brush the dirt off very gently.”

  Although Oliver was scraggy and small there was something very adult about him. Prill didn’t like the look in those large blue eyes of his. It said so plainly that he thought she was both ignorant and stupid.

  He was the only person who didn’t seem affected by the house. She and Colin had talked about that in the kitchen. Nothing had made Oliver wake up in the night sweating, there had been no mould or mustiness round him. And he certainly hadn’t complained about a smell; the only smell he didn’t like was Alison when she needed a fresh nappy. In fact, the baby seemed to upset him rather a lot, especially when she cried. Prill had seen him actually put his fingers in his ears when he thought nobody was looking.

  “Well, he’s used to being on his own at home,” Mum had said. “And he’s been ill, don’t forget. He was in bed for weeks, and Auntie Phyl kept him very quiet. Anyway, a din like that might get on your nerves too if all you’d ever been used to was a house full of old people.” But Prill still felt like thumping him.

  Colin and his mother had gone with Alison on a walk up to the O’Malleys’ farm. Jessie went with them, mad with delight at being released from the concrete mixer. Mrs O’Malley rang the exchange to tell them the bungalow phone wasn’t working. “It’s funny that,” she said. “All the phones go off together usually, when we have gales. But last night was calm enough. Still, they’ll come to it to be sure, eventually. You didn’t need it today, did you?”

  “No-o,” Mrs Blakeman said slowly. “Though my husband will have been trying to get through, and I had just wondered about getting a doctor to look at the baby. She’s been really miserable since we got here.”

  The farmer’s wife took Alison on her lap. The baby gurgled and grabbed at the strings of her apron. “She looks grand now, a real grand girl she is. Oh, that’s bold!” And she prised Alison’s fingers away from the chain round her neck.

  “I think it must be the weather,” Mum said. “We’ve all been terribly hot. We are expecting it to rain all the time.”

  Mrs O’Malley looked puzzled. “It’s not been so hot, has it?” Then she smiled. “I’ve been so busy lately, I’ve probably just not noticed.”

  “Our milk went off last night,” Colin said suddenly. His mother frowned at him. “I left it out after supper,” she said firmly. “I must have, and obviously the heat turned it.”

  Kevin appeared in the kitchen doorway and started pulling his boots off. “Don’t do that,” his mother ordered. “Slip across to the dairy and fetch some more milk for Mrs Blakeman. Last night’s was off apparently.”

  Mum was embarrassed. “Really,” she began. “We really don’t need—”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mrs Blakeman. It may well have been the old milk you got, by mistake. It happens sometimes. I’ll ask Donal. He helps us in the evenings and he gets confused these days about what goes where.”

  Kevin came back with a can and put it on the table. He grinned at Colin. “I’ve been trying to persuade your cousin to go up the Yellow Tunnel, but he doesn’t seem too keen. He wants to keep on with his digging.”

  “What’s the Yellow Tunnel?”

  “Well, if you want a good walk, one that’ll tire out that dog of yours, go along the shore, below the bungalow. You could do it this afternoon, it’s low tide. You walk right along the sands as far as
Ballimagliesh Strand then you can climb up to the chapel. It’s a ruin really, right on the cliff edge. It’s a proper beauty spot, isn’t it, Mam?”

  “So it is. We used to have picnics there years ago. All the young people went. Beautiful, it is.”

  “But what about this tunnel?”

  “Well, there’s a track up to the ruin, through the grass, a bit steep in places but sure it’s fine in dry weather like this. But you can climb up through a crack in the rocks. It’s great. It brings you out by the chapel walls in the middle of the old graveyard.”

  “Do you need ropes?”

  “Oh no, there are plenty of footholes. But I should take a torch.”

  Colin could see that climbing up a real tunnel might not appeal to Oliver, and anyway, Mum might prefer him not to do it. He was still rather shaky after his illness. Digging a little hidey-hole in your garden was one thing, feeling your way up a great crack gouged out by the waves was quite another. It appealed to Colin, though.

  When they were back at the bungalow he got everybody organized. Prill didn’t need persuading. She cheered up a bit when he told her Mrs O’Malley had reported that their phone was out of order, but she still didn’t want to stay in the house.

  “Well, who wants to, anyway,” Colin said, “on a day like this?”

  They put some food together and installed Alison in a canvas carrier that Colin usually wore on his back like a rucksack. Most days she didn’t care who carried her around but she was being awkward this morning. It had to be Mum.

  Oliver kept on digging till the very last moment, muttering darkly that he didn’t want to go. He had things to do that afternoon which didn’t include the Blakemans.

  “Oh, come on, Olly!” Prill shouted. “We’re wasting the day. It’ll be cooler down by the sea. You could take your sweater off,” she added, unable to resist.