Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  Waiting outside the courtroom, Darren straightened his tie and shuffled his documents. As Officer in Case, he was required to be there on the first day of the trial and, most likely, on multiple occasions throughout. Since both defendants were pleading not guilty on grounds of diminished responsibility, it was likely to go on for many weeks, perhaps months. Darren had no concerns that they might be found not guilty. The evidence that he and his team had amassed against them was undeniable. But he was concerned about what might be said in that courtroom; what might come to light. This was something that he and Helen both shared with the murderers; a mortal fear of the secrets that might be revealed. He didn’t believe it, and yet didn’t want it to be discussed in public, in case that somehow brought it a step closer to being real.

  While Halloween may have been appropriate for the spookiness of this trial, it was not great timing in other respects. Tonight was the night when his disparate team, half of whom were unaware of the other half, were going to try and incriminate Shawn Forrest. One way or the other, the sonic weapon case had to be resolved tonight. As Thomas Kuper had said, this was an endgame.

  Mikko had had his heart set on performing at the Bombed-Out Church the moment he saw it. An Anglican church built in the 1800s in the Georgian gothic style, it had been badly damaged during the Liverpool Blitz in 1941, and was left standing as a roofless shell. A memorial to those lost in the war. And for Mikko, a perfect symbol of the decline of Christianity. The tower and outer walls of the perpendicular gothic structure remained intact, crowned by evocative battlements. Some of the beautiful stained glass windows had survived, including a depiction of what was believed to be the first Liver bird. The empty nave and chancel now served as the perfect event space. Today this space was a flurry of activity as preparations took place for the evening’s concert. Huge amplifiers were being hoisted on to the chancel stage. After ten years of touring, Total Depravity’s operation was slick and they were soon ready for their sound check. Perched on the merchandise table at the side of the nave, Mikko and Helen tried to hide their amusement as they watched The Messiah prepare for his set. His bandmates were struggling to attach a giant stag’s skull to the microphone, placing smoke machines around the stage, carrying on strange tribal drums, wind chimes, a child’s xylophone... The Messiah himself had been manoeuvred into position and was taking deep breaths, taking in the environment, as if he was meditating.

  ‘He really does believe it, doesn’t he?’ mused Helen. ‘I think Knut does too. Do you believe any of it?’ she asked Mikko.

  Mikko shook his head. ‘Summoning Satan? Uh-uh. Nobody does. It’s not a real thing. Come on. Those Norwegian church burners in the 1990s? They were just kids. Think about it. It doesn’t make any sense. You know astronomers have found a black hole, hundreds of millions of light years away, that emits a frequency fifty-seven octaves below middle C. The lowest frequency a human can hear is one-twentieth of a second. This black hole has a frequency of ten million years!’

  ‘I love that you know that.’

  ‘Of course I know it. I’m a goddamn genius, that’s why you can’t resist me. But the point is, when the universe is sending out god-like sound waves from the beginning of time, it’s a little fucking convenient that the frequency for Satan happens to be the lowest setting on The Messiah’s amplifiers. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I do. Still. I do believe in God. And it gives me the creeps somehow.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He put his arm around her. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘Mikko, if I was easily offended, I hardly think I’d be your girlfriend.’

  ‘Girlfriend. Fuck, that makes me feel good. Anyway, I didn’t say I didn’t believe in God.’

  ‘Really? I thought you were…’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I don’t believe The Messiah summons the Devil. But I didn’t say I don’t believe in the Devil. You can’t have God without the Devil. You know? Just like you can’t have good without evil. If nobody was capable of doing wrong, we’d be like, fucking, robots. Our actions would have no moral value. Or whatever. If there’s no Devil, then the concept of God loses its identity – he needs a – what do you call it? An antithesis - in order to be good. Otherwise he’s just some dude.’

  ‘Sine Diabolo nullus Dominus. Without the Devil there is no God.’

  ‘Yeah. What I said. If evil exists, and I think we can all agree on that, then the Devil exists. That’s what it is. Sorry, I get pretty fucking philosophical before a gig. Now go sing in your choir and get back here before showtime… wait, what is he doing?’

  He nodded to the stage area, where The Messiah had been led by his keyboardist and drummer over to the wall of the church, and was leaning against it, his ear pressed against the bare stone wall. Mikko winked at Helen and they hopped off the table and went towards the stage.

  ‘Dude, how’s it going over here…?’

  They stopped dead a few metres away as The Messiah held up his hand, and the two band members raised fingers to their lips. After a few moments, The Messiah moved away from the wall slightly to face them.

  ‘My apologies. I was listening for the Voices of the Universe.’

  ‘Ok,’ said Mikko. ‘Did you hear them?’

  ‘Buildings remember. Stone walls are filled with the traumas of human history. This is place memory, this is Stone Tape theory.’

  ‘What a beautiful concept,’ said Helen. ‘Since this church was bombed in the 1940s, perhaps you heard something from the Second World War?’

  ‘Yes. I heard the planes overheard, I heard the air raid sirens, I heard the church bells as they crashed to the ground. I heard the children screaming…’ He placed his hands to his head, and the keyboardist moved to comfort him. She added,

  ‘He is a parageologist, a psychometrist. These are the Akashic records, the compendium of all human events. They exist only in a non-physical environment, the etheric plane. We will channel them tonight. We have a song about it.’

  ‘Ah, what’s that one called?’

  ‘Regurgitation of Semi-Digested Eyeballs.’

  ‘Catchy. Anyway listen, you guys need to be playing at midnight exactly tonight. So Total Depravity will go on first.’

  The whole band looked up, surprised. ‘So you will be opening, for us?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s no hierarchy here. But you have to be ready to play at midnight, no delays. Is that ok?’

  The Messiah bowed. ‘You honour us.’

  Choir practice was always Helen’s favourite evening of the week. After ten years of denying herself any music whatsoever, in accordance with the strict Calvinist vows under which she had lived, one of the first things she did when she had hung up her habit was to join a choir. Now she was music director of the Liverpool All Angels’ Community Choir, with free rein to rouse the motley collection of enthusiastic voices in whatever form she chose. And her ambition knew no bounds; they had already tackled Monteverdi’s Vespers and several Bach cantatas, and she was now musing over whether she could incorporate some sort of heavy metal adaptation into the choir.

  Tonight, as she conducted the choir in its rendition of Thine Be The Glory, her smile was fixed as she mouthed the words along with them, but her mind was elsewhere. She was on edge. Everything seemed to have reached a point of no return. Everything was coming to a head that day, and it felt very symbolic that it was Halloween. The trial had started, and although she had not been called as a witness yet, it was hanging over her; most of all the prospect of seeing her captors, dredging up the memories of that terrifying night when she had woken shivering in that basement and held that poor baby. She wasn’t as afraid as Mikko of being cross-examined by the defence barristers. Her academic training would help her here; years of defending her arguments against petulant and competitive academics would stand her in good stead. Her natural defiance would also help her. She was not ashamed of her role in the case. She wasn’t even ashamed of the fact that during the case she had broken all three of her vows. She k
new the defence would pick up on that – poverty, by going on a trip to Monaco; chastity, by sleeping with a heavy metal guitarist, for goodness sake; and obedience, for all the lies she told along the way. She didn’t regret any of it.

  But she was ashamed of, well, of everything else that had come before. Her ten years of living a lie, her escaping from the grief and guilt of her brother’s death by hiding herself away and retreating from life itself. She could barely face up to it herself, let alone have it all aired in public.

  Helen was also afraid of seeing Andrew Shepherd again. Because, while he may have appeared to the police, the courts, and the public as a dangerous eccentric, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the possibility that he might have been right. It was ridiculous, crazy, blasphemous. A gene for sin. The possibility of changing it. And yet it was no crazier than the Christian ideals on which she had based her whole life, on which billions of people for two millennia had based their lives. What did it mean? She thought of the baby. The baby that she had held in her arms in that damp basement, the first time in its miserable life it had been shown kindness. And now that baby was a thriving toddler, living in luxury in Blundellsands. If Shepherd was right, that baby was the first human to be born without sin. The first human since… no, she couldn’t even think about it.

  The choir had reached the final chorus of Handel’s beautiful melody. The organ pipes kicked in an octave lower, their resultant tones sending shivers down the spines of Helen and her singers as they split into a three part harmony, further intensifying the sumptuousness of the music. The powerful resonance induced an emotion almost too strong to bear, enough almost to incite belief in a higher power. She mused that resonance in music was designed to evoke spirituality; indeed, churches had been designed specifically that way.

  Summoning. She thought about Vox Inferi and their silly spectrogram that purported to summon the Devil. It was almost too blasphemous even to contemplate a spectrogram for God. But then, that was what prayer was, surely? Summoning God. When Catholics and Anglicans performed the eucharist, when they turned the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, they believed in this transubstantiation. They believed it became real, that it was a summoning, that it was magic. Was that any more ridiculous, or hard to believe?

  Tonight she felt the music even more strongly than usual. Despite everything, Helen’s belief in God held firm, and for some reason, on this Halloween evening, filled with cartoonish demons and witches and ghosts, she felt He was there tonight, more than ever.

  Thirty-Seven

  As the sun set, and as Colette was being fitted with a microphone in the Canning Place audio department to prepare for the night’s operation, another wire was also being fitted. A cable was fed out of a grille at the side stage door of the Bombed-Out Church. It snaked down the grassy slope, was laced across the road, and taped to the edge of the gutter, where it traced its way down Berry Street to reach the Lumina Building.

  Engrossed in his task, moving backwards in a crouch along the edge of the pavement, Knut accidentally knocked into a group of lads and girls in varying degrees of fancy dress, who were standing in a circle outside a bar, smoking. The man he bumped into reeled to one side, spilling his pint. Regaining his balance, he squared up to Knut:

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

  Knut unfurled himself slowly to his full height, towering over the lad by at least a foot. He grimaced in his deepest voice: ‘I am summoning Satan.’ Then he laughed manically.

  For a moment the man looked terrified and automatically cowered backwards… then also began to laugh manically, and the girls joined in.

  ‘Alright, nice one mate, sound. Have a good night, yeah.’

  Thirty-Eight

  A handsome young vampire flung open the door of the Nag’s Head pub and held it ajar with one arm, a staff raised in his other arm to point the way as a group of ghosts, werewolves and devils spilled out onto the pavement of Deansgate.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, now that you’ve had sufficient medicinal beverages to calm your nerves, we are now going to take in a new stop on our tour. Because, as many of you know, Liverpool has a new ghost. Who here has heard of the Mersey Tunnel Ghost?’ There were a few whoops of hilarity from his audience.

  ‘And since tonight is a special night, if we are lucky our ghost might give us a Halloween wail… Onwards!’

  Halloween was always the most lucrative night of the year for Liverpool Hauntology Society, and there were several tour groups out tonight. The company had existed in one form or another since the mid-nineteenth century. It had started out as a parlour game in the grand Waterloo mansions of wealthy merchant seamen, the Victorian gothic craze spreading north to Liverpool’s early high society. The organisation had fallen into decline in the mid-twentieth century, along with the rest of the city. But since the re-emergence of Liverpool as a city of culture, the Hauntology Society had rebranded itself as a provider of ghost tours. It was doing a roaring trade, with a monopoly on the market for Japanese tourists, hen and stag parties. Local actors in full costume would take them on a whistle-stop tour of the city centre’s crypts, boarded-up theatres and smugglers’ hiding places, stopping at pubs along the way to ply them with alcohol.

  The Mersey Ghost was a double-edged sword. It was a new attraction, a new stop on the tour which had in truth been forced to make up half its stories. But now there was a real ghost, how long could the Society maintain its hold on this niche tourist activity, before newcomers jumped on the bandwagon?

  Robbie Callan was a new hire; just out of drama school and with a few bit-parts in TV shows here and there, this was his regular income, which had the added bonus of being a great way to pick up the ladies. Tonight he was dressed as a gentleman Dracula, with top hat, flowing cloak, monocle and cane, which he waved as he led his merry band through the city.

  But as they headed past the Liver birds and down the lower dock road, Robbie regaling them with a gruesome murder story, there was a momentary waver in his enthusiasm, a flicker of hesitation and an unconscious slowing down. He was leading them towards the Kingsway Tunnel Vent to listen for the Mersey Ghost. The huge concrete monolith was perched on little spaceship legs. It was an open challenge to take it seriously, despite its slightly comical aspect. It was flanked by twin white air vents like sentries, or amplifiers, and it seemed to be the epicentre of all the strange noises recently. But nobody was that bothered, were they? Tonight, Robbie noticed that there was already a large group of people congregated on the road outside the structure. Had there been a fire alarm in the building opposite? Was this a film set?

  New to the job, he wasn’t sure how to improvise this unforeseen obstacle.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it looks as if we are not the only ones here to pay our respects to the Mersey Tunnel Ghost this evening. Yes, that’s right, this is the Kingsway Tunnel vent, one of several tunnel vents in Liverpool. A constant reminder of the city’s busy, and sometimes terrifying, underground life. Now you might have expected the Mersey Ghost to choose the Queensway Tunnel vent down the road, a much more beautiful creation with its Egyptian hieroglyphics and elaborate alien-like carvings. But no, our very own Mersey Tunnel Ghost has chosen the brutalist Kingsway tower from which to emit its plaintive wails.’ He let his voice linger theatrically over the last two words, waving his hands in the air, to appreciative giggles from his audience.

  ‘Some say it’s the drunken ghost of Mother Redcap, the eighteenth century smuggling queen of the Wirral, calling out to her merry band of wreckers and smugglers after one too many tankards of rum. Some say it’s the guilty sobbing of the ghost of Thomas Golightly, mayor of Liverpool and master of the slave trade. Or is it the angry cries of the seventeen workers who lost their lives during the tunnel’s construction in the 1920s?’

  He and his game audience knew that people said nothing of the sort; the Tunnel Ghost had only existed for a few weeks and these were hastily made-up stories. But Robbie was genuinely unnerved no
w, because they had reached the base of the tunnel vent and, despite the crowd, there was an ominous silence. There were maybe a hundred to a hundred and fifty people there, standing very still, not speaking. The silence was profound; with the road closed for works, and with the workers having downed tools for the day, the silence was almost a hum.

  There were no obvious distinguishing features about this crowd, other than their calm faces, which all looked towards the tower. They were all ages, with no commonality of dress. Except that, if Robbie had looked closely, he might have noticed that they were all wearing an infinity symbol of some sort – a pin, a brooch, a tattoo. He didn’t notice this, but he did notice the birds. Overhead, a giant flock of what might have been starlings was flying in formation, a mesmerising prism that twisted and contorted in geometrical variations of a figure eight. And on top of the Kingsway tower with its two white sentries, the straight line of the architecture was broken by the silhouettes of crows, lined up along the edges, motionless.

  Robbie’s group had fallen behind slightly to take photos, so he ventured up to a very tall old woman who stood on the edge of the crowd.

  ‘Excuse me, what’s everyone here for?’

  Without taking her eyes away from the vent, Mrs Kuper said, in a strong Swiss accent, ‘We are here because it is time.’

  ‘Time for what?’ Robbie wondered if he had missed a memo. The company sometimes staged little ghostly performances along the route to liven things up, but he hadn’t heard about this one.

  Finally Mrs Kuper turned to him and smiled to reveal large brown teeth. ‘It is time to listen for His coming.’

  Thirty-Nine

  As the sun was setting, Darren raced back from court to Canning Place. The opening day of the trial had been weird. Andrew Shepherd had been ejected from the proceedings, but not before an extraordinary outburst which had unnerved the whole court, and especially the defendants. Darren had seen it brewing. While the prosecution team barrister laid out their case, and the defendants had tried their best to remain implacable, making no eye contact with anyone, Andrew Shepherd had looked… smug. And slightly manic. He himself was trying to make eye contact with the accused the whole time, and eventually he could contain himself no longer. Darren saw the moment that Shepherd stood up to speak, uninvited, interrupting the judge, and Darren instinctively moved to stop him, but there was nothing he could do.