The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  Sam will be fine without me.

  The windscreen’s glass disintegrated. Beyond it was a whirl of muted colour. Terrible mechanical sounds bombarded the interior.

  The Reliant hit a second tree. Its steel frame compressed around Trish’s brittle body.

  Darkness.

  Trish cannot feel her body. The Reliant, the woodland, and Pendeen are a million light-years away. Salt water envelopes her, and she swims upward. Her head breaks the surface, and she clambers out from a rock pool.

  A sun floods the sky, but it is no day on Earth. Gold rays shine over Pendeen’s cliff tops as they move – no. They erode into the sea as it thrashes faster than is physically possible. Atop the cliffs, huts of wood and stone rise and collapse. Across the hills, trees unfurl. Brick by brick, Pendeen’s lighthouse erects anew.

  Then it all collapses once again, and the woodland diminishes and the fragments of rock rise from the water to rejoin the cliff. A settlement of stone and wooden huts spreads across the hills, and it is on fire. Abidemi is there, and she watches on with much sadness.

  Abidemi turns to greet Trish. Her back is flayed, her sockets are empty, and roots throb beneath her skin where veins should be. Trish does wonder, by a miracle, whether her own body is still alive and if she is still connected to it.

  ‘Lovely Trish, where life is infinite, death is absent,’ Abidemi says.

  ‘We all belong to the frequency,’ Trish returns.

  ‘You’ll know this place is the ombrederi.’

  ‘The afterlife.’

  ‘Of sorts. Each and every human who has ever been or will be joins us here after death,’ Abidemi explains. ‘All of humanity, from all of time, all at once.’

  The skyline torrents, and the wind carries a billion voices. Her knees buckle. Even her imprint cannot fathom the ombrederi’s scale.

  ‘We were never meant to know about transcendence,’ Trish ponders.

  Abidemi beckons her across the rock pools, and she follows.

  ‘That is true, but equally, I think you knew,’ Abidemi says. She invites Trish closer to a pool strewn with sea urchins. ‘Your mind finds the future before it finds the past, does it not?’

  Just as she suspected.

  ‘I can become a gywandras too?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid Rasha and James are lost, stuck too firmly to their pasts,’ Abidemi says. ‘My telling you all that you’ll come to learn from exposure of the ombrederi is a waste of physical time. You have a task.’

  ‘I have to . . . my god, I have to kill Will.’ Although it already happened in her past, it still hurts her deeply to know it in the ombrederi, to know his blood was on her hands and will be again.

  ‘You have to ensure he dies,’ Abidemi agrees. ‘I’m afraid it is much more than that. Every moment that led you here is still in limbo. It still might not happen.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t?’

  ‘The physical, the ombrederi, they all depend on cause and effect,’ Abidemi says. ‘After all, emotion and experience are what tie us all together. Undo that, and existence falls.’

  ‘The occupations. The hauntings. The dasfurvya.’

  ‘The river always finds the sea.’

  ‘Why me?’ Trish asks. ‘Any witness, from any place, from any time.’

  ‘To answer that, let me tell you why the ombrederi chose me. There was a threat to the balance. I am tied to you and to others. We have tread similar paths at different times.’

  ‘We’re emotionally tied to the core events. It’s chance.’

  ‘Tied, yes. Chance, no. It is choice. You chose to protect Rasha, and that is why you’re here. Now that it has happened, it was already written. You must transcend.’

  The pool beside them bubbles and writhes and becomes molten black. It has an allure to it. Trish longs to be with it, the way she searched for Shauna with the receptor.

  ‘The ombrederi can only send you back to certain points in time.’

  ‘Intersections,’ Trish says. ‘Will told us.’

  ‘As if it was always written, there is an intersection that takes you to your past.’

  ‘A gywandras creates itself,’ Trish quotes Vanessa-Edward.

  ‘From there, you will have agency,’ Abidemi says. ‘The ombrederi will guide you. Descend if you consent to transcendence.’

  What can Trish do but accept? She walks to the pool and submerges into the black water. Her mind fills with information: an empty library whose shelves are inundated with volumes, access to all information if she desires. The water is all around her. It laps, gentle and warm, around her imprint, an amniotic fluid to birth the bringer of misery.

  She dives down into the blackness.

  First there is darkness. Then a voice, without gender or age, like a flat piano chord, whispers, ‘The river always finds the sea.’

  The pond water bubbles with bright light. It rises, swirls, and forms a tunnel of colour, one solid enough for Trish to walk upon, and she does to find herself in a room she never thought she’d see again.

  Trewin’s Halfway House has a bedroom just for teen girls. Four singles and three bunk beds are crammed between walls tacked with posters of pop stars. Trish, at the age of thirteen, and Shauna, fifteen, are forced to share a single bed by the window. On the cusp of winter, cold air seeps through the single glazing, so the sisters have to spoon beneath a heap of thin blankets to keep warm. It is at this time that Trish comes into her witnessing capabilities and learns that the dead do not remain so. It is a period of life where she can’t tell reality from memory, life from death. She faints often and sleepwalks just as much. Many times she thrashes at the air whilst she sleeps, and Shauna wakes her, often to the taunts of the girls they share the room with.

  Trish walks to the bed. Young Shauna, aged by tragedy, and stranger still, her thirteen-year-old self, are wrapped up together, safe in the idea they’ll always be together.

  Trish is not welcome. Her skin pinches as if fishing hooks are strung across her body to wrench her from a place and time she has no business being in, from a space that her own imprint already inhabited. She reaches out to her younger self. The frequency energy intensifies. Trish struggles to reach herself; they repel each other as if she is one of two positive magnets being forced together. With all her might, she touches young Trish’s forehead.

  Her imprint splices apart as if she is shoved through a sieve. Her teenage self thrashes and rolls in the bed. Shauna wakes and dives from bed.

  Adult Trish surveys her hands; they are space black, glass yet liquid. She is burdened with an armour, one linked to so many catastrophic events in recent weeks.

  When her young body calms, Trish knows that she is done. On the bed, Shauna cradles teenage Trish, and around them the girls crowd – some are horrified, but most snicker and point. Teenage Trish wakes, and her eyes look straight ahead, alert and terrified, locked on the Trish that is now before.

  At the gywandras she has now become.

  And Shauna. What Trish would give to be in her sister’s arms just one more time, to see her as she was, in her early thirties with a happy married life ahead of her.

  That is it, her next destination as a gywandras.

  It is time for Shauna to die.

  If Trish is to describe what it is like to be a gywandras, it is an inferno of contradiction: indestructible to the point of fragility, hollow of emotion yet brimming with vehemence. The pool water tunnel churns and snatches the halfway house away. Within its currents come images from hundreds of moments, and in each of them the faces of Sam, Will, Rasha, James, and Trish are reflected.

  Of course, the gywandras festered into Trish’s life long before they met Rasha. It was there when Shauna died – or dies. It forces an imprint to occupy Michael and kill Shauna.

  I’m ready, she thinks to the ombrederi.

  The Puffin and Hare amalgamates from the water, its sticky tables and far stickier patrons crammed between its bloodred walls, as she remembers it. Raucous laughter rings crispl
y. It is not abstract in the way a memory obtained through the receptor would be. It is real. It happens now.

  Oh, her freckly face full of love and life. Shauna laughs amongst her friends, all decorated in a variety of pink bridesmaid accessories.

  A man carries a round of drinks and trips before her: Michael. The contents shatter to the floor. He looks around as patrons jeer. Only Trish could have tripped him. Michael, who is long from sober himself, pauses. He doesn’t look through Trish, but rather right at her. He blinks, considers what he sees as a drunken illusion, and sulks back toward the bar.

  Trish is frozen, petrified to move. This has happened before, but it happens now. She is not merely a spectator: she is an active participant.

  The memory shifts again. Shauna stumbles up the cobbled high street, phone in hand. Trish races after her.

  ‘Disgusting prick!’ Shauna yells. Michael hobbles behind her on Market Jew Street, intoxicated to the heavens. ‘Maybe she’ll finally see sense.’

  ‘I’m here,’ Trish calls, but Shauna cannot hear her.

  In fact, Trish realises the ombrederi brought her to the wrong spot. She saw this moment the day in Princetown, nestled deep within Michael’s subconscious. A gywandras materialised from the butcher’s doorway. And it does now.

  It just isn’t Trish.

  The second gywandras is mostly a waxen chest on deerlike legs. It skitters toward Michael.

  ‘No!’ Trish cries out. ‘Please, no!’

  The second gywandras falters. There is still a shred of hope – a fine sliver – that perhaps Shauna won’t die.

  The gywandras’s skin warbles and retracts to reveal a face: Rasha. She cries, and her bottom lip quivers.

  ‘It has to happen, Trish,’ Rasha utters. ‘I’ve seen what will happen if it doesn’t. War everywhere. War like Syria.’

  ‘Then I will do it,’ Trish says, and she waltzes forward. If it has to be – if the ombrederi requires it of them. ‘Let it be me.’

  ‘What kind of friend would I be if I did?’ Rasha asks. ‘There’s a darkness in me. I’ve become a coercer. How can any of that be for good?’

  What can Trish say when she doesn’t have the answers, when this world is as new to her as it is Rasha?

  The gywandras armour envelops Rasha. With a long disjointed arm, she beckons an imprint from the shadows of Market Jew Street: the knife-wielding woman. Trish freezes. Her own gywandras skin roots to the cobbles as Shauna’s death unfolds before her once again.

  Occupied-Michael lumbers at Shauna, grabs her by the wrist, and forces her to turn around. She fights back to no avail, and he thrusts her into the shadows beside the garage.

  Shauna is gone, and Trish burns with rage.

  Shauna’s body drops to the cobbles. Her imprint – faint and flickering – materialises beside her. Her eyes find Trish, and for a moment she seems to smile. Then she dissipates into the frequency energy.

  Michael’s body hits the ground. It shudders and rolls, and the imprint pools out of him onto the cobbles and slinks into the darkness once more.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rasha says beneath her gywandras armour, and she too disappears from the scene.

  With a sharp intake of breath, Michael comes back to himself and rolls onto his stomach. He hurls, and vomit showers onto the ground. He wipes his mouth, rises on unsteady legs, sees Shauna’s limp body, and bounds forward.

  ‘No, no, no!’ he cries.

  He grabs Shauna by the armpits and pulls her into the streetlight. Michael presses on Shauna’s chest, then puts his mouth to hers and puffs air into it. He performs CPR again. Pump, pump, breath, breath. He howls every time he fails, then pumps harder the more desperate he becomes to revive her.

  But he cannot, and he never will.

  The alleyway melts away from Trish, with the sound of Michael’s cries in her ears, and Shauna’s blank blue face etched into her mind.

  The rage inside her intensifies.

  Rasha, she thinks. I must find Rasha.

  The whirlpool tunnel dispels Trish into a patch of dense shrubbery.

  She rises without her gywandras armour and scans the horizon – a riot of subtropical plants – to know that it is the Lost Gardens of Heligan: Rasha’s neutral place.

  Rasha’s sobs echo across the warped landscape. Trish races down an intimate footpath between a bamboo plant and a man-made waterfall toward the voice.

  ‘What I have I done?’ Rasha cries. ‘What have I done?’

  Trish scrambles up a hill and finds Rasha facedown on the earth. She sobs and pounds the dirt with her fists. Behind her lies The Mud Maiden, a sculpture of a sleeping woman shrouded in moss and ivy. Trish traipses forward, hesitant to calm her friend.

  Yes, still her friend. Trish can’t hold the teenager to Shauna’s death, not when she was influenced by Edward Penrose to become a coercer of imprints. After all, they both have the weight of the ombrederi and humanity’s existence slung on their shoulders.

  Because if Rasha hadn’t, in the end, Trish would have had to. Better a gywandras of their own. It was The Network’s fault.

  Trish crouches beside Rasha and lays a hand on her shoulder. Rasha jumps up, startled.

  ‘You found me,’ she says. ‘You came here.’

  ‘We’re gywandras now,’ Trish says. ‘I think we can travel anywhere.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m so. . .’

  ‘You listen to me,’ Trish says. ‘None of us asked for this, and if it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.’

  It would have been me, Trish thinks.

  ‘I thought it was the right thing,’ Rasha stammers. ‘I don’t even know what that is anymore.’

  Trish can’t disagree. Murder is wrong, and she grieved for her elder sister for sixteen months. She knows how much it hurts, that it aches in every organ and darkens every thought. Yet, the ombrederi flows through her subconscious and helps Trish understand it is a drop in a turbulent sea of events; existence is still at stake.

  ‘I said I’d never be like them,’ the teenager continues. She sits down, eyes fixed on the canopy where birds swarm and chirp. ‘I swore I would be better than the rebels in Syria, than Cridland. I’m not. I’m worse!’

  ‘We’re the sum of our pasts,’ Trish says. ‘As much as we want to believe otherwise. If Shauna hadn’t . . . then I would never have found out about the gywandras or what the Network was doing.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be here now! If none of that had happened, we wouldn’t be gywandras now.’

  Trish mulls over Not-Dave’s speech outside the lighthouse, the words that led her to crash the Reliant, how Vanessa-Edward said the gywandras came to be.

  ‘It’s a paradox,’ Trish says. ‘If the gywandras wasn’t us, it would have been one of the Network.’

  Rasha wipes her eyes. Trish notes how they aren’t the only victims of the Network. If they don’t act soon, there will be more.

  ‘Rasha, listen to me,’ Trish says, grabbing Rasha’s shoulders. ‘We’ll find some good in this, together. Listen, we’re not the only ones down here. James is held here against his will.’

  ‘He was bad, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He made some mistakes,’ Trish admits. ‘He meant well. He tried to stop Edward Penrose. You can find him. Bring him home. One fewer victim for the Network, yeah? One fewer death.’

  ‘One fewer death,’ Rasha repeats.

  Trish rises to her feet. The gywandras armour swells around her once more.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Even though she is concealed in the gywandras armour, Trish cannot turn back to face Rasha.

  ‘The last piece of the puzzle,’ she says. ‘Will.’

  Colour, sound, emotion – it is all one chaotic vortex.

  Trish struggles to find the mental strength to navigate the tunnel to her next destination, and when she finally does it isn’t one place but a series of interconnected rooms. In each one is a version of Will, sat in his untidy bedroom or a dim pocket of the collieries
or a quiet quayside cafe. Prepubescent Will, teenage Will, thirtysomething Will. He mostly hunches over a notebook or tablet and writes away. The words on his pages and screens are venomous; his disgust for transcendence stains the ink and pixels of his work.

  Will met the gywandras, and unless Rasha is to return, Trish will have to kill him. Trish stalks through the various scenes where the ombrederi’s might is strongest: the activity centre. Will turns in his seat when she enters. He shakes his head; he probably thinks it was a shadow.

  A trickle. The activity centre becomes water, and the water becomes the laboratories. The ombrederi’s grasp is strongest where there are no dampeners. Will jumps up from his stool. Even though he cannot see Trish, he stares directly at her.

  ‘Abidemi?’ he calls out. He waits for a response with bated breath.

  Trish decides to lurk closer, toward the contents of the desk. To his right are printed copies of his report outlining the sonar program. To his left are his notes on transcendence. They continue to cause misery. How could Will have been so careless in his attempts to dissolve the project? Had he entrusted her, he may never have needed to die. Instead, so many unforgivable events occurred. She thrusts forward and swipes the sheets of paper to the floor in a flurry of secrets.

  Will recedes from the desk. He takes out his smartphone and speaks into the dictation app.

  ‘April 22, 2016,’ he begins. ‘Location: laboratory offices, the Network. Time is 19:43. I’ve been engaging with a grade three imprint for several weeks. Moments ago, it displayed physical strength. I can sense that it’s highly aggravated, angry perhaps. It doesn’t respond to Abidemi . . .’

  The room grows darker as the ombrederi leads Trish to the next in a swirl of colour: Will’s bedroom at his parents’ cottage. It is the dead of night, and the double bed has been pushed into the far right corner to give way to the mass of notes sprawled across the floor and walls.

  Will senses Trish’s presence and leaps from his bed. He reaches for the EMP that lies on his side table. Trish is not sure what the EMP will do to a gywandras, but if it reacts in the same way as it does with imprints, then she cannot take the risk. Everything that led her to this very moment pivoted on Will’s death. He stalled the gywandras project and led them to multiple clues. Trish would never discover the gywandras at the scene of Shauna’s murder, and Sam wouldn’t go to the Refinery and uncover the truth about the dasfurvya.