The Voices (26 page)

‘Why?’

‘It was how I heard her . . . the last time.’

‘You heard
something,
Laura . . .’

‘I heard
her.’

‘You know that can’t be right.’

‘What if—’

‘No. Don’t even think about it.’

‘Come, child. It is time –
that’s what I heard him say.’

‘There was no one there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘People see things – hear things – when they wake up. Things that aren’t really there.’

‘Who says?’

‘Inspector Barnes.’

‘What does he know? He thinks we killed our own child.’ Her voice had become bellicose.

‘Laura—’

‘There’s no ransom note, Chris. Think about it.’

Christopher sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Laura, this isn’t helping. You’re thinking crazy thoughts. I know how upset you are about my tapes. I know you thought Faye was in danger, but—’

She had stopped listening to him. ‘Why us? It doesn’t make any sense.’

Christopher carried on talking, regardless of her inattention, more for his own benefit than for his wife’s. ‘And maybe you did have some kind of premonition. But ghosts don’t kidnap children. OK? It just doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. My tapes have got nothing to do with Faye’s abduction. OK? Nothing.’

Laura reached down and forced the plug back into the wall. Her eyes were wide and aglow with fiery defiance.

The telephone stopped ringing and the house became silent. Even Inspector Barnes failed to return.

Christopher detected a slight improvement in his wife’s condition. She no longer lay on the bed all day and very occasionally she picked up a book. At mealtimes she toyed with her food but usually managed to eat a little before rising from the table. Her hours became more
regular. Sometimes, she would surprise Christopher by responding to a question and a short, stumbling conversation might follow. They were like actors reading lines at a rehearsal, familiarizing themselves with an obscure, intractable script. She remained, however, indifferent to her appearance. Her hair was uncombed and she dressed in the same grubby outfit every day until he confiscated her dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket. Vitamin deficiency had caused the corners of her mouth to rupture and these lesions had developed into unsightly sores.

Laura was never entirely mute. Her silences always hummed with the potential for accusation. He lived in fear of a sudden discharge of words that would connect him directly with her anger. Consequently, in order to evade that possibility, he spent an increasing number of hours walking on the heath. Away from the house, he found himself able to lower his defences and consider Laura’s position. Had anything happened that might support her belief in supernatural abduction? Anything at all that a rational individual would accept?

There had been the
Come to me, Faye
message, but he had originally interpreted it as
Come Tommy. Fate!
Then there had been the
She is mine
message. He had recorded many similar phrases and this one only became sinister
(rather than, say, romantic) with hindsight. And as for Edward Stokes Maybury, Christopher supposed that many Victorian entertainers must have used children in their acts. The fact that Maybury made children disappear was actually quite predictable: children have flexible joints and are small enough to squeeze behind mirrors. Furthermore, the slum areas of London would have afforded Maybury a constant supply of cheap labour. All of these elements could be linked together in order to produce a narrative consistent with Laura’s standpoint, but the fact remained that what she believed was fundamentally impossible.

Christopher was glad that he had told her nothing about the
She is mine
message and hardly anything about Maybury. Such information would have produced even deeper entrenchment in the quagmire of her madness (although it was also true that Laura had been largely indifferent when he had first spoken to her about Maybury). Christopher didn’t doubt that she had heard voices coming through the baby monitor – genuine communications, radio interference or auditory hallucinations, it didn’t really matter which. Shock had amplified her pre-existing anxieties and the conclusion she had reached was absurd.

Christopher sat on a tree stump in a former grassy
hollow that was now a dustbowl. The sun punished the back of his neck and the air was fragrant with hot sap. He recognized that he had been engaging in a form of self-deception. His willingness to consider Laura’s point of view wasn’t really an example of open-minded fairness, but rather a means of reassuring himself that he wasn’t to blame for his daughter’s disappearance.

‘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, listening. 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!’