by Terry Kitto
She had Shauna’s killer to find and Michael’s name to clear.
Shauna had taken her last breaths in Penzance in an alleyway that intersected Market Jew Street and New Town Lane.
Trish traipsed down its cobbles and checked her watch: four in the morning. The old fishing port was otherworldly at night without the milling locals and squabbling seagulls. The metallic moonlight contorted the buildings either side of her into a Burton-scape of crooked lines and precarious structures. Trish took the receptor from her duffel bag and fixed it onto her head. She caught her smoky reflection amongst the cuts of meat in the butcher’s window. Her eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks drawn; she looked halfway to death.
Receptor secured, Trish stood between a ramshackle garage and the side of a Cornwall Hospice. The receptor’s motor hummed, and its weight caused her neck and shoulders to ache. Trish pulled a perfume bottle from her pocket. Glam, flogged by a reality television star. God knows who, but it had been Shauna’s favourite, to the point where the expensive-to-the-pound-cheap-to-the-nose odour was Shauna. Every relic and every memory. Trish splashed a little onto her forefinger and drew lines with it across her neck. ‘Stale rosé,’ Trish often mocked. Shauna wouldn’t disagree; she had been bought it for Christmas by her partner, Josh, and his family. They had thought a lot of Shauna – Trish too – but Trish lost them when she had chosen to defend Michael against amounting allegations.
After all, the evidence could not be disputed. That night, Michael was last seen leaving The Puffin and Hare with Shauna. He’d brawled with a teenager over a game of darts and was thrown out by the doorman. Later forensics found his DNA on all her clothes, as hers was on his. His actions after her death divided many. He’d been the one to call 999, and when the police arrived they tore him from Shauna’s body where he knelt, sobbing into her stomach. Many, Shauna’s in-laws included, put that down to guilt. Trish knew that Michael, who rarely kept on the good side of the law, would scarper if he’d committed such an act.
Trish pocketed Shauna’s perfume, closed her eyes, and reached for the world that lingered just beyond her basic senses. Her mind fled into the ombrederi.
Penzance’s ombrederi was ablaze with the town’s history.
A rabid pub fire tore through the roof of The Puffin and Hare. November floods rushed down Market Jew Street and took locals’ rubbish bins with it.
Trish focused hard as Glam swamped her nostrils. The fire and the floods sunk away as paint wafts from a brush soaked in turpentine. A figure moulded itself from the shadows ahead of her. Trish’s heart plummeted. Not the shadow, she prayed. Not here.
It wasn’t the shadow imprint at all but a lanky woman who staggered forward and brandished a knife. She lunged and cut through another drunken woman. Trish took hold of the energy around the memory and forced the ground to swallow the imprints.
Trish needed a stronger memory. What was Shauna, above all else?
Teagues’ Lighting Shop unravelled from the darkness. That night Trish had hid from social services. Shauna had coaxed her out from between the aisles of energy-saving LEDs, eyes anywhere but the counter. Their parents’ bodies lay there. Shauna’s face, just a teenager herself, came to Trish as vivid as it had been that night: gnome-esque with warm chestnut eyes. Those freckled cheeks creased with heartbreak.
No matter how many times Trish replayed the memory in her head, let her chest heave with the horror of her parents’ death, the ombrederi never changed. Trish let the memory flutter away.
She didn’t want to, but Trish thought of the act: murder. Her mind wouldn’t let her put the act and Shauna’s beautiful face together. It was unfair; it was disgusting.
It was life, she’d learnt, always closely followed by death.
Coarse blue twine. That had been in the coroner’s report. It left a deep purple indent in the flesh of her neck, and her rounded face had become blue and bloated.
Trish breathed sharply. Cheap perfume.
Shauna materialised from the frequency energy and ambled up the alleyway as fast as her drunken legs would carry her. Tears turned her mascara to sludge across her cheeks. Her high heels clattered on the cobbles, hand on the wall of the Cornwall Hospice for support.
‘I’m sorry, Trish,’ she cried. ‘Trish, Trish . . .’
‘I’m here!’ Trish called, but that was then, and Trish was now, and Shauna wouldn’t be able to hear.
In fact, neither could Trish. Shauna’s cries dissolved. The darkest shadows in the butcher’s shop door rippled, and from them staggered a body on irregular limbs, awkward and splayfooted. What could be described as its head had no features; it was just a bulbous waxen facade.
The shadow imprint.
Trish shrunk in its aura. Despite its awkward posture and inadequate biology, the shadow imprint filled the air with a sense of superiority. Colour and shape disintegrated around its edges as if it were a humanoid eclipse.
With a whimper, Trish lost the connection to the ombrederi and slammed onto the cobbles of Market Jew Street. The receptor slipped from her head and clanged to the ground. Had shock broken her connection to the ombrederi, or had the shadow cast her out?
Trish scrambled to her feet and rubbed the knees of her leggings, now torn and mottled with blood. She’d hit the ground hard, more than enough to rip her away from the ombrederi. Her hands shook as she scooped the receptor up in her arms. She hadn’t imagined the shadow – that much she knew. It was as much part of the memory as Shauna or the buildings were.
It had been there the night Shauna died.
Samuel Bickle wanted to investigate Pendeen alone.
The peninsula’s cliff tops were barren in the a.m. and allowed Sam to indulge in habits that many would scold him for. As ever, it didn’t turn out that way. Cavern fever set in, and Will was adamant he’d go with Sam – after all, eighteen hours in semidarkness and artificial lights was no good for anyone’s mental health, let alone a witness’s. Ten minutes after their arrival, Trish rang Sam. He spent the next thirty minutes listening to her recount the recent sonar trial in Penzance over loudspeaker.
Will kept in earshot as he stabbed EMP beacons into the earth. Trish’s frantic words washed over Sam. He soaked up the waves as they rolled, silver in the moonlight. Sam adored Trish – she was often the glue that kept him and Will together. However, her one defining flaw was that she struggled to let go of things she couldn’t possibly change.
‘Are you sure you weren’t just projecting onto the memory?’ Sam asked again. ‘You’ve been thinking about it a lot.’
‘For the twentieth time, Bickle,’ Trish groaned. ‘It felt – how can I describe it – sentient. It had an aura, and when it appeared all sound and colour – ’
An 8-bit chime informed Sam that Trish had lost connection.
‘There goes her 5 percent battery,’ he said.
‘She might be under a lot of stress, but she has foresight,’ Will said. ‘If anyone will find something plausible with sonar, it’s Trish.’
‘Under a lot of stress, exactly,’ Sam remarked. ‘The last thing you should have done was suggest sonar.’
‘I thought she could do with a distraction,’ Will said. ‘At least I’m trying to help.’
Sam dared not retort to Will’s jibe. Yes, he had been indisposed when Trish had led the seminar and hadn’t been there to support her. But she’d had Will, and that was better.
Will flitted between the probes to check readings for frequency energy. Behind them, the lighthouse loomed over Pendeen. It marked one of the most active ley lines in the county, mostly because frequency energy latched to tin ore. The Network hadn’t taken to Wheal Gorenn or Pendeen on a whim, after all. Ley lines were often nicknamed ‘anchor points’ by witnesses, for imprints tended to gravitate toward the power sources; Pendeen was Abidemi’s. They’d find her there or not at all.
Abidemi, the guide that had abandoned them, just as Sam suspected everyone would. For Sam, the strength of the anchor point wouldn’t be enough. He
withdrew a baggie of ketamine from his jacket.
Will snatched the plastic wallet from Sam’s hand and scrutinised the ivory pills within; Will had to make his point. Sam abandoned the Network equipment and sprung at Will. He kept his eyes on the ketamine just in case Will flung them into the toiling sea below.
‘You promised,’ Will growled.
‘Well, I can’t protract without it,’ Sam said. ‘Abidemi’s gone. She’s being blamed for everything the shadow imprint has done. Needs must.’
Will threw the ziplock bag at him. He turned back to their equipment, plucked a probe from a bag, and thrust it into the soil where it stood upright.
Sam went back to his bags and took out a ridged square box: an amplifier. It gradually enhanced natural frequency energy and was far safer and more effective than an EMP. Used in tangent with a hallucinogenic substance, better still.
‘When was the last time you withdrew?’ Will asked.
‘Successfully? Not since rehab.’
‘You want to go back there? Worse yet, the Refinery?’
‘I’m not going to get addicted.’
‘You always will be,’ Will scoffed. ‘But that’s not what I meant. If you protract at the height of a frequency spike, you might not come back.’
Sam ignored him, wrenched the last beacon from its container, and jabbed it into the dirt.
‘Wouldn’t you be so lucky,’ he said under his breath in purposeful earshot of Will.
The probes beeped in unison with every twenty hertz of frequency energy. There were beeps forty seconds apart, but in no time at all it accelerated to every ten seconds, then every five.
‘Nearly at the height of a spike,’ Will said.
Sam ripped the baggie open, put a few pills on a closed hard case, and crushed it with the corner of a remote handset.
‘For fuck’s sake, really?’ Will griped.
‘It’s quicker this way.’
Sam rolled the card flap of a cigarette packet, put it to his nose, and snorted. The ketamine stung his nostrils beautifully. As he stood upright, the effects were already upon him. The outlines of Will, the probes, and their cases became hazy, and colours bled into one another.
‘The amplifier is live.’ Will’s voice reverberated. Sam’s skin crawled. Abstract thoughts, neither his nor induced by ketamine, swam through the fog in his brain. ‘Frequency energy is consistent.’
Eyes closed, Sam let his imprint succumb to the movement of the frequency energy as it lapped and rolled around him. The wind on his neck numbed, and the ache in his joints eased. His imprint shed the bone and sinew and post-winter fat behind like dough scraped from a proofing bowl.
Just his imprint.
Outside of his body, he looked back on himself, his face vacant atop the cliffs. Hair grey and face lined, he looked older than his reflection in mirrors suggested. Will hung back, lost in the motion of everything. Grass fluttered, waves hurtled, a barn owl swooped, and tears poured from Will’s eyes.
It was all inconsequential.
To reach Abidemi, he had to think of the shame that bound them both together. The scar on his right arm was as painful as the day he was branded it.
Sam recalled that day in Keast Family Bakery – the unbearable heat from the many ovens, a poorly ventilated kitchen at the height of summer. Yeasty bread and vanilla buttercream wafted through the bakery, congealed with the cigarette smoke and sweat that clung to the bakers’ whites. It had been Sam’s first job since his mother’s incarceration, living between bedsits, each more meagre than the last. He had refused the Network’s helping hand, certain he could build a normal life. There never was a normal for Sam.
The previous night, Sam and his colleagues had embarked on an end of season pub and club crawl through Newquay’s town centre. He thought of his mother often, of the occultist nutjobs that scuttled beneath Wheal Gorenn, and each time he did he necked a shot of vodka. Every time he saw an imprint entwined in the disco lights or loitering in empty hallways, he took a triple of tequila, until person and imprint had become one indistinguishable blur. During his intoxicated daze, he had kissed the kitchen supervisor, Tim, and later learnt the alcohol he had consumed clouded what little judgment he had.
The next morning, Tim and his kitchen assistants pounced on Sam. They dragged him to one of the ovens. Tim found an iron cutout in the shape of a carrot. He held it with tongs, opened an oven door, and pressed it against the bottom of the oven. When the cutout was warped from heat, Tim withdrew it and pressed it into Sam’s forearm. The pain was excruciating; the shame was worse. It scarred his skin – marked his imprint. Only Abidemi had come close to experiencing a similar tragedy. Abidemi, who had still not come.
Abidemi who, much like Will, had given up on him.
Will.
His face swam into view. Horrified. Bloodied. Bruised. He fell through a sky of diamonds. Rasha was bound in rope and grabbed at by many hands. Trish was crushed in an iron fist —
Sam come back to his body. It was heavy as though he’d risen from a bath. Clouds had since cleared the evening sky, and stars swirled with Gogh-esque velocity.
He rose steadily, his hands numbed to the grass beneath him; he could have been wearing oven mitts. With the equipment and flashlight in hand, Will charged to James’ people carrier, which they borrowed from their manager.
He never looked back to see if Sam would follow.
Eyes. Eyes everywhere. They watched Sam, and they judged him. In the activity centre, Vanessa peered from her desk when they passed. Will’s pained expression as they sat at the table in the biology lab. Trish’s scowl as she joined them amongst the glass walls. Even the Network’s logo peered at him like owlish eyes. Embellished on equipment, ID badges, and push-pull doors, the logo comprised of two circles interlocked at an angle. Left to interpretation, Sam was certain it depicted engagement, the moment in which the frontal lobe latched to the energy of an imprint. He was also sure they scathed him for breaking his sobriety. For breaking Will.
Will ensured he took the available seat farthest away from Sam so that Trish sat between them. She was often the mediator between the pair, whether the issue was work or mothers or, as ever, drugs. That day she was preoccupied.
‘I know what I saw,’ she said. ‘It was the shadow imprint. Speaking of which, did you find Abidemi?’
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘Her signature wasn’t on any emotional tethers.’
‘The ketamine worked out for you,’ Will sneered.
‘I couldn’t clear my mind,’ Sam said. The haunting images of Will and Trish came back to him. ‘Everything going on, with the disciplinary and with the Abadi girl – ’
‘Rasha,’ Trish reminded him.
‘Yep. I wasn’t in the right headspace. This doesn’t mean Abidemi is guilty.’
‘Doesn’t make her innocent, either,’ Trish jibed. ‘An imprint is incognito, haunts people to the point of occupation, as a guiding imprint goes AWOL.’
‘Abidemi wouldn’t break imprint code,’ Sam said. He had always been surer of her than himself. ‘I think it’s more a coincidence that all of this stuff is happening since frequency spikes have escalated.’
Trish and Will sat upright and stared at him.
‘A fifteen-year-old girl draws enough imprint activity for our systems to detect it,’ Sam continued. ‘When we do intervene, we only raise the frequency energy in the caravan site minutely, yet her susceptibility to it increases tenfold.’
‘It’s more than coincidental,’ Will said. He spun on the stool, his tablet in hand. ‘Look at these readings from Pendeen.’
He turned the tablet screen to them. A simple line graph depicted frequency waves in a forty-eight-hour period. The peaks ebbed and flowed in exact eight-hour cycles.
‘It’s like clockwork,’ Trish observed. ‘Only man-made interference could do that.’
‘There’s another spike incoming,’ Will said.
Frequency energy tingled upon Sam’s skin. Most of the tunnel and cavern
walls in the Network were lined with a honeycomb pattern of deflectors, but for investigative purposes the laboratories weren’t. Still coming down from his high, Sam was more exposed than most.
‘Brace yourselves,’ he said.
Energy shot through the glass room and penetrated his skull. The labs were swiped from Sam’s view –
Wheal Gorenn unfolded around them in a time-lapse. At the epicentre of it all stood a girl with dirty-blond hair and a snapped neck: Abidemi. The shadow imprint joined her, with a gait neither human nor animal. Sam tried to reach out to Abidemi. The shadow would consume her. Instead, it stood by her side in solidarity. A torrent of water cascaded into the cavern –
The cold iron walkway. Sam climbed to his feet and helped Trish to hers. Will refused his help. Sam leant in and kissed him. It was a quick emotionless peck, a formality that sustained their relationship. It lingered, not with romance or emotional support, but with distrust. Sam had many bad habits, and disappointing people was one of them.
Sam wasn’t going to mention the vision he had, but Will said, ‘I saw Abidemi. I saw Abidemi and the shadow imprint.’
‘Me too,’ Trish puffed. ‘Like they’d both been there, from the beginning, for all this time.’
Sam’s exhausted eyes reflected back at him from the Reliant’s windows. Behind it, the entanglement of farm buildings and woodland passed by in a plum blur. Trish drove in silence; Will punched words into his iPad. No one was spirited enough to talk.
The Network was on high alert from increased frequency spikes. James had sent specialist teams to all of their seven high-frequency sites including Pendeen. Sam and Trish remained uninvited; being demoted had its perks. Despite his protests, Will was overworked and had been refused participation. Off-put by what he had experienced – and not fond of the idea of staying in the collieries completely alone – Will reluctantly went home with Sam.
After twenty minutes of dispirited silence, they reached Tresillian, and the Reliant’s headlights caught the red brick of Sam and Will’s apartment building. Once a priory in the 1700s, their building had passed through the hands of the rich and the fortunate until it was renovated into a handful of flats in the noughties. Weeds sprouted in the grouting, its west side stained where it took the brunt of wet weather. As they climbed out, Will turned back to Trish.