by Gary Gibson
‘Sorry,’ shouted Metka, pausing the audio. ‘It has to be this loud. You’ll understand why in a moment. What happened at that moment, do you remember?’
‘Well, I thought I heard a sound like someone was about to say something, from right behind me,’ she said. ‘It startled me a little and I stumbled when I looked around and saw no one there.’
Metka nodded, and started the audio again, this time turning it even louder.
The recording of Susan’s unsteady breathing filled the room, sounding like bellows as she dug around between the joists, first for her shoe, and then for the bracelet. The background hiss made her think of some tropical jungle caught in a deluge.
‘Listen closely,’ Metka shouted. ‘Can you hear?’
Susan heard nothing but a din of static, except, perhaps, for a slight hiccup, as if it had been momentarily interrupted. ‘I’m sorry,’ she shouted, ‘I can’t. Really, this is just –’
‘I’ll change the settings,’ Metka yelled, then rewound the audio. The recording screeched oddly as it ran backwards at speed. Bernard, who had gone to sit at another laptop and appeared to be writing someone an email, seemed entirely unfazed by the racket.
The hissing was deeper in tone this time, filling the room with a low rumble Susan could almost feel in her teeth. For a moment, she thought she could make something out – an oo followed by aa.
Metka rolled it back yet again, then forward, modulating the sound further. It sounded almost like a voice, saying uff ath.
Metka modulated it again.
Susan, a voice said.
She dropped her coffee. She thanked the Gods she’d put the plastic lid back on: even so, a little of it leaked across some of the cables. She snatched the cup back up and pressed the lid down tight before putting it down on a flat surface.
Metka had turned the sound off, and for the first time Susan understood what a deafening silence was. ‘No need to worry,’ said Bernard, snatching a cloth up from his desk and mopping up the spilt coffee.
‘What the hell was that?’ asked Susan. ‘Where did that voice-’
‘Keep listening,’ said Metka, and played the recording again.
Susan stared hard at Metka, afraid some kind of elaborate trick was being played on her. Susan, the recording said again, somehow much clearer now Metka had modified it. The name repeated with the regularity of a heartbeat. Susan. Susan. Susan.
Susan found herself moving backwards until her back was pressed up against the door, her hand over her mouth.
Then the voice changed, saying: Susan, he’ll kill me. He’ll kill me, Susan. He’ll kill me...
She fled, running out into the corridor. The next thing she knew, she was back at the top of the grand staircase, looking down at the security desk and breathing hard.
Suddenly the very last thing she wanted was to be anywhere near Ashford Hall. She heard Metka calling after her, and it spurred her into action, sending her clattering down the stairs and past the security guard, who looked at her curiously as she fled outside.
Then she got in her car and put as much distance between herself and that voice as she could.
That same Tuesday evening, Susan received two emails: one from Rajam, and one from Metka. Rajam’s said since she hadn’t come in that day, he’d gone ahead with writing up some research notes and doing some routine maintenance. Metka’s email, by contrast, took the form of an apology.
Soon after, Metka called her on her mobile phone.
‘I hope you don’t mind, but I got your number from Rajam this morning. I know that this may not be to the fore of your thoughts at this moment, but I do think there are some things we should talk about.’
‘That recording you played me,’ said Susan. ‘It was faked, wasn’t it?’
‘It was not faked,’ Metka insisted somewhat testily. ‘As much as you might prefer it were not the case, I swear what I played to you is real. Just give me half an hour to explain. If you don’t agree something extraordinary is happening here, I will never bring it up again. Do you know the Grey Lady?’
One of Wardenby’s two pubs, in the village’s original high street. ‘I know it, yes. But I’m far from sure –’
‘Meet me there at eight.’
She found Metka in an alcove towards the back of the Grey Lady’s lounge, far from the loud chatter of the main bar. Metka sat with a half-finished shepherd’s pie in front of her, a pair of Bose earphones clamped over her ears and a laptop screen illuminating her features. A poster above her announced an upcoming performance by a band called The Stone Tapes.
When Metka looked up, her expression made it clear she hadn’t been sure whether Susan would actually turn up. In truth, neither had Susan.
‘You’re going to have to try very hard,’ said Susan, sitting across from Metka without taking off her coat, ‘to convince me what I heard this afternoon wasn’t some crappy audio from a horror movie.’
‘I can’t prove that,’ said Metka. ‘All I can do is give you my word. Our sound equipment is highly sensitive and it was recording the whole time you were in there. You told me that the whistling you heard, but which wasn’t picked up by our microphones, sounded the same as a recording made in that same room many years ago. For the moment at least, are you willing to accept that?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Susan. ‘For the moment, anyway.’ She relaxed enough to sit back from where she was perched on the edge of her seat. ‘But I have to remain sceptical – very sceptical. You must understand why.’
‘Of course.’ Metka nodded. ‘One has to be, regarding such matters.’
‘All right,’ asked Susan, ‘all these recordings you’ve been telling me about – they date back to Clara Ward’s murder?’
‘Yes. The first was made just days after she died. A hundred more were recorded over the next twenty-five years, with the one I played you being the most recent. If you want to know more about them, there are numerous online articles as well as academic research.’
Susan picked up a menu with a sigh and began to unbutton her coat. ‘You have no idea just how much you unnerved me.’
‘Sorry.’ She sounded like she meant it. ‘There is more I would like to play to you, if you would allow me.’ She put up a hand. ‘Only whenever you are ready.’
‘I really feel like I’ve had enough of that kind of thing for a lifetime. And...’ she sighed. ‘I don’t think I’ll be at Ashford Hall much longer, so I probably won’t be able to help you as much as you clearly think I can.’
Metka’s brow crinkled into a frown. ‘Your research is complete?’
‘Not exactly. I...’ She dropped the menu back down. ‘Our experiment didn’t work. In fact, the whole thing’s turned out to be an utter waste of time.’
‘Oh.’ Metka regarded her with some sympathy. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
Not as sorry as I am, thought Susan.
‘I think,’ said Metka, ‘I owe you a dinner, if you haven’t eaten. First I scare you half out of your pants, then I drag you all the way here. Besides, it’s cheap. Allow me, please.’
Susan saw no reason to object. ‘I make a terrible dinner companion,’ she said. ‘I have a reputation for talking about nothing but work. I’m very boring, I’m afraid.’
‘Nonsense.’ Metka waved to a passing member of the bar staff and Susan ordered a pie and chips. ‘If you don’t mind,’ asked Metka, ‘how did you come to work for Ashford?’
‘Well, after I graduated, I went to the States to do my PhD and managed to get myself into the junior faculty at UCLA for two years. I ended up working on experiments involving quantum entanglement.’
Metka nodded. ‘Spooky action at a distance.’
‘Well, we had some odd results involving an experiment I was assisting on. That led me to wonder if there might be something in there that demonstrated retrocausality.’
Metka nodded, and began picking at the remains of her own meal. ‘Information going backwards in time, you said.’
‘To when
a pair of particles were first entangled, yes. And then it goes forward again. I shared my findings with two senior researchers on the project because I needed more time to test and verify my results.’
‘And?’
Susan sighed, unpleasant memories quickly resurfacing. ‘To cut a long story short, they carried out their own tests and published before me and without my knowledge.’
‘Isn’t that like... stealing your work?’
‘Not exactly, no. I had every right to publish my own paper if I wanted, except their having seniority over me pretty much guaranteed their paper would get published well in advance of anything I could come up with, and get a lot more attention. And by the time I did finally publish something, it would be old news.’
Metka frowned. ‘I would have kicked up a fuss.’
‘Yes,’ said Susan, picking up a knife and fork as her pie and chips arrived. ‘Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I did.’
‘“Unfortunately”?’
Susan’s fist tightened around the knife in her hand as she sawed a chip in half. ‘I got told everything I just told you – that they had every right to do what they did, just like I had every right to write my own paper. So I thought, fine. I’ll forget about it. Besides, my work was solid, or so I believed. Except when it came time to review my contract, they kicked me out.’
Metka regarded her thoughtfully. ‘And you think it’s because you complained?’
‘I think it’s because I didn’t regularly play golf with members of the review board, like certain senior researchers did.’ She shook her head. ‘I really thought I was onto something, Metka. I really did.’
‘So what will you do next,’ Metka asked, ‘if your experiment is over?’
‘I’ll go in to take some final readings and write a final report, but after that we’ll have to start dismantling everything.’
Metka took a deep breath, as if she needed to get her courage up before speaking. ‘I was perhaps not entirely truthful with you when I asked you to meet me here.’
Susan looked up at her, her mouth full of chips and pie. ‘Oh?’
The other woman smiled apologetically. ‘While I was getting your email and phone number from Rajam, he showed me the machine you built.’
‘The Beast?’
Metka chuckled quietly. ‘Beauty and the Beast – it’s really very clever, the names. Anyway, it reminded me of something, and... well, I would be very remiss if I didn’t at least ask you to listen to something again.’
Susan stared at the laptop and headphones next to Metka’s elbow with alarm and put her knife and fork down. ‘Oh God, Metka. You’re not going to ask me to listen to another of those ghastly recordings?’
‘Please,’ said Metka, pushing her dish aside and pulling her laptop close. ‘I understand your reticence, but what I have here is quite, quite different from what I played you this morning. It’s a recording dating from 1992.’ She plugged her headphones into the laptop, then passed the headset over to Susan. ‘I promise you, if you think nothing of it, I will never bother you with these matters again or ever even mention them. I swear. But I truly believe you’ll regret not hearing this.’
Susan’s gut told her to thank the woman and leave, but instead she let Metka push the headphones into her hands.
‘Just to be clear,’ Susan reminded her, ‘I don’t believe in any of this shit. I only even came along this morning because I couldn’t face going into work.’
‘Then believe in the evidence of your ears,’ said Metka. She touched a noise-reducing switch on the side of the headphones as Susan, with some reluctance, put them on, still unable to shake the sense that she was falling for some horrendously complicated confidence trick.
With the headphones on, the background rumble of conversation from the main bar faded to almost nothing. She watched, hesitant and fearful, as Metka’s fingers moved across the keyboard of her computer.
She heard a hiss, growing louder. Then came a deep bass rumbling that might have been a voice, but muffled and far from audible.
She reached up to take the headphones off and tell Metka she could make nothing out, when the voice became suddenly much clearer.
It’s not too late for Beauty, a man’s voice said. She could just about make the words out over the hiss. I think they’re ready to take over. Then, after a pause, We don’t have to tell Susan yet.
She tore the headphones off and stood up. ‘It’s been nice talking to you,’ she said, her voice taut and harsh, ‘but this is the last straw. I’ve had enough of –’
While she spoke, Metka turned her laptop around so Susan could see the screen. It showed a black and white photograph of a tumbled ruin, and a headline reading SPOOKY RUMBLINGS AT ASHFORD HALL.
‘Read this,’ said Metka, pointing at one particular paragraph. ‘This is an archive page from the Daily Mirror, dated 28 February 1992. Do you see what it says?’
Susan sat down slowly and read it.
Amongst the spooky goings-on, according to Arthur Melville, chairman of the Brighton Tulpa Society, are audio recordings of ghostly visitations. “Most of them appear meaningless on the surface,” Arthur told our reporter, “but we think perhaps restless spirits are trying to communicate something important to us. That’s why we in the Society feel it’s vital to keep track of these voices, and the things they tell us.”
Arthur is also the organiser behind a séance due to be held in the ruins of Ashford Hall, which burnt down nearly fifty years ago after being hit by a stray German bomb. The spooks apparently like to say things like “The Beast is failing, it’s not too late for Beauty, and we don’t have to tell Susan yet.” Susan, unfortunately, was not available for comment.
‘You could still have made that up,’ Susan said weakly.
Metka stared at her. ‘Of course. I dug into the Daily Mirror’s archives and inserted fake historical documentation. I also snuck into the British Archives and inserted fake information about the same recording into dozens of recorded reports and widely distributed articles on Ashford Hall EVPs.’ She arched one eyebrow. ‘And used your time machine to go back and do it.’
‘It could still be some weird coincidence.’ Susan realised her heart was thundering in her chest. ‘And it doesn’t exactly sound like a natural conversation, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Metka agreed. ‘Although few EVP’s do. But even so, what I just played you is not the full recording. The original is much longer, with very long pauses between each statement. I can play the original recording for you if you like, but we’d be here for a while.’
‘No.’ Susan shook her head. It wasn’t an experience she had the remotest desire to repeat. ‘Besides, it’s just one recording. That makes it nothing more than a coincidence.’
‘But it isn’t the only recording,’ Metka reminded her. ‘I told you there are dozens more, and several of those contain the same words and phrases, recorded between the time of Clare Ward’s murder and shortly before the renovation and reconstruction work began on Ashford Hall.’
‘Recorded how, exactly?’ Susan asked. ‘And by whom?’
‘Recorded by people who have an interest in such things. The man in the article, Arthur Melville, is the head of a group called the Tulpa Society. They have an extensive collection of their own recordings. Melville allowed us access to them when we told him we were coming to Ashford Hall.’
‘Look,’ said Susan, regaining some of her composure, ‘even if you somehow managed to convince me any of this meant something, the fact is being involved with parapsychologists might cost me my career.’ What’s left of it, anyway.
‘But don’t you see?’ Metka insisted. ‘There is a clear connection between these recordings and your work!’
Susan shook her head in confusion. ‘How could you possibly figure that?’
Metka sighed as if Susan were an obstinate schoolchild unable to grasp a simple concept. ‘You said you were sending information back in time, is that correct?’
�
�Yes,’ Susan agreed. ‘That’s what we were trying to do. But even if we’d succeeded, the information would only have travelled backwards in time by a few seconds. That’s barely enough time to blink.’
‘I apologise if what I say next seems ridiculous to you,’ said Metka. ‘You undoubtedly have a much deeper understanding of these matters than I do. But I could not help but wonder – might it be possible that your experiment is working, but instead of going back in time by microseconds, the information contained within your particles is somehow instead travelling back many years into the past?’
‘That’s ridic –’ Susan paused mid-word, thinking.
‘I admit it seems like a silly idea,’ said Metka, ‘and I realise I’m hardly qualified to –’
‘No,’ said Susan, putting up a hand to shush her. ‘Hold on.’
Was such a thing really possible, as outrageous as it sounded, she wondered? Except the messages they were trying to send between Beauty and the Beast were hardly messages in the sense Metka or most people meant: they were more like packets of data containing coordinate information related to the time and place of each experiment. There were certainly no cryptic voice messages involved.
Susan poked at the remains of her food, but her hunger was gone. ‘Did you ever hear of a man called Percival Lowell?’
Metka shook her head. ‘Back in the 1870s,’ Susan explained, ‘Lowell looked through a telescope and saw dark lines on the surface of Mars. He managed to convince himself these were evidence of canals built by some ancient Martian civilisation. Except, of course, they weren’t anything of the kind.’
‘I don’t see how –’
‘The point is, he saw what he wanted to see. And you’re trying to tell me that somehow I’m sending messages possibly decades back into the past, where they get picked up by some kook sitting around in a bunch of rubble in the rain with a tape recorder?’
Metka regarded her levelly. ‘Then how do you explain it?’
‘I don’t know. But here’s the thing: that recording you played me back at Ashford Hall, from when I was in that room and I lost my shoe, wasn’t some message from the future. That sounded like someone – or something – speaking to me directly. Which either means Ashford Hall is haunted by an actual ghost, or someone is trying to convince me it is. That makes it two separate phenomena, do you see? On the one hand, we have messages from the future – our present – meaning it’s a physical phenomenon, unrelated to the supernatural. But on the other hand,’ Susan continued, waving her fork at Metka, ‘we have that... voice, whispering to me like...’ She shuddered and put the fork down again.