The Devils Harvest: The End of All Flesh. Read Free Page B

hand and dropped the umbrella as if it was of no significance – social norms not high on his list. He took a high backed seat besides the open crackling fire and gently lowered himself down onto it, crossing his long thin legs, showing of his black socks.

    “Please, take a seat,” he simply said. He waved a hand at the empty chair opposite.
     
    I was still in a state of shock. I hadn’t worked out what he was yet, but I knew something was not right. My primeval instincts’ telling me something was very wrong. It took all my will power from simply stopping myself from running out the door, plunging into the cold stormy night, taking my chances out there, rather than be anywhere near him, and that smile of his.

    “Please,” he said once again. As he did so this time the door was wrenched from my grasp and slammed shut. I let myself believe for those few precious seconds that it was my imagination taking hold, nothing more than the wind pulling it from my hand. That was until the latch clicked and the bolt locked.
     
    My eyes pried away from the now locked and bolted door, to see him sat motionless, only the wide smile being any movement from his direction. Then his tongue raked over his chapped lips. Like a dead body having just been raised by necromancy, I slowly moved across the room, bumping into a knee-high table in the process, upturning it along with the dead telephone.

    “Please sit, Mr. Cain,” he said, in his relaxed modulated voice. I hadn’t told him my name. Had I? But then everyone in the area knew I lived here, but they kept at a respectable distance. Until now. My body answered by taking another high backed wing chair opposite, with its studded buttons in red hard leather. My favourite seat, one I sat in while thinking or simply reading. I never knew why I had another positioned opposite, never having visitors. I think it was for comfort reason. Freudian psychology would say I was creating an illusion that I wasn’t alone.
     
    The two chairs were framed by the large fireplace. There was a thick wooden fire surround that was almost twelve foot across, and five high. The fire nestled in the middle on the grate, and it had two stone seats to either side, if you wished to sit uncomfortably close. I believed they were also used for drying out food and herbs were hung to either side. Firewood was also stacked on each side to keep it dry. There was a carbon copy of it in the large kitchen.

    “May I smoke?” he asked, already reaching into the confines of his jacket to remove a packet of unfiltered Marlboros. I knew them well, my chosen brand before I had given them up after losing a brother to lung cancer.
     
    He looked around, his eye skipping all around the room.

    “I have –” I coughed, trying to clear my constricted throat. “I have no ashtrays,” I managed to squeeze out eventually. The first time I had spoken, and for such a mundane reason.
     
    “That’s right,” he stated matter-of-fact, “after the unfortunate sickness with your older brother.” He lifted the cigarette to his thinly pressed lips and lit it with a single match he had struck by scraping with his fingernail, like you see in the movies. Smoke encompassed his face, shrouding him from view for a fraction of a second. Then two long plumes of smoke issued from his nostrils, now encircling his lap like the witches Vixens deadly fog.

    “What about the ashtray in the cupboard under the stairs?” he asked politely, as if inquiring about my health.
     
    I dislodged an old memory, realizing that yes there was an old ashtray under the stairs in an old cardboard box, right next to the small collection of Christmas decorations I had put away a few weeks ago. I had put the ashtray there years before, stowing it away with some of my brother’s belongings. Not wanting to throw it way because it had been his, even though – in a way – it had been the cause of his death.

    In fact it was an ashtray I had bought him on one of