The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  It was only when Mallory glared at Sam that he realised they’d spoken to him.

  ‘Come again?’ he asked.

  The matronlike woman breathed in deeply and said, ‘The Refinery runs on mealtimes. Breakfast seven to ten, lunch at one, tea at six.’

  ‘And in between?’ Sam asked. He held his breath for the answer.

  ‘Treatment,’ Lilith said matter-of-factly, as if he should have known the answer.

  ‘We’ll have you settled in before your assessment,’ Mallory explained. They turned onto a second wing and stopped before cell – room – seventy-one.

  ‘Welcome home.’ Lilith smiled, her mouth crooked, eyes empty.

  As Sam entered, he wondered whether Lilith’s lexicon had ‘home’ and ‘prison’ confused. He had a single metal bed frame in the corner by a barred window. In the opposite corner was a ceramic toilet and sink. The walls were padded with a yellowed impact foam, and a CCTV camera was mounted above the door. The Refinery didn’t operate on trust.

  ‘Cosy,’ Sam quipped.

  ‘Change, and we’ll be with you in twenty.’

  The door was locked shut behind them, and Sam, minus the CCTV camera, was alone. On the bed lay a bundle of stiff white pyjamas. He tore his shirt off. A foul stench rose from his armpits; he’d not showered in three days. He slipped the garbs over his thin frame. They had the rigidity of tarpaulin – to restrict any superfluous movement, he suspected. He slid his bare feet into cardboard-thin slippers, certain that he’d find many things in the Refinery, but comfort wouldn’t be one of them.

  There was a startling buzz, and his door swung outward. Mallory returned with a touch screen tablet in hand.

  ‘Ready for the assessment?’ she asked.

  Sam nodded; he did not want to discover the consequences if he said no.

  They traipsed down an assortment of identical hallways, forever white and forever devoid of patients, and descended a flight of stairs to a floor far colder and more industrial than its predecessors. A lack of windows made him presume they were underground. Mallory escorted Sam into a low-ceilinged room, its walls coated in ridged soundproof material, every surface black. There was no furniture, only a tripod, atop which a metal ball the size of Sam’s head was erected. It reminded him of a plasma ball, except it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn there was more than a Tesla coil inside.

  ‘What’s the assessment?’ Sam asked. He rubbed his thumb against his palm; his hands were saturated with sweat.

  ‘You’ve made some broad claims, Mr Bickle,’ Mallory exclaimed. Her eyes raced across the tablet’s screen. ‘That you are a gywandras, no less.’

  Of course the Refinery’s employees know, Sam thought. Everyone but us.

  ‘Claims?’ Sam prompted.

  ‘You didn’t think we would take such a statement lightly, did you?’ Mallory sneered. ‘No, you’re far from it. But you made a comment that sparked a few ideas. You can withdraw your imprint from your body, is that right?’

  Sam was glued to the floor. He’d thought he was a step ahead of Vanessa, when in actual fact she was many ahead of him. He’d been double bluffed into another trap altogether, one that was potentially worse than the archives.

  ‘With a little help,’ Sam replied. He tried to remain stoic; he’d never let the fear show.

  ‘Yes, we have that here too, dependency on ketamine,’ Mallory said. ‘But I’d imagine any hallucinogenic substance would do, wouldn’t it? Yes, thought so. Alcohol too? Well, Mr Bickle, this isn’t the collieries. Here you can’t empty the stores of our opioids, and if you did, the repercussions wouldn’t be worth it.’

  Sam didn’t want to listen to such dribble. He just wanted answers, straight up.

  ‘So you want me to withdraw?’

  ‘Please,’ Mallory said. She pulled a small box from her pocket, opened it up, and showed him two ketamine pills. ‘We’ll make it easy on you for your first day.’

  Sam’s stomach lurched, and his veins burned hot. He hadn’t taken ketamine in a few days, and the sheer sight of it made him want to lunge forward and snatch them from Mallory’s grip, to be in a state so far removed from reality that he’d have little care what was to follow. Any ounce of self-control, any morsel of retaliation, dissolved. He shot a hand out to the ketamine. Mallory retracted her hand a little.

  ‘But note, we won’t make a habit of this. An intoxicated mind is an unreliable one, and that just won’t do for a gywandras.’

  Sam caught the end of her sentence, a phrase he’d earlier dismissed as a figure of speech.

  ‘A gywandras?’

  Mallory didn’t answer. She rattled the box for him to take the ketamine. He doubted such an uptight woman would allow him to crush and snort the pills, so he swallowed them in one.

  The nurse navigated the controls on her tablet screen. A whir filled the room, as if an old generator had creaked to life after years of disuse. The plasma ball crackled with static. Sam’s senses dulled, his body lightened, and the dark room burst with colour. His imprint spliced itself from his many nerves and ligaments. The frequency energy emitted by the plasma flowed strong, and he stepped out of his body –

  A flash of light.

  White-hot agony fried Sam’s body, and he collapsed to the ground. His imprint was back in his body, and his muscles cramped. Mallory’s face leered above him, distorted in the glare of the plasma ball.

  ‘What . . .’ he murmured. He couldn’t enunciate, as if his face had been numbed before a dental procedure.

  ‘Withdraw your imprint at will,’ Mallory’s voice echoed.

  Sam’s imprint crawled from his body once more. His heartbeat simmered.

  Multiple flashes of white.

  Unable to speak, he howled through his slack mouth. His limbs flailed and jerked. His imprint hadn’t resealed connection with his body.

  Mallory towered over him.

  ‘See, Mr Bickle,’ she said. ‘To be a witness is a gift, and gifts should be cherished. If you didn’t numb your body and mind with narcotics, you could have become more than you are. You wouldn’t be lying here now, in pain, a slave to flesh. You’d be a gywandras already. But perhaps there is hope for you yet.’

  Of course the Refinery wasn’t a health centre; it conducted experiments the Network wouldn’t allow within its caverns.

  The Refinery, where people were degraded to lab rats and doomed to die before escape was possible.

  A white-hot flash. A void of colour and a calamity of sound overwhelmed his senses. It all gave way to complete darkness, impenetrable silence, and utter agony.

  It was only his third morning in the Refinery, but for Sam it could have been a lifetime.

  Maddened howls, more animal than human, kept him awake. He lay on the hard mattress and listened to the drip-drip of his faulty toilet, his desolate room a prison cell designed to prevent sleep. He doubted the CCTV camera slept either. Cravings took hold of his body, not for food nor nicotine. Ketamine. His addictions had kept him in bad choices and poor company since 2013.

  Poor company, indeed, he scathed. His treatment sessions – nonsensical torture for the straight talkers – were short but often. In a room painted coal black, the nurses submerged him into an ice-cold sensory deprivation tank. In a clinical room, acupuncture needles wired to a car battery caused his body to convulse with a torrent of radiating pain. Every day there was the plasma ball, and with each use his imprint returned to his body less and less. His reflexes were slower, he stammered when he spoke – which was little and rare – and he became bogged down with depression.

  Beyond his own room were other rooms in which a myriad of patients cried and screamed, rooms that only the white-clad staff could access. That’s all the Refinery was: a compilation of spaces in which terrible events happened, of which the worst could not be seen.

  The morning sun bled tangerine through the square window above his bed and cast shadows of the iron bars across the three other walls. He took caution when he rose from bed; sciatica
spasmed across his lower back. Sam expected to wait at least another thirty minutes before being escorted to breakfast when the door to his cell – room – opened, and both Mallory and Lilith entered. He hadn’t been blessed with both of their presences since the day he was admitted.

  ‘Treatment first,’ Mallory said. ‘Breakfast as a reward.’

  It took Sam longer to walk to the room, but when the plasma ball was lit up it took him less time to withdraw from his body. The nurses stopped supplying him with ketamine, but that no longer seemed to matter. Withdrawing had become his new escape, no longer weighed down by the pain or the cravings or the sluggishness and ineptitude of his body. He could withdraw farther now, able to walk – as his imprint – to the very corners of the black room, and as he looked back at Mallory and Lilith, with expressions that could only be accomplishment, he was still able to control his body. No longer did it fall to the ground as a lifeless sack of flesh, but it stayed upright and maintained its balance. If he could do that, his plan to find Rose might just work.

  As Sam progressed with his ability to withdraw, Mallory and Lilith exercised more patience when he returned to his body. They let him recline against the wall whilst sensation returned to his hands and feet and waited as he sipped a sickly sweet tea. He did wonder when he’d be freed, for surely he had reached the extent of what withdrawing from a body could achieve. He dared not asked, not whilst they showed him some humanity.

  Afterward, the nurses escorted Sam to the canteen, its walls insulated with deflectors; frequency energy couldn’t penetrate in the communal areas. Sam sat at a plastic bench and watched Mallory skirt away. When he’d first arrived, he quickly concluded patients were mentally ill or permanently occupied. The tests he was subjected to confirmed it was both.

  As Rose would surely be.

  Two gents, well into their sixties, were escorted by a stout male nurse to the neighbouring table. The nurse was the youngest Sam saw there and the only one who cracked a smile at the patients – a genuine, toothy one at that. His name tag read, ‘Nathan.’

  ‘Henry, Dave, breakfast will start soon,’ Nathan said in a light but authoritative tone. ‘Sit tight here, and someone will come along. Good gents.’

  Nathan waltzed back the way he’d come and left Henry and Dave in a dazed state.

  ‘It collapsed,’ Henry said. He’d lost weight fast; the skin on his forearms flapped like a deflated balloon. ‘They’re all trapped down there. They’ll die if we don’t help, they’ll help if we die.’

  ‘Mary’s coming for tea,’ Dave retorted. He quivered with onset Parkinson’s. ‘Should I tell her? That it’s all gone?’

  Henry itched his elbows and rocked back and forth. He stopped, sat upright, and grabbed Dave by his wrist. Sam deduced that another imprint spoke from within him as he said, ‘What are you doing down here? This isn’t a place for kids. Where are your parents?’

  Sam didn’t stare right at them in case he antagonised them. He’d never been a people person. Irregular eyebrows, mismatched eyes, hair of multiple colours and textures: the men were survivors of occupation. They experienced what Will had. The desire for answers overtook Sam’s instincts to avoid them. He staggered from the bench he sat at and parked himself opposite the two men. Dave failed to notice him. He clenched his right earlobe and sucked on his left thumb. Henry swivelled on the bench to face Sam.

  ‘She’s an innocent woman,’ he said. ‘I know your type. What you want with her, and it’s only ever one thing . . .’

  Sam let them ramble on. He scoured his fractured memory for what he could remember of the strange events since he was admitted.

  ‘Gywandras,’ Sam uttered.

  Henry fell silent. His irises grew a shade blacker, and his hands balled into fists.

  Dave’s shivering depleted. He addressed Sam in a cool tone. ‘We all belong to the frequency.’

  ‘This body won’t do,’ Henry uttered. ‘It’s all wrong.’

  ‘How many bodies have you had?’ Sam asked. Both men – or rather, the congregation of imprints inside them – grew tense.

  ‘No right one in seven, no right one in seven,’ Dave said.

  ‘Because seven eight nine.’ Henry cackled.

  Sam sighed, as deflated as Henry looked. Sam was ravenous for answers, more so than he was for the Refinery’s grey slop. Both men – or whatever imprints controlled their bodies – had recognised the word ‘gywandras.’ There’d been a flash in their mutated eyes, a quiver of their lips. He didn’t know them well enough to navigate a coherent conversation, but he could find Rose. He took a fist of sugar cubes from a canister at the centre of the table, pocketed them, and stumbled into the halls.

  The Refinery had one redeeming quality: patients were allowed to roam the hallways between mealtimes if they were compliant in their tests. Sam had a short but opportune window to try and find his mum.

  Few mulled through the halls, and he’d certainly recognise Rose amongst those who did. She was nowhere to be seen. Most of the cell doors were closed, as were the serving hatches. Sam glanced into a dozen of the open ones, met unfamiliar faces, and admitted defeat. A new plan of action.

  Nathan strolled down the hallway with a locked medicine trolley. Sam approached him. What would he do – garner sympathy? The last thing he wanted was pity.

  ‘Hey, mate, got anything for pain?’ he asked. ‘It’s been a rough few days.’

  Nathan didn’t seem sure whether to smile at the news of Sam’s discomfort. Finally, Sam thought, someone around here with an ounce of morality.

  ‘Can I take your name, buddy?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Bickle, Samuel.’

  Nathan consulted a register on top of his medicine trolley and ran his finger across the table of names and room numbers. He paused, thinking he’d found Sam, then continued on. Sam caught the name Nathan had faltered on: Rose Bickle, room sixty-three. That was all he needed. Nathan looked back at Sam.

  ‘No can do, I’m afraid,’ he said.

  ‘Got me down as a compulsive addict, eh? That’s a hard label to shake.’

  ‘You’re here, aren’t you? We’ll have you cured in no time.’

  Sweet summer child, Sam mused.

  ‘We can only hope,’ he said, and he walked away as briskly as possible in his cumbersome body. Room sixty-three. It was only a few doors down from his own.

  Sam took a deep breath, ready to withdraw for the second time that day. He’d initially thought to withdraw in his room but knew that he’d be spotted by the CCTV camera mounted there. In the hallway, the CCTV cameras were at either end of the low-vaulted ceiling, and Sam, at its middle, would surely be just a blip on a security monitor. He stopped outside room sixty-three and closed his eyes. His imprint untangled itself from his body.

  Unsure of whether he would be able to pass through solid matter, Sam – his imprint – dove toward Rose’s cell door. A laminated medical record tacked beneath the serving hatch outlined how Rose’s care demanded two nurses minimum. ‘High risk,’ it concluded in bold. He pressed on and leapt right through the door. As easy as that. Finally, after many years, there was Rose.

  Except, she wasn’t anything as Sam remembered.

  Oh, her poor body, he thought. Rose’s naked body was skeletal and brittle, and she turned as Sam’s imprint crossed into her cell. She stumbled forward upon weak legs, wiping drool from her mouth. Liver spots and self-inflicted scars decorated the back of her hand in an intricate game of noughts and crosses. Her eyes, once sea blue, were now cement grey. One autumn, during the ten tours, Sam had happened across a deer, riddled with disease and starvation, slumped in a ravine on Bodmin Moor. He couldn’t help but be reminded of that. Rose’s arms were just bone, and the skin around her eyes was so sunken they may just pop from her skull. A sympathetic farmer had eventually shot the deer dead.

  Rose’s cell of fourteen years was decorated with a chaotic mural of crayon. A dozen various styles and subject matters were scrawled over the padded walls and provided a
n uncomfortable glance into her occupied mind. As Sam expected, a scribble of black represented the gywandras at the corner of the room. Many were streams of numbers, similar to those found in the Nancarrows’ study.

  Sam lurked closer to Rose, and as if her body were magnetised, his imprint was drawn to it, inviting him to fuse with flesh once more. If any part of Rose remained, buried inside within the dilapidated body, he’d be sure to find it. He started with his hands on hers. Weakness, the kind caused by malnourishment, coursed through his imprint. An arthritic ache niggled away at her knuckles, and so Sam’s knuckles too. It was then he noticed a bruise on her arm – no, not a bruise, a tattoo of a cherub – that seeped up from underneath her skin.

  Her arrhythmic heart skipped every fourth beat, a chill swept across her naked body, and she had a constant awareness of the caesarean scar, stretched into a hopeful smile, where Sam had been brought into their cold world.

  Sam occupied Rose.

  ‘Will you stop ignoring me?’ Rose yelled.

  Sam blinked and looked over at his mum from the passenger seat of her Beetle. He’d crossed into the ombrederi, into his own memory.

  He remembered that afternoon well. He and Rose were stuck in after-school traffic. Sam had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. The unbearable summer heat left him drowsy, and he’d begun to daydream about boys – those who were certainly alive, and one who was not.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ Sam told his mother.

  He had fled to the woods the previous night to find a boy he often lost to the shadows. The boy never changed clothes and didn’t grow dirty, and his hair was always in a slick crew cut. In fact, over the few months since Sam had found him, he hadn’t seemed to age at all.

  Sam didn’t know which was stranger: that the boy was most certainly a ghost, or that Sam didn’t seem to mind.