The Voices

by F. R. Tallis

  ‘Impossible,’ he said out loud, while gripping the tree stump to remind himself of the material world and its certainties. Believing in spirit communication through electronic devices was, for him, the acceptable limit of credulity, but anything beyond that was clearly insane.

  Faye had been abducted by a person or persons unknown. He remembered those occasions when he had heard noises in the garden and how he had assumed that they were produced by an animal. And then there had been the light in the gazebo and the signs of vagrancy. Perhaps someone had been planning to abduct Faye for months, patiently observing, biding their time, hidden behind the gorse bushes or lying in the long grass. Another memory: Laura, eight and a half months pregnant and looking out of the French windows. She had seen a man wearing what she thought was a frock coat . . .

  The ransom note had not materialized, which meant that they – whoever they were – didn’t want money. No, they wanted Faye for some other purpose. The thought made him feel sick and he leaned over the grass and started to retch.

  What would they do to his sweet little girl?

  It wasn’t the dead that should be feared, but the living.

  There was an alternative scenario. He had read about childless women who kidnapped babies and infants because they had a pathological need to find an outlet for their pent-up maternal urges. Their compulsion to love was overwhelming. Christopher hoped that Faye had been abducted by such a person, but it was a frail hope, a brittle confection of spun sugar that soon snapped and disintegrated. All too easily his thoughts returned to vile sexual perversions, torture and, ultimately, murder. One day, the telephone would ring and he would be summoned to a morgue to identify her abused and discarded body. The thought was so terrible it made him feel faint with grief.

  He didn’t know how long he could tolerate the uncertainty. In a way, not knowing what had happened to Faye was worse than receiving news of her death. His life would be held in abeyance, he would not be able to move forward, and he would be forever tormented by futile hopes. As the years passed, he would study every child in the street, and then every adolescent, and then every young woman, looking for the daughter he had lost. The strain would be too much to bear. He would lose his mind.

  An instant later he had an idea that made him sit bolt upright. It seemed to electrify him into a state of rigid alertness. He didn’t have to accept a life of uncertainty because he had the means – equipment, tools – to find the answers. For months he had been communicating with the dead. He could try asking them for some help, and if Faye had already passed over to the other side, they might be able to tell him.

  Late August 1976

  Christopher spent days in his studio whispering different variants of the same question into a microphone while the tapes rolled. ‘Is my daughter with you? Do you know where she is?’ When he played the recordings back they contained nothing. He listened to the empty hissing that issued from the speakers and felt deeply troubled. Where had they gone, his ‘unseen friends’? Raudive’s procedure didn’t always work – far from it – but Christopher had never experienced such a protracted period of silence. He had become accustomed to capturing at least something on tape, albeit an incomprehensible crackle that only approximated human speech. Continued failure produced an uneasy feeling that intensified and mounted.

  He gazed into the implacable blackness beyond the windowpane and fancied that only a void existed beyond the glass. This impression of a vast emptiness found a disturbing internal resonance and he suddenly felt his grip on reality slip. Had it all been an illusion? Had he really been recording the voices of the dead, or had he simply imagined it all? He felt untethered, adrift and panicky. Christopher stood up too quickly and his office chair spun away and crashed into the VCS3 stand. He grabbed a cassette labelled ‘Speech of Shadows: third movement’ and hit an ‘eject’ button. A vertical door sprung open in readiness to receive the cartridge. He slotted the cassette into place, slammed the door closed and pressed ‘play’. A chord gradually assembled itself, one note at a time, and when it was complete an attenuated female voice declared, ‘The ocean has no end.’ Christopher sighed and pressed the ‘stop’ button. ‘Jesus,’ he said, brushing a fallen lock of hair from his forehead. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  The next day he received a telephone call from Henry. His agent was clearly uncomfortable.

  ‘Chris, I really didn’t want to make this call, but I’m obliged to let you know what’s happening, I hope you understand. The Android Insurrection people are beginning to get very impatient. I’ve informed them about the . . .’ He hesitated before changing his choice of words. ‘Your situation, and sadly, they aren’t being terribly sympathetic. In fact, they’re demanding to hear what you’ve got.’

  ‘It isn’t convenient,’ said Christopher. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Yes, of course . . . but really, Chris, can’t we sort something out? I could send a cab over. How about that? You wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. Just hand over the tapes and leave the rest to me. I’m sure I can handle Mike Judd.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Henry.’

  ‘But what’s your objection?’

  ‘I’m not. . . ready.’

  ‘No one will ask you to do any more work, I’ll see to that. Not now at any rate.’

  ‘Give me another couple of weeks.’

  The conversation continued unproductively for several minutes, until Christopher, exhausted by its pointless circularity, brought it to an end. ‘I can’t talk anymore, Henry. I’ll call you back.’ Nothing had been decided. Immediately afterwards, Christopher fixed himself a large, medicinal gin and tonic.

  He trudged upstairs to the studio, sat next to a tape machine, pressed ‘record’ and spoke softly into a microphone. ‘Faye, darling? If you’re there, let me know that you’re OK. It’s Daddy. Please, darling. I love you.’ Tears collected on his chin and finally fell in quick succession, spotting the material of his trousers.

  Christopher had spent the whole day recording and replaying silence. He turned the volume up high and listened intently for perturbations in the continuous hiss. Outside, the light was ebbing away and the cloudless sky was becoming textured with shades of pink and violet. The heat was intolerable. He had finished the bottle of gin he had started drinking in the morning and a dull ache was spreading behind his eyes. Was there any point in continuing? He was about to switch the tape machine off when he heard something – a kind of soft juddering embedded in the noise. It subsided and then started up again, increasing in volume and acquiring a halting rhythm. When he grasped what he was listening to, he felt as if a cold hand had reached into his chest. There could be no mistake – it was the sound of a child crying. Each sob resonated in a cavernous acoustic that recollected the interior of a church. Echoes proliferated. The child was becoming more desperate, its breathing more ragged, until it wailed, the tonal arc rising and falling through a spectrum of emotions – rage, fear, anguish, abandonment – before dying away until all that remained was a pitiful whimpering. The introduction of pitch brought with it intimations of character. ‘Oh Christ!’ Christopher groaned. ‘No, no, no.’ He had no doubt he was listening to his daughter. The crying started up again and she suddenly shrieked. Pain made her squeal and an uncharacteristically low moan preceded more helpless sobbing. What did it mean? Where was she? He wanted to clap his hands over his ears, but he forced himself to carry on listening.

  ‘What are you doing? What’s that?’ The voice was harsh and urgent. Christopher thought that it was on the tape but the sound of Laura’s clogs on the floor alerted him to her presence. He rotated the chair to face her. ‘Chris? What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me. What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He tried to sound nonchalant. ‘Go downstairs, Laura.’

  Christopher leaned back to press the ‘stop’ button.

  ‘No, leave it alone,’ Laura barked. She walked up to one of the speakers and tilted her head, list
ening. Her face slowly filled with horror; her mouth opened, her cheeks collapsed, and her eyes seemed to swell out of their sockets. There was something almost operatic about the scale of her emotion. She was like a diva striking a pose, inhabiting her role before the challenge of a demanding ‘mad scene’. Turning to look at Christopher, she said, ‘It’s Faye.’ Her voice quivered. ‘When did you record this?’ He couldn’t bring himself to say. Christopher reached for the ‘stop’ button again and was surprised when Laura grabbed his wrist. Her grip was like a manacle. She glared at him, but as she did so, the twilight infiltrated her eyes, turning them gold, and he was reminded of the woman he had once loved and lost. Something on the tape reclaimed her attention. She released his wrist, the blood drained from her face, and she stared at the speaker as if it were an apparition. ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’

  ‘What?’

  Her reply was almost whispered: ‘Chains.’

  ‘What do you mean, chains?’

  The sobbing subsided for a moment, and he thought that he might be able to discern a faint clicking noise in the background, perhaps, but nothing that would explain Laura’s obvious terror. She stumbled, as if her legs had given way beneath her, and she thrust both hands onto the mixing desk. Christopher got up from his chair to offer her support, but she shouted, ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Laura,’ he pleaded, ‘I don’t understand.’

  She was breathing heavily. Hunched over the faders, she did not make eye contact and when she spoke her voice contained a note of wonder. ‘You recorded this after she was taken.’

  He turned the tape off and summoned the strength to say, ‘Yes.’

  There was a beat of silence before she yelled, ‘You stupid bastard, you fucking stupid bastard!’ She picked up a handful of his cassettes and threw them at the wall. They shattered and the parts skittered across the floor. Rounding on him, she screamed, ‘You stupid, stupid bastard!’ He felt the force of her anger like a punch in the stomach. ‘Oh my God,’ she growled, throwing her head back. ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ She kicked the VCS3 stand and it toppled over. Then, ripping a curtain of tape loops off their hooks, she cast them into the air like party streamers. ‘What did I tell you?’ she demanded.

  ‘Laura, please . . .’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ She jabbed a finger at him.

  The force of her verbal assault rendered him speechless.

  Laura dashed out of the room and slammed the door. He listened to her running down the stairs and for a few moments he could not move. His mind became blank. Gradually, his senses reconnected with the world and he snapped out of his malaise; he pushed his palms down on the arms of the chair and launched himself at the door.

  He found Laura on the first-floor landing. She was leaning over the banisters, not crying, but making odd moaning noises. Approaching her warily, he said, ‘Laura, listen. Please.’ She turned to look at him. ‘You were right,’ he nodded, encouraging her to acknowledge his admission. ‘I shouldn’t have made those recordings. I didn’t know what I was doing . . . and I don’t know what any of it means.’

  Laura’s grief was so intense it manifested as a kind of rapture. A peculiar half-smile flickered into being. ‘You invited something unspeakable into this house and—’

  ‘No, Laura,’ he interrupted, ‘we don’t know that. Not for sure.’

  It was Faye.’

  ‘It sounded like Faye.’

  The back of Laura’s hand hit the side of his face hard. He took a step backwards.

  ‘You selfish bastard!’

  She raised her hand again, and, anticipating the next slap, he twisted awkwardly. He was standing at the top of the stairs and he tried to grab the banister rail to prevent himself from falling, but he missed, and the world began to revolve rapidly.

  Laura watched him bounce down the steps and she was reminded of a marionette being jerked this way and that by an incompetent puppeteer. His arms wheeled around and his legs were suddenly up in the air. He tumbled, head over heels, and when he reached the bottom, at the point where he might reasonably have been expected to come to rest, he seemed to gain extra momentum. Like a gymnast ending an acrobatic display with a final flourish, he somersaulted and travelled an extra yard. Even though she was delirious with rage, Laura registered the oddity.

  The house was still and very silent.

  Laura used the banister rail to aid her cautious descent. She staggered forward and came to a halt beside her husband. His head and neck were askew, projecting from his torso at an acute angle. She didn’t need to check his pulse. He was clearly dead.

  The interview room had bare grey walls and contained only essential furniture: a laminated table and three plastic chairs. A fluorescent strip on the ceiling emitted a flickering light. Inspector Barnes and his assistant sat on one side of the table, Laura on the other. Damp patches had begun to appear on the inspector’s blue nylon shirt and the smell of his body odour was overpowering. The air was hazy with smoke. Barnes lit another cigarette and leaned back in his chair. ‘So you were arguing . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Laura replied.

  The unsteady illumination made the inspector and his pale, bony companion look sinister. It made their movements appear discontinuous.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s difficult to say exactly.’

  ‘Try.’

  She wanted to tell him the truth, but how could she? ‘Chris could be very selfish. I suppose that’s always the case with creative people. They get so caught up in their work . . . you know?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do, to be honest.’

  ‘He locked himself away in his studio and never came out.’

  ‘Were you angry with him?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. He’d been in the studio all day. We started talking, and – I don’t know – things escalated, I got upset.’

  ‘But what were you arguing about, specifically?’

  ‘He’d stopped listening to me. It was like talking to a brick wall.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I wanted to move house, but he didn’t take any notice. He didn’t take what I said seriously.’

  ‘Why did you want to move house?’

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

  It was past midnight and Laura was exhausted. The strain of thinking up plausible answers to Inspector Barnes’s questions was beginning to show. She clasped her hands together in order to conceal a tremble and attempted to remain focused; however, she was only partially present. A part of her had been unable to escape from the studio; a lesser self, like a photographic negative, was trapped in the past, listening, in perpetuity, to Faye’s cries and the clink-clink-clink of swaying chains.

  Inspector Barnes tapped his cigarette over a cheap metal ashtray and said, ‘I thought you were happily married. You didn’t say any of this before.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Laura replied. ‘I didn’t think it was relevant to your investigation.’

  A wry smile invited her to reconsider what she’d just said. Inspector Barnes took another drag from his cigarette. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘I lost my temper. I broke some of my husband’s tapes, pushed an instrument over, then I ran downstairs and he followed me. Things got a bit . . . physical.’

  ‘What? He hit you?’

  ‘No, no. I’m afraid I hit him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was just . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Really upset.’

  ‘How did your husband react?’

  ‘He turned away . . .’ She found it difficult to speak coherently. ‘It was an accident. I suppose he tripped. I don’t know . . . it all happened so fast. And then he fell.’

  ‘Down the stairs,’ Barnes added, as if her final words required clarification. Then he surprised her by being even more precise: ‘The first flight of stairs, the stairs that you see when you enter through the front door.’

 
‘Yes,’ she said, confused by his pedantry.

  The big man glanced at his assistant and then returned his attention to Laura. ‘Did you move your husband after his fall?’

  ‘He wasn’t breathing. There was no point. I dialled 999 right away.’

  ‘You’re quite sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The detective lifted the cigarette to his mouth and the tip became bright as he inhaled. His lips parted and he allowed the smoke to float out slowly. ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What’s odd?’

  Barnes took his time answering. ‘Where we found your husband’s body would suggest that he fell from the landing.’

  Laura shook her head. ‘Well, he didn’t. He fell down the stairs.’

  ‘Then why wasn’t he at the bottom of the stairs? Why was he off to the side?’

  ‘He fell in a peculiar way. I saw it happen. You’re quite wrong – he didn’t fall from the landing. He couldn’t have fallen from the landing, not by accident, because he’d have had to go over the banisters.’ She said this confidently. Nevertheless, the detective’s response was unexpected. He appeared to be quietly amused.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not by accident.’ His massive head rocked backwards and forwards. ‘That’s right.’ It took a few seconds for Laura to grasp what he was implying, and when she did her heart seemed to balloon in her chest. She wanted to protest, but her lungs were unable to supply her voice box with sufficient air to accomplish speech. Before she had quite recovered, the inspector said, ‘There was an Akai 4000DS tape recorder in your husband’s studio. Do you know the model?’ Laura shook her head. ‘Your husband owned many tape recorders, but it was one of the smaller ones. He kept it on a stack of equipment on the right side of the main . . . consul.’ The inspector created an imaginary floor plan in the air with his hands. ‘One of my officers has one just like it at home. It was all set up and he managed to get it going. I have to say, what we heard was quite disturbing. Your husband seems to have recorded a child screaming, a child who must have been about the same age as your daughter. Can you tell us anything about it?’