by Terry Kitto
She smacks the device from Will’s hand. It clatters across the floor. She cannot bring herself to do it.
A sliver of flame bursts from a ceiling beam. Abidemi rocks back and forth in the air. She urges Trish on. Trish soaks Will up as he adjusts the EMP. He is bleary-eyed; he cries over Sam and the state of their relationship, no doubt. His crooked nose, his untameable hair. It isn’t fair that he won’t grow old, that his eyes will not bear smile lines and his hair won’t grow grey and wispy. She planned her own future, how she, Sam, and Will would spend their retirement walking coastal paths, taking picnics to St Ives and coach trips to Brighton. Whether or not such a future will come to pass lies in her tar-like hands.
I can’t do it, Trish thinks.
‘You don’t have to,’ Abidemi responds.
The wall to Will’s left ripples into an archway of light. Another gywandras enters their midst. Rasha has come again. Abidemi must know Trish’s weaknesses; she sees all of time, after all. She brought Rasha here.
Rasha’s gywandras armour fades and returns. Through flickers of the viscous skin, Rasha’s face is seen. She wails, and tears cascade across her face. She fought to be good for so long, only for it to not matter in the end.
Gywandras-Rasha glides around Will in a circle, the way a seagull inspects a carton of chips. Trish follows in case Rasha springs toward Will.
‘Rasha!’ Trish cries.
The girl stops. Her molten face turns to the painting mounted on Will’s wall.
‘The Vincent will fall,’ Rasha responds. ‘There’s a reason for everything. I don’t have a choice.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong; time is still in flux,’ Trish says. ‘We are still able to make decisions.’
‘But it has already happened.’
‘That’s right. It’s happened. It has to happen. But . . .’
Trish thinks over the hours after they learnt of Will’s demise, and Sam initially suspected that Will had committed suicide. Sam might have been frivolous with his emotions, but he always had a good instinct. Perhaps Sam was right after all. Abidemi’s instructions weren’t to kill Will but to ensure that he died.
‘We’re not murderers,’ Trish continues. ‘It doesn’t mean it has to be us.’
Rasha seems to think a moment. ‘Will’s choice?’ she asks.
‘Will’s choice.’
Trish takes two deep breaths despite knowing full well she has no lungs to take in air. She walks into Will’s body. Their minds overlap, and their synapses fuse as one.
The lighting shop shines with millions of bulbs. Trish no longer has the gywandras armour; she’s her pre-crash self. Will’s projection is transparent. The lights in the distance shine through him.
‘Trish? Are you dead?’ he asks, alarmed.
Trish expected him to become at one with the ombrederi and have all the answers he needs; this version of his imprint is still bound to his body, bound to the physical world, and so doesn’t know what his future holds.
‘Not quite,’ Trish replies. ‘I’ve transcended.’
His eyes flicker.
‘Is it you? Have you been haunting me all these months?’ he asks. ‘All these years?’
How can she tell him he is going to die? How can she make it painless?
‘Yes. You’re going to transcend, Will.’
‘I don’t want to,’ Will explains. ‘I’m trying to find a way to end it. The board, they want it for terrible things.’
‘Show me,’ Trish says.
The darkness swirls into James’s incandescent office. Trish watches from the doorway as Will and Vanessa argue.
‘It could be disastrous,’ Will cries. He slams a paper report onto the desk. ‘It could be catastrophic. A weapon which, in the wrong hands – ’
‘I disagree,’ Vanessa says. Her voice is low and firm. ‘Human evolution lies within the mind. All we have done from the dawn of time is expand our horizons. It’s more than flying a plane or exploring space. True transcendence, unhindered by a physical body, is the ultimate achievement.’
‘We cannot begin to understand it,’ Will retorts. ‘If people die – ’
Trish is pulled from the birdcage and back into the lighting shop. Will greets her.
‘I saw into you,’ he says. ‘I’m not going to transcend, am I?’
‘Reality is threatened, Will,’ Trish says. ‘Just as you predicted. Your death is one of a series of events that will stop the board. It has to happen. It is written.’
‘You’ve been chosen to do it,’ Will says. He’s caught between disappointment and disgust. He has never spoken to Trish in this way, and it hurts like hell. ‘I’ll fight for my life.’
A blur of light. Shauna strolls amongst the lights of their parents’ shop, not her imprint, though; vague, blurred, it is a memory of someone who knew her little. Will’s memory. This is how he chooses to fight.
Trish delves into his mind. It takes the Network’s form. Thousands of cave openings and labyrinthine tunnels shine through the magnetic darkness. She lets her instincts lead her to a cavern – but no, it is Phil and Margaret’s farmhouse kitchen. Will sits at the table, head cradled in his hands. Margaret hunches over her sink and scrubs a sparkling tray.
‘This changes things, you know that?’ Margaret mutters over the squeak of a Brillo Pad on glass. ‘How could it not?’
‘I’m the same person as I was before,’ Will stammers.
‘No,’ Margaret replies. She shakes the Brillo Pad in her hand. ‘In my eyes you’ve changed because I’ve realised how much of a liar you were.’
‘I didn’t lie, I just didn’t know how . . . Sam gave me the confidence, he showed me it’s okay – ’
Margaret throws the Brillo Pad to the counter.
‘But it’s not okay!’ she screeches. ‘You’re a stranger now. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if you’re Will anymore . . .’
The memory spins, tyres in a dark woodland. Will and Sam sit in Will’s car. They hold hands as lightning strikes the valley below. It spins again, doused in blue and red, and on the floor of Teagues’ Lighting Shop, Trish’s parents lie still, plastic bags over their heads, taped around their necks, faces frozen in one last gasp of breath.
Trish stands on the spot, numb to it all. The anger outlives the victims twofold, aches in her chest for the parents who left her by their own admission. She could have stopped it. The GP should have offered support, the world shouldn’t be so callous. Her parents should have held out for one more day, for one more business loan –
She takes the anger and fills herself up with it. Cold envelopes her as the gywandras skin seeps through her pores. She races away from the lighting shop, through the mineshafts. Life hangs in the balance, she tells herself. She finds the cave entrance and dives through.
Sam’s living room. He lies on the sofa, eyes rolled to the back of his head. White powder marks the black coffee table. Will stands before him and cries. It’s as though Sam cannot see him and instead looks right through him.
‘He doesn’t know.’ Sam strings each word together.
‘Know what?’ Will cries.
Sam looks through Will, the wall behind him, and the world beyond that. A glimmer of fire. A flurry of priests. Sam is more focused on the dead than the living. Will snatches up the clear packet of pills, climbs over the couch, and thrusts it in Sam’s face. He wants Sam to see the packet, to see his disappointment, to feel his hurt.
‘He doesn’t see,’ Sam groans.
‘See what? See what?’
‘That I don’t love him – ’
Will sinks back onto the other end of the sofa, defeated.
‘ – the way he wants me to,’ Sam finishes.
Will radiates an all too familiar anguish. To learn a spouse’s love isn’t as deep as yours is a grief all its own. Outside of the ombrederi, of this version of Will’s memory, his imprint recedes.
Trish takes the chance.
She recounts all she has seen, and it unfu
rls around her in the ombrederi: fire engulfs buildings; the occupations of Rasha, Ted, and Kasey; Vanessa as she forces James to transcend; the disfigured dasfurvya.
Your death saves mankind. Your death saves mankind, she thinks over and over, hoping that Will’s imprint will hear it.
Trish’s synapses weld with Will’s in an intense surge of energy. The bruises on Will’s arms register with her, along with the ache at his fingertips. She opens Will’s eyes to find the bedroom destroyed: bed upturned, wardrobe in smithereens, shelving and copious amounts of plaster ripped from the walls. Their fight has been physical as well as of the mind. Amidst the catastrophe, Will is transfixed on the window before him.
He blinks twice fast. His senses slip from her, and when she opens her eyes she stands aside Will and watches on as –
Will sprints as fast as he can on unsteady legs. He lunges, slices through the glass, and is gone.
He dies for the first time, again.
Trish chokes upon a scream, a roar, a cry to a god that can’t exist for such needless cruelty. She screams, and she hurls. The gywandras armour extends and roots itself into Will’s bedroom floor. The room dissolves and returns many times, each with a different aged Will.
A four-year-old in dungarees and a Postman Pat jumper drops a toy train at the sound of her roars.
A prepubescent Will turns his CD player up full blast to drown out her shrieks with The Cure.
Eighteen-year-old Will in a tie-dye T-shirt screams and curses back at the invisible woman.
A bearded and tired thirty-one-year-old sits with his back against his wardrobe and whispers softly, ‘He tries to disappear. Wherever he goes will never be distant enough. It’s me he’s running from. Whoever you are, I know your pain. Whoever you are, I’m not scared of you. I feel for you, you hear me?’
Will’s voice eases Trish’s pain. She crawls forward and slumps against the wall beside his wardrobe. Will looks vaguely in her direction; he can sense her but can’t see her.
‘What has caused you so much pain?’ he asks.
Trish falters. If only Will, in that time, sensed the gywandras, knew that it was Trish beneath the armour. The conversations they could have, the tenderness she could show him. After all, there is only one answer, one Will can understand entirely, imbedded in every fibre of both of their beings.
‘Love,’ she says.
Trish smiles and for one very brief moment is sure that Will smiles too.
The ombrederi lifts Trish into the water tunnel. She thought her work was done, that she would be returned to whatever remained of her physical body.
She is thrust onto a hillside beneath a starlit night. Upon the brow of the hill, a tent ruffles in a polite wind, and a campfire simmers before it. Sat there, staring into the flames, are James and Rasha, a glimmer of gywandras armour upon their skin.
‘You can’t transcend much longer,’ Trish cries. ‘Close the connection. Go home.’
Rasha rises. James, however, remains seated. Rasha takes in Trish’s appearance.
‘I was waiting for you,’ she says. ‘Is it done?’
Trish can only nod.
Rasha hugs her. Over the teenager’s head, Trish locks eyes with James.
‘I’m sorry, Trish,’ he says. ‘I can’t go back.’
Behind them, the giggle of young girls sounds from the tent.
‘It’s not real, James. All this time, I’ve been searching for Shauna – for the truth. It’s not – ’
‘It is real,’ James says, ‘in the sense that it is all I have. The girls weren’t witnesses, their imprints won’t survive in the physical. That has to be enough.’
The ombrederi attempts to tug Trish away from the campsite. Her efforts are in vain.
‘I know I should have been stronger,’ James continues. ‘I should have fought Vanessa harder.’
‘We all belong to the frequency, even if we don’t want to,’ Trish replies. ‘In the end it didn’t matter.’
Rasha pulls away from Trish.
‘We made choices, didn’t we?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ Trish says. ‘And they were written.’
Trish looks at the Network’s director, sad that he won’t come with them.
‘The river always finds the sea,’ she says.
‘It’s been an honour and a pleasure,’ James retorts.
The campsite dissolves, and the women are left in darkness. Trish gestures to go on. Rasha’s projection fades.
The darkness has the heaviness of water. Trish swims and kicks. Her head breaks the surface of the rock pool, and the gywandras armour slides from her body. Trish climbs out onto the rock pools, stands upright, and takes in the ombrederi’s landscape. Beneath the cliffs, Trish feels as though she has accomplished little.
The landscape stills, the lighthouse stands, and an array of cords flow out from its aerie as if it is a maypole. They glimmer, and beads of light flow across the landscape. Voices ring from them.
‘They are tethers,’ the ombrederi whispers. ‘Connecting us all.’
‘We all belong to the frequency,’ Trish mutters.
She runs to the lighthouse, dashes inside, sprints up the spiral stairwell, and bounds into the aerie. Trish steps out onto the balcony that wraps around the base of the lighthouse’s diagonal windows. The cords are joined to the railing. They swell and beat and dim and brighten. She knows the voices and can put a face and name to all; the tethers belong to each member of the Network. She grasps the bundle of cords, squeezes them tightly, and closes her eyes. She recalls her brief stint in the ombrederi and the knowledge she recently acquired, the danger the world faces if the gywandras is used for unnatural purposes. She compresses the images down from her mind and along her arm into the cords. She opens her eyes. The cords shine with a pure golden light: truth. The Network is enlightened.
The cliff tops settle to resemble present day – Trish’s now, anyhow. There is peace.
Trish descends the stairwell and into the yard. Abidemi greets her there. She is whole and youthful and springs forward like the sprightly fourteen-year-old she was when she died.
‘Everything is done,’ Trish says. ‘There are other organisations, aren’t there? The Edward Penrose trust doesn’t just fund the Network and the Refinery. People I couldn’t reach who need to be warned.’
‘I can only agree.’ Abidemi gestures outward, and Will and James materialise beside her. Their projections are as strong and pure as Abidemi’s; they have been in the ombrederi longer than their physical bodies have been dead. Time, a subjective measurement. ‘We are three, and we can bring you back to your body.’
‘You can repair it?’
‘We can try. Only a fighting chance at best.’
‘Thank you.’
‘The whole of existence thanks you.’
Abidemi and company walk over to Trish and right into her.
Darkness.
A tingling sensation spasms across her body. The hiss of the Reliant’s engine fills her ears. White-hot pain sears through every inch of bone and tissue. And life. Sweet, glorious, hopeful, physical life.
Brakes screeched in the distance. Sam couldn’t tear his eyes from the wooded hillside. Metal thunked against solid bark. Brake lights flickered through the trees as the Reliant toppled and crunched down the hillside with Trish still inside.
Inside, but most certainly not alive.
Will, Rose, James, Rasha, and now Trish – Sam had never been more alone.
‘No!’ he roared. He thrashed against Not-Dave’s grip. ‘Let me go, you bastard!’
‘It had to be done, Sam,’ Not-Dave said.
Sam fought out of Not-Dave’s grip. He stared hard at the man’s face. He wanted to scream at him, punch, kick. But becoming lost in his eyes, he found he couldn’t.
‘You don’t know – you couldn’t possibly know . . .’
Not-Dave edged closer to him.
‘I do, Sammy,’ he said.
Sam stood upright and wiped the tears
from his eyes. The lighthouse’s beam caught the side of Not-Dave’s face. The blond hair turned dark and curly, eyes blue, nose sharp.
‘Will?’
‘Do not get attached to this body, Sam,’ Will said. ‘It’s not permanent.’
Sam reached out. He traced Will’s face, his pronounced cheekbones, his heavy brow.
‘She’s going to kill you,’ Sam uttered. His face was wet with tears.
‘I’m already dead, but yes, she will, and Trish has to, Sam. For the good of, well, for the good of existence.’
‘And there is no other way?’
‘Not that can be written,’ Will said. He took Sam’s hand.
‘Trish is going to die,’ Sam said. ‘You, now her, and I’m just here. I can’t help.’
Someone stirred on the ground. Vanessa wobbled to her feet. Sam went to step toward her, but Will held out an arm.
‘Let me go! I’ll kill her!’
‘That isn’t Vanessa,’ Will said. ‘It hasn’t been for a very long time.’
Vanessa staggered forward and found their faces. She hesitated.
‘You’ve worn that body thin,’ Will stated. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Edward?’
Vanessa, Edward – whatever imprint was within the body – blinked hard.
‘Edward, yes, I haven’t used that name in a long time,’ Vanessa-Edward said. ‘The river always finds the sea.’
Vanessa-Edward’s eyes found the cliff edge, and she bolted from the yard and leapt into the hungry sea. Shock coursed through his body.
‘She just went, just like that.’
‘Edward will be in the ombrederi now,’ Will said. ‘He won’t be able to escape from Abidemi.’
‘Edward . . .’ Sam uttered.
‘Edward Penrose, yes. See, Sam, this all goes far deeper and has gone on for far longer than you and me, which is why we need to stop it.’ Will turned Sam around to face him, more Will-ish with every second. ‘We still have our small part to play. This is the strongest ley line in the county. We fight here, in the physical.’