Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  And standing on a tripod, revealed when Shawn pulled off the canvas cover, was the weapon itself. It was part-way between a gun and a cannon, and was clearly of the same ilk as the military-grade weapons advertised in the Mersey Acoustics catalogue, although it had a pre-fabricated, put-together feel. It consisted of a long segmented tube, like an extendable camera lens, with a crude trigger and a lot of exposed wiring. It had been meticulously wiped clean of fingerprints.

  Justine closed the door behind them, and for a while the distant roar of black metal continued, then it seemed to fade away or disappear completely, who knew.

  ‘Come on, give us a hand, it’s not that heavy, is it?’ Justine began to pick up the weapon and manoeuvre it onto her shoulder. Shawn looked at her and smiled, amused despite the strange urgency of the situation. ‘Justine, what are you doing?’

  ‘I told you, we need to take it to the mouthpiece – it’s now.’

  ‘Justine, put it down. We don’t need it anymore, everything’s done. It’s better if we don’t go near this. There’s nothing to connect me to it, so I’ll get someone to come and clear it all away and destroy it. We’re gonna make a fortune with this casino. You and me.’

  At that moment, with a pronounced click that reverberated down the tunnel network, a large studio light was turned on. Behind it were stood Darren, Dave, and two other officers. Shawn was momentarily paralysed, his expression neutral as he planned his next move.

  And then he backed away from the weapon, leaving it with Justine. He put his hands up.

  Darren stepped forward. ‘Shawn Forrest, I am arresting you on suspicion of the murders of Robin Neilson and Ian Springer.’ In a lower voice he said ‘And if I had my way, of Matt Adeyemi and his two colleagues, Eliza Bektashi, the Liverpool Eight, Max Killy… and who the fuck knows how many others?’ Louder again, he added, ‘You are not obliged to say anything. But anything you do say...’

  But Shawn had backed away with his hands up in the air to signal innocence. ‘I haven’t touched it, Detective. You’ve got nothing. She brought me down here, said she wanted to show me something.’ He was in the centre of the tunnel space now.

  And then they all realised that Justine, holding the weapon properly now, was laughing. Laughing her beautiful scouse cackle, as if she was having a cocktail with her mates. ‘You stupid fucking idiot.’

  Shawn backed away further now, signalling for Justine to stop. ‘Justine, what are you doing? Stop, you don’t know how to use that thing.’

  She continued laughing, as a whirring sound indicated electrical disks firing up. ‘I don’t need to know how to use it. Did you even read the book? Where in the book does it say the mouthpiece of Adramelech has to be a fucking bloke?’

  Shawn turned and ran, slipping in the pool of fetid water that had collected in the dip of the tunnel, jumping and tripping over animal corpses, until he was almost out of range of the lights. But not out of range of the weapon. Justine fired, and the armed police, who had been ready to respond, all instinctively cowered and covered their ears. This would have been useless, except they were behind the weapon. Its direction, engineered by Springer, had an unparalleled precision. All they felt was a strange boom, as if a jetplane had flown past or a train had gone into a tunnel. But Shawn Forrest felt the full pressure of the universe, very slowly at first, then with increasing violence, as his body collapsed in on itself. Justine’s hand remained on the trigger and she watched his suffering, before his body exploded into nothing more than splatters on the walls of the tunnel.

  And then there was silence.

  She placed the weapon back carefully.

  ‘Fuck.’ Darren stamped his feet in frustration. ‘That wasn’t what we had in mind. Fuck. Justine Kuper, I’m arresting you on…’

  But Justine was ignoring him. She was picking the weapon back up from its tripod, hoisting it on to one shoulder, her gym-toned biceps straining. She almost buckled under the weight of it, but steadied herself and turned to face the four police officers.

  ‘All right Justine,’ said Darren, instinctively backing away. ‘Put that down. We can help you. We can say it was self-defence. Self-defence.’ He was starting to panic, because something didn’t feel right about this. He whispered to the armed officers that flanked him ‘If she goes for the trigger, take the shot.’

  She was still laughing. ‘Did you not hear me? I thought you’d read the book, Darren. So I’ll ask again, where in the book does it say the mouthpiece of Adramelech is a bloke? I brought our Lord to Earth with fire and flame, and now He speaks through me, and I am the leader of His army on Earth.’

  Justine’s mouth continued to move, but her voice was drowned by a sudden blasting sound which Darren recognized all too well. The tunnel was filled with the sound of The Messiah, unbearably loud, echoing through the passageways and beyond. Justine dropped the weapon in shock and it clattered to the ground, several pieces of it falling off. She backed away, as Shawn had done, away from the clearing into the tunnel.

  ‘What’s going on? What have you done?’ she screamed, but they couldn’t hear her, and by the expressions on the other officers’ faces they were as mystified and terrified as her.

  Justine began to run, in the same direction that Shawn had taken. She tripped over in her heels, falling hard on one elbow. She took the shoes off and hurled them away, scrambling up and leaping over animal corpses. She tripped and fell in the messy remnants of Shawn’s body, but picked herself up and carried on, smeared now with blood.

  The deafening noise continued. Darren signalled to the two officers to stay with the weapon, while he and Dave ran down the tunnel after Justine, both carrying torches that danced as they ran. But disused tunnels don’t go on forever, even in a labyrinth under the city of birds. Eventually the shaft ended in a pile of wooden railway sleepers that blocked the way. Darren flashed his torch across to a narrower passage that broke off to the left, and saw Justine feeling her way blindly along the concave brick wall.

  The music continued but its tone was different now, due to the periscope effect of the meandering tunnel. And now the music mingled with a distant rumble. This was not the familiar trundle of the last train to Southport; that had already passed. This was a deeper whoosh, heralding a far greater speed. Occasionally, freight trains used a section of the Northern line at night, under prior agreement with Mersey Rail. Freight trains travelled much faster.

  This tunnel, a supply channel between the Wapping tunnel and the Southport line during the 1870s, led on to the Northern Line. Not on to the platform, but straight out on to the tracks. Darren and Dave could see a light ahead of them now, the faint glow of the active tunnel, revealing Justine’s silhouette and her bobbing hair as she ran. And then the rumbling became louder, closer, and Justine’s bobbing silhouette was replaced by the rushing colours of the freight train. They slowed their run to a jog, and when they arrived at the edge, they saw that there would have been no give at all between the train and the walls.

  For some irritating reason, the mantra, ‘mind the gap between the train and the platform’, heard thousands of times in his life in the scouse monotone over the tannoy at Waterloo station, was stuck in Darren’s head.

  He stepped on to the tracks, his hands on his head, looking back to where the train had come from, and then ahead to where it had disappeared. There was no longer any sign, and no sound. His hands fell down to this face. The tracks were dimly lit into the distance by security lamps at intervals on the tunnel wall. As they headed north, towards Formby, they appeared to join. He knew what he saw; the effect of perspective causing the rails to meet at some point in infinity, in projective space; some point beyond human measurement. And yet he also knew that parallel lines can never meet. Both are mathematical facts, each contradicting the other.

  Parallel lines never meet; parallel lines meet at infinity. Two paths, two truths.

  Epilogue

  Darren, Mikko and Helen sat around a table in the Queen’s Head pub, around the corner f
rom the criminal courts. It had been almost a month since Halloween, and with at least one of them in the witness stand every day, there had been no time to meet and digest the strange events of that night. On the table, sticky and stained with decades of glass marks, was a dog-eared copy of the day’s Liverpool Echo. The Shepherd trial had been expected to dominate the newspapers, both local and national, for weeks, but in Liverpool it had been unexpectedly bumped to the inner pages by the Forrest/Napier debacle. First, the headlines had screamed that Shawn Forrest was dead, having apparently shot himself. The editorials began to eulogise him, until the stories about the binaural beats and the Napier methane myth came out. And then there was the news that Justine Kuper, the city’s best-known WAG, was also dead, killed by a train. Today, the headline read ‘Council Executive Charged With Fraud’ and there was a photograph of Vanessa Scott being led out of Wordsworth House in handcuffs. The report included quotes from confused Napier residents, some of whom were delighted to be staying in their homes, others a little disappointed not to moving into luxury city centre apartments after all.

  ‘So how do you feel, Darren, now that Shawn Forrest is gone?’ Helen asked.

  ‘It’s not the way I would have chosen for it to go down. It’s not the way I wanted justice to be served. But I’m happy for the city that he’s gone. And I’m happy for Matt that he’s gone.’

  As Mikko lifted the pint glass to his lips, they noticed that he was shaking.

  ‘Are you all right, Mikko?’

  He nodded, smiling at himself. ‘Yeah, I’m ok. It’s just not good for my anxiety, dude, this whole being cross-examined. That defence lawyer was not fucking around. There was a moment when I started to wonder if I did the fucking murders myself.’

  ‘That’s normal, don’t worry. They try their best to break you.’

  ‘Fucking brutal, man.’

  ‘You did really well. And everyone in that room knows you were a hero.’

  ‘I didn’t feel like one, man.’

  Helen asked, ‘Do you think justice will be done in the case, Darren?’

  Darren nodded. ‘They’ll go down, for sure. Although it doesn’t help that Shepherd kept shouting about his fourth patient. I suspect he’ll be removed from the witness roster after all that.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed that everyone on the defence team looked very upset by that. What did he mean by that? Who’s this Lilith Taylor he was shouting about?’

  ‘Lilith Taylor was an elderly woman dying of cancer in a hospice, where Shepherd was volunteering. Apparently her family hated her so she had no visitors, and he befriended her. I suspect he was doing his genetic experiments on her. The defendants knew about Jason Hardman, Chelsea McAllister and Stuart Killy, but not about this lady.’

  ‘So presumably he had identified her as a reprobate, and was trying to get her a place in heaven before she died.’ mused Helen. ‘And for the murderers, she was the one that got away.’

  ‘Lilith. Fuck.’ Mikko shook his head in mock despair and took a huge gulp of his pint.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Darren.

  ‘Lilith. She was a demon. Everyone in heavy metal knows that.’

  Helen added, ‘Oh yes. Lilith is a female demonic creature in many traditions. She predates the Bible by a long way; she’s a figure from Jewish mythology, Babylon and Greek tradition, also known as lamia, a childkiller, or a vampirish screech owl. Rather an unfortunate name, this woman’s parents saddled her with.’

  ‘I think she was known as Lily,’ said Darren. ‘Although I remember that, according to Father Anthony at the hospice, she was a very unpleasant character. I’m not sure what she had done, but her family had disowned her, and she never had any visitors. That’s why they used to let Andrew Shepherd visit so often.’

  Helen was staring into space and reciting by heart, ‘“And thus Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Sorry, it’s from Corinthians. But that’s surely one of the greatest fears, that a demon would enter heaven.’

  They all shuddered involuntarily at this thought, even if Darren and Mikko didn’t believe in heaven or hell, and Helen was starting to wonder about it herself.

  ‘And then what about one of the accused shouting out to you, Helen, at the end of today?’

  ‘Oh yes. Look to the child, Helen. They said the same thing the night they were led away in handcuffs, convinced that Shepherd’s baby is a sort of Second Coming. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. Perhaps I should ask Deaconess Margaret what she thinks.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true?’

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, it’s ridiculous. I saw the baby, that day in the Kupers’ garden, with the foster lady. I… I don’t know what to think...’ she trailed off.

  ‘Speaking of demons,’ said Darren, lightening the mood. ‘That was a brilliant move, getting the music to play in the tunnel. I thought the plan was just for the nightclub. I had no idea you were going to do that! And it couldn’t have come on at a better moment. Honestly, Justine was about to zap us with that weapon.’

  Mikko looked behind him, as if Darren might be addressing someone else. ‘I have literally no idea what you’re talking about, dude. What music?’

  ‘The Messiah’s music, what do you think? That nightmare sound came blasting into the tunnel, as if it was coming out of Justine’s own mouth! She freaked out, dropped the gun and ran away. That’s how it all came to a head.’

  ‘Darren. I didn’t put the music in the tunnel.’

  ‘Yes you did. I was there!’

  ‘No. I didn’t. I didn’t even know where the tunnel was. How the fuck would we have got the cables down into a tunnel?’

  ‘Ok, not you – so Knut did it.’

  ‘No, man. I’m telling you. Nobody from Total Depravity had anything to do with that tunnel.’

  ‘Darren,’ said Helen, with mounting urgency. ‘Are you saying you could hear The Messiah’s music in the tunnel?’

  ‘Yes!’ Darren was becoming irritated now. ‘Just like it was playing in the club, with the spectrogram, all that.’

  ‘Darren,’ said Mikko. ‘I hate to break it to you, but there was no Messiah music, no spectrogram, nothing. Someone tampered with the cable and the connection didn’t work. I felt really bad on the night, but then when I heard it had all worked out anyway… well, I didn’t get a chance to tell you.’

  Darren laughed, although there was a nervous tone to his voice. ‘You’re messing with me, aren’t you?’

  Mikko and Helen said nothing. They were all a little nervous now.

  Helen said gently, ‘Maybe you imagined it?’

  ‘I didn’t imagine it! Everyone heard it! In the nightclub, everyone was holding their ears in agony – Colette said so, she was there! And in the tunnel, where I was, Dave heard it too. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘That’s like a… what do you call it…’ Mikko was snapping his fingers, trying to remember something. ‘An egregore. That’s it. An egregore is like a sort of collective consciousness. It’s from chaos magick. Like an astral group mind. So in this case, it’s like a group of people all hearing the same thing, in different places, when it’s not really there. Fuck, I’m going to make that a track on the album.’

  They all fell silent, processing their own interpretations of what had happened.

  ‘What will you do after the trial, Darren? Will you just be assigned to the next case that comes along?’

  ‘Yeah. Back to normal. In theory.’

  ‘Except nothing is really normal, is it?’

  ‘I don’t think I’m a very good policeman.’

  Both Helen and Mikko moved to protest. ‘Are you kidding, man? Look at everything that’s happened. You saved the city,’ but Darren held up his hand.

  ‘Sorry, I’m not looking for sympathy. What I mean is, there’s a difference between being a police officer and being an investigator. And everything that’s happened… it all happened in spite of, not because of, police work. I broke the rules and it felt good,
it felt right.’

  ‘I know how that feels, too,’ said Helen, smiling. ‘Maybe you need to take a proper break, Darren.’

  ‘Well, I was thinking of taking a sabbatical.’

  ‘I think that’s great idea. And what will you do? Travel?’

  ‘I was thinking of studying, actually. I was always on at Matt to go to university, and he never got the chance. So maybe I will.’

  ‘What will you study? Law? Criminology?’

  ‘Don’t laugh… I was thinking about theology. I might even take your course. I have… a lot of questions. About everything that’s happened in the past year.’

  Suddenly there was a knock on the pub window, shaking Darren from his reverie. A tall, handsome man was standing outside, holding a toddler who was peering through the stained glass and making a face. Eager to change the subject, Mikko made a face back.

  ‘Darren,’ said Helen, ‘is that Thomas?’

  ‘Yeah. We haven’t spoken since it happened, but he called me last night. He invited me to go out for a pizza with him and Alfie.’

  Mikko and Helen watched out of the window as Darren climbed into a red Ferrari which then pulled out of the pub car park. They didn’t see the tiny silver infinity symbol placed next to the car’s oversized exhaust pipes. But they heard its engine roar as it accelerated away down the street.

  They were left with the raucous chatter of a group of office workers having an after-work drink, the clinking of glasses, the half-discernible background pop from the pub stereo. They bathed in the sounds, because we inhabit sounds as much as we inhabit space. Sounds are not simply sets of frequencies, amplitudes and oscillations, reflections and abatements. They tell the truth about the universe.

  Mikko and Helen didn’t hear the beating of their own hearts, or the scrabble of a mouse somewhere within the floorboards. They didn’t hear the seismic groan from a tectonic shift a thousand miles away underneath the Atlantic Ocean, or the minute pulse of a gravitational wave hitting the surface of the earth after a journey of a hundred million years.