by Terry Kitto
‘We’re not having guests tonight.’
A shrill scream sounded twice: once from the house and a millisecond later from the intercom.
‘We can help your daughter,’ Sam responded.
‘I told you lot not to come back.’
‘We’re specialists from the Network,’ Sam somewhat lied. ‘We’ve cured people in similar conditions.’
The intercom went off. A breeze rustled through the trees overhead, indifferent from the roar of the sea. Buzz. The gate teetered inward. The group hurtled across the yard. They were greeted at the front door by the middle-aged woman Rasha had seen in the ombrederi. The clothes on her minute frame were worth more than all of Rasha’s and Haya’s worldly possessions. Her hands clasped the doorframe, as Haya had when she’d warned off the witnesses at the caravan site.
‘That Vanessa asked you come?’
‘Not exactly – ’
The woman went to wrench the door shut, but Rasha slammed her hand against it.
‘It’s your daughter, isn’t it?’ Rasha asked. ‘Doing things she shouldn’t be able to?’
The mother nodded. Her grip on the door loosened.
‘I was like that not long ago. They saved me.’ Rasha gestured to her friends. ‘Let us help her. Please.’
The mother muttered something under her breath and pushed the door wide open. She led the witnesses inside, through three storeys of pine and slate, the aesthetic often punctuated by a bookcase or a family photo of the woman and her four identical blond children.
‘You have other kids?’ Trish asked.
‘Three, four altogether.’
‘Have they been affected?’
‘No, they’re perfectly normal. God, she’s only twelve.’
‘Kasey, any mental illnesses? Depression, bipolar?’
‘I told you, perfectly normal.’
She reminded Rasha very much of Fred, and for a moment Rasha was less inclined to help the family.
The office was exactly as Rasha saw in the ombrederi, with a hectic gallery of drawings tacked to the walls. It provided an insight into the girl’s poor occupied mind.
Kasey. She levitated by no physical means, the space between her body and the pine floor empty. The frequency energy around them was electric, as if Rasha’s skin was pricked with hypodermic needles.
‘Trish . . .’ Rasha said, reaching for Trish’s elbow.
‘Kasey, stop it,’ the mother begged.
‘It’s not her,’ Sam said, and he crouched down. ‘Kasey, can you hear me?’
The girl cocked her head.
‘Kasey,’ Sam continued, ‘if you can hear me, tell me your last name.’
‘Her last name is Nancarrow.’
Sam stepped back. Had Kasey’s voice been altered a few octaves lower, what they would have heard was Will.
Sam inched toward the floating girl. Trish grabbed his arm, but he shook her off.
‘Are we talking to William Reeves?’ Trish asked.
The girl’s body flipped through the air like a tossed coin, knocking Sam and Trish to the floor. The girl turned upright, and her toes skimmed the polished floorboards, face struck with horror.
Rasha retreated, her back pressed to the wall. Her hands grasped one of the many sheets of paper tacked to the wall. The pages weren’t filled with drawings at all but streams of numbers and interlocking circles, much like the Network’s symbol.
‘Mummy!’ Kasey cried.
‘I’m here, Kase, oh god, I’m here!’ Ms Nancarrow hollered. ‘What are you doing?’
Trish and Sam had equipment in hand to record the event.
‘We need to deduce the severity of the occupation before we can begin,’ Trish said.
‘And how severe is it?’
‘Grade three imprint,’ Trish read out, ‘with a 65 percent hold of the cerebral cortex. Moderate occupation. Known imprint.’
‘Known?’ Ms Nancarrow spat.
‘Yes,’ Trish said. ‘The imprint was a friend.’
‘Was?’
‘Until he died, which I’ve not forgiven you for yet, William!’ Sam hollered. ‘Are you there?’
A shudder, and the girl’s eyes found Sam. They blinked as Will had, twice fast. Rasha watched Sam tread closer to the occupied girl. She could only fathom how conflicted he was to find his spouse in another body, and a child’s at that.
‘Will, you’re going to have to leave Kasey,’ Trish said.
Kasey’s face twitched.
‘I can’t stay,’ Kasey-Will agreed. ‘What is the date?’
‘May 5,’ Rasha said.
Kasey-Will exhaled sharply.
‘It’s too soon. This is the wrong intersection.’
‘The wrong intersection?’ Sam asked. There was no response. ‘How are you here? How are you strong enough?’
‘One question at a time,’ Trish warned.
‘It’s everything and it’s nothing,’ Kasey-Will said in both voices, the audio equivalent of drinking hot tea after ice cream.
‘What does that mean, Will?’ Sam asked.
‘We all belong to the frequency.’
The ominous riddle made Rasha’s heart plummet. Chills spread across her body, but not from Will’s words nor the frequency energy. The paper on the walls rippled despite there being no wind. The numerous LED ceiling lights dimmed of their own accord, and colour – the garish Crayola’d numbers, the leather-bound spines on the bookcases – dulled to various grey hues. In the corner of the room, a tentacle of molten black fluid seeped up from a crack in the floorboards and unraveled itself into the gywandras.
‘It’s here,’ Rasha whispered.
Trish and Sam were drawn to the corner. Sam lowered the spectro.
‘What is the gywandras, Will?’ Sam asked.
‘You’re asking the wrong question,’ Kasey-Will said. ‘You need to ask how they became the gywandras.’
‘They?’ Trish asked. ‘Who is it?’
‘An acquaintance.’
‘You’re working with it?’ Sam asked with disbelief.
‘Your notes, the archivists,’ Trish said. ‘The Network knows about the gywandras, right?’
‘They’re facilitating it,’ Kasey-Will said. ‘Trust no one. We have no friends left there.’
In the corner, the gywandras groaned, hollow and guttural, as if an entire continent had imploded and slid beneath the sea. Its body quavered. Frequency energy coursed from it, stronger than Rasha had ever experienced. She could understand why Vanessa and Leri spoke about it with equal parts awe and fear.
‘Transcendence!’ Rasha shouted. ‘That’s what the gywandras wants.’
‘You cannot seek transcendence; it finds you,’ Kasey-Will said. ‘It is the ultimate death.’
Kasey’s body slumped to the floor. Her eyes rolled, and her mouth frothed.
Trish fell to her knees beside the thrashing girl.
‘Sam, the spectro!’ she shouted. Sam didn’t move. Rasha knew that if she were in his shoes, she would be paralysed with shock, especially now they knew his connection to the gywandras.
‘Sam!’ Trish called again.
Sam shook himself awake and pointed the gadget at Kasey.
‘We’re losing her!’ Sam shrieked.
‘Kasey, can you hear me?’ Trish asked. She shook the girl’s shoulders out of desperation.
The frequency energy tore through the pine room. Rasha’s senses dulled, and her eyes grew heavy. Kasey’s aura seeped from her writhing body and bloomed in the study’s volatile atmosphere.
‘I’ve found her,’ Rasha said, and before the adults could intervene, she slipped into the ombrederi.
I won’t let her die, Rasha thought. I can’t.
Rasha’s feet hit the study’s floor. It was a wintry afternoon, and a gas fireplace opposite the desk threw the room into a cosy orange light. Grape-scented e-cigarette vapour wafted over a busy desk. In his leather-backed chair, a handsome man wrote a letter. Kasey, no more than seven years of age, sat
on the floor by his desk and built a haphazard structure with a box of Jenga. The study in the present day still retained some sense of her father’s aura, the warmth and comfort, and Rasha understood why Kasey’s mind fled there. Rasha would have as well, to her pre-war apartment, if it didn’t hurt so much.
The study’s walls peeled away. In its place was a dense woodland of leafless trees. Rasha could not tell by the darkness whether it was early morning or late at night, but either way it wasn’t an opportune time for young Kasey to adventure across the frosty ground in her nightgown and slippers. Her panicked breath left a trail of steam in her wake. She didn’t flee; she ran after her father. His silhouette came and went between the barren trees.
The trees thinned, and the ground became more roots than mud. A river sliced through the woods and babbled against the embankment. Her father stopped to shed his barber’s jacket. He dropped a canvas bag to the ground, hauled stones from the water’s edge, and dropped them in until it was full. He zipped the canvas bag up, tied a rope from its handles to one of his ankles, heaved the bulging bag into his arms, and crept along the river’s edge toward a bridge. Mystified by his actions, Kasey continued to follow her father, and Rasha stalked after them both. She knew where this was headed. She knew how this would end.
Kasey’s father stopped at the height of the bridge, climbed up onto it, and took the bag into his hands once again. Without a morsel of hesitation, he leapt. He plunged into the river’s icy depths with a splash. Kasey raced to the bridge’s wall and hopped to get a better view of the water. She yelled and cried for her father.
She never saw him again.
Back to the study, the morning before, and her father scrawled into his journal. Rasha looked over his shoulder and read the passage in his diary.
I can’t do this anymore, he wrote. Even my happiest days are bleak. It’s just emptiness, day after day, and it’ll never end.
The study exploded. Walls collapsed, books burst apart, a window smashed, and Rasha knew where she was: in what remained of Will’s room, just as she had seen the night the gywandras occupied her. She teetered across the bloodstained carpet, mindful of the glass, to pick up the shredded painting. Aflame in the corner of the room, strung from a beam by a weathered noose, was an imprint that Rasha recognised from witness accounts: Abidemi. The heat of Abidemi’s body chilled, and the room darkened. The gywandras unravelled itself before the window. Rasha had met Trish’s theories with dubiety, but now she believed them: the gywandras targeted them.
Amidst the two entities was Will, and he was not as she remembered him; his endowed nose was snapped at an angle, clawlike cuts spread across his cheeks, and his face was purple with bruises.
‘I’m early,’ he said.
‘Will, I’m sorry. I could have saved you.’
‘No. It was done, and when it is done it is written, and when it is written it has to happen.’
The walls of Will’s room wavered as if they were bedsheets. The room grew darker and colder. Kasey’s aura slipped away.
‘Let Kasey go,’ Rasha said. ‘Do your business and let Kasey go. She’s just a kid.’
‘My business is done,’ he said nonchalantly.
Will nodded, raised an arm, and flung it forward. Rasha was lifted off her feet, out of the wrecked room into the physical.
‘Extraction successful,’ Rasha heard Sam cry. ‘She lives! She lives!’
Rasha opened her eyes to find herself on the pine floor. A surge of nausea rocked Rasha’s stomach. Kasey was wide-awake, cradled in her mother’s arms, much as Rasha had been in Haya’s the night of her own occupation.
There were tears in Sam’s eyes, and he appeared the most relieved she had ever seen him.
Frequency nausea subsided, and Rasha scrambled to her feet with Trish’s help.
‘Kasey Nancarrow,’ Trish uttered, ‘we witness you.’
The witnesses packed and ignored Ms Nancarrow’s questions, not dissimilar to what Rasha had muttered after her occupation.
‘But who, exactly, are you? How did you find us? Are you watching us? I demand answers!’
They ignored her. Sam stopped to survey the paper tacked to the walls. He snatched a few up and thrust them into a pocket.
The witnesses slunk from the house with equipment in hand. Rasha was relieved to go back out into the open, under the bruised evening sky.
Sam and Trish halted, and Rasha walked into the square of Sam’s back. James, Vanessa, and Leri headed through the Nancarrows’ gate. A handful of witnesses were with them, people Rasha knew by face but not by name.
‘What in the frequency are you doing here?’ Vanessa spat. She set eyes on Rasha, and her face softened.
‘Extraction successful,’ Sam said simply.
A gust tore across the driveway between the witnesses.
‘Need I remind you about the conditions of your disciplinary – ’ James began.
‘Let’s not do this here,’ Vanessa said, a hand on James’s forearm. Her eyes hadn’t left Rasha.
James nodded and gulped down spittle – an unsavoury retort, perhaps. Rasha couldn’t understand why they weren’t thankful for a positive extraction.
‘Debrief at the collieries, now,’ he commanded. ‘Miss Abadi needs to go home.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Vanessa said.
‘I want Trish to do it,’ Rasha blurted.
‘Trish and Sam are needed at the collieries,’ James retorted.
Leri stepped forward with a bag of equipment.
‘I’ll arrange aftercare for the family,’ she told James.
He nodded and watched Leri rush into the cottage. He beckoned everyone out of the yard. Vanessa’s Land Rover and James’s people carrier sat aside the Reliant. Trish hugged Rasha goodbye.
‘Well done, you star,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll pop by soon.’
She and Sam departed to the Reliant, James to his people carrier. Rasha and Vanessa climbed into the Land Rover. Vanessa pulled away from Lanhydrock and didn’t speak until they were bolting down the A39 toward Gorenn.
‘What happened back there?’ Vanessa asked. ‘I want the truth, nothing less.’
‘The girl, Kasey, was occupied,’ Rasha recounted. ‘She was grieving for her father. He . . . killed himself and – ’
‘Who occupied her?’
Rasha froze. Vanessa knew of the gywandras and transcendence. Will warned them against it.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You must,’ Vanessa said. ‘You extracted the imprint.’
Rasha thought over the stilted conversation in the Nancarrows’ yard. She’d been preoccupied with images of Kasey’s hovering body, her father’s last moments, and Will’s bludgeoned face, but she was certain that Trish and Sam hadn’t said who had extracted the imprint. Yet Vanessa knew. Rasha didn’t question it; she dared not fan the flames.
‘It was a girl,’ she lied. ‘A girl I’ve never seen before.’
‘Was she hanging by a rope?’ Vanessa asked. She flicked her indicator and wrenched at the gear stick.
‘Yes,’ Rasha said. Vanessa spoke of Abidemi, so Rasha went with it. ‘Yes, and her body was on fire.’
Silence consumed the cabin. Rasha looked out of the windscreen and noticed Vanessa’s leather journal lay open on the dash. Across its pages were lines of numbers punctuated by decimals, similar to those found at the Nancarrow residence. Vanessa had either copied them from Kasey’s father’s study or she’d already had them. The pages were stained, bent, and torn – decades old at best.
Rasha gazed out of the window, intent to not speak either as night-soaked Gorenn unfurled before her. Kasey had levitated. It was more than human, just as Vanessa had preached the week prior. Rasha’s bruised fingernails served as a painful reminder of her own occupation.
The Land Rover’s lights illuminated the gates of the caravan park. Rasha gave her thanks to Vanessa and thrust the stiff passenger door open. Vanessa grabbed her injured hand.
‘You may feel obliga
ted to protect Sam and Trish,’ Vanessa snarled. ‘Yes, they saved you, maybe you owe them, but you’re not subservient to them. All this lying. If I seem cross, it’s because I am. I see so much potential in you; I know what you’ll become . . .’
Vanessa turned in her seat and stared hard out the windscreen. She wasn’t meant to say that.
‘You want me to become a coercer,’ Rasha said through gritted teeth. ‘You want me to transcend.’
Rasha didn’t know what either term meant, though the mention of them riled Vanessa. She still had Rasha’s hand in hers, and she squeezed it tighter.
‘We don’t take deceit lightly at the Network,’ Vanessa said. ‘Trish and Sam, they’re poison. Gifted people too encumbered by being alive to even consider their own talents. I won’t have you turn out like them. I won’t let you see them again.’
Rasha tugged her arm from Vanessa’s grip and hopped down from the vehicle. She scarpered toward the caravan, ignored Mr Keats’s aggravated cats, blanked the Gills’ chorus of hellos from their holiday home, and barged straight into forty-five. She closed the door and dove right onto the sofa, imbedding herself amongst the cushions. Vanessa was, as were many she’d befriended, a twisted individual. Every choice word she’d used had been licked with malice, and she’d undermined Rasha at every turn, as if she knew Rasha better than she did herself. Now Rasha was forbidden to see the two most genuine people she knew.
Haya’s bedroom door opened and cast a cone of light across the dining room floor. She stepped out and watched Rasha sob into a cushion. Rasha was certain she’d retreat back to her room; after all, it was the first time they’d seen each other since she threw her cereal bowl on the floor. A week had passed, and so much had happened; Rasha barely recognised herself.
‘Rasha?’ Haya called in Levantine. She flicked a switch, and incandescent light swamped the caravan.
Rasha cried harder. She’d saved Kasey, only to be vilified for what she couldn’t control – actions she didn’t mean – by people with skewed vendettas. Everyone had their own goals, and Rasha was caught in the cross fire.