The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  The road was moderately well-kept. The shrubbery either side was trimmed back, and its few potholes were patched with Tarmac. Tracks indented the gravel: it was frequented by vehicles. Rasha kept to its left side just in case a car sped along. Dense woodland smothered the road, and the sea’s salty aroma came off the tail end of the howling wind. Through the leafy canopy, a stone chimney reared its head – the engine house, worn in comparison to its glorified illustration on her school jumper.

  Gravel crackled under tyres. Rasha turned as a burgundy three-wheeled Reliant Robin trundled toward her. It slowed to a stop a metre away. Trish and Sam climbed from the front seats, and she heard Trish say, ‘I told you she was coming, Bickle, and we were almost late.’

  Trish, her hair now sky blue, approached first, face awash with concern.

  ‘Help me,’ Rasha begged.

  Rasha was choked with emotion; her saviours stood before her in reality’s cold, hard light, two of three people she owed her life to.

  ‘I’m a monster, and I need help,’ she cried.

  Trish stepped forward as if to hug her. She must have thought better of it and held her hands behind her back. Sam leant on the Reliant’s bonnet, his face sour.

  ‘Please,’ Rasha muttered.

  ‘We should take her to the Network,’ Sam said to Trish. ‘If James knows we’ve had unofficial contact, he’ll have our heads. Think about the disciplinary.’

  Trish looked at Rasha with sympathy.

  ‘That can wait,’ Trish said. ‘Look at her; she needs some humanity. Take the Reliant. Meet us by the coal house.’

  Sam huffed but didn’t retort. He jumped into the Reliant and sped toward the engine house. Trish took Rasha by the hand, and they broke into the woodland to the right. Roots threatened to trip them, and crows cawed overhead. The trees thinned, and a wall of blue met them; the sea stretched from the cliff edge to the sky. To their left were crumbled foundations, the remnants of what Rasha presumed to be the coal house. Beyond that the ground was cratered from decades of mining and construction. The last intact engine house perched on the northwest fringe, just before a sharp incline into the raging sea below.

  Nothing else was said between the pair until Sam approached them. He was quiet, in a world of his own, eyes tired, shoulders slumped. He perched on the remains of a slate wall as Rasha and Trish – ‘Short for Trisha, but call me T’ – walked the coastline. Trish seemed uncomfortable in the silence and filled it with proverbial nonsense. Rasha was grateful for her effort, for she wasn’t accommodated in social circles often.

  ‘How do you feel when you’re near an imprint?’ Trish asked.

  ‘A ghost?’ Rasha asked.

  ‘Right.’

  Rasha thought back to the blood that had oozed from her mouth when she’d seen Joel Tredethy, the shadow who infested her mind as if it were a weed leeching healthy soil of nutrients.

  ‘It’s like I’m becoming someone else. Becoming them.’

  Trish nodded.

  ‘That’s engagement.’ Trish reached out and pretended to knock on Rasha’s forehead. ‘We’re not witnesses by chance. This noggin’ of yours is complex and astounding. When you’re born it’s smooth – a pebble. Through experience it develops all of these ribbons and pathways. What do you know about the limbic system?’

  ‘Is that a computer thing?’

  ‘It’s part of the brain,’ Trish said in a sisterly fashion. ‘Though you could say it’s like the processor of a computer. The limbic system develops differently person to person. Through extreme trauma it becomes sensitive to certain emotions, and how it develops affects how you process emotions. Take this cliff. It wasn’t this way fifty years ago, and it won’t be in the next fifty. It changes every day, the waves crashing into it, leaving their mark. Imprints are the same. Their energy transmits in waves, and it’s the limbic system that catches it all.’

  Rasha was lost in Trish’s words and the lapping water. She recollected the labyrinth that her mind had been imprisoned in the previous night.

  ‘Syria. My memories were used against me . . .’

  ‘An imprint will latch on to familiar emotions. If it knows pain, it will find it. But don’t look so downtrodden. Remember, the cliff is ever changing, and so are you.’

  Rasha hoped so. She wanted to be old Rasha again, long before her mother had branded her monster and long before monsters had taken her family from her. Then again, had her family not perished – had she not led Milana to her death – she wouldn’t have been a witness.

  ‘I know who the shadow is.’

  ‘The shadow?’ Sam asked.

  Sam hopped from the wall and neared the women.

  ‘The one that . . . occupied me,’ Rasha confirmed in an attempt to adopt their terminology. ‘It was my sister, Milana. I did something terrible and – ’

  ‘The girl in the rubble who we saw in the ombrederi?’ Trish asked. Rasha nodded, and the bright-haired woman continued. ‘It takes the mind of a witness to become an imprint. If it were her, she would have come to you before now.’

  Rasha sniffed to hold back tears. For once they would have been tears of relief. If Milana wasn’t haunting her, as she had originally believed, then there was chance she had forgiven Rasha.

  ‘I think I know where it came from,’ Rasha said. ‘When we were fighting it, there in the ombrederi, I saw into it. I saw the mines. Whatever the shadow is, it came from here.’

  Perspiration dewed across Trish’s and Sam’s ashen faces.

  They darted through the woodland. Branches tugged at their clothes as if to pull Rasha away from the strangers.

  ‘Can imprints do that?’ Rasha asked. ‘Hide themselves?’

  ‘There’s one that has, yes,’ Sam said.

  He didn’t care to expand. Rasha paused. She’d succumbed to their analogies and theories because they fed her appetite for answers. She was miles from civilisation with two people who could speak to the dead and ensured they told her as little as possible. A metre away was a chain-link fence. Beyond it, erected proud and strong, was the engine house. Around it were two angular warehouses whose windows seeped cold white light. People were there, and the duo avoided them. Sam had mentioned a disciplinary.

  They have been fired, Rasha thought, fired and AWOL, and I’m their bargaining chip, which is why they’re telling me half-truths.

  ‘Who are you hiding from?’ she challenged.

  Trish and Sam stopped by the fence and turned to her.

  ‘No one,’ said Sam.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ Trish said.

  Rasha had heard the expression time and again from adults who excused her from conversation. I was raised in a war zone, thank you.

  ‘I’ll tell everyone about this place,’ Rasha warned.

  Trish and Sam turned to look at each other. Wide eyes and hand gestures communicated different views. Sam shook his head.

  ‘We’re facing a disciplinary because of what we did to you,’ he said.

  Rasha scowled.

  ‘You saved me,’ she said.

  ‘It was our fault the imprint found you,’ Trish said. She eased toward Rasha. ‘It was an experiment. We’re trying to understand how witnesses develop. We pushed it too far. It was a mistake.’

  She was haunted at the same time each night – Rasha accepted that. They watched her walk to school in the morning and followed with a drone on her return. Mr Keats had warned of strange people who skulked about the caravan site.

  ‘You did this to me,’ Rasha growled. She shoved Sam with all her might. ‘You made me like this!’

  He held her wrists before she could strike him again.

  ‘No, no,’ Sam said. ‘You were already capable. All we did was heighten your connection.’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  Sam gestured to Trish and said with a sly smile, ‘The Hound herself.’

  Trish glared at him.

  ‘I can hear people, other witnesses mostly,’ Trish told Rasha. ‘Young’uns li
ke you broadcast more than most. Last night was horrible, but there’s a positive to it all. What you’re capable of, we can help you control it. Are you with us?’

  What quality of life would she have if she couldn’t control engagement? Sleep-deprived, barely able to part real life from the dead – she’d never be granted permanent citizenship at that rate. If she couldn’t control it, she’d lose Haya and Cornwall. Rasha nodded.

  Sam led them at a sprint alongside the chain-link fence where a yellow hazard sign read, ‘Danger, do not enter. Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ They squeezed through a gap that probably trafficked foxes and badgers.

  At a security door, Sam typed a code – which Rasha could have sworn was 1-3-6-6-6 – and they were inside. Stale warmth and sullen chatter met them as they trudged down a steady incline into the jaw of a mineshaft. Trish procured a band from her pocket, infused with many dull materials, and stretched it over her forehead. Rasha shot her a quizzical look.

  ‘All these witnesses projecting their thoughts,’ Trish told Rasha. ‘Enough to drive anyone mad.’

  Rasha supposed it dulled others’ thoughts and noted how bitter Trish was about it. At the tunnel’s end, two copper plaques were fixed to a wall. One read, ‘The Imprint Activity Network is Funded by the Edward Penrose Trust,’ and another was a memorial that listed names of deceased colleagues. Sam and Trish gestured to it as they passed.

  ‘The river always finds the sea,’ they chanted.

  The shaft’s throat was short and opened out into a large cavern lit by artificial lamps. Plasterboard offices were sprawled upon metal walkways. Sam and Trish whisked Rasha into another opening. She locked eyes with a stout frog-faced woman stood in the adjacent tunnel. The woman consulted a leather-bound notebook, smiled at Rasha, and scribbled amongst its pages. Rasha continued on with the two witnesses to the head of a ladder which descended into another tunnel. She hesitated.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Trish said. ‘It’s safe. Like a tower block but underground.’

  Tower blocks with little escape did not incite her with confidence.

  A steel girder pulverised her father’s body.

  Rasha nodded, stepped onto the ladder, and descended into absolute blackness. Déjà vu amassed with each step as the shadow’s memories ebbed and flowed into her consciousness. The pitter-patter of feet and hands on the metal rungs quickened. They found a winding tunnel which expanded into an ill-lit cavern. Its farthest, steepest wall was four storeys high. Many pillars, ranging in materials and sizes, supported the sloped ceiling. It gave the impression they stood under a gargantuan spider.

  Sam and Trish raced over to the base of the wall where Will flitted between machinery with a clipboard in hand.

  ‘We messaged Will ahead,’ Sam said. ‘He’s going to help us.’

  Trish beckoned Rasha closer. The wall was roughly hewn, its surface pitted like the faces of her acne-strewn classmates. Evenly spaced wires dangled from sockets along it, all embellished in tin. Trish crossed to a table and unwrapped a package from a sun-bleached cover. It was a helmet, crustaceous in appearance, riddled with kettle sockets that matched the plugs on the wall. Rasha had watched too many late-night sci-fi reruns on Channel Five to not be weary.

  ‘What is going on?’ she cried. Sam turned to look at her. Compassion glimmered in his sad eyes.

  ‘Occupation is extremely rare,’ Trish informed her. ‘You could answer a lot of questions for us.’

  Will and Sam looked at each other, eyebrows cocked. Will turned back to Rasha and gestured to the helmet that Trish connected to the wall via various wires.

  ‘This is a receptor,’ he explained. ‘The wall is rich in tin ore; it has a compound that magnifies the frequency, strengthening your connection to imprints.’

  ‘So when you wear the receptor,’ Trish continued, ‘you can extend your mind, your consciousness, into the ombrederi.’

  ‘The frequency?’

  ‘It’s better if you experience it for yourself.’

  ‘We want you to try and reach out for the shadow,’ Sam said. Behind him, Trish muttered into Will’s ear, probably to update him on what Rasha had told them. ‘Can you do this for us?’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ Trish said.

  Will’s stare pierced through her. Rasha played the ideas in her mind: the alternative possibilities, the consequences, percentages and fractions. Ultimately, there was only one answer. ‘If I want to shut the imprints out of my mind, I’m going to have to learn to let them in when I want, aren’t I?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Sam said. ‘It’s all about controlling the threshold between the physical and the ombrederi.’

  ‘We can control your connection manually,’ Trish said. ‘If you struggle, we can shut it out.’

  ‘Is this the only way?’ Rasha asked. She didn’t want to admit that the machine scared her.

  ‘The safest way,’ Will confirmed. ‘We all have guides, a particular imprint the we have a deep connection with. Until you establish that and train your mind, this is the best option.’

  Rasha strode to an old chair beside the helmet Trish had set up. She shuffled to find comfort on the hard seat. The trio waltzed around her.

  ‘The helmet’s heavy,’ Trish warned.

  With Sam’s help, Trish carefully placed the helmet over Rasha’s head. Attached to the bottom was a neck brace, which Rasha learnt was necessary when the weight of it pinched her shoulders. Sam latched them together whilst Trish placed electrodes at intervals on her forehead. She didn’t expect the receptor to be heavy and claustrophobic.

  Milana in rubble.

  She looked out beyond the witnesses to the beams that could buckle at any moment, the only thing that stopped the cavern ceiling from crushing them.

  A burning hellscape.

  ‘Okay, Rasha,’ Trish said. ‘You need to clear your mind. I know, easier said than done. Focus on your breathing. In, out. In, out. As soon as you register any memories or thoughts – ’

  Her father’s skull crumpled beneath stone.

  ‘– cast them out, turn your mind back to your breathing.’

  Rasha closed her eyes, then breathed in through her nose and slowly out of her mouth. In, out, in, out. She purposefully inhaled sharply through her nose when Syrian horrors invaded her memory. As she did, the metallic, oxidised air itched at her nostrils and lingered on her pallet like the taste of death.

  Her father in the darkness, ash and dust turning his blood black.

  In, out. The darkness of her eyelids conquered all.

  ‘If your mind is clear,’ Trish said, ‘I want you to imagine a familiar place, a neutral or happy environment where you can bring yourself when entering the ombrederi. You know mine already.’

  ‘The lighting shop,’ Rasha said.

  She recalled the warmth of it, and although it was cosy and familiar to Trish, Rasha needed an outside space. The week the Abadis moved to the caravan site, the friendlier locals held a fundraiser in their name to buy amenities and take a trip to the Lost Gardens of Heligan. It had been a beautiful spring day, just after a storm, and was the first time in months that Rasha surrounded herself with greenery. But it was no longer just a memory.

  Rasha was in the ombrederi.

  Rasha was rooted to a footpath amidst the botanical gardens. There was a soft colourful haze to the trees and plants: the ombrederi’s atmosphere. Bushes teemed with acacias and brugmansias and bechsonarias, and amongst the leafy canopy came shrill birdsong.

  ‘I’m here,’ Rasha called out toward the treetops, to the real world.

  ‘Great,’ Trish’s voice echoed back. ‘We’ll make the receptor live. You’ll start to feel imprint energy all around us. Identify individual imprints. Plot them onto your neutral place. Right? Brilliant. Turning the receptor on in five. . . four. . . three. . .’

  The click of a button. In her mind – the ombrederi – figures began to populate the gardens. Static energy crawled across her skin, and varie
d emotions – from heart-jumping elation to bowel-twisting sadness – whirled in her stomach.

  ‘Do you feel that energy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thoughts, memories, emotions, they all broadcast around us, through us. They tie us and imprints together. That is the frequency.’

  The gardens burst with hundreds of imprints. Rasha understood: death wasn’t an absolute end, but a further form of being. The ombrederi was another world, and the frequency energy connected the two.

  ‘So,’ Trish continued, ‘if you feel ready, we want you to connect to the shadow. You have to find a mutual connection. Open your mind up to the memories you were thinking of the night you were occupied, the ones that drew the shadow to you. Remind yourself how that felt and call out to it.’

  That was the easy part; the memories were always there.

  Automatic rifles popped.

  Bodies smouldered.

  Milana’s arm no longer attached to her body –

  Heligan’s trees uprooted themselves, and the undergrowth wilted. Rasha’s feet hit the floor of a tunnel. She climbed to her feet, noting the tunnel’s similarity to the ones she had passed to reach the tin ore wall. A colony of miners, their skin enveloped in soot, marched with pickaxes. At the centre of the shaft, a piston reached the height of the cavern. It was three times as wide as the men’s waists. They climbed onto it to elevate their exhausted bodies to the surface.

  An explosion rumbled. Torrents of rubble and dust shed over them. A metallic ping-ping-chink-ping, and the piston crashed down, cavern ceiling and all, and flattened the men beneath it.

  Rasha opened her eyes to reality, heart thudding inside her chest.

  The helmet’s supports dug into her collarbone. She looked for Trish, Sam, and Will. The witnesses were there, but they were not alone. The miners were with them – they always had been. The heightened frequency energy coursed through her, and the imprints sharpened. Some were burnt or bloodied, others had lost arms and legs. A skeletal boy no older than Rasha was so close that she could see his brain throb inside his cracked cranium.