The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  An alarm boomed. Sam snapped from the security guard’s body back into his own. He stumbled into the reception. The double doors were open, and the patients, all with varying degrees of dasfurvya transformation, bounded toward the open front doors in a bid for freedom.

  It occurred to Sam – where will they go? There’d be no hiding from the Network. It seemed the dasfurvya had their own ideas.

  Mallory, Lilith, and a band of nurses barged out of the door opposite the security room.

  ‘Stop!’ Mallory commanded. She threw herself in amongst the dasfurvya. ‘There’ll be consequences. Don’t make it harder on yourselves.’

  The horde of patients stopped in their tracks. They all turned their heads at once, as if they were all remote-controlled puppets. They leapt at the nurses – punching, kicking, and biting. The nurses were silenced one by one until all that could be heard was Mallory, and then she was quiet forever.

  Good riddance, Sam thought. Nine lifetimes too many.

  Satisfied with their revenge, the dasfurvya retreated away from the four nurses’ bodies and strode for him. His post-withdrawal legs wouldn’t outrun the dasfurvya. What words were there for occupied people who had spent years being tortured?

  The crowd accumulated in the reception, and Dave strode forward. He’d changed so much since their conversation in the dining room: his skin smooth, hair dark, eyes blue. He was similar in a strange way. Dave, and yet not.

  Not-Dave reached out a hand and said, ‘No need to stand there, Sam. There’s work to do before the gywandras arrives.’

  The barbary pirates chase Ewella and Kyauta across the choppy waters and near with tremendous pace. The duo thrust their oars into the water with all their might as the night dies around them. The wild country fills their vision, but it isn’t close enough.

  Ewella dares not look back at her former captors. She fears the next time she does the whites of their eyes will be plain as day. An earlier head count told her there are six of them. After the murder of Kyauta’s rapist, there will be bloodlust amongst the pirates – lust for her and Ky’s blood, to be precise. The very thought makes her row faster.

  With an exasperated shout and nod, Kyauta directs Ewella’s attention to a cove ahead in the green-orange sunrise – the very same spot where the crew docked their dingy to kidnap Ewella.

  ‘Not far!’ she shouts. Ky yells with glee.

  Kyauta paddles with velocity, leant forward in his seat. Their chasers’ oars are synchronised, efficient, fast.

  The underside of Ewella and Kyauta’s dingy snags the seabed. They throw their oars down, scramble up from their seats, and jump into the water. The surface comes to Ewella’s abdomen. She does not register the cold – numb from the crisp night air or the adrenaline of the chase, she is not sure. Kyauta holds her forearm to support her in the water, and they wade onto the pebble beach and bolt inside a cave, its mouth a brutal slit on the rock face.

  The darkness suffocates them. They trip and amble their way over stones and find places to hide. Ewella tries to control her breath. A nettle-like tingle scuttles across her arms and neck, and she knows she is in the company of the dead. There is a vengeful aura in the cave.

  A crunch of gravel. Ewella peeks over the rock she hides behind. The pirates enter, torches in hand. The tallest shouts anxious words in his native tongue. A stone is thrown – the size of a man’s head – and lands by their feet. A second strikes the tall man down. More come. The rocks rise from the ground, held by nothing but air. A second man – a toothless runt – is flung sideways. He slams to the ground and is dragged past Ewella and Kyauta into the deepest blackest pits of the cave. His screams are silenced.

  The barbary pirates abandon their torches and scarper to the boats, two into each dingy.

  Ewella smiles at Kyauta. He looks back at her with horror. She rises, steps over to him, and holds out a hand.

  ‘No,’ he says, trembling with fear.

  ‘Isle,’ she responds. She points upward.

  She steps out into the fresh sea air, sure Ky will follow. She savours the very fact she stands on still land.

  The duo climbs the cliff whilst the sun wakes. Ewella’s shins cramp and her back aches. At the top of the cliff, the path back to the village is clear. She stays a little ahead of Ky. Girls disappearing, whispers of dark men from foreign lands: the Kernewek won’t welcome him.

  Ewella’s pace quickens as they enter a cluster of trees. Smoke hangs in the air, the way it does when the village fires are lit for winter. As they break through the very last of the branches, she stops dead in her tracks. The sky is polluted with brown smoke that billows from houses on fire. Horse-backed soldiers zigzag amongst burnt homes. Pistols gleam in their hands as they herd terrified locals toward a hanging frame. Ewella won’t be welcomed back, not when it is occupied by Britons.

  Fear solidifies in Kyauta’s face. He steps back into the tree line. Ewella follows. Her heart thumps a hole out of her chest, and tears sting her eyes. She remembers the burning huts in Ebok’s memory and understands Ky’s discomfort.

  Ewella takes Ky’s hand and leads him farther into the woodland until the ransacking of her home is no longer seen nor heard. Concealed by overgrown thickets and the lip of a steep cliff, it is as safe a place as any.

  ‘Who?’ he manages to say and points toward the village. ‘Who?’

  Ewella is not confident enough to try and explain the story with words alone. She plucks a twig from the dirt and draws simplistic stick figure representations of herself and her family into the dry soil: parents larger, females with triangles of curtain hair. She points to each in turn.

  ‘Me, Ewella. Mother. Father. Jory. Meraud. Baby Chesten.’

  She scrawls what resembles a Briton soldier.

  ‘Briton. Soldier. Bad.’

  She points to a pistol in the Briton’s hand. She had never seen one herself, but she knows the story well. She knows what the pistol did to her father’s body. Ewella carves a line through the drawing of her father. She can’t stop and scratches out the entire picture. Kyauta grabs her wrist and pries the branch from her grasp. He takes her other hand in his.

  ‘Kyauta. Sorry. Ewe . . .’ He stumbles with the consonants. He glances at the drawing of the ruined family, the deceased father, and instead calls her, ‘Abidemi.’

  He is sympathetic; she does not need to be told the word means grief. She knows there is more to come – it happens now, the other side of the woods. She rubs her eyes to console her tears and evade her fatigue. They rowed and ran and climbed over the last four hours, and now as they rest Ewella is aware of how tired she’s become. Kyauta’s eyes are heavy and weary.

  ‘We can sleep here,’ she says. She mimes sleep with her hands and pats a flat area of moss between the tangle of tree roots. ‘When we’ve slept we’ll eat and drink.’

  They lie down. The spongy soil eases her tightly coiled back, better than any straw mattress. They lie there a while, unable to sleep, but even the physical rest is enough; the fire around her hips subsides. Cormorants and blue tits chirp in the canopy above them, and apart from the occasional shout from the village and the hunger that growls within their stomachs, the coastline is silent.

  ‘When this is over, we’ll go to the village,’ Ewella says. ‘They’ll fear you at first, but there’s building work to be done, and when they see you’re kind and ready to help, they’ll accept you.’

  Ewella knows Kyauta barely understands what she says, yet he looks at her and grins. Hope is a wonderful thing.

  A rustle of leaves. Heavy stomps. Kyauta drops his smile. Ewella rights herself and crawls through the undergrowth. Feet away, on the outskirts of the thicket, an armoured man stops by a tree, his cock out to piss on a berry bush. A sky-blue tunic juts out beneath his chest plate. He is a Parliamentarian: a group intent on stealing Kernew from the Royalists.

  The worser of two British evils, Ewella thinks.

  She recedes. A branch cracks beneath her knee. The Parliamentarian s
naps his head in her direction. He points and shouts words she does not know. Ewella backs away and takes Ky by the hand. Footsteps rush at them from all sides. Ewella is struck on the temple. She falls to the ground. Ky is tackled by two men twice his size and pushed beside her. The soldiers shout in a queer mix of fear and fascination.

  Ewella and Kyauta have their hands bound and are wrenched up onto their feet. Blood trickles from the aching wound on Ewella’s forehead. She counts six men in all. They are pushed and pulled through the trees. One man with an unpleasant sharp nose snaps a branch from a fallen tree and prods Kyauta with it. Ky’s eyes are wide with fear, and his cheeks flush with shame. The soldier Ewella caught pissing bears a pistol. She had never seen one up close before but learns that it was aptly described to her: it bears a phallic quality, phallic and cunning.

  On the outskirts of the trees are the soldiers’ horses, all strong and athletic steeds compared to those seen around the village. Oh, the village – smoke settles into opaque plumes. All that is left is stone and ash.

  The soldier who found them shouts. She does not know English, only Kernewek and a little Nigerian. His words are abrupt and harsh; it must be an order.

  He grabs her bound wrists, laces a rope from them to his steed’s saddle, and mounts. One of his fellow soldiers does the same with Kyauta. He kicks the horse into submission and canters toward the village. She is forced to sprint. Her legs are unused and her stomach unfed; she has neither the agility nor the stamina. She trips, facedown in the sun-baked soil, and is dragged behind the horse. Stones tear her skin. Dust grates her windpipe.

  The horse slows, and her short journey ends. Hands bound, legs ravaged, Ewella struggles to rise. She tries to keep her face blank of emotion – the Britons do not deserve more. A mass of kneeling villagers sharpens into view. She recognises familiar faces – neighbours, the blacksmith, a butcher – but cannot find her family. Amidst the terrorised locals is a hanging frame where three limp grey bodies sway in the breeze. Ewella’s heart stops.

  Soldiers sigh with disbelief at the sight of Kyauta. He failed to run and is dragged up beside Ewella. Village folk scream and recoil.

  ‘Kyauta,’ she mumbles.

  A Briton untangles a whip from his belt and strikes the dirt beside Ewella.

  ‘Be good,’ she says to Ky. ‘Don’t fight.’

  The lightening crack of a whip, but this time it strikes Ewella’s thigh. Instant fire.

  She watches on, defiant, and dares to catch a soldier’s eye and scare them into submission with her bravery. They are too intent upon their conversation. There will be no innocence in their plans, Ewella realises, as many gesture to the empty nooses that sway alongside the dead. Some fondle the pistols strung to their belts. The pistols, Ewella thinks. I beg you, a quick death for a sweet boy.

  Kyauta’s fate is decided. Two broad soldiers step forward and drag Ky from the ground. They tug his rope and lead him to the hanging frame. He struggles a little. An impatient Briton strikes him with their whip.

  Ewella yanks at the rope connecting her to the horse. It comes loose. She hobbles to her feet and propels forward at tremendous speed. She collides into Kyauta’s back. They hit the dirt. She tenses her body around him – a flesh shield. The soldiers tug at her rags, but she is entangled around Ky. Burns ripple across her back as she is struck by the whip. The pain rattles her body. Two soldiers dive forward and pry her from him.

  Ewella and Ky are thrust beneath the hanging frame and propped up onto logs by the soldiers. Nooses wrap around their necks. Villagers scream – not a child, not a maiden! – but it only fills the Britons with intent. A soldier steps forward and kicks the log out from under Ky. Ewella diverts her eyes to the ground, on Ky’s shadow as it flails. With all the courage she can muster, she looks up and finds, and only concentrates upon, Kyauta’s eyes as they dim. He manages to mutter, with his last breath, ‘Abidemi.’

  Life and pain and recognition fall from his face. He is still.

  The world upturns as the log is kicked out from under Ewella. Her throat tightens in a tug-of-war between rope and gravity. Tendons pop and vertebras crack. She gulps for air. It comes to her mouth, to tempt her, but no further. Pain slides away, and the heat of the summer’s day dwindles. Only a tingle remains, as though she swarms with thousands of fleas, and the world around Ewella darkens with an early night.

  Rasha decided to fight.

  It was the third evening after Trish’s midnight visit. She and Haya sat at their dining room table and studied diligently, as they had every night since Trish’s warning. Haya stumbled over consonants with a textbook given to Rasha by Gorenn Comprehensive. Rasha half paid attention to her homework as she watched Haya over the lip of her history textbook. Her mother made huge leaps of progress, not that Rasha was completely surprised; Haya was the sharpest person Rasha knew. Haya coughed, sipped the dregs of her tea, stretched, checked the clock – 7:15 – then returned to her work. Rasha analysed her in the meek light of their Cornish Hospice lamp, one she’d mended herself. Haya frowned as she worked, the lines on her forehead age’s language: the history of a grief-stricken forty-three-year-old. The lamplight caught her gaunt cheekbones and thin hair. Why did no one discuss the horror of a mother’s physical demise, made withered and brittle by age like seaworn jetsam? Joel had a mother too, did he not? She must have grown frail too once she’d learnt her son died.

  Not letting her dark thoughts fester, Rasha returned to her textbook. She read up on the siege of Troy, where ballistae were draped with soaked horse hides in protection from flaming arrows. Since then it had, by way of oral minstrelsy and numerous translated texts, become the myth of the great Trojan horse that held Greek soldiers in its wooden belly to get beyond Troy’s walls. Constantly turning Kasey’s occupation over in her mind, and never far away from Joel, Rasha couldn’t help but draw parallels to the Trojan horse.

  That night Rasha endured a disturbed sleep, dreaming of a burning car that hurtled down a tree-strewn hillside. Half awake, she rose with Haya in the morning. Her mother escorted her to the caravan park gates to greet the school bus. Haya hadn’t questioned the new routine and put it down to Rasha’s anxiety of taking public transport.

  Haya waved at Rasha as the bus pulled away. The morning before, children had teased Rasha for having Haya walk her to the bus stop. Today the children were concerned over other matters.

  ‘I heard he can’t toss himself off now,’ said a pigtailed girl from the seat in front of Rasha.

  ‘Don’t be a pillock, Shan. He still has his other hand,’ her friend responded as she drew a cock in the steam on the bus window. ‘His kids might come out one-handed, though. Genetics.’

  Fred and his severed hand made the wildfire gossip that gripped the school, hence why Fred no longer took the bus. Rasha hadn’t seen Fred herself. The whispers informed her that he’d been reduced to a gag in which old friends would scare their peers with the monstrous stump on his right hand. Girls dared not put him at the centre of their lust. All he’d once been – and still was, minus four fingers – had disappeared from public consciousness in the mishap with the saw. Because of me, Rasha thought. For all the bad she had put out into the world, Rasha was determined to do some good.

  She had to wait for third period to be in the workshop. Her classmates were on the final stages of their wooden LED lamps. The brief was simplistic: a wooden lamp to house an LED bulb. Hers was an ode to her trip to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, and now her space within the greater ombrederi. Inspired by that day, Rasha carved the base into a myriad of engravings. It depicted Cornish flowers that she’d found in Heligan, and acacias and brugmansias and bechsonarias tapered around the base.

  Her delight simmered when Cridland came over to her desk. He smiled when he saw the end product. It turned Rasha’s stomach.

  ‘Good to see that you have turned your attitude around,’ he said. ‘I knew you weren’t so easily influenced.’

  Rasha remained silent and glared at Cridland.
He turned on his heel and told off a table of girls for internet shopping on their phones. Her anger got the better of her. A monster roamed amongst children two decades after he’d murdered one in cold blood, and it couldn’t go on any longer.

  Rasha reached beneath her desk, withdrew the EMP from her rucksack, and planted the device into her trouser pocket. She scurried to the vacant storeroom, made sure Cridland hadn’t seen, and closed the door. She took the EMP and looked over its controls; the power button was clearly labelled. She took a deep breath, readied herself for the onslaught that would follow, and turned the EMP off.

  Frequency energy slapped at her full force and pricked her skin. In an instant, Joel emerged amongst the shelves – a broken doll remembered by a sadistic chant whilst his murderer walked free. She wasn’t scared of Joel anymore.

  The living horrified her more than the dead ever had.

  Joel stumbled closer. Rasha regurgitated the anger she’d felt the last time she controlled Joel: at Fred and friends bullying their helpless peers, at Cridland as he prowled amongst a school of children.

  Agony fired through her limbs, back taut as if the discs in her spine had collapsed. She had control of Joel.

  Rasha raced to the door and peered into the classroom. Cridland ambled back to his desk. Sitting was best whilst Rasha forced occupation onto him.

  Would the plan work? She couldn’t be sure, but it was the only justice suitable that Rasha could think of which didn’t end in violence. If Joel’s imprint could fuse with Cridland’s body long enough to run to the headmaster’s office and confess the teacher’s sins, then it was a decent plan.

  Cridland lowered himself into his chair. Rasha had to act fast – she couldn’t hold Joel’s imprint for long. She imagined Joel walking toward Cridland, and Joel passed through the storeroom into the classroom as if the walls were projections, headed straight for Cridland, his broken arms outstretched. The woodworks teacher looked forward, straight at Joel. He couldn’t see him, but he seemed to sense the dead boy. Maybe, Rasha thought, a bond ties murderer and their victims together in life and death.