Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  His army on Earth shall congregate at the mouthpiece, and here his word shall be spoken. Here in the city of birds, where the sounds of nameless terror pour in from every cavity, orifice and aperture.

  And his leader on Earth shall be chosen to speak his words. This leader shall be a loyal follower, who has been moulded in Adramelech’s image, who has proven themselves through inflamed deeds. The Mouthpiece shall be one who, like our Lord during his eight thousand years of anguish, has been humiliated, taken for a preening fool, their mind left to fester and rot. Those who underestimated Adramelech, and those who underestimated the Mouthpiece of Adramelech, shall now know the truth about misery.

  But the followers of Adramelech shall not be afraid, for then they shall know the truth about human destiny.

  15 Ars Adramelechum 9.2

  Twenty-Nine

  Darren arrived early the next morning, keen to act on the new knowledge that Shawn Forrest was planning to build a giant casino, and was most probably planning to obtain the land to do so by illegal means. But it would have to wait, because Colette was waiting at his desk, and she looked as if she had news too.

  ‘You know how you asked me to look into Ian Springer’s students, boss? Well, I think I’ve got something.’ Darren sat down and she pulled up a chair next to him to show him her list.

  ‘So. Springer’s weekly lectures were well-attended; he would get around fifty people each time, and they were open to the public so it’s not possible to name all the attendees. As for his own students, he had six first-year undergraduates who just started a few weeks ago, and six second-years who will have known him better, because he taught them last year too. I tracked those six down – it didn’t take long since four of them live in the same student house. I interviewed them all separately – nothing of interest there, unfortunately.’

  ‘Ok… what about the PhD students?’

  Her eyes sparkled as she tapped her pen against a name she had written down. ‘Now this is where it gets more interesting. The departmental admin office told me that he currently didn’t have any postgraduate students. He did have one, who quit six months ago without finishing his qualification. Name of Oliver Hecht. I looked him up, and fortunately he had a couple of publications listed on the internet. He was doing research on…’ here she read from a print-out, ‘binaural beats and i-dosing.’

  ‘I-dosing? What’s that? Sounds like a drug.’

  ‘Well, it sort of is. It’s called a digital drug. Apparently it’s a craze. Now listen to this.’ Again she read from her print-out:

  ‘“Binaural beats happen when each ear receives different sound waves. If you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it’s coming from the inside of the head. It’s used in clinical settings to treat anxiety and sleep disorders. But there are also claims that users could experience feelings similar to those induced by cocaine or ecstasy.”’

  ‘“The brain perceives a third frequency, which is the mathematical difference between the two real frequencies, and apparently depending on what this frequency is, it has different effects on the brain. It’s called the ‘frequency following response.’”Apparently it’s a craze amongst teenagers on the internet, they get addicted.’

  Darren knew she was going somewhere with this, but he was still a step behind. She went on:

  ‘Now listen. What does this bit remind you of? “Some scientists believe that i-dosing can be highly dangerous. Users can come to crave the chemical high that is created in their brain by listening to binaural beats, which can cause altered behavioural states even when not listening to the material. These altered states include poor concentration, anxiety and aggression. Over time, the user’s eardrums may begin to malfunction as an ear-fluid imbalance develops. It is unknown whether there is a risk of permanent hearing loss and even brain damage from this pummelling by alternating, uneven frequencies. It is also unknown whether the makers of these i-dosing products may have powerful hidden agendas, for example embedding subliminal messages in the beats. What is known is that users become literally addicted to the sound. It’s almost a form of hypnosis.”’

  ‘Addicted to sound. Who does that remind you of?’

  ‘Sounds a bit like Dave.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  They both looked over at Dave’s empty desk.

  ‘Right, have you got an address on Oliver Hecht, then?’

  ‘No. That’s the problem. Since he left the university he’s sort of fallen off the grid. No record of employment, and he’s not claiming benefits, so there’s no record of an address.’

  ‘Right, this lad is officially a Person of Interest. Go back to the university, find his parents, find his friends, maybe there’s a girlfriend… maybe he hasn’t cut himself off completely from his old life.’

  ‘Boss, could he be a Missing Person?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Because Lacey Collins said that the sound technician at the Lumina Club is called Ollie. And I think this Ollie, and Oliver Hecht, are the same person.’

  ‘On it.’

  Later, Darren was in his kitchen at home when the phone rang.

  ‘Darren, it’s Helen. Guess what? We’ve got the book.’

  ‘Shit. Nice one. And?’

  ‘And I’ve read it. There’s a lot to tell you. I mean, to do with the case. To do with Matt, Shawn Forrest, Justine, everything. Can you come over to Formby?’

  He looked at his personal incident board, filled with images and clippings of Shawn Forrest. Then he looked at the photo of him and Matt, laughing together in the pub after a Liverpool match.

  ‘On me way.’

  The book lay in pride of place on the low coffee table, a space having been cleared around it amongst the empty glasses, beer cans and ash trays. Everyone looked at it with a mixture of amusement, reverence and fear.

  ‘I won’t bore you with the whole story,’ said Helen. ‘It’s very tedious, to be honest. What’s more interesting is the imagery. The book is filled with fire, as expected, but it’s also full of sound.’

  ‘Sound?’

  ‘It’s filled with descriptions of sound. Evocations of sound. No different from the Bible in that respect; the Bible is filled with trumpets, thunder, harps, choirs… but in the Bible it’s rather muddled imagery. Whereas in the Ars Adramelechum, it’s unequivocal. After an era of fire, when the time arrives for Adramelech to take his kingdom on Earth, he will reveal himself through sound: ‘Hark! Every ear shall be deafened by the thunder-tones of Adramelech; and these sound shall be the echoes of his groans and shrieks during his agony in Hell and Beyond.’ It all sounds a lot like the Tribulation.’

  ‘And what’s he planning to do on earth, then?’

  ‘Well, plunder its wealth and rule over its people, I suppose. The book doesn’t really get that far. I wonder if this Jerome Hugonnet didn’t quite get to the end before he died. It all finishes rather abruptly.’

  ‘So how does this relate to Forrest, then? If he’s got the book. Does he think he’s possessed by Adramelech or something?’

  ‘Possession is an interesting word,’ said, Helen. ‘I would say possession exists, but it’s more secular than supernatural. People can be possessed by greed, desire; they can make themselves demons. And in terms of getting people to follow them; well, we’ve all seen how herd intoxication works. There’s never been an easier time to influence and manipulate the herd.’

  ‘So how does all this play out, then?’ Darren was trying to share Helen’s intellectual interest, but inside he was disappointed. This wasn’t going anywhere.

  ‘Well, it’s not clear. It all stops rather abruptly, like I said. But there is a sort of prophecy; that when Satan too returns to earth, the power of God and Satan together will be too great for this demon.’

  ‘It turns out that Forrest may not have chosen the best demon,’ said Mikko. ‘Because this dude has a weakness… his ambition. He wants to be more powerf
ul than Satan. And you don’t want to go up against Satan.’

  ‘So it turns out, Darren, that Mikko wasn’t being completely facetious when he said there would be a three-way battle between God, Satan and Adramelech.’

  ‘Ok,’ said Darren, unconvinced. ‘So Shawn Forrest thinks he’s channelling Adramelech through sound, and using it to kill and manipulate people. Or, he’s just pissing about with this demonology stuff, and has basically got hold of a sonic weapon which he’s paid someone to soup up. At the very least, this demon has given him the idea.’

  Darren couldn’t help feeling a little irritated. This was all, as McGregor would put it, ‘pie in the sky’. There was no evidence of anything here. But then, what had he expected? He was hanging out with a heavy metal band. Who, by rights, he shouldn’t be speaking to before the Shepherd trial.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ said Helen, ‘according to the book there have been followers of Adramelech scattered all over the world for the past eight thousand years, so it may be one of them that gave him the idea. Who knows, maybe someone at the acoustic department?’

  ‘So the book gave him the idea to use sound as a weapon. This doesn’t really get us anywhere though, does it, in terms of catching him? And who knows where he’s going to strike next.’

  Mikko and Helen looked at each other, and Helen began to speak. ‘The thing is, Darren, this book only matters in so far as Shawn Forrest believes it. And if we can assume that he does, then Mikko has a sort of plan…’

  But Darren wasn’t listening. He was thinking about something else.

  ‘You know that recording? The backmasked recording that Professor Neilson made? There’s something bothering me about it. It’s too simple.’

  ‘You told us it was just one word, right? Spoken backwards over lots of background noise?’

  ‘Exactly. It was the name of the housing estate where Forrest is planning to build his casino. Where we think he’s been making them all sick with this sonic weapon. But this Neilson was a brilliant acoustical engineer. And he wanted to warn people; he wanted to tell the police what was happening. And he was so afraid that he hid the message in this absurd way. But what if this message was intercepted? He was afraid of that too. And why would such a brilliant acoustical engineer, capable of such technical wizardry, create a simple one-word backwards message? I think there might be a message within the message. To throw anyone who might have intercepted the USB off the scent.’

  ‘Sorry, Darren, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at,’ said Helen.

  But Mikko was snapping his fingers in a gesture of understanding. ‘I know what you mean. You think there’s something else in there, something else in that recording.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Is it possible to break it down further, into its component parts?’

  He looked at the Norwegian musicians, from one to the other, hoping for a positive reaction, but they looked unsure. ‘Anders is our technical guy,’ said Mikko. ‘What can you do, Anders?’

  ‘It is complicated. Music is not really designed to be reverse-engineered. There are programmes that can do it, that can break it down, but you might not hear the component parts that you need. It depends which component parts you want. We can try. Do you have the recording?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s on my phone.’

  Darren, Helen and Mikko followed Anders down to the basement, where Anders uploaded Neilson’s recording on to his computer. He played the white noise that was now familiar to Darren, then he played it backwards so they could hear the word ‘Napier’. He studied the screen for a while, playing around with equalisers, turning different frequencies up and down. But he was shaking his head, despondent. ‘This is a very complicated recording, there are so many channels. I can’t distinguish anything clearly enough. It’s very strange, actually – it’s so complicated, it’s like he threw the kitchen sink at it. Is that how you use that expression? And yet, it feels, somehow, organised. I’m going to try putting it into a programme called Rev-Amp. It’s reverse engineering software. The technology is very new, but in theory, the algorithm should break down the recording into its constituent parts.’

  They waited with baited breath as Anders uploaded the recording into his programme, and a spectrogram appeared on the screen as the sound played. The spectrogram resembled a Rothko painting; the sound was so thick that the amplitude was just blocks of colour, with only the slightest hint of bleeding between them. All the while, the infernal noise was playing. Anders fiddled around with the programme, adjusting parameters here and there, and eventually he brought out several discernible tracks. A violin scraping a tune here, a car engine there. But nothing that gave them any clue as to a message.

  Anders was shaking his head, mystified. ‘These oscillations are odd... they don’t seem random. It’s like they’ve been specifically placed.’

  ‘But they don’t sound like anything.’

  Darren said ‘What if they look like something? Could you hide a picture in a piece of audio? Like, the Vox Inferi devil or the Lumina infinity loop. Except hidden under lots of other layers? Neilson had synaesthesia – he saw music, right? So maybe he left something for us to see.’

  ‘Yes… by reversing the process of producing the spectrogram, it is possible to create a signal whose spectrogram is an arbitrary image. Lots of electronic music artists have done that.’

  ‘Let’s see then, let’s make a spectrogram.’

  ‘But Darren,’ said Anders, pointing at the screen, ‘this is one. That’s what a spectrogram is.’

  ‘No, but I mean…’ But Darren didn’t really know what he meant. He tried to explain. ‘There must be other programmes, special software, you know, to make pictures. Not just standard graphs like this.’

  ‘The problem is, there are many different sonic visualisation techniques. It’s completely subjective. You can make sound look any way you want. What I mean is, depending on which programme you use, sound could look completely different.’

  ‘I get it. But is it worth a try? If Neilson wanted this message to be deciphered, he would have used a programme which can be accessed. Perhaps not easily, but it would be accessible. So what if we try a few? Maybe if we see it in different colours… or in 3D.’

  He could tell that he was beginning to stab in the dark.

  ‘Darren, why don’t you take it to the police audio department?’ asked Helen. ‘Wouldn’t they have better equipment?’

  Darren looked at Anders. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘You could try. But the police would only have the same software as us. Their programme might have a different name, but the technology is the same. It’s called polyphonic note separation. It’s just audio forensics.’

  ‘Leave it with me, Darren,’ said Helen. ‘I will puzzle it over. You look exhausted, we all are. Let’s call it a night.’

  ‘Hold on. What about this plan, then?’

  Helen and Mikko smiled at each other. ‘So,’ he said, leaning forward and rubbing his hands together. ‘What’s this dude Adramelech’s weakness? His greed. He wants to be more powerful than Satan. It’s a bold move, but no fucking way is that going to work, man. And he knows that really. Satan had him spinning through the void being repeatedly skinned alive for eight thousand years. So. What’s the one thing he’s afraid of? Who’s the one dude who could ruin his chances of taking over God’s earth?’

  Darren sighed theatrically and reached for a beer. This was going to be a long and pointless evening.

  Thirty

  On the train in the morning, Darren received a text message from Canter: Pop in and see me when you’ve got a minute.

  He hovered outside her glass door. She was on the phone but signalled for him to come in and sit down. Eventually she put the phone down, rolling her eyes.

  ‘Darren, sorry. I’m up to my eyeballs in it right now. We’re getting so many calls, nuisance calls, about all these stupid spooky noises. The local newspapers have been having a right laugh with it, but it’s wasting polic
e time. Scallies messing about reporting ghosts, you know. You can hear them sniggering in the background. Anyway. I just wanted to check in, see how you’re getting on?’

  ‘Nothing back from forensics at Springer’s house, and no leads on the weapon. So it’s slow going. But Colette and I are chasing a lead on a former student of Springer who’s gone missing…’

  ‘That’s fine, Darren,’ she interrupted, ‘but I’m sure DCI McGregor has that investigation in hand. I meant you. How are you? I’m very aware that I’ve allowed you to take on extra work against medical advice, so I just wanted to check you’re ok.’

  ‘I’m ok, yeah.’ Darren hated these conversations. How many times over the past three months had people asked him whether he was ok? Of course he wasn’t ok, and of course he would answer that he was.

  ‘You look tired. Are you sleeping?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ Darren lied, as his nightly terrors flashed through his mind. ‘It’s early days, right? I really appreciate being on the case, honestly. I need to keep busy.’

  ‘Well, the trial kicks off next week, so you’ll certainly be occupied. Anyway, it looks like Colette is itching to tell you something, she’s lurking behind the door. Ok, thanks Darren. Take care of yourself.’

  ‘Have you found Oliver?’ Darren asked, as he and Colette marched back to their desks together.

  ‘Yep. I think so. And you won’t believe where he is,’ Colette said as they sat down. ‘I spoke to his parents, who live down south. They had no idea he’d quit university, but they had noticed he’d stopped asking for money. They haven’t seen him for months, but they spoke to him last week and everything was fine. So I went back to the university, asked around the student union. Someone pointed me in the direction of his ex-girlfriend. Apparently, he started flashing cash around, designer clothes, no job to speak of but out all hours. And – a fancy new apartment. She dumped him because she suspected he was drug-dealing. There was no other way to explain it.’