The Harvest

CHAPTER ONE
The orphanage was like a bruise as you turned onto the street.
A Victorian building, plain, with a single storey made of red brick that years of pollution had blackened. Its façade had a series of small sash windows, most of which were broken and covered by dark metal grilles, placed high.
People walking by would sense the place was staring down upon them, many quickening their pace without thinking. The building gave the impression of melancholy and neglect.
There wasn’t any graffiti on the orphanage’s walls, unusual in this part of town. The place remained unsullied by the army of local taggers.
Standing outside in the drizzle, surrounded by a small collection of cardboard moving boxes, Tim Waverly considered the peculiarity of calling such a place home. At twenty-eight and single, it seemed like the best solution for him, if he wanted to remain in London. He couldn’t bring himself to contemplate a house share.
He waved at a child who stared at him through the window of a flat on the other side of the street, smiling when they ducked out of sight. In the trees above him, magpies chittered, a sharp, angry sound like a rebuke.

Tim knew little about the place, but had been told that years of confusion about the building’s ownership, along with various legal disputes, stalled plans to develop ‘luxury apartments’ on the site.
The representative from Guardian Angels, Xander, who met him at the orphanage earlier that morning for orientation, was the type of upper-middle-class Londoner who attended the minor co-ed independent school Tim taught at. In a tight-fitting suit paired with shiny brown brogues without socks, Xander looked like someone who shared too many selfies on social media.
Checklist pinned to a plastic clipboard, Xander had rattled through a series of guardianship rules which were basic enough. Formalities done, he’d looked up from the clipboard and asked, “So, what’s your story then, dude?”
Tim, teeth on edge from being addressed as dude, explained his position. Given teachers weren’t highly paid, even in the private sector, he wanted to save for a mortgage, but had no way to do so. He didn’t tell the man that finding rent for the last place was a struggle, and that the Angels’ flyer pushed through his letterbox had seemed some kind of sign:

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“Couldn’t the old Bank of Mum and Dad step in?” Xander asked, emphasising his words with air-quotes.
“They would have if they weren’t dead - there wasn’t much to inherit.” This last, from Tim, had the desired effect and killed the conversation. Xander had handed him a large bunch of keys, run a hand through over-waxed hair, and said his goodbyes.
The low fee for this place (Xander insisted it wasn’t rent) was key to Tim’s decision to take it on. His housing costs were reducing by almost seventy percent, so he’d have some spare money to pop into his savings account for the first time since...well, ever.
Given the orphanage’s age and level of disrepair, his living quarters for the next six months weren’t much better than a hostel.
The Guardians had cobbled together an apartment with plain stud walls and squeezed it into a small, dark corner of the building (Tim had been instructed not to place anything on the walls, as it was one of the rules). A flimsy, lockless, PVC ‘front door’ added little security, while sparse furnishings were provided. The initial impression was of a large prison cell.
The apartment had a tiny, windowless bathroom (shower, no bath) which stood to one side of a combined living/kitchen/bedroom studio, with barred windows set higher on the external wall than might be expected. Perhaps they were worried about the orphans trying to escape, he thought. Tim was just thankful that the apartment had services attached to it. There was a small boiler for hot water and electric heaters. Most other parts of the building remained without power.
Outside the apartment, the orphanage was a dark warren of corridors lined with small rooms. The place smelled sour. Years of emptiness and the spread of damp, he supposed. Many spiderwebs, dotted with the desiccated remains of flying insects, were epic, and he vowed to tackle these as a priority, not keen to meet their architects.
When he’d first been to look at the place, he had been led into what had once been a large industrial kitchen. Apart from a few cabinets, doors hanging off, and steel worktops, there were few clues as to the room’s previous use. Someone had stripped out all the appliances.

As he unpacked his few personal possessions, Tim’s thoughts turned back to the day the Guardian Angels had accepted his application. He’d been on an overheated bus, staring out at the rain through fogged windows, on the way back to his rented flat after giving blood. Donating was something he’d done since he was a late teen, every twelve weeks like clockwork. One legacy, perhaps, of having lost his mother to aggressive leukaemia when he was just a boy. The other legacy, less welcome, was a tendency to melancholy which he’d been medicated for, having balked at the idea of talking therapy. That he’d not needed the medication for several years pleased him.
Sitting towards the rear of the top deck, avoiding eye contact with other passengers, he had taken the Guardians’ call. The excitement of the news, combined with the loss of a pint of blood and the vehicle’s heat, had made him rather unwell.
He remembered feeling outside of himself for a short time, black spots crowding in on his vision like small insects and having to take several careful breaths in order to avoid the embarrassment of being taken ill and the attendant inconvenience to other travellers.
Tim, rocking with the motion of the bus, had noticed a noise drilling into his brain. A baby on the lower deck having a screaming fit.

. . .

He saw the writing during a recce of the orphanage.
He had to use a flashlight; there was no power in this part of the building, and little light from the darkening sky outside made its way through the windows. Turning the corner into yet another corridor, Tim came to a stop as the torchlight picked out letters scrawled deep
into the faded plaster. He ran the dim light across the words which ran the full length of the space from floor to ceiling:
“Suffer The Children.”
Placing the torch on the stone floor, Tim found himself compelled to touch the biblical quote, the nail on his index finger picking at the edge of the huge S, causing dust from the old plaster to rain down to the floor, flickering in the torchlight like tiny sparks. He winced as a sharp piece of masonry lodged under his fingernail. Looking down, he saw a bead of blood, black in the light from his torch, oozing from beneath the nail, and sucked the end of his finger, tasting copper. Moving his hand across the uneven wall, he heard an echoing bark of laughter. A man, he supposed, passing by in the street outside.

BANG! BANG!

The sudden noise made Tim flinch, wrenching his attention from the writing on the wall as the sound reverberated around the building.
It took a few moments for him to realise where it was coming from. The heavy brass knocker struck the orphanage’s sturdy main door for a third time, emphatic. BANG!
He groaned. Meeting new people wasn’t his favourite thing. He considered ignoring it, but the knocking came again, insistent. Perhaps Xander forgot to tell me another rule, he thought.
Retrieving the torch and taking one last look at the words defacing the wall, he headed toward the large front door. When he hauled the door open, he was greeted by a frizzy-haired woman swathed in what appeared to be a random collection of clothing. Patterned materials cascaded over her in a clashing multitude of coloured layers. At first glance, she could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty-five.
The woman beamed and thrust a sad bunch of flowers at him. “I knew it! You’re actually going to live here!” she said. She held out the hand which wasn’t holding any flowers, and he shook it. “Louise Sanglin, fifty-four Oldfield Street, I spotted you emptying your little car earlier.”
“And you brought flowers,” Tim said. While he enjoyed addressing a class of teenagers, he liked his own company. Despite this, he gestured behind him, knowing that she was expecting to be invited in and feeling anxious about being considered impolite by any of his new neighbours.
“I’ve never been inside this old place,” she said as he walked her to his apartment. “I’ve always thought it was creepy standing empty at the end of the road.”
He looked at her. “I hope you’ve had a tetanus booster. I think the plan is to pull it down, build luxury flats, but I’m probably going to be here for at least six months, as property guardian. Caretaking the building, essentially.” Reaching the threshold of the apartment, he gave a small shrug. “This is me.”
“Interesting. Having this place to yourself I mean,” she said, sitting on the sofa while he made coffee. “You’re braver than I am. It’s got a funny atmosphere, hasn’t it? But here you are, actually living in the strangest building on the street!”
Tim, thinking back to the words scratched into the wall, began saying that, strictly speaking, his address was on the A-road which ran along the bottom of Oldfield and realised she wasn’t listening. Louise Sanglin was a talker, and Tim was content to say little. He sometimes wondered if standing up all day in front of his students had made him less inclined to speak to people outside of school, the quiet man grown from the bookish child.
“So, here’s the thing,” she was saying about the orphanage, “I’ve lived here for a decade, but I’ve rarely seen anyone walk into this old place. People say there was a campaign to get it closed down, and it’s remained abandoned ever since.” She glanced around at their surroundings and Tim caught a momentary expression pass across her eyes, as if she had sensed something distasteful.
Mrs Sanglin said that she was married to Stephan, who spent much of his time working overseas. “Dubai, so loads of tax-free money, the downside being that we spend less time together than we’d like.” Tim assumed they were childless, as she didn’t mention any. He pegged the woman as an inveterate gossip and avoided sharing any personal information, certain she would broadcast it to the rest of the neighbourhood.
Despite his reluctance to share his own history, Louise delighted in taking Tim through a verbal snapshot of Oldfield Street, or at least those inhabitants who made themselves known to their little community. This being London, it amounted to about twenty percent of them. She told him about Sean and Andrew, a young gay couple who ironically referred to themselves as ‘Shandrew’ and lived with their dog, Molly. “Cute little thing, a bit of an intimate sniffer, if you know what I mean.”
Louise thought the “old dears” in the street loved having a gay couple as neighbours, while parents of teenage boys were suspicious. Tim took this speculation with a pinch of salt.
She had apparently been to their house on various occasions. “You’d never know it, but that place used to be a real mess, honestly awful. When we came here, it was a jumble of flats, bedsit central, God knows who was living in there. Those boys have done a huge amount of work. Everything, top to bottom. It belongs in a magazine!”
Tim grew irritated as she shared her opinion about the residents of Oldfield Court. The affordable housing across from the orphanage resembled his childhood home. She described its residents as “in the street, but not part of our community,” and he resisted the temptation to ask her how a property guardian who couldn’t afford normal rent might fit into her community. He was certain his arrival was catnip to the local gossip network.
When she got to the Warwicks, Tim stopped her. “Lucy Warwick? Bit of an emo?”
“That’s her, wears black. I imagine she doesn’t make it easy for her parents. They’re churchgoers, I believe.”
Tim grimaced, unhappy about living in such proximity to a student, but kept his counsel. Keen to be alone, he stood and was thankful that his unwanted visitor took the hint. As she gathered her things, she warned him that one of the flats in Oldfield Court was “known to the police as a drug-
den.”

When Mrs Sanglin had said her goodbyes, with an open invitation for 'dinner or brunch sometime' (which Tim made a mental note to avoid), he called it a night. Wrapped in the duvet, itself piled with coats, and still wearing socks in the cold bed, he spent several minutes engaged in a fruitless attempt to focus on his paperback but gave up after trying to read the same page three times.
The impact of moving had caught up with him. He gave an extravagant yawn, then another, before settling down for his first night in his new home. In the dark, something stirred. Right at the edge of his awareness, just as sleep took him, Tim could hear a baby’s cries.
. . .

Wanting to get things looking as homely as possible, Tim attacked his living quarters with gusto. He wiped and bleached surfaces and vacuumed the floors. Afterwards, he changed the placement of the sparse furnishings and set out his small but treasured collection of books in a way he found pleasing to the eye.
He had spent the morning further exploring the building beyond the walls of his living space. It was bleak. There were few adornments, its warren of narrow, damp-smelling, corridors almost identical. Some of these led to dead-ends, making the place confusing to navigate.
From time to time, he found signs of habitation in the building’s darkest corners–in one he spotted an ancient game of hangman etched above the skirting board, faint letters spelling out SCR-AM, and could imagine whispering children playing their game while lying on the floor.
He hadn’t counted the bedrooms leading off these corridors, but there were about fifty or sixty. These were cramped cells with breezeblock walls and sturdy doors fashioned from thin metal bars. Most were without windows. Quite a few of the bedrooms still had small, iron-framed beds on which thin, damp mattresses lay. Dark stains covering the mattresses caught Tim’s attention, and he didn’t want to think about them.
Under one bed, he’d spotted a shoe which was missing its pair.
Age had softened the old, black leather, which was mottled with musty white mould. This discovery caused Tim a surprising and intense wave of sadness. Having lost his own mother when he was little, he thought he understood something of the children who had inhabited these mean rooms, their loneliness and isolation. Turning the small shoe around in his hands, he had a rare and vivid memory of his mother smiling down at him, as he got fitted for a similar pair, for primary school, he assumed.
He wondered what his students, in their comfortable homes with modern conveniences, would think of the place. No doubt, these poor, parentless children had been forced into lives that would horrify and confuse his students. They were comfortable in their own homes and surrounded by the conveniences of modern life.
Besides its many bedrooms, the orphanage had two dismal, grey bathroom blocks. These housed rows of basins, twelve in all, open showers and toilet cubicles without doors. This was both sad and disturbing. Along with the barred bedroom doors, it gave the impression that the staff didn’t grant the children who had lived here any privacy from each other or from their warders.
The institutional atmosphere of the place was depressing and claustrophobic, despite the large footprint of the building.
As guardian, Tim was required to undertake certain tasks which he needed to fit around his full-time teaching job. The Guardian Angels expected him to check the building each morning and before he turned in for the night. Failure to do so would cause the termination of his contract, as set out in Xander’s list of rules.
As well as keeping an eye on things, he had to attend to minor repairs, ironic, he thought, in a building earmarked for demolition.
Given the sheer scale of the orphanage, and the filth and detritus present everywhere outside the confines of his small living quarters, Tim wasn’t sure what repairs would be considered important. The Angels had left him a haphazard pile of tools in the cavernous old kitchen.
That evening, he sat behind the closed plastic door of the apartment, thinking about his tour of the orphanage. He wondered if he should set up a spreadsheet to organise any tasks. It seemed a sensible idea, and he’d already decided to start with the cobwebs, which hung from the ceilings and covered surfaces like ancient shrouds.
Thumbing through his phone, pondering a takeaway, he glanced up. His stomach lurched as if from a sudden alteration in the room’s air pressure.
An unusual stain was visible on the solid outside wall, next to the television. It appeared to be the type of mark that, perhaps, one could see better by not looking straight at it. He moved closer, and the effect reduced, so he resumed his seat.
Sitting back, chewing at the edge of his thumbnail, Tim couldn’t determine what it was about the stain (it’s a handprint, popped into his head) that seemed so uncanny. He stared at it, unblinking, for a few moments before realisation dawned. He could see the fingerprints and palm lines. A rush of cold air sliced through the space, accompanied by a further twist of nausea deep in his bowel.
The handprint didn’t look like someone leaning against the wall had left it. It looked like someone’s hand pressing through, as if seeking to escape from inside the wall. He felt a sudden, urgent need to rub it away.