by Terry Kitto
‘You can’t escape the gywandras,’ Leri spat. ‘The tide is strong.’
Trish stepped forward and feigned a lunge. Leri retreated, hands up in surrender.
Trish threw the pole aside and raced to the driver’s door. She jumped into the Reliant, shoved her keys into the ignition, and sped out into the collieries’ yard. Her headlights illuminated the gate.
The locked gate.
Trish put on the handbrake and hit the throttle. Smoke billowed from the tyres. She pushed the handbrake down. There was a moment of unsteadiness as the Reliant tried to veer sideways. Thwack. The gates flung open. The bonnet rippled. The Reliant threatened to roll.
Trish realigned the vehicle’s course and sped on down the lane.
She wiped away the tears that fell from her eyes. She’d abandoned her one remaining friend and fled a place she’d once called home. Rasha was a target, and being in her presence only put the teenager in more danger.
What was there to do? Where was she to go? Answers, she thought, the one thing that matters now.
Only one place remained where she could find answers about the gywandras, and that was within Michael’s own head, sixty miles away in Dartmoor.
Dusk descended as Trish rolled up to the caravan site. Steam hissed from the Reliant’s bonnet. She rose from the car and paced toward Rasha’s caravan.
What would she do? Knock on the door? No, Haya would be problematic. There was no way she could hide Rasha away. The Network was clever, but they weren’t above the law. Rasha couldn’t just disappear; neighbours would question her whereabouts, then soon Gorenn Comprehensive and the social services would be involved. The teenager was protected, to some degree, by people who governed her well-being.
Trish crept around to the right side of the caravan. Images flooded her mind: desolated Syrian streets, a bloodied hand torn apart by a saw, a teenage boy with broken arms and a twisted neck. Confident she’d located Rasha’s bedroom window, she knocked lightly.
The carousel of Rasha’s thoughts halted; Trish had disrupted Rasha’s sleep. She knocked on the glass once more.
‘Rasha!’ she whispered.
Dark shapes moved beyond the glass, and a weary Rasha pushed the awning open.
‘Trish?’ she said. ‘Vanessa said I can’t see you again.’
‘You might not, for a while. Listen, kiddo, things aren’t great. I’m going away for a while. Sam, he won’t be around – ’
‘What happened?’ Rasha asked.
‘The board, they know about the gywandras. They’ve been trying to create it, to use it. Will was meant to be the gywandras, but that failed, and . . . I think they’re going to try and use you next. They won’t just come and get you. So you have to promise me. Take the bus to and from school. Stay in school all day. Never leave the caravan park without someone. Do that, and they can’t take you. Don’t ever be alone.’
On the outskirts of Trish’s mind, an EMP filtered the air of frequency energy, and the air became clear and crisp.
‘Trish, you’re scaring me.’
‘Sorry, Rasha, but I have to be quick. After you were occupied, Sam and I placed a couple of EMPs around the park to help you. There’s one under that caravan there.’
Trish pointed to the caravan immediately adjacent.
‘That’s Mr Keats’s caravan,’ the teenager said.
‘I want you to take that one and keep it with you. Put it in your schoolbag. As long as it’s transmitting, the Network will struggle to access your mind remotely.’
‘You’re not part of the Network anymore?’
‘I’m not,’ Trish confessed.
‘Do you know what the gywandras is?’
‘Not exactly,’ Trish said. ‘But I know what it does. It transcends time.’
‘Time travel?’
‘Right. No matter who it is or what it wants, its origin could be at any time. God, whoever it is might not have been born yet.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘After everything we’ve seen, the goalposts for what is plausible have been moved.’
Trish noted that the sky was a lighter navy.
‘I have to go,’ Trish said. ‘Remember, EMP with you at all times. Never be alone.’
‘Never be alone,’ Rasha repeated.
Trish went to walk away, then turned back to Rasha.
‘You’re special, Rasha. That also puts you in danger. Understood?’
Rasha went pale, swallowed a response, and nodded instead. Trish, as satisfied as she could be with the exchange, raced across the caravan site back to the Reliant and drove away.
By the time Trish drove to Princetown and caught some disturbed sleep in a lay-by, the sun had risen and a plan had formed in her mind. She squeezed the Reliant into the last available space on Tavistock Road. Moor Crescent was to her left, and right of her was an empty park. The town was just as drab and grey as the prison. Princetown had been built as barracks for HMP Dartmoor, so the houses had belonged, as some still did, to the prison staff. Beyond their rooftops, the prison walls loomed, a reminder that the law governed all.
Trish’s plan was far from watertight. She needed to access Michael’s memories of the night Shauna died. She was confident that, in his intoxicated state, he had sighted the gywandras and even saw what it planned to do. The problem was that she couldn’t visit him again, not without a booking, and not on a Tuesday when visitors weren’t allowed. So her only other choice was the receptor. The prison was riddled with imprints, so Trish was certain she could probe through memories from Michael’s short spell there to pick up on conversations he might have had with inmates. His cellmates probably came together to reminisce over nights out, the drugs they’d taken, the sports they’d played, and the girls they’d pestered.
Trish couldn’t walk up to the prison walls with the receptor and expect to go unnoticed. She needed a conductor to amplify the signal. Her answer lay just twenty feet from the parked Reliant: the Church of St Michael and All Angels, righteous and out of place in a prison-bound town.
Receptor in hand, Trish abandoned the Reliant and crossed the road into the church. It was a late Tuesday morning, and the church, with its stonework and narrow pews and faded stained glass windows, was desolate. Frequency energy was thick; the tapered piers and chamfered arches were made entirely of granite, a commonplace material in Princetown’s construction. HMP Dartmoor’s energy was palpable – eerie and acquitted, endlessly hopeless – and the frequency was intensified in a church of granite.
The brevity of her task dawned on her. She strode through the church and found an alcove behind the pulpit that would shield her from view of visitors. She sat on her trench coat and adjusted the receptor’s straps. With the motor’s buzz as ambience, Trish secured the receptor, closed her eyes, and fell into the ombrederi.
Princetown shimmered around Trish in the ombrederi. The many pasts of Dartmoor gathered together in one infinite landscape: the bloodied carcasses of civil war soldiers rotted in bogs, rudimentary Neolithic farmers herded sheep amongst the hills, and builders mastered stone as they were bitten by winter frost. They laboured, fought invisible enemies, and signalled to awry cattle, unaware that blood no longer pumped through their veins.
A trail of colour, like car lights in a time-lapse, leaked across Moor Crescent. Trish touched it. Michael’s aura came to her, a volatile mix of anger and primal urges, a predilection to sin: his emotional tether.
The moorland melted away into a whirl of colour, and Trish found herself within the prison’s walls. She stood on the first floor walkway of an empty atrium, cells stacked four storeys high. Fifty-foot safety netting was strung between balconies from one side to the other. A lone guard strode by to do his rounds. It was after hours and quieter than Trish imagined, clinical too; its white walls, iron railings, and strip lighting were immaculate and cold, just as hospitals could be.
Projections materialised across the walkways; blurred and devoid of detail, they were grade one guides. Sh
e moved toward a cluster of them on the ground floor and turned everything over in her mind: the conversations with Michael, the gywandras and its viscous black skin, Shauna found dead in Penzance with a bloated purple neck. Then a voice reverberated in the ombrederi.
‘You’re an idiot,’ Shauna’s voice chimed.
As the ink of a Polaroid blotted into being, The Puffin and Hare sprouted around Trish. A regular Saturday night, the bar brimmed with drunken punters, air so thick with alcohol fumes that the smoke on the locals’ breath could ignite the place.
At the bar, Michael had a thin lad pinned to the wall. Michael’s eyes danced in their sockets, too intoxicated on drink and god knows what to focus. From the blurred crowd, Shauna raced over to try and wrench Michael’s grip from the boy’s collar.
‘He’s just a kid!’ she yelled. ‘It’s just a stupid game of darts! Get over it!’
Michael pushed Shauna away and knocked her to the grubby carpet.
People offered to help her to her feet, but Shauna did so of her own accord. The pub’s bouncer hurtled over, pried Michael’s fists from the lad’s collar, and thrust him out onto the street. Shauna followed, apologising to the bouncer on her way out. The bouncer disappeared back into the hustle and bustle of the pub. Shauna turned to Michael and jabbed a finger into his chest.
‘You’re an idiot,’ she growled. ‘Getting high, picking on kids half your age. Some man!’
Michael staggered upright on the cobbles and looked through her.
‘I don’t know what Trish sees in you. Never have, never will. Waste of the air you breathe.’
‘She ain’t got anyone else,’ Michael said. ‘She’ll never leave.’
Trish’s stomach sunk. She’d proved Michael right.
‘Disgusting prick,’ Shauna retorted. She ambled up the cobbles, taking her mobile from her jacket pocket. ‘Taking coke, starting fights. Trish will want to hear about this. Maybe she’ll finally see sense.’
The ombrederi grew vacuum-quiet. Unbeknownst to Shauna and Michael, dark shadows in the mouth of the butcher’s shop rippled. From them came the gywandras. Colour and shape disintegrated around its edges. Trish shrunk in its aura. Its influence was boundless. A thousand answers lurked beneath its blank facade, and if it had transcended time, perhaps a thousand years of knowledge.
This is it, she thought. In the physical, her heart hammered in her chest.
The gywandras glided over the ground, its legs barely contacting the cobbles. It reached Michael. Trish half expected it to envelop him. No. It gestured to the darkest corner of the alley, from which stumbled an imprint Trish had seen before, days ago when she first tried the receptor in Penzance: the murderous woman. On the gywandras’s command, the woman floundered toward Michael, pressed herself against his body, and sunk into Michael’s pores.
Michael was occupied.
‘No!’ Trish hollered, not that anyone could hear. ‘Don’t you do it!’
Occupied-Michael propelled himself up the alleyway. Shauna heard his thunderous footsteps and began to jog, her stilettoed feet distrusting the ground with her drunken gait. In the moonlight, Michael’s face came into focus, eyes blank. His body was there, but his mind was elsewhere.
He grabbed Shauna and turned her to face him. She slapped him. He punched her, grabbed her by the scruff of her top, and pushed her into the darkness beside the garage. All that came was Shauna’s muffled gasps of air. A sliver of blue twine bit into her bloated neck.
It was done. Shauna, no more.
Trish was cemented to the cobbles. Her heart pounded in her chest – the only thing assuring her she was still alive. Her veins burned hot. Deep down she had blamed Michael for Shauna’s death, and it hadn’t been him at all. Not truly. It was the gywandras. She no longer feared it.
She hated it.
Occupied-Michael tottered out of the shadows and back down the alleyway. He stumbled against the doors of the butcher and slammed to the ground. From his open mouth spilled the wild woman, and her imprint melted into shadows, never to be seen again.
The gywandras loitered in the alley. Its chest heaved. Trish forgot it was a memory and hollered, ‘Why her? Why us?’
She hadn’t anticipated the gywandras to turn and face her. For the first time, she saw its somewhat-eyes, without any indistinguishable shape, two burning stars absorbed into an endless void. The gywandras, unbound by time, whose present could be others’ pasts.
It shook its distorted head Trish’s way and dematerialised, leaving only the night and Shauna’s lifeless body.
Trish’s heartbeat pulsed in her fingertips. The receptor’s frayed supports bruised her collar bone –
Trish came to on the floor by the pulpit and vomited across the granite floor. She tore the receptor from her head and cast it aside. It clanged on the stone and rolled to a stop.
Shauna had died again, and Michael had been wrongly vindicated.
Michael would age in HMP Dartmoor if he were so unlucky, but it didn’t matter because he wasn’t the perpetrator.
Michael was innocent. The gywandras had taken everything from her: her loved ones, her friends, the Network.
Trish gathered her things and raced back to the Reliant before she was caught by a member of the public. Her life was barely worth living.
She’d do anything to stop the Network.
Ewella watches Kyauta raise a coconut above his head. His other clamps an invisible neck. He swings the coconut down and mimes clubbing someone over the head, as silent as possible; the cargo hold brims with captives now. His nightly visits to Ewella grow later and ever more silent. She learnt his name, one particularly chilly evening by torchlight and took to the language well; she’d shared Ebok’s mind and inherited an instinct for the Zarma dialect. Ewella shakes her head to his plan: no. He hears that a lot. No. He learnt to use it.
‘Can you get me more food?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Tonight,’ she says and pulls at the chains that shackle her to the ship’s gullet. She points out, beyond the sea, to the land, to home. ‘Let’s escape tonight.’
‘No.’
Kyauta knows the workings of the ship: the routine of the watchmen, how sea sickness deprives the crew of sleep, the wandering thieves who steal food or a girl’s innocence, or both. Kyauta illustrated a steady movement with the flat of his hand: the sea must be calm. There was a full moon the last four nights; the waters were turbulent and rocked the ship so much Ewella was sick to her stomach. Kyauta ate her dates.
She points through a slit in the hull. The sea is lit by the moon, a tear drop in the oily sky. The tide laps calmly in the ballast below them. The wind is still.
‘Yes,’ Ewella whispers, enacting the steady sea with her hand.
Kyauta’s pupils dilate with fear. Ewella can see his mind go through the motions: terror at abandoning his ship mates and a guilt from wanting to be free from them. The night before they had a fragmented conversation disrupted by the cries of a particularly disturbed girl. Ewella and Kyauta realised the ship wasn’t headed back to his home. Ewella recalled Ebok’s memory of the cargo being taken directly to the Arabian markets. Kyauta learnt their ship restocks there before it returned to European shores. Kyauta whispers with heartbreak:
‘Ile.’
Ewella presumes it means ‘home’. She points to the shoreline and to him.
‘Ile,’ she says.
His face softens in the moonlight. A daring smile breaks the sadness on his face.
Kyauta rushes from the deck and tiptoes up the ladder. The crew’s quarters are on the floor above. Ewella looks over the other girls, who sleep lightly in the constant terror of their situation. Fifteen girls in all, at one with the straw and the dirt and their own faeces. Ewella is selfish. Her escape means little if the other girls don’t come. She won’t be able to live with herself.
There is barefoot pitter-patter, and Kyauta returns to the lower deck, a warped metal key in hand. Kyauta puts it into the lock of her shackl
es and twists. They do not open. He wiggles it a little. The shackles come loose. She shakes herself out of them, crawls forwards and stands up to her full height. Her twisted spine aches; the blood rushes to her disused limbs. Kyauta grabs her hand and pulls her towards the ladder. She digs her feet into the splintered floor and gestures at the sleeping, ill-trodden maidens.
‘No,’ Kyauta said. A sentence follows she cannot translate, but his gestures she can: there is not enough time.
Ewella fears what awaits the girls in the markets and beyond.
‘Come back,’ Ewella demands.
Ky nods.
‘You promise?’ Ewella asks, her usual response.
‘Promise.’
They skulk up the ladder. Her joints click and her heart pounds. My fear shall awaken them. The sleeping quarters reek of body odour, the kind Ewella likens to her father and brother after a day of thatching. The crew sleeps in worn, filthy hammocks that sway in and out of grey moonbeams. They customised the quarters with leaves and branches from the wild country to soften the harsh reality of living at sea. The acidic undercurrent of vomit shatters the illusion. The pair push on through the deck. Ewella makes sure to keep her eyes to the ground. If she doesn’t see them, they might not see her.
There is another ladder to climb. At its end is the open world. The cold salt air reinvigorates her soul. The duo manoeuvre across the top deck, between masts, nets and kegs, to the side of the ship where two wooden boats lay side by side, ready to be dropped into the water at short notice. Kyauta mimes lowering of the boat by rope. It comfortably fits eight people. Ewella knows she is not strong enough. She shakes her head and presents her dainty arms. Kyauta mimes pushing it. She nods.
They shove the boat towards a gap in the railing. There is a ledge. Kyauta takes an oar from the boat, slots it beneath the hull and applies leverage. Under his instructions, Ewella pushes. It inches near. The underside scrapes the deck. She grows impatient and her hands tire.