The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  She reaches the cliff edge. There is a rocky descent to the ferocious waters below. The salty air cleanses her senses and dulls the world beyond her own mind. Back to herself. Back to Ewella.

  She dares toe the cliff edge. A child of the wild country – the daughter of a fisherman, at that – and yet she cannot swim. A twisted spine and a lopsided pelvis leave her unable to float in the calmest waters. Ewella, the hunched maiden who converses with the empty air. Anything but powerful, as her name suggests. Foles, indeed.

  As the waves beneath her, pictures roll into her mind and swirl against her skull. Goodness, what she sees. Desert plains dry because of a forever summer. Beasts with long teeth, longer noses, and impossible necks. Unbearable sadness punches her gullet. For a family torn apart. A family with ebony skin.

  Giddiness overcomes her. She falls to her knees. Before her, a league out at sea, merely shadows against the glittering ocean, vessels float. Four, maybe five. Their sails are jagged as the rocks around her; it is not of British design. Perhaps that’s where the memories come from.

  Ewella picks herself up, unruffles her fraying dress, and races back to the village. Will anyone heed her? Chances are slight. Her brother, Arthek, burdened with their father’s duties, will push her aside with embarrassment. Her mother will smack her for making up such tales. She’ll also be smacked for fleeing.

  The terrain flattens into meadows, and she spots the silvery leaves of catmint. That will be her excuse: flowers for her father’s grave. The overgrown verge ruffles. It’s a stifling summer day, for there is no wind. Something moves purposefully unseen. Wide hunting eyes glint amongst the leaves. Ebony men of large stature emerge with dirtied vests and trousers. Fear rids Ewella of her voice; a scream catches in her stomach as though tied with a fisherman’s knot.

  Hands grab at her and wrap coarse twine around her wrists and ankles. A stale slither of fabric is thrust into her mouth. She kicks hard and catches their pelvises with her heels. Fights with Arthek taught her men’s weak spots. They slap her and drag her across the sunbaked earth. Her feet, which once ran so desperately away from her village, scrape across the rocky incline to the water’s edge where she is cast into a dingy. Her five captors settle into the boat and drive it out to sea with their paddles.

  Despite the terror at the captors who tower over her and the swell of alien imagery in her mind, Ewella cannot take her eyes away from her wild country as it shrinks from view.

  Rasha ensured she made her tie loose when she changed for school.

  For the five nights since she’d last been at the collieries, she’d dreamt of being strangled by the man that Sam and Trish named Michael. Then he’d let go, and Rasha would fall for an eternity. Will often fell with her, bloodied and bruised, and shards of glass would hail past them.

  Since her occupation, Rasha had heard nothing from the Network. Not that she needed to; Will’s death was indisputable knowledge, as the sky is blue or how blood runs red. They were concerned with greater things.

  Rasha just didn’t know how she knew.

  After a kerfuffle finding matching socks, Rasha floated into the kitchen. Haya brewed a green tea at the kitchen counter. Skin ashen and hair tangled, she probably hadn’t slept. Since the occupation, Haya got herself from bed and took her medication without Rasha’s assistance. She avoided being within proximity of Rasha. Fear was all her mother needed to regain her independence.

  ‘Morning,’ Rasha said in Levantine with feigned sprightliness, hoping a positive attitude would entice her mother to come out of her shell.

  ‘Yep,’ Haya retorted. Her back remained to Rasha as she poured her tea, eyes fixed on the lifeless park beyond the window.

  Their relationship had been sustained by transactional utterances of ‘dinner’ or ‘bed.’ Haya hadn’t looked at Rasha once, at least not whilst Rasha looked her way. Haya denied her very existence, and it irked Rasha. After all, it was she who was occupied.

  If only I could ignore it, Rasha thought.

  Rasha feigned ignorance. ‘Breakfast’ was interpreted as ‘morning, did you sleep well?’ whilst ‘bed’ became the conclusion of a doting conversation about boys and coursework. She did things to please Haya. Rice Pops at breakfast, for example. Terribly bland crisp cardboard nuggets, nothing on bourbons. She poured a bowl and munched with her mouth open in the hope Haya would tell her off for poor table manners, to give some indication that they were still mother and daughter.

  ‘We’re learning about wavelengths in school,’ Rasha said. ‘They teach it like they’re robots.’

  Haya stayed silent. Her tea must have been scalding because she took short regulated sips and stared forward, focused on nothing in particular.

  ‘Coding in IT. It’s its own language.’

  Sip.

  ‘They say a fifth of us will be software engineers, that’s where the industry is heading. Well, the ones who go university anyway. If we’re allowed to stay in Britain, I want to go to uni.’

  Sip.

  Rasha glared at her mother. The grey unkempt hair. The jewellery that slipped over her thin knuckles. A shell of her former self. There was that saying – like father, like son – and Rasha fretted whether it could be applied to mothers and daughters. She wanted more from her life than perpetual fear and uncertainty.

  Rasha rose from the table, her cereal half-eaten. She strode straight to the sink, elbow to elbow with Haya as she scraped the sodden remains of her Rice Pops down the drain and rinsed it with cold water. Haya snatched up her tea and sertraline and moved to the sofa. She plonked herself onto the cushions, body turned toward the large bay window.

  There would be no hope that day.

  She grabbed her rucksack from the coat peg and burst out into the damp morning. No goodbye – vacant words were worse than silence.

  By the time Rasha had paced the length of the caravan park she was already soaked through and so was somewhat relieved to be under the cover of the trees in the narrow lane. She made a mental note to keep her raincoat hung by her rucksack for the mornings she would storm out of the caravan.

  Not that she would be out in the open for long.

  A mechanical hum followed Rasha for the best part of a minute before she realised that it wasn’t a tractor in the neighbouring field. Behind her dawdled a beaten Land Rover. The backroads of Gorenn were frequented by cautious drivers who avoided overtaking pedestrians and cyclists in the narrows. Rasha backed into the verge to let them pass. The vehicle didn’t speed up.

  ‘Well come on, then,’ she muttered. She’d be soaked to her underwear before long. The Rover crawled forward, and Rasha recognised the face behind the windscreen. It had stared at her, wide-eyed, in the collieries, much as it did now: the short, frog-faced woman with the leather journal.

  The Rover was level with Rasha when it stopped. The woman reached over to the passenger door and cranked the window down.

  ‘Rasha, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  Rasha nodded, unsure how to respond. What if she misplaced the face? She couldn’t risk mentioning the Network or Wheal Gorenn. Allah knew the repercussions.

  The woman seemed aware of Rasha’s discomfort and smiled toothily.

  ‘I saw you at the collieries,’ she prompted. ‘I’m Vanessa. Hopefully that means you’ll be joining us?’

  ‘I’m allowed?’ Rasha asked. Rushed into Wheal Gorenn and beckoned through deserted mineshafts, she’d been an unwanted secret.

  ‘That’s what it’s there for,’ Vanessa chortled. ‘The Network is a haven for people like you and me.’

  With a broad smile, Vanessa leant across the front seat and opened the passenger door.

  ‘You’re not going to walk to school in this, are you?’

  Had she heard from Trish and friends, she would have declined, but as seemed to be the case since her arrival to Britain, Rasha had been abandoned by them that week. Rasha nodded, leapt into the Rover, and pulled the door closed. Vanessa trundled on up the lane. Her Land Rover was certainly
a working farm vehicle: mud encrusted the foot wells, and the back seat brimmed with supplies from mismatched Wellingtons to a horse saddle. Vanessa herself, short and stout with a speckle of rosacea across the bridge of her nose, fitted the archetypal farmer’s wife.

  ‘Tell me, Rasha,’ Vanessa said. ‘What do you think engagement is?’

  Trish had asked a similar question the day Rasha first entered Wheal Gorenn. Since then she’d built upon her original response.

  ‘There are walls around us. Engagement tears them down.’

  Vanessa nodded. In the meek stormy light, she held a smile somewhere between satisfaction and, dare Rasha think it, concern.

  ‘When the Network cures me,’ Rasha continued, ‘I will be able to keep the walls up for good?’

  Vanessa glanced at her, face stony.

  ‘Is that what they told you?’ she asked. ‘Sam and Trish?’

  ‘More or less,’ Rasha said.

  ‘What you have isn’t an affliction,’ Vanessa said. ‘It’s a gift.’

  Rasha pondered over the various hauntings, from the crooked shadow to the miners drowned in a sea of blood to Joel Tredethy with his limbs snapped at various angles.

  ‘It’s no gift,’ she said. ‘The stuff I see.’

  ‘When you can control engagement, you’ll bypass all of that,’ Vanessa said. ‘If you’ll have me, I want to assist you. You don’t need curing; you need nurturing.’

  ‘You say it like it’s a superpower,’ Rasha said, not caring that she sounded scornful. Constantly seeing imprints’ gruesome deaths was a disadvantage in her eyes.

  ‘No,’ Vanessa said with a smile. ‘It’s more than human.’

  The Land Rover reached the school gate. Rasha unbuckled her seat belt and then looked at Vanessa. She still didn’t quite understand what Vanessa wanted, but her offer tempted Rasha all the same. Trish and Sam had approached Rasha with so much caution and uncertainty. Haya glanced at her with horrified eyes. Rasha was tired of being held at arm’s length. Vanessa promised to embrace what Rasha had been forced to bottle up.

  ‘You’re not much of a talker, are you?’ Vanessa chortled. ‘School finishes at three thirty? Well, I’ll come back then. If you don’t want me to mentor you, just walk right by my Landy. I’ll get the message loud and clear.’

  Rasha nodded, gathered up her rucksack, and hopped out into the car park alongside the school gymnasium. The canteen was opposite, and the smell of deep-fat fryers and powdered custard stirred her Rice Pop–laden stomach. Rasha walked away, stopped, and turned back.

  ‘What happened to that man?’ she asked. ‘To Will?’

  ‘If you’re as special as I think you are, then you already know.’

  Will plummets in a storm of glass.

  Her stomach writhed. Rasha pelted as fast as she could to the nearest toilet.

  Vanessa’s offer became more tempting as Rasha’s day continued.

  As Vanessa had driven her to school, Rasha had arrived forty minutes early. The only unlocked toilets were the staff’s, where she’d idled for forty minutes, rocking back and forth until the panic attack loosened its grip on her lungs. Certain she could keep further attacks at bay, she headed to Cridland’s workshop just as the bell for first period tolled. It was rare for Rasha to turn up to class on time.

  Unperturbed by the laggard schoolchildren in the halls, Rasha walked with her head bowed as she deliberated over the cause of the anxiety attack, which was usually a recipe for another because guilt pumped around her body like a poison. She’d known Will would die – or at the very least that a terrible event would soon pass. Two voices sparred in her head.

  You couldn’t possibly have known that would happen.

  I should have kept going to the collieries. Persuaded them to have me. Every night. I should have learnt and learnt until I knew. I could have saved him.

  What sobered her as she crossed the playground to workshop 2B was that she had Vanessa’s offer on the table.

  Rasha wouldn’t have to make the same mistake twice.

  Rasha arrived at the workshop to learn that the class had to work on their portfolios. Cridland had an assessment with the head of Design Technology to find their work was subpar at best. Rasha hid away in the back row in her usual spot. She unpacked her portfolio as the door opened and closed behind her, and Fred Parsons sat down at her table two seats over.

  Rasha’s body froze with anxiety-induced rigor mortis, as it always did around Fred and his friends. Rasha focused on the whiteboard before them as Cridland blundered through YouTube’s menus for a video he had added to his watch-later playlist. She barely blinked until a rendering tutorial flashed up on screen. The illustrator resembled Haya before the decimation of Homs. She spoke with animated hands, produced puns about vectors, and often flicked her silky black hair from her face. Rasha wondered, if Syria’s war hadn’t happened, whether Haya would be as joyous. Perhaps Rasha would act the same. Confident and carefree, that was what Rasha craved. Impossible, she thought, when the dead come knocking.

  Frequency energy itched her skin. Her mind slipped from her skull, on the verge of the ombrederi, much like it had that morning in the collieries. Rasha turned her head slowly, disguising her search for the imprint as an absentminded gaze out of the window. That was when she found Joel.

  He stood bowlegged, and cartilage burst from his kneecaps. His misty eyes sharpened. With his twisted arm, Joel pointed through the window at Cridland.

  Something struck her temple. A paper ball rolled to a stop on the desk. The window was vacant, and Joel was gone. Rasha unfurled the note to find wierdo sprawled across it. The i was incorrectly before the e: Fred’s handiwork. She caught his gaze. She saw it in his eyes as they narrowed.

  He knew she was abnormal.

  Another frequency wave surged over Rasha and whisked her mind to the ombrederi.

  Rasha was in the very same workshop, although it didn’t seem so old; the extractor fan by the window had a new shine to it, and the wooden benches were free of graffiti and paint stains. Hunched over his desk was Cridland. Wrinkle free and with a full head of hair, Rasha presumed that he was at least thirty years younger. That would mean it was the nineties.

  Fred showed her a memory from within the ombrederi.

  In walked Joel, his bones unbroken and his neck not yet twisted, but he was peculiar in other ways. He dared not make eye contact with Cridland and chose to look at the floor or an empty corner. His trousers, hitched up high above his waist, displayed his bare ankles. The laces on his leather shoes were untied, trailing on the workshop floor.

  Joel walked in just as Cridland unlocked a money box. The teacher took out the wads of cash and coins and thrust them quickly into the inner pockets of his warehouse coat. The label on the box read: Exeter School Trip.

  ‘That’s stealing!’ Joel blurted, eyes fixed to the floor.

  Cridland jumped, slammed the tin shut, and spun to meet Joel.

  ‘No, no,’ Cridland said, cogs turning behind his eyes. ‘Joel, I’m taking it to the bank.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Joel said nervously. ‘When Mummy takes money to the bank, she counts it and puts it into plastic bags. Banks won’t take it otherwise, Mummy says.’

  ‘Yes, I’m taking it home to do that,’ Cridland stuttered.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Joel said. He shook his head, eyes now fixed on a fly that zigzagged around the strip light. ‘I don’t think so. I’m telling.’

  Joel turned. He stumbled on his laces, recovered, and vaulted through the fire exit. Cridland rifled through his pockets, returned the money to the tin, locked it, and raced after Joel.

  The workshop spun, colours bled into one another, and when the chaos stilled, Rasha’s feet touched the stairwell that headed to the maths floor. Joel stumbled up the steps, Cridland on his heels. Outside the windows, both students and teachers lounged in the playground under the stifling sun.

  ‘I’m telling Mrs Bligh!’ Joel cried. ‘Stealing is bad, stealing is w
rong!’

  ‘I wasn’t stealing,’ Cridland huffed.

  They reached the third floor landing to the maths department. Cridland caught up with Joel and grabbed him by the wrist.

  ‘You’re right,’ Cridland said, his voice empty. ‘It was wrong. A bad mistake. How about this? I’ll put it back, and no one will have to know.’

  Rasha drew closer. Cridland gripped Joel’s wrist tighter.

  ‘I’m still telling,’ Joel stuttered.

  Joel’s comment seemed to hit a nerve with Cridland, for he let go of Joel’s wrist. Frozen with fear, Joel kept his arm suspended in the air.

  Cridland stood upright, rolled his shoulders, flexed his neck, and pushed Joel. The schoolboy teetered on the edge of the stairs. He went to step forward to maintain his balance, but he couldn’t – his right foot was stood on his left’s laces. Joel tumbled backward. His head cracked against a cement stair. Immediately dead. His limp body rolled and flailed down the two flights, joints snapping as he went, until his body came to a twisted heap in the hallway below. Cridland crept to the banister to peek at Joel’s battered little body. The teacher and murderer wrapped his coat around himself and strode through the maths department, headed toward the adjacent stairwell.

  Joel’s body was left for someone else to find.

  The first thing Rasha registered when she came back to the physical and pried herself from her desk was Fred’s laughter. A couple of her cohort spun in their seats to face her. Fred mimicked what she must have looked like: mouth agape, frantic eyes watching the air.

  ‘Quiet,’ Cridland barked. ‘Face the whiteboard.’