The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  Joel reached Cridland. Rasha thought hard. Occupy him, occupy him.

  The imprint grabbed Cridland’s head with his disjointed hands. Rasha’s heart palpitated – he might’ve snapped the teacher’s neck. He didn’t. The imprint pressed his head against Cridland’s brow and disappeared.

  Joel occupied Cridland.

  Cridland’s body slumped in his seat, head bowed. He could have slept, and the class supposed so, too. One by one, they whipped out their phones and Snapchatted and tweeted their teacher. Rasha squeezed the cupboard’s doorframe. She wondered if Joel tormented Cridland from within the ombrederi. What if Joel killed him? Cridland was close to retirement; the odds of a heart attack were great. Death was an easy way out. It wasn’t justice. Joel seemed to agree.

  Cridland’s body jerked in his seat. He stumbled up, legs bowed as if they were broken, arms limp at his sides. There was no way that Joel could manoeuvre the heavy body to the headmaster’s office.

  The class rose from their desks, utterly horrified, their phones still locked on Cridland as he waltzed amidst the desks. Rasha betted that some of them were streaming live, too. All Rasha and Joel had to do was have the teacher confess.

  Cridland let out a yell and crumpled to the floor. He rolled and convulsed, kicked and shook, and then he opened his mouth and cried, ‘I killed Joel Tredethy! I killed Joel Tredethy!’

  At the back of the class, Gregory Dingle bolted through the fire exit. The rest of their cohort continued to record and take photos. Tens of videos probably circulated social media, and as soon as their family and friends recognised Joel’s name, Rasha knew it’d spread like wildfire.

  Joel departed Mr Cridland’s body before Gregory returned with the head of Design and Technology, Mr Pritchard. As soon as his imprint vanished into the dusty air, Cridland came to and clambered to his feet. He was pale and dared not look anyone in the eye. Police and paramedics were called.

  ‘It was just a seizure,’ Mr Pritchard told the class.

  The unruly children were told to depart to lunch early. Rasha was one of the last to pack her things. Mr Pritchard escorted Cridland to a chair. As she passed, the pair locked eyes. Did he know Rasha was involved? Cridland could have looked into Joel, as Rasha had looked into Will the night of Kasey’s occupation.

  Her stomach was lighter, free of anxiety, when she crossed into the playground. Rasha was certain Joel would never plague her again. Sirens hurried through the air. It was out of her hands now.

  Not wanting to spend her twenty extra minutes in a bathroom, Rasha found an empty IT suite. She logged on to a computer and opened her internet browser to find Sam and Trish staring back at her from a thumbnail.

  The thumbnail didn’t have their faces, exactly, but warped E-FITs from a local news article that read, ‘Two Suspects Wanted for South Cornwall Murder.’

  Rasha pulled her chair closer to the desk and flicked through the article. It described the elderly care home, Angove Lodge, where Ted lost his life. Two people had entered with false identities and butchered the old man. That was where the details went awry. It didn’t mention a third – for James had been there that night, as Rasha understood it – and of course the paper wouldn’t have reported anything paranormal even if they’d been told it.

  Vanessa and the board. They’d promised to conceal Trish and Sam’s connection to Ted’s death but had instead used it to eradicate them as threats.

  Is that what happens to people who know too much? Rasha wondered.

  Rasha logged out, collected her things, and raced from the IT suite. Trish was in hiding and probably didn’t have internet; she wouldn’t know. Rasha wasn’t sure if her foresight, along with the receptor, reached Gorenn from wherever she was hidden. There was only one way to be sure.

  Rasha darted back through the playground. If she detonated the EMP, she’d need to be high above any of the school’s electronic equipment. Rasha had watched the boys in her year climb to the DT department’s roof to retrieve their awry footballs many a time. She copied their route – onto the general waste bins, up the brackets that held the dust collection chute to the wall – and heaved herself onto the flat roof. The building was only one storey, so she hoped that would be high enough to send a message far and wide.

  Rasha traipsed to the centre of the roof. She withdrew the EMP from her bag. Her stomach sunk. The device had been off since Joel occupied Cridland. Her mind hadn’t been protected for a good half an hour. Allah knows the thoughts she projected, who heard them first. She’d been so intent helping Joel get his revenge that she hadn’t remembered to turn it on again.

  She wasn’t sure if she could reach for Trish, but it was the only thing she could think of. If the police caught up with Trish there’d be no one left to stop the Network. The gywandras would roam, and occupations would continue.

  Rasha pinched the power dial on the bug-like contraption and turned it up as high as it could go. The frequency energy seethed around her, and Rasha thought of Trish’s warm face and many different hairstyles. She recollected Shauna, the sister Trish desperately sought after, and envisioned the Calypso in Sleep’s farmyard.

  Rasha hit the floor of Calypso’s sky-blue saloon. Trish sat at the kitchen table in near darkness, the blinds drawn. She supposed that it was a memory until she saw the clock on the wall above Trish: quarter past twelve. It was the present.

  Rasha wasn’t the only one there who shouldn’t have been. At first she thought the imprint was the gywandras, but it wasn’t black at all – in fact, it was the furthest thing from empty. It had multiple faces and many hands and arms: at least ten entities conjoined as one. One face shone stronger than the others: Vanessa.

  She must have locked onto Rasha’s signal. She’d revealed Trish’s hiding space.

  ‘Run!’ Rasha screamed. Trish jumped to her feet and looked square at Rasha. ‘They know where you are! Run!’

  Trish bolted from the Calypso, and the scene was lost in a whirl of colour, as was Rasha. An immense panic stirred Rasha’s gut, as if she was the sea and tides lapped at her intestines.

  The rugged Cornish countryside flashed before her, on top of which staggered a mass of misshapen people and –

  ‘Sam!’ she cried out. Sam conferred with the contorted people. They all wore white uniforms, some dirtied, some bloodied.

  The world lifted from under her feet, and a cliff top towered above her, where a horde of people surrounded a lighthouse. They had mismatched eyes, patchwork hair – Frankenstein’s monsters with knitted facial features.

  ‘Dasfurvya!’ a hundred voices cried out.

  They eroded to a heap of ash, and Rasha sunk into the ombrederi’s inky space, down and deeper.

  The night’s cold wind startled Rasha. The sky was a fierce pink, the rooftop dewy around her.

  Her father impaled by a steel girder.

  No, this wasn’t Syria. It was very much Cornwall, and as she remembered more, she realised, I’ve put Trish in danger.

  She raised herself from the ground and felt in the near dark for the EMP. The dial was on, the analogue screen dead; she’d run the battery dry. Trish had once said witnesses projected in their sleep as their subconsciousness came to the forefront. She’d been without an EMP for at least nine hours. She needed to move.

  I must get home.

  Flashlights swept across the playground. Four, maybe five. She dove back onto the roof and strained her ears for scraps of conversation. Due to the lateness of the hour, the people below were either a friendly search party or the Network, but there was no way to know for certain. Rasha thought of Joel, and he materialised by her side. She closed her eyes and connected to him.

  Joel leapt from the roof. Flashes of faces came to Rasha as Joel coursed through the strangers: a brute of a man and a bug-eyed woman, all whom Rasha did not recognise. But the third face she did: Leri. The Network knew she was alone. She’d projected after all. Trish would be in trouble too. She needed to get home before she could attempt to make contact.
Haya would be worried.

  Rasha thought over the school’s layout and concocted a plan. All the flashlights were grouped at the eastern side: the playground, tennis courts, and gymnasium. If Rasha climbed down from the roof on the western side and stayed away from the lit car park, she could cut through the alleyway between the English and history buildings under the cover of night. There was a taxi rank two minutes away in town – maybe one at a sprint. It was as good a plan as any.

  As silently as Rasha could, she gathered up the EMP and her rucksack and shuffled along the roof on all fours to its western edge, then lowered herself onto a windowsill. The gutter broke with a snap, and Rasha slammed into the bushes below. She froze, ears turned toward the awry witnesses.

  A barrage of footsteps echoed across the playground.

  ‘Over there!’ a witness cried.

  Rasha sprung up, untangled herself from the bushes, and hobbled down the alley with a bruised ankle. Her stalkers’ flashlights thrust the many windowsills and awnings she passed into cones of light and shadows. The footsteps grew louder. Hands grabbed her shoulders. Rasha was wrenched to the ground.

  She was flipped over and came face-to-face with Leri.

  ‘I’ve got her!’ Leri cried, eyes manic.

  Rasha thought of Joel, and the twisted boy slid from the shadows. He clamped Leri’s neck with a gnarled hand, hauled her into the air, and slammed her against the wall.

  Rasha didn’t need to see the outcome. She scrambled to her feet and raced toward the end of the alleyway. The bus bay was in view, and the town’s lights glimmered beyond that.

  Out in the open, Rasha sprinted along the pavement. An engine roared. Headlights swamped her. A vehicle screeched to a halt beside her.

  ‘Rasha!’ Trish yelled.

  It was the Reliant – its bonnet twisted – and Trish was in the driver’s seat, the receptor strapped to her head.

  ‘Get in!’ Trish said. ‘Hurry.’

  Rasha vaulted over the bonnet and into the passenger’s side. Trish sped away onto the main road. Behind the Reliant, board members flooded out from the alleyway. Trish turned the corner, and they were out view.

  ‘I led them to you,’ Rasha cried. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to project, I just saw the news article . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  Rasha realised Trish wasn’t disgruntled – she had the receptor on. It must have fed her information. The woman blinked and came back to herself.

  ‘Can you take the receptor off for me, kiddo?’

  Rasha nodded and did as Trish asked. She threw it onto the back seat. Trish thanked her and relaxed into her seat.

  ‘You controlled the imprint back there?’

  ‘Like I did the day I hurt Fred,’ Rasha exclaimed. ‘Is it right that I can do that?’

  ‘A coercer,’ Trish said. ‘It was often theorised, but no witness ever achieved it. But two weeks ago I didn’t know about the gywandras, or imprints living between bodies.’

  Rasha threw Trish a quizzical look.

  ‘Right,’ Trish said. ‘Vanessa isn’t, well, Vanessa. At some point she was occupied by an imprint.’

  ‘I saw her when I reached for you. Loads of different faces.’

  ‘Vanessa’s had many bodies,’ Trish mused. ‘Whoever she used to be was gone a long time ago.’

  Occupations were one thing – and a scary one at that – but for imprints to change bodies like a fresh set of clothes set Rasha’s hairs on end. Outside the Reliant’s windows, the town’s lights shrunk away.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Rasha asked.

  ‘I was following Sam with the receptor,’ Trish explained. ‘He was taken to the Refinery, but now he’s escaped. He’s running to Pendeen.’

  ‘Pendeen . . .’ Rasha thought, trying to put a place to the name. ‘Is there a lighthouse there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When I was lost in the ombrederi, I saw a lighthouse. There were people watching from the cliffs. They shouted a word. Dasfurvya.’

  ‘Then there we go.’

  ‘But what is it all for?’

  ‘The board wants to achieve gywandras. To transcend time. The occupations weren’t random. The ombrederi tried to stop them. Everyone died because the board meddled with something they shouldn’t have, and we got caught up in it all.’

  That all made sense to Rasha. She recalled Vanessa and Leri’s conversation outside the Long Walk, Vanessa’s spiel about becoming post-human. It only led to one further question.

  ‘Then who is the gywandras?’

  Trish didn’t reply. Rasha couldn’t tell whether Trish didn’t know or, worse yet, she had an inkling but didn’t want to voice it.

  Rasha thought over the way the gywandras controlled occupations. They willed imprints onto innocent victims, as Rasha had forced Joel onto Fred and Cridland. An old fear niggled away in Rasha’s mind.

  What if it’s me?

  Trish bombed the Reliant down the A3071 toward Pendeen. Beyond the flatlands, the lighthouse was a hazy nub on the horizon. They’d arrive in a matter of minutes. Rasha’s stomach writhed as frequency energy condensed.

  ‘What do we do when we get there?’ she asked. She hoped Trish’s foresight conjured a series of potential outcomes.

  ‘It all depends on what we find.’

  ‘You can’t see what’s ahead?’

  ‘Not through this frequency energy, no.’

  Rasha noted Trish’s white knuckles and her bitten bottom lip.

  The gates to the lighthouse were open on their arrival. Trish slowed the Reliant and rolled into the yard. The headlights illuminated a congregation of people, all dressed in white. They turned to the Reliant with welcome.

  ‘Who are they?’ Rasha asked.

  Trish peered through the Reliant’s cracked windscreen. Rasha looked too and saw the mismatched faces.

  ‘I think they’re from the Refinery,’ Trish deduced.

  The crowd parted, and Sam raced toward the Reliant. Trish unclipped her seat belt, jumped from the car, and hugged him. Rasha got out into the yard and sidled around the Reliant. She avoided the countless ill-sorted eyes fixed upon her.

  ‘Hey, kid,’ Sam said and squeezed her shoulder. He slurred when he spoke, and his actions were slow, as if he was drunk or worse.

  ‘They’re from the Refinery?’ Rasha asked.

  Another man broke through the crowd. He somehow looked sixty and thirty respectively as his blond hair turned black, his nose and mouth sharply defined – the body adhered to a new imprint. It could have happened to Rasha’s body that night in the caravan had the Network not saved her. ‘Dave’ was sewn onto his Refinery garb.

  Rasha understood Sam’s random phone call at school, how Vanessa and the board occupied their present bodies.

  ‘Sam, set us free,’ Not-Dave said.

  ‘I’m good at being a pain in the arse,’ Sam retorted. He didn’t seem entirely comfortable in the presence of dasfurvya either. Who could be, Rasha noted, when they could have your body next?

  ‘You shouldn’t be in those bodies,’ Rasha snapped. Her father and sister only had one chance at life, whilst other imprints snatched bodies and lived forever.

  ‘Well, Rasha,’ Not-Dave said. ‘Do you believe you have the right to your body because you were born into it, you and it as one?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Was your mind born then?’ Not-Dave continued. ‘Or was it just your body?’

  ‘Birth, rebirth, they’re one of the same thing?’ Trish asked over her shoulder.

  ‘Let’s walk and talk. In bodies, we are bound by time. There isn’t much of that left at all.’

  Sam escorted Trish and Rasha toward the lighthouse.

  ‘It was already opened when we arrived,’ he explained. ‘We think the board got here first.’

  ‘More will come,’ Trish said. ‘They were after us. They won’t be far behind.’

  Not-Dave muttered commands to h
is people. They raced to the yard gates and yanked them closed. He led Sam, Trish, and Rasha inside the lighthouse. The hallway was white. Pipes and wires snaked across each wall and the ceiling with Kubrik perfection. Above them, the sound of the beacon rotating was distinguishable – for all Rasha knew, a body was being hauled across the landing. The hallway was short and ended at the bottom of a spiral staircase that looped up to the beacon. A hatch was built into the atrium floor. Trish looked back at Rasha. Her nerves must have showed. Trish took her sweaty hand in her own.

  ‘The mineshafts here go out under the sea,’ Trish explained to Rasha. ‘They’ve collapsed, and whatever is left is waterlogged, so there’s no way into them. The lighthouse’s engineer, Thomas Matthews, was a witness, and he built a tunnel underground, where activity was heightened. Little did he know it was directly above a ley line, a vault of frequency energy.’

  The hatch was open, and in turn they climbed down. Four of the dasfurvya took the rear. Rasha could only have faith that her two friends knew what they were doing. Each rung down into the warmth of the tunnel brought on a denser frequency energy. It wasn’t until they were in the sloped tunnel that the conversation started again, and it was led by Trish.

  ‘The ombrederi is causing the occupations, is that right? Is the ombrederi itself conscious?’

  ‘Some might call it a collective consciousness, others the source,’ Not-Dave said. ‘A little of it lives inside everyone. There is a primal instinct in us all to survive when we are threatened, and the ombrederi is no different. Becoming a gywandras with the ability to rewrite time would rip apart all of existence.’

  ‘Which is why Will died,’ Trish said. Rasha saw Sam flinch. The wound that was grief was still tender. ‘To stall transcendence.’