by Terry Kitto
‘How can you sit there and compare a successful extraction to an adolescent witness sawing people’s fingers off?’ Trish asked. ‘Next you’ll be saying Vanessa has her reasons.’
‘Well – ’
‘Don’t want to hear it,’ Trish interjected. She took a deep breath and swallowed back thoughts of Will’s bloodied room, Sam’s grey skin and bloodshot eyes, Rasha splayed on her bedroom ceiling, Shauna’s swollen purple neck. ‘Rasha isn’t emotionally stable. She needs someone she is comfortable with, a friend.’
‘If you’re implying yourself – ’
‘I’m as good as. Let me assist Vanessa.’
James pushed himself back into his chair and rolled his rounded shoulders. He turned away, stared hard at his computer monitor, then looked back to Trish.
‘On one condition,’ he said. ‘Tell your friend to go home and stop stealing ketamine.’
Trish doubted she’d convince Sam toward sobriety. Will hadn’t had much luck when he was alive.
In his office, James swivelled his computer monitor to face her; one in four of the CCTV grids framed the store’s hand-cranked rolling shelves. Sam perused their dissociative drugs, the half-light casting a Gollum-esque silhouette over him. Trish faintly promised James to lecture Sam.
‘And Trish,’ James said as she exited the birdcage. ‘If he doesn’t listen, tell him the Refinery won’t, either.’
Rasha had promised to stay put in the activity centre, so Trish traversed the various shafts and tunnels to the stores. Her mind would not stray from Shauna – Rasha, rather. She’d been overlooked and failed by every adult she came across. It was too reminiscent of Trish’s own childhood, dragged from care home to foster family to psychiatrist, her witnessing abilities amounting to unprecedented and dangerous levels. What could Rasha become if she already controlled imprints?
What was Vanessa thinking, pushing the teenager so far so soon?
The laboratory’s lights were on. Sam lacked tact in hiding his drug abuse. Many, James included, would pass it off as a careless druggy craving a fix. Trish knew it was a desperate man’s cry for help.
She found Sam whilst he wound the shelves closed and grabbed his wrist before he could plunge the pills into a pocket. Hand suspended in the close air, she felt his veins varicosed beneath his ashen skin. The bags under his eyes were so dark a stranger could mistake them for ebbing bruises.
‘Rough day?’ she asked.
‘Rough life.’
Trish pried the baggy from his hands, surprised that he let her.
‘You had an audience.’ Trish jerked her head to the CCTV camera blinking above them. Sam sought the camera lens and shrunk in its presence.
‘It’s all very well having Big Brother judging me but not doing anything.’
‘James threatened the Refinery, Sam.’
Sam stuttered, pushed Trish aside, and strode toward the lab’s exit.
‘It’s a Bickle tradition by this point,’ he muttered.
As Shauna had been on Trish’s mind, Rose was never far from Sam’s.
‘I know we can’t help Rose,’ Trish said, ‘but we can keep Rasha safe. That’s got to mean something.’
She chased Sam as his pace quickened through the laboratories. As they went, the lights switched off and the darkness bit at their heels.
‘They’re very different cases.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Rasha was occupied. Mum wasn’t.’
‘You know that for sure?’
Sam stopped. He didn’t turn to look at Trish. She suspected that his cheeks would shine with tears if he did.
‘What does it matter? Doesn’t give me my childhood back.’
‘Will said – ’ Trish stopped herself.
‘He tried to tell me, too,’ Sam explained. ‘Back when Mum was sent to the Refinery, they were still called possessions; there was only exorcism. When did they turn out well for anyone?’
Trish couldn’t fault Sam’s logic. Before the turn of the century, before new witnessing science rebranded possessions as occupations and the group moved away from religion, the rare phenomena hadn’t once been successfully treated in the UK.
‘Was evidence ever submitted to the archives?’
Sam shrugged. ‘I was a kid.’ He arrived at the ladder to the southern exit. ‘Heading home, or . . . ?’
‘Going in that direction,’ Trish said. ‘Taking Rasha home.’
‘She’s here?’
Without another word, he bolted up the ladder two rungs at a time. Trish raced after him, but she wasn’t quick enough. Before she reached the top, Sam’s voice boomed through sublevel one. ‘Rasha! Rasha!’
Trish bounded through the activity centre to her desk, where Sam towered over Rasha.
‘You knew he’d die!’ he hollered. ‘You knew, you knew!’
What dwindling witnesses remained hurtled through the chipboard partitions. Vanessa and James erupted from the birdcage. James pulled Sam back whilst Vanessa hugged a shaken Rasha.
‘What did it?’ Sam yelled. ‘What was it?’
‘That’s enough,’ James growled in Sam’s ear.
Vanessa helped Rasha from Trish’s seat.
‘Come with me,’ she muttered. ‘We’ll get you home.’
When Vanessa and Rasha were out of sight into the northern tunnel that led to the car park, James released Sam and spun him around so that they were eye to eye.
‘I know you’re grieving,’ James said. ‘Will hasn’t crossed from the frequency, so we haven’t got answers. I’m giving you compassionate leave, and you better take it and not come back to the collieries. Listen, if I see you in the stores again, it won’t just be the Refinery for you, it’ll be dismissal.’
James cradled Sam’s nape.
‘We can’t lose you, too,’ James finished.
Sam’s eyes watered, but no tears fell. He nodded, let his body relax, and allowed James to escort him toward the southern tunnel.
‘I’ll take you back to Tresillian,’ Trish heard James say.
The remaining witnesses dithered back to their desks; they eyed one another but dared not say a word with Trish amongst them. Trish was the last to move. It seemed that details of Rose’s incarceration had been kept from Sam. Perhaps they bore a connection to Rasha’s occupation.
After all, everyone became entangled in the shadow imprint’s web.
The archives was the only place in the collieries that Trish could take off her dielectric band, and it was for that reason she was anxious.
She descended to subzero two, past the mouths of the test caverns, and up the series of northern ladders to subzero one. The tunnel funnelled out before a breeze-block wall and, set within it, the vault’s oxidised steel door shone in Trish’s phone light.
Trish withdrew her keycard from her pocket, avoiding her outdated acne-ridden ID photo, and swiped it against the scanner left of the door. Metallic clicks and groans punctured the quiet, and the door swung ajar. Thankfully, her access hadn’t been restricted since the disciplinary. Floodlights illuminated the space as Trish crossed the threshold, its off-white floors and walls chiselled to modernistic perfection.
Spaced at six even points across the cavern were round tin pedestals, electromagnets, and tethered to each was an imprint: the archivists. The six imprints had once been guides and were able to retain memories, so rather than risk printed documents and off-line servers falling into civilians’ hands, witnesses transferred important memories into the archivists. It was a strand of the same science that later inspired Trish’s sonar project.
Trish’s heart drummed faster, but she dared not look at the archivists’ forms, for there was little left. The archivists were inhibited with other people’s memories; the more they retained, the less of themselves was left. Over time their forms degraded to skeletal acid-washed projections. Here and there features were distinct. As Trish passed the one closest to the vault door, a cataract eye followed her. On another, a hand with gnarled talons flexed
and tensed. Trish dared not look as she stood on the centre dais between all six archivists. There were three kinds of deaths, as far as witnesses were concerned: existing as an imprint, dissolving into the frequency, and being reduced to an empty shell that roamed Earth. The latter concept haunted Trish the most; an existence without memories was surely worse than an infinite end.
Trish reached the centre dais and, with trembling hands, removed the dielectric band. The six archivists’ auras straggled against her mind. They did not shed memories or emotions – cold and empty, as much as Rasha had described the shadow imprint. Yes, the shadow imprint. The reason she was there at all.
She closed her eyes and filled her mind with images of the mutant imprint. The ombrederi consumed her.
An impenetrable fog swamped Trish. In the ombrederi, her feet crunched on the gravel of the collieries’ drive, and the engine house chimney loomed into view as she walked. This was the archives, the nerve centre of the Network, stowed safely within the frequency’s wavelengths. The place where, if she looked well enough, Trish would find answers.
Shadows, she thought. Shadows and emptiness.
The fog condensed into solid shapes, and various rooms materialised across the collieries’ yard as if she’d strode onto a theatre set. A middle-aged couple shivered beneath upturned sheets in their master bedroom, an occupied teenage boy writhed and squirmed in a poster-ridden room, and twin sisters scarpered from a dark forest. All were drenched in thick shadows – the most generic results for Trish’s request.
Trish recalled what she had sensed of the shadow imprint, the gangly insect limbs that had staggered beneath a molten body, its skin neither flesh nor fluid but both, with a depth of absolute chaotic nothingness.
The fog didn’t stir.
The shadow imprint, the shadow imprint.
Wind pelted through the whitewashed yard and slammed into Trish. She was thrust backward by invisible fists. The six mutated archivists tried to eject Trish from the archives. She dug her heels into the gravel and kept her mind on the imprint. For the archivists to do that only confirmed her suspicions: a secret lay buried deep within the frequency. If that was the case, such information wouldn’t be obtained from the archives as easily. She needed a visceral memory.
Trish had memorised the date of Rose’s incarceration: 14 January 2001, the turn of the new century and an abrupt kick into adulthood for sixteen-year-old Sam. She remembered some photos that Sam had stolen from retired witness Steph Blake. Steph had tried to extract – or then exorcise – Rose. The blurred Polaroids showed a crazed Rose with unblinking eyes and a skeletal self-abused body.
The archive’s white mist moulded itself into the living room of a bungalow. Nauseating pastel wallpaper, earwax-orange settees, and diamond-patterned threadbare carpet were remnants of a bygone decade. Steph Blake, a woman with thinning ironed hair and thick-rimmed glasses, watched as Rose, bruised and brittle, repeatedly thew herself against the floor.
‘7:29 p.m.,’ Steph uttered into her tape recorder, fists shaking. ‘Rose is – Christ. She is moving rabidly. It’s not . . . not human.’
Steph paused, closed her eyes, and consulted with the air to her right. Trish rightly confirmed that Steph spoke to her guiding imprint, for the retired witness said, ‘Are you sure, Percy? But what is that?’ She stopped a moment, took a deep breath, and spoke again into the recorder. ‘It’s here again. The faceless one. Percy says it has a name – ’
Before Steph finished her sentence, Rose clambered to her feet and leapt upon one of the sofas. She thrashed and hissed at Steph. The flickering wall lights illuminated a dripping mural smeared on the wall with faeces: a malformed body, pairs of wry arms and legs, and two bleeding eyes torn from the floral wallpaper.
The shadow imprint.
Trish ceased connection with the archivists and opened her eyes to the dim vault. She dared not spend unnecessary time in the archives considering what she had uncovered: the archivists kept a catalogue of all searches a witness made. Incognito mode didn’t exist between minds. It wouldn’t have been a problem, but Trish was certain the shadow imprint wasn’t meant to be found.
The floodlights diminished behind her as she proceeded to the vault door. She recognised Steph Blake’s guide, Percy Shilson, from the memorial at the collieries’ entrance.
With her dielectric band fixed back into place, Trish raced through the rocky oesophagus to the terminal room. Guilt choked her. Had she told the board about the shadow imprint after Rasha’s occupation, they could have consulted the archives for Rose’s occupation. If she had been as transparent as witnesses were entrusted to be, Will’s life could have been spared. If only she trusted the board.
The terminal room was vacant when Trish arrived. She raced straight to the one and only oval glass desk. The device was an evolution of the ouija board and had copper circles imbedded into its glass surface, making a QWERTY keyboard. Most imprints were too weak to project a physical form or communicate telepathically, and so instead they could spell out short answers to simple questions. Their energy would touch a copper key and create a closed electrical circuit that would then register on the adjacent monitor — hence how inherited the name ‘terminal’. She flicked a few switches on the device’s control panel. A motor purred, and the monitor blinked beside it, a blank word processing document upon its screen. A cursor pulsed, waiting for the dead to converse: the only way Trish could contact imprints whilst wearing her dielectric band.
‘Percy Shilson,’ she called. ‘Percy Shilson, you are being beckoned.’
A torrent of frequency energy swelled around her. An imprint arrived. After her splurge in the archives, Trish was happy that her dielectric band blocked his form from her mind. It was rumoured that his afterlife began with the end of a shotgun.
Trish ensured that her questions were short and to the point. She needed specific answers quickly.
‘You were present the night Rose Bickle was occupied?’
At the bottom of the keyboard were two separate keys for yes and no. Yes lit up and registered on the monitor.
‘Were one of the imprints faceless?’
The cursor blinked.
‘Did the shadow imprint occupy her?’
‘Yes.’ The terminal’s keyboard lit up as a word was spelled out: G-Y-W-A. Trish consulted the monitor as the word came together.
‘Gywandras,’ Trish read. ‘Does the Network know this?’
A few seconds passed, then –
‘Yes.’
Trish deleted the file from the Anascribe program and turned the terminal off. She was thrust into darkness. The Network had been her home for the majority of her twenties.
It also swarmed with lies.
Gywandras.
Trish had a name, one that meant no more than the very fact that it existed. Which, in a world where she would be dismissed at the very mention of it, became the driving force to find out more. The name, however, didn’t help to establish the gywandras’s motivations. Fear made her heart skip a beat when she thought, That’s if it has a motivation at all.
As Trish meandered to ground level, Will’s words echoed in her head.
‘Maybe it’s not enough to have knowledge of an event. Perhaps you have to be emotionally invested.’
Trish knew that if she hoped to learn about the gywandras, she’d need to learn more about Shauna’s death and why it had been there. To do it, she’d need to accept one of the amounting visitation requests to Her Majesty’s Prison, Dartmoor and look Michael dead in the eyes. She’d figure out how Rasha had seen Michael in the ombrederi and why the gywandras had watched Shauna die.
Trish skulked through the busy activity centre to avoid attention; working unsociable hours wouldn’t be good for her disciplinary. She scuttled through the winding tunnel toward the storeroom. Sweat soaked her fringe by the time she finished her ascent, and when she wiped it away from her forehead a teal smudge was on the back of her hand. Last night’s hair dye ran. She dove into the store
room and swiped the receptor from its display case in the corner.
Clustered at the northern edge of Princetown, HMP Dartmoor was secluded within two rings of steep granite walls. A dense mist rode the tail end of a passing storm and gave the illusion it rode on the back of a cloud. There was nothing fantastical about it; it was the most sobering place in the world.
Once she was in the visitor’s car park, Trish quadruple-checked her doors were locked and whisked through the gate into the main yard. She clutched her unlocked phone as to provide permission of her visit at a second’s notice and patted the pocket of her denim jacket; her driver’s license was in reach. Not that it would help – she was brunette in her photograph. Her hair had been dyed more the last eight years than she’d had a full night’s sleep.
She ground her teeth along her walk across the car park. There was no way she could get away with wearing the dielectric band, which meant that her mind was open to the chaos and the dead that surely lurked inside the prison.
Trish slowed her pace when she neared the visitor’s entrance to gradually acclimatise to the mounting frequency energy. From the mist loomed the outlines of imprints, misshapen and hollow, and they dispersed as quickly as they’d appeared. The prison, towering over her, made Trish’s stomach whirl with guilt. That was the problem with foresight: emotions plagued her for events that had not come to pass. After checking her email and passport – her faded teal hair was not once questioned – the guard at the double doors let her through into the visitors’ centre. Each guard she met was a cookie-cutter of the last as she was patted down, probed with a metal detector, and told to sign her details into the guest book, and when she was feet from each one she heard their thoughts.
Nice bit of kit we’ve got here.
Wonder if Mandy’s doing pie for dinner.
That Pascoe kid, he’d be better off hanging himself.
More guards nodded and pointed her on down the hallways, in company of thoughts they believed only they could hear. The visitation room was a wide space, the size and smell of a school gymnasium, crammed with cheap plastic tables and chairs, and a children’s play area in the corner. The officer led her to a table, where she repositioned her chair a few times. A double door opened, and a wave of inmates sidled in one by one. Brothers-by-broken-law, they were as identical to one another as the guards were. Grey tracksuits – modified to a degree – grade one haircuts, stoic expressions, robotic shuffles: the men looked tough. Trish knew that, when night fell, they were far from it.