“Around? Very poetic. Bit of a stretch, love, if you ask me.”
“Maybe it’s the only way we can get to him, through the headset, that is.”
“Yes, and maybe you’re delirious. Anyway, I thought it didn’t work on you.”
“Well, it’s all I’ve got right now, so get me some kind of headset, I don’t care how primitive it is, we can even go back to the motorcycle helmet until you can do better if needs be.”
“Cairo…”
“Yes, he could be dead. I might be in denial and it could be a hopeless task.”
“Just checking.” She saluted. “By the way, I know why they didn’t let Bentley go.”
“Continue.”
“There was writing on his forehead, it said, ‘Rapist. Take my DNA.’ And they did, apparently. You remember those two nurses?”
“Bentley?” I said. “That must have been Gabriel, but how did he know? God, I’m not even surprised, what does that say?”
I knew one of the nurses, Gina, a diminutive, firecracker girl who’d suffered severe post-traumatic stress in the aftermath. She’d had the wit to put a plastic bag on the right hand she’d scratched him with before she phoned the police. She had a faint memory of him cleaning it, but he didn’t manage to wash it all away, no-one ever does. Harriet, lying on her bed in the Nurses Home, petrified in every sense of the word as that stringy streak pumped away like it was his right. Poor Harriet, all slurring and fogged and bloody, wondering what the hell she did to deserve it. I cursed myself for occasionally feeling sorry for him, especially as I’d probably been next on the list.
“Doesn’t matter what he tells them now, does it? They’ll never believe it. In fact, they’ll probably see it as evidence of psychosis.”
“Maybe there is justice in this world.” Gizmo said. “I hope he’s singing like a canary, they’ll throw away the key.”
“Don’t hold your breath, his family are as well connected as it gets. Chances are they’ll find a way to spring him.”
The probability that, if Gabriel had written that on Bentley’s forehead, he thought there was a fair chance we were coming back and he wasn’t, I kept to myself.
Twenty-eight
We only needed a vehicle for generating basic pulses as opposed to more complex operations, which meant I could have a headset producing a weak rotating magnetic field on a customised pattern within a matter of hours. While I was waiting, I converted a small, sparsely furnished room next to the dining area into an appropriate space, cobbled together a sleep mask and found some noise reducing headphones in a drawer containing a profusion of technical innards. Sitting in the leather office chair, I attempted to piece together what I had.
Tabitha was on the money, as usual, spend any time in the world of neuroscience and it rattles all your preconceptions about the nature of existence. I once encountered a patient who’d been all but dead for hours whilst undergoing complicated and risky brain surgery. Staff confirmed that she’d accurately reported everything that happened in the operating theatre down to the last detail. There were some who’d go to any scientific length to explain such phenomena away, whilst others accepted them willingly as proof of God and the afterlife. For myself, the only honourable course was to commit to an open mind – a facility I expected would be most useful in the following hours.
Memory was the star in the firmament. Joe had said that when Gabriel was a child, he knew things about people, knew what they’d done, raising the possibility that Gabriel was once able to access people’s memories. This ability seemed to regenerate around the time I came to know him. Was it stimulated by the pulses? Then, in Another Place, our memories disappeared altogether, but once they returned, Gabriel was literally able to manifest them. It was why he kept away from us all, proximity and consequent emotional stimulation led to uncontrolled manifestation. But we were happier without our thoughts and memories. It seemed an odd fit. Throughout recorded history there’d been both religions and individuals who believed that all human experience existed in a cosmic reservoir that could potentially be accessed; the Buddhists with their Akashic Records, Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious, Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Resonance. Could the reservoir exist and could Gabriel have access to it, even be trapped in it? The possibility that he’d connected with me as a child when he was an adult lent weight to a patently crazy theory. But why would the reservoir induce the sensed presence experience? If I had to factor memory into the headset, I was sunk. Some of the relevant centres in the brain were way too deep to be affected by a weak EM pulse. There seemed to be a fundamental contradiction. Practitioners of meditation all emphasised that ease of being arises out of detachment from thought and memory and there was plenty of scientific evidence to support them. Nevertheless, a high percentage of test subjects had linked the sensed presence experience to pleasant recollections, as did Gabriel.
Gizmo popped her head around the door. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to fathom out where to look.”
“Ah. Good luck with that.” She was about to disappear when she did an about turn. “What do we tell them?”
“We’ll just say we needed time out.”
“No, about what happened to us.”
“We have to keep quiet. If we tell them the truth, they either won’t believe us and label us delusional, or will believe us and turn us into lab specimens. There’s no win here.”
“But, what we’ve been through. Don’t you think the world needs to know? Don’t you think science needs to know?”
“Yes, but working out how to do that will take a while. You’ve seen the crowds outside the house, it’s the tip of the iceberg.”
“I wonder if anything like this has happened before and they didn’t spill, either.”
Damn.
What if all human beings were connected to the bank of memories to a greater or lesser degree? What if all those eureka moments that had punctuated history came from people who were tapping into the reservoir without even knowing it? Galileo, Da Vinci, Tesla, Jung, Einstein, Ramanujan. Was it possible when zoning out, I was accessing the information in the reservoir? The notion was fascinating, but useless without the means to apply it.
A hand reached over my shoulder holding a decent looking headset.
“Bloody hell, that was quick.”
“No, it wasn’t, time flies when you’re mulling.”
“You don’t think it will affect…” I said, pointing to my stomach.
“Oh, for God’s sake, missis, you get more EM coming from your computer screen. Get a grip.”
“I’m worried I’ll be a bad mother.”
“Oh, your bloody brain’s turning to fudge, already. I won’t get any sense out of you for the next two years. You’ll be good at it, okay? Now, are you going to put that thing on or just look at it?”
“I’m going to put it on.”
Twenty-nine
I was nowhere, I didn’t even know what I was doing and despite several attempts, the headset failed to deliver a sensed presence experience. When I woke up the next day, I checked the mail for Vik’s I’m okay message, then turned the TV on to monitor the news. There’d been developments, people were claiming that the faces of the statues that made up Another Place on Crosby bore a remarkable resemblance to Gabriel, likewise The Dream. The crowds outside my house were swelling, the fields beyond were full of tents and makeshift seating areas, there was even a burger van and a drinks stall.
After the recklessness of my third bacon butty in twenty-four hours, I went back to the makeshift room and renewed my headset efforts. This time I tried to induce the zone while the set was pulsing, but I couldn’t do it. I’d never been able to control it. In frustration, I went to find Gizmo, who was still hacking.
“What are you looking for, Giz?”
“Anything.” She said, without looking up. I was n
o stranger to conversing with the back of Gizmo’s head.
“What sends me into the zone?”
“A neurological mystery, as a rule. A puzzle with no obvious answer. The more unprecedented the problem, the deeper you seem to go.”
“Then find me one. And if I go into the zone, put the headset on and set the pulses going.”
What, are you crazy?”
“Quite possibly, as it happens.”
“Look honey, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but you’re clutching at straws here. This is so not like you. I mean, I understand, what with the baby and all, but… We’ve got to get back to the guys. And you’re going to need all that clinic and classes stuff, whatever it is they do there, apart from anything else. You’ve seen the news, we’re all going to have to leave, you know that. We can’t stay here and we can’t stay there.”
“Just this one thing, Gizmo, then I promise to move on.”
“Cairo, I don’t want to be brutal.”
“Why change the habits of a lifetime?”
“You feel guilty because you think if you hadn’t met Gabriel, none of this would have happened.”
“Well, don’t feel you have to hold back. Now, find me a problem to solve.”
“You already have it, missis. What happened to Gabriel.”
“Yes, but the trouble with that is I haven’t been in the zone once.”
“Well, here, I’m sending this over to you. I’ve constructed a three-dimensional map of the factors as I see them. That might do it.”
The diagram appeared on the screen. I had an unfortunate habit of forgetting Gizmo was a total genius. “This is beautiful.”
“Yeah, whatever. Just concentrate on it, Okay?
“If it happens, put the headset on. And strobe me.”
“Are you serious? You want to be pulsed and try to induce a seizure while you’re in the zone?”
“Yep.”
“For God’s sake woman, apart from any other considerations, what about the baby? You were worried about the pulses ten minutes ago. Now you want me to do this. I’m not doing it.”
“Women with epilepsy have babies all the time, Gizmo.”
“You’ve lost the plot.”
“Have you thought about what this baby’s already been through?” I had, scared myself to death with it. Tried to push it down, not think about it, but every now and then I’d cough it up like a fur ball. “Can you rig up a strobe?”
“That’s not the problem, I can do it through the screen. Oh, blood and thunder, give me five minutes to think about it.”
Which meant yes.
*
I studied Gizmo’s diagram until the pieces floated like random continents in a planetary sea, then aligned into three distinct regions.
“So, the physical world as we know it, then a world where all the thoughts and memories that have ever existed are stored. After that, a world beyond physicality, thought and memory, a world of pure essence, whatever that is.”
A rustling around my head, lights flashing.
“The reservoir of thought and memory exists between the physical world and the essential world and in a person living in the physical world, it’s the only place they can meet. That’s how Gabriel could enter the world of thought and memory and how essence can filter through to the physical world. If thought and memory are decommissioned, essence of essence will follow, whatever essence is. That could explain why they were connected in the pulse experiments. If Gabriel isn’t in the reservoir or back here...
I’m trying to find the occupant when I should be looking for the building.”
The sharp, green scent of privet flower transmutes into petrol, spattered blood, the sounds of smashing and screaming. Sirens, an antiseptic smell, nothing is making sense, I’m in a hospital bed, tubes, my body shakes, there’s a woman, she’s kind, my body becomes stiff and I smell the privet flower again. The hum of saline, sulphurous beach, I want to be on the beach, lie on the soft sand, no worries, no responsibilities, just the sound of the waves. I’m in Another Place, grateful and delighted, singing with aliveness. It becomes night and as vision attunes, I catch the dim outline of someone walking into the sea. My heart vaults as I see it’s Gabriel. No sound escapes when I call out, but I keep calling. He swims out to The Dream and I follow his silhouette through the lapping water, but it’s a me I don’t understand. Sitting on the base, he ties the strand of rope around his leg. Fastening the other end to the rock, he pushes it into the sea. Thorns of fear creep as I realise what he’s about to do. My mute screams are worthless, just me without body or power, watching him sucked out of sight like bathwater down a plughole. Wading through the fear, I slip under, chasing him down, his expression calm and resolved before the light from the moon can reach no further. I try to get to him, to untie the rock from around his leg, over and over I try, but there is no corporeal self with which to act. He has only one thought and it’s me and we find each other and then I know I’m just a little girl. For a moment, I’m absorbed in him, then, an explosion of firework lights in my eyes, flying out on a lightning rod, zapping away and back, no, not now, no.
I came round coughing and spluttering, wriggling in the squelch of cold, salty water. Gizmo ripped the headset to pieces once she’d taken it off.
“For God’s sake, Gizmo.”
“Just in case you get tempted.”
“I have to go back.”
She looked pallid and distracted. “This shit does my head in.” She squeezed the water from hair and mopped my eyes with the bottom of her t-shirt. “Come on, we’d better get you dry.”
“I have to go back.”
She took my face in both her hands, lifting it towards hers. “You’re not going back. Read my lips – you’re not going back.” Her head nodded down. “Think about him.”
“Him?”
“Him, her, I just didn’t want to say ‘it’.”
“But I don’t know for certain.”
“Tell me what happened, Cairo.”
She listened, picking at fingernails which occasionally strayed between her teeth, to be chewed upon.
“You’re the scientist, Cairo, what do you infer from the evidence?”
“He hasn’t been found. He almost certainly drowned. One rock too many, it’s like he knew. But I need to go back, I have to save him.”
“What happens if you save him?”
“What do you mean?”
He did what he did for a reason; he obviously knew something we didn’t and I’m guessing it was something mighty big. I saw the way he looked at you, there’s no way he’d have left you unless he had no other choice. You don’t know what you’re messing with, you don’t know what you’ve already messed with.”
A booming sound in the distance. I thought Gizmo had started to shake my chair, but she was shaking too. All the screens went dead and in the distance, the sound of multiple car alarms. We rushed outside, scanning Hebden Bridge in the valley below. Even through there was no visible evidence, you could sense that the power was out. Then dark, darker than any lamp free night, a fearful, unprecedented black. A glimmer, followed by flickering, like those awful old strip lights that used to falter on their way to life. I felt Gabriel washing through me as a sharp wind billowed from the valley. The first time I saw him, it was like being smacked in the head by a love shovel, like I was predisposed to love him, but couldn’t admit it, made me feel like a stupid, ugly girl simpering after something out of my league; a shadow from my pre-Tabitha life that never quite left me. Men like Gabriel usually chose those frosty little princesses looking for a meal ticket, but at least they could regret it at their leisure. I wanted his brain all right, but I wanted him more. I wanted to be consumed in his proximity and as I breathed him in through the keen moorland air, I was infused. A fluttering inside my stomach.
&nbs
p; “Cairo? Cairo?”
“Yes?”
“Where the hell did you go?”
“It’s okay, I’m here.”
Everything sprang back to life. We returned to the house, where the computers were working again. Breaking news, minor earthquake centred on Manchester. The shivering was uncontrollable. Gizmo took my hand.
“I rest my case, Cairo. God only knows what we’ve done. We’re going home.”
Thirty
The police escorted us for the last couple of hundred yards or we’d never have got through. There was a bit of fluster when they realised it was us, toing and froing on the radio before we embarked on a procession through the herd of humanity that lingered for sign or miracle or message. Faces that echoed the disquiet we’d witnessed on the journey home searched, though they couldn’t impregnate the darkened windows, leaving me free to peer at will without fear of engagement. When we passed the burger van, I had a sudden craving, which seemed disloyal. The day was broody and billowing, sheets of ashy rain already visible over the distant plain, weaving through the waves of luminescence that had appeared in the sky since the tremor. Mind skating down the hills into thoughts of Manchester, I imagined Gabriel in his trademark suit, hugging the buildings to avoid the worst of it. Everyone would be wet and muddy within the hour, an encouragement to go back from whence they came rather than back to their tents, but home wasn’t calling to them as it called to me. The flashes started as we drew closer to the house, cameras pressed up to the glass like we were in a prison van. Gizmo offered the finger.
“I wish we could get back to normal, trouble is I don’t have the faintest idea what normal is, anymore.” She said.
She hugged Vikram and Joe, at which point I got seriously worried about her. I’d got all pumped up to explain, but before I had the chance, reinforcements arrived and it had to sit like a great, lardy lump in my stomach. Dominic and Lucinda had brought a trauma counsellor with them. He introduced himself as Martin, a tall and slender middle-aged man of calm manner and casual dress. I’d been expecting it – if the people involved in cataclysmic events don’t collectively reconstruct within a short time of their unfolding, the memory starts to play terrible tricks, a notion that raised a wry smile. As it was, the window had already passed thanks to Gizmo’s and my adventure, but I guess they had to do their best. It was a sign that they saw us as victims, innocent and genuine. If we got through this, they’d probably offer us counselling and leave us alone for a while. After that they’d start talking about hypnosis. Dominic and Lucinda stayed in the living room while Martin suggested we went through to the kitchen, which was a distraction because I kept wondering what they might be up to. The fact they knew I was pregnant was a further invasion.
The Cairo Pulse Page 18
