The Frequency Read online

  Her father, disembowelled and singed.

  She couldn’t move her body. This was not anxiety’s doing. It was as if her nerves were wires in a parallel circuit.

  Her vision shrunk as if binoculars had been pulled from her face. Absolute darkness pressed against her eyeballs.

  Her heart beat to a new rhythm, and her lungs inhaled to a different pattern.

  The shadow stole her body. Rasha was a stringless kite caught in a ferocious wind.

  If I let go, she thought, I will be a ghost too.

  At that very thought, she plummeted into depths of complete and utter nothingness.

  Rasha stumbled through an inferno that could only be hell.

  A ravenous fire gnawed at debris to her left. It engulfed the charred ruins and poisoned the air with acrid smoke. She learnt how she was still alive: a steel girder had fallen against Rasha’s bunk bed and sheltered her from the debris that was once her bedroom.

  For rubble was all that remained of her family’s Syrian apartment.

  She’d been fighting with seven-year-old Milana over the letter she had torn when the missile struck. They were meant to have hidden underneath their bunk bed, but Rasha had stirred their argument again, and Milana had crawled out into the room when there was an explosion and the world upturned.

  Milana, she thought.

  In the rubble before her, amidst bent steel rods and hunks of sandstone, was a dusty hand.

  ‘Milana!’ Rasha cried, coughing through smoke as it clogged her windpipe. ‘Milana, Milana . . .’

  She shuffled forward, reached out with her bruised arm, and gripped Milana’s hand. It was still warm. There was give: Milana could be pulled free. Rasha tugged. Rubble shifted, and fresh dust plumed against the flickering fire. Milana’s arm ended where the shoulder should have begun.

  Just blood and sinew, and it was all Rasha’s fault.

  Rasha dropped the limb, recoiled onto the ash-ridden floorboards, and retched. She brought up clotted blood, exactly as that day in workshop 2B.

  Workshop 2B.

  Rasha froze. That’s right, she thought. Joel Tredethy, Gorenn Holiday Park, and the shadow happened thousands of miles away in Cornwall. The fire burned, smoke gushed, and Milana’s corpse bled, but it wasn’t truly happening.

  It wasn’t real. The shadow had put her there.

  Rasha observed the scene. The edges of the firelight and the crumbled brickwork were licked by a crimson-and-cyan haze. Where there was movement came distortion. Flames pulsated in rhythm to her own heartbeat, and dust plumes echoed as if there were many layers of the same image. Beyond that, where Homs’s remaining buildings should have loomed, was impenetrable blackness. Rasha deduced that this wasn’t her memory, nor was it happening now.

  It was somewhere new altogether. She had been fooled into thinking it was real. Perhaps the shadow was Milana after all, and she’d imprisoned Rasha in this place as punishment for killing her.

  She was in hell.

  Rasha stumbled through the ruins for a way home. There was a door intact, and she pushed it open only to find a tunnel. Deep underground, the air was warm and stagnant, and miners drove pickaxes into stone. Each lunge furthered a network of veins beneath the land. They coughed and spluttered; the work made them sick. Rasha’s feet left the damp floor for metal walkways and clinical lights. Machines and formulas filled the caverns and voices carried on the air, all talking about ghosts.

  Rasha raced blindly into the mouth of another tunnel only to find herself back in her decimated bedroom with Milana’s detached arm.

  A yell echoed across the heavens. It didn’t seem to be part of the world in which Rasha’s mind inhabited, but from the physical world where her body remained.

  ‘Who are you?’ Her mother’s voice quavered.

  ‘We’re here to help your daughter, Mrs Abadi,’ a woman replied gravely. Plastic fasteners clicked.

  ‘Occupation, grade three imprint,’ said a man with a smoker’s husk.

  ‘Let’s engage,’ the woman remarked.

  Smoke stirred at the end of the decimated room. From the darkness came three cautious figures. Clad in various shades of black, hoods down, all that differentiated them in that moment was their hair: the woman had a bright lilac undercut do, the shorter man’s was dirty blond and unkempt, and the taller man was a writer type with black curls galore. The men didn’t come so clearly; their images were opaque and distorted, as if they stood behind frosted glass. There was no doubt in Rasha’s mind: they were the hooded people from that morning.

  ‘I’ll engage with the imprint and . . .’ The woman paused as if to ask herself what she could possibly do. ‘I’ll reason with it.’

  Darkness took the men, and the woman approached.

  ‘Rasha?’ she asked and reached out a hand.

  Rasha found that she could look into her. The name Shauna came to her first, but that didn’t sit right, and a different one found its way to her lips. ‘You’re Trish, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Trish said, eyes wide. ‘Rasha, do you know what’s happening?’

  ‘I’m being possessed, aren’t I? By a ghost?’

  ‘Something like that. We don’t have much time until it takes over your body. If you want to survive, you have to try everything I ask. Can you do that?’

  Rasha didn’t know where she was. What if this world was of the shadow’s creation, to torture Rasha for eternity? Perhaps Trish was just another of those shadows that had stolen the woman’s image to mock Rasha.

  ‘What happens if I don’t?’ Rasha challenged.

  Trish’s leaf-green eyes glistened.

  ‘Then you’ll be lost here forever.’

  Rasha took Trish’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Subject has been obtained,’ Trish called out. ‘Initiating extraction.’

  They plunged through a door and into the apartment’s hallway. The patterned rugs slipped beneath their feet, and the wall’s plaster scraped under Rasha’s fingertips. Solid, impossibly real. Yet it wasn’t. The hallway was infinite, and every door they opened took them back to her ruined bedroom and Milana’s bloodied remains.

  ‘It’s punishing me!’ Rasha cried. ‘I’m in hell, and it’s punishing me!’

  Trish squeezed Rasha’s arms, her vernal green eyes wide with sympathy.

  ‘There is no hell,’ Trish informed her. ‘There is only this place, the ombrederi. The imprint is feeding on your negative emotions. You need to be in control. See that door there? When we open it, we’re going to see a time when you were happiest, yeah?’

  Rasha nodded. The happiest she had ever been was before she’d had her father and sister ripped from her life. It hurt too much to go that far back. Trish wrenched the door open and led Rasha in. Their feet hit workshop 2B’s chalky floor. Cridland stepped forward with an end-of-year certificate for best portfolio. Bullets obliterated him. Walls splintered and collapsed.

  Rasha clambered from the rubble of her bedroom with Trish’s support.

  ‘There’s got to be something else in you,’ Trish pleaded. She was desperate now. Rasha sensed time was running out. Soon this would be permanent; Rasha would be trapped there, agonised by her wrongdoings for eternity.

  ‘Trish.’ The blond man’s voice came from the outside – from the real world. ‘Be careful. Don’t allow yourself to be occupied, too.’

  ‘Sam, I’ve got this!’ Trish cried. She turned to Rasha. ‘Do you have something?’

  ‘I think so.’

  They strode through an open door to their left, back inside the apartment’s living room, only it wasn’t war-torn and decimated. The hearth rug, the giadual sofas, the smell of Haya cooking a zesty tabbouleh – all was as it should be. Rasha, Haya, Milana, and their father played a game of charades. Despite the pop of gunfire outside, they mimed from cards and were riddled with laughter, the kind that helped her forget for a moment.

  Always the simple things.

  ‘Keep that memory, Rasha,’ Trish instructed. ‘Focu
s on the happy. Let it fill you up.’

  Oh, it did. Her chest loosened, and her stomach lightened. If only it could last forever.

  A door sprung up behind Rasha’s father. She didn’t want to go. If she stayed, if she could fend off the dark memories of the war, when the war seemed farther away in the southern districts, she would always be happy.

  ‘This isn’t real, Rasha,’ Trish said gently, as if she knew what was going through Rasha’s mind. ‘Let’s get you home to your mother.’

  Haya. Of course. She couldn’t let her mother be alone in the real world. Rasha let Trish guide her through the doorway.

  They entered a boundless lighting shop, no walls in sight. Thousands of glass bulbs radiated light and warmth.

  ‘Where is this?’ Rasha asked.

  ‘The ombrederi is a bridge between minds,’ Trish explained. ‘This is where my mind meets the ombrederi. A neutral place.’

  At a counter stood a portly man, and Trish tiptoed to peck him on the cheek. They carried the same button nose and wide-set eyes; her father, Rasha presumed. He must have died, for Rasha sensed that anybody they saw in the ombrederi had departed the living. Trish turned to her.

  ‘Now, you’re going to be in darkness for a moment,’ Trish said. ‘Just a split second, but I promise you, keep your happy memory in your mind, and you’ll come back to us.’ She called to the outside. ‘Prepare the EMP.’

  From far off there was an electrical whine.

  ‘Fire EMP.’

  Static crackled. The lighting shop melted around Rasha and snatched Trish away. She was all alone. The heaviness of her body returned. Pain seared beneath her fingernails, and cramps rose from her limbs.

  Rasha saw one last image of a wooden ship as it plummeted into a sea.

  Then there was purple darkness.

  ‘She looked into my mind,’ Rasha heard Trish mutter. ‘She knew my name. She even knew who Shauna was.’

  Rasha opened her eyes. She lay on the floor of her room in caravan forty-five, head in her mother’s lap. Haya howled, and Rasha could only describe it as relief from a heartache well-known. Around them, Trish and her two accomplices consulted an array of gadgets. In the doorway, Sam flicked through the options of a touch screen monitor and showed it to his comrades.

  ‘Imprint successfully expelled,’ he confirmed.

  Beneath Haya’s cries and her saviour’s babble, Rasha whispered questions as sensations returned to her body. ‘Who are you? How did you find me?’

  Stone-cold silence. Other times, she would get answers. ‘Imprints, are they . . . ghosts?’

  ‘Yes,’ the curly-haired man said. He was called Will, except Rasha wasn’t sure how she knew.

  ‘Was the shadow an imprint?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Sam replied gravely.

  Will crouched down beside Haya and Rasha.

  ‘The Network has resolved your case. Rasha Abadi, we witness you.’

  He began to rise, but Rasha grabbed his hand tightly. He had to know.

  ‘The Vincent will fall,’ she whispered.

  Tiredness overwhelmed her, and the room spun violently.

  ‘Mrs Abadi, she should come with us for a follow-up. We’ll make sure she’s okay,’ Trish began. Her voice seemed far away now.

  ‘She stay,’ Haya growled in English, arms wrapped around Rasha.

  Trish’s face loomed in close, and she pressed her forehead against Rasha’s clammy temple –

  A winding lane surrounded by overgrown verges. A crumbling chimney stack.

  Rasha had walked by it enough to know that this was Wheal Gorenn Mine.

  ‘Find us,’ Trish said impossibly, for she hadn’t moved her lips. It had sprouted in Rasha’s mind, so clear it could have been her own thought.

  Haya pushed Trish away. Grogginess pulled Rasha’s eyes closed. She feared the darkness.

  ‘Keep the lights on,’ Rasha pleaded, and sound and picture became one as she drifted into an undisturbed sleep.

  Rasha woke slowly. Her bedsheets, soaked in her own urine, were vacuum packed to her aching body. That was the least of her concerns. Deep scratches covered the plasterboard walls above her head. Her fingernails were bruised, cuticles bloodied. She remembered how her body had belonged to the shadow, her senses distant, heart beating to a new rhythm. Whilst she was possessed, in the world that Trish named the ombrederi, had her body defied physics and climbed her bedroom walls?

  Her mind reeled with the prior night’s events, and she couldn’t pinpoint her first thought, but her most recurrent was, I must find them. The strangers in the night, unperturbed by the shadow as it tried to snatch Rasha’s body.

  She jumped from her sodden bed and tore the soiled sheets away, ignoring the pain in her fingers. The shadow had caused more carnage than she’d thought.

  That had been the most frightening revelation. Her saviours had come prepared with cases of equipment and had spoken a language all their own – imprints and EMPs and extractions – yet with all their knowledge, when Rasha had asked what the shadow was, she’d been met with a grave, ‘We don’t know.’

  With her soaked sheets bundled underarm, Rasha opened her bedroom door to hear Haya say in English, ‘Rasha home. Rasha ill.’

  She spoke on the pay-as-you-go Nokia that Mr Keats had handed down to them. That was school sorted. Rasha had no intention of going, of course. She tiptoed across the hall to the utility room, threw her sheets in the half-empty washing machine, turned it on, and sped into the bathroom to wash. No, she was skipping school to go to Wheal Gorenn.

  The night before, Trish had put her forehead against Rasha’s, and Rasha had seen the abandoned mining site that was nestled on the edge of town. She wasn’t mistaken; she walked past it twice daily, and even their drab uniforms had the engine house stitched within the yellow-and-black emblem. She didn’t know how Trish had passed the message between their minds – if that happened at all – but she did know Trish and company wanted her to find them. Perhaps they could cure her.

  Rasha was also desperate to reach Wheal Gorenn because, when the shadow had her contained within what Trish named the ombrederi, she had fought back. She’d also seen the mines, full of grimy workers hauling stone and cart, and how she presumed it was now, full of desks, gadgets, and clinically bright lights. The shadow had a connection to the mines that her saviours may not know.

  Her father had always said that help is best returned. She could offer them information for saving her life.

  Rasha quickly towelled herself dry and dressed in a mismatched outfit of Red Cross plaid. She tiptoed into the kitchen, swiped the half-empty packet of bourbons from the counter, and stowed them in her rucksack. She went to the front door and tried the handle: locked. She reached for the top of the doorframe where their caravan keys were usually kept, but all her fingers disturbed was dust.

  ‘Stay inside,’ Haya said in Levantine.

  Rasha spun on the spot. Haya sat in the lounge area, merely a shadow against the drawn curtains. She staggered to her feet and walked closer to the kitchen light. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair unkempt.

  ‘Please, Mama,’ Rasha said. She had contemplated lying, but Haya wasn’t someone easily fooled; she’d worked in law, after all.

  ‘You’re going to look for those people, aren’t you?’ Haya asked. Rasha stammered for a response that didn’t involve a partial lie. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Haya’s voice was shrill and broken – there was fear there. Rasha understood. The last time a member of Haya’s family was in danger they’d been in the midst of a desolated city with death on their backs. The caravan was meant to be a sanctuary nestled at the edge of the world.

  ‘You don’t need to be scared of those people,’ Rasha said. ‘You heard how they understand ghosts, you saw the equipment they had. They can protect us.’

  Rasha stepped toward her mother. Haya backed away towards the sofa.

  ‘Mama,’ Rasha said. ‘It’s just me.’

  Haya fell onto the
sofa and clutched at the cushion beneath her. Rasha realised that was the problem: it was just her. The girl who, the night before, had crawled along the walls, inhuman.

  ‘Mama,’ Rasha called. Warm tears spilled across her face. She edged towards her mother the way she’d approach a cowering dog. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  Haya scooted back onto the sofa — any further and she’d be sat on the windowsill.

  ‘Mama, don’t be scared.’

  She was just feet from Haya –

  ‘Stay away!’ Haya yelled. ‘Rasha, just stay away, please.’

  ‘I’m not a monster, Mama,’ Rasha whined. ‘I’m not . . .’

  Am I? she concluded in her head.

  By the wide, horrified stare that Haya gave her, her mother certainly thought so. If that was the case, she needed a cure more than ever.

  Rasha turned on her heel and raced past the locked door into her bedroom. She raised the damp window, climbed onto the sill, and leapt to the gavel outside their caravan. Despite being eight thirty in the morning, the sun was beating down as if it were noon. Many caravan-dwellers were already sitting outside their abodes, relishing the beautiful start to their mornings after a stormy night.

  Eyes to the ground, Rasha was hurrying to the site entrance when she heard someone call her name. It was Mr Keats, stood in his doorway. His tabbies mewed from cages stacked one on top of the other. She wouldn’t have been in the mood to entertain Mr Keats – she had more pressing matters, after all – but he looked prepared to drive to the vet, and Wheal Gorenn was on the way.

  ‘Need a hand?’ she asked.

  ‘Please.’

  Rasha hauled the crates two at a time to his lemon-yellow Nissan Micra, and when she was done he asked, ‘Need a lift?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘School?’ he asked as they climbed in.

  ‘Wheal Gorenn,’ she said and pulled the passenger door. As she clicked her seat belt into place, she caught Mr Keats’s cocked eyebrow. ‘School trip,’ she concluded.

  The cats mewed and hissed from their travel cages. Rasha’s nostrils itched with allergies as she elaborated on her lie – a mining history field trip, no less. Perhaps it was true – she didn’t know what she would find there. Mr Keats pulled into Wheal Gorenn’s drive and wished her fun, then the Micra disappeared in a flurry of dust and meows, and Rasha was alone on the narrow lane.