Sound Read online

  Praise for Catherine Fearns’ second novel, Consuming Fire…

  “This was a joy to read, a classic one-sitting book which blends arcane theology and magic with a detective thriller set in the heart of Liverpool. The descriptions of place are atmospheric with strong characters and expert plotting. I am waiting eagerly for the next installment.”

  Amazon UK customer

  “This is such a gripping read. I was pulled straight in by the historical opening and couldn’t stop reading. A powerful and highly original story that won’t let you go!”

  Katharine Johnson, author of The Secret and The Silence

  “The writing of Consuming Fire is absolutely breathtaking. It’s beautiful and poetic, and makes this novel strange and unique. I’m honestly in awe.”

  Jessica Belmont, book blogger

  “Consuming Fire is a brave and innovative novel which blends classical narrative with fragments of an ancient demonological text that preface almost every chapter. That entirely invented text (the Ars Andramelechum) showcases both Fearns' skill and her dry sense of humour and allows the reader to remain one step ahead of Darren and Helen as they unravel the mystery.”

  Amazon UK customer

  “Detailed and well-written, Consuming Fire may make you consider the possibilities of the supernatural and occult, regardless of which side of the theological line you fall on, but it will definitely scare the hell out of you. You won’t stop reading.”

  Felicia Denise, book blogger

  “What really hooks you into this book is Catherine Fearns’ ablility to leave clues strewn throughout the whole book and yet not giving anything away till the last moment. Those are some astounding writing skills right there. I have truly and utterly fallen for Consuming Fire. Happy reading and getting spooked!!”

  Trails of Tales Book Blog

  “Another macabre tale of the occult weaving its way into the every day world told masterfully.”

  Amazon UK customer

  Sound

  Catherine Fearns

  Copyright © 2019 by Catherine Fearns

  Artwork: goonwrite.com

  Design: soqoqo

  Editor: Alice Cullerne-Bown

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.

  First Dark Edition, darkstroke, Crooked Cat Books 2019

  Discover us online:

  www.darkstroke.com

  Join us on instagram:

  https://www.instagram.com/darkstrokebooks/

  Include #darkstroke in a photo of yourself

  holding his book on Instagram and

  something nice will happen.

  For my children

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you once again Laurence and Steph Patterson at Crooked Cat Books/Darkstroke, for your continued trust and support. Thank you to my editor Alice Cullerne Brown for your precision, insight and hard work.

  Thank you to my trusty beta readers John Campos, David Meldrum, Dorothy Roussen, Paul Tod and Louise Braddock; I truly appreciate your precious time and your honesty.

  Thank you Lad Agabekov and Jérôme Pellegrini for your advice on sound engineering; Rebecca Bradley for information on police procedural matters; Laura and Matthew Gowen for legal and courtroom advice.

  I’m grateful to Abe Souza, the winner of my ‘Name The Band’ competition, who came up with the perfect name for satanic black metal band Vox Inferi.

  Thank you again to Rachel Gilbey at Rachel’s Random Resources, Sam Missingham at Lounge Books, Bob Stone at Write Blend, Hannah Hargrave, and the incredibly supportive community of Crooked Cat authors.

  And last but by no means least, thank you to everyone who has been reading and reviewing my books. It means the world to me, and I hope you enjoy this third instalment.

  About the Author

  Catherine Fearns is from Liverpool, UK. Her first novel, Reprobation, was published by Crooked Cat Books in October 2018. As a music journalist she has written for Pure Grain Audio, Broken Amp and Noisey. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Offshoots, Toasted Cheese, Succubus, Here Comes Everyone and Metal Music Studies. She has a degree in History from Oxford University and a Masters from the London School of Economics, and prior to becoming a writer she worked as a financial analyst and breastfeeding counsellor. She lives in Geneva with her husband and four children.

  Also by Catherine Fearns

  Reprobation

  Consuming Fire

  Sound

  ‘I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature’

  Edvard Munch, 1892

  ‘I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.

  How, then, am I mad?’

  Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-tale Heart, 1843

  ‘He who has an ear, let him hear...’

  Revelation 2:7

  One

  Close your eyes, stand still, don’t breathe. Reduce the world to its sounds. Birdsong, the drone of traffic, children’s laughter, a baby’s cry. On this autumn evening in Liverpool, waves crash on the beach and a harsh wind whips past the eardrums so that they ring with the sounds of primordial seas. In pubs across the city glasses clink, voices cackle with laughter, the bass thuds from a thousand stereo speakers. Traffic noise on the ring road is broken by the Doppler squeal of an ambulance, veering through as cars shuffle awkwardly to the kerb. A passenger jet roars overhead, newly taken off from John Lennon airport; its lights twinkle into the navy sky then disappear. And then there are the sounds we can’t hear. The beating of hearts, whales calling to each other under vast oceans, a star exploding in a distant galaxy a million light years away.

  On the Napier housing estate, there is a sense of intangible yet profound unease. There has been for weeks, perhaps months. There’s a bad vibe here. Even the least paranoid amongst the residents can no longer deny it, can no longer avoid the possibility that they are going mad. There’s something in the air, or the water, or the ground. Too many people are sick; the doctor’s surgery can’t cope with the array of illnesses, it doesn’t make sense. People avoid silence, because the silence is not a real silence. There’s a hum, an almost – almost – imperceptible ringing in their ears, like tinnitus. It’s definitely the mobile phone mast that overlooks the estate. Or it’s definitely the nearby windfarm, that white noise that carries across the waves. Or it’s the train from that new underground station nearby making the earth vibrate. Or there’s poison in the ground, chemicals in the water, coal dust in the air. As paranoia sets in, the possibilities are endless.

  At Liverpool University, Professor Robin Neilson is still at his desk, long after the rest of the department has gone home for the evening. He doesn’t so much hear all these sounds as see them. The synaesthesia that has blessed him, or afflicted him, since birth renders his world a constant assault of coloured waveforms. People are their own spectrograms, the frequencies of their voices resonating in his brain with the accuracy of a sonometer. Behind his eyes he sees the dance of soundwaves in three dimensions and colours, as if he could reach out and touch them.

  This is his gift; this is his curse. He wears earplugs most of the time, since hearing music – in shops, elevators, on television, in the street – is a nightmare of sensory overload. Only the darkness of sleep provides him with relief, and even then his own blood vessels dance behind his eyes as they pulse, and his dreams are plagued by discordant music. Perhaps in a time before this, his natural form of virtual reality would have simply rendered the world more beautiful. But in the age of machines, with the birth of noise and t
he bombardment of electronic media, we are all synaesthetes. Prisoners of over-stimulation, we anchor ourselves on the moorings of our senses, striving to pluck the meaningful from the meaningless as the ocean of sound crashes against us. Becoming ever more detached from each other as we seek artificially heightened sensations, we are numbed to the noise surrounding us. But Professor Neilson cannot tune it out. He is swallowed up by his hyper-rich reality, lost in infinite repercussions and reverberations that are too overwhelming to ever be consonant or harmonious. Always dissonant, always disturbed.

  He chose to cope by studying the phenomenon that afflicts him, and has built a successful career as a psychoacoustician. A renowned expert on the effects of sound on human health, author of many books and papers, and sought after by architects and town planners the world over. This is perhaps the only job he could have done. And he is perhaps the only person who could do it this well.

  But recently something has been troubling him more than the busy waveforms that crowd his consciousness. A new frequency has entered the equation. He knows it is not his mind finally giving in to madness, after all these years of resistance, because his equipment is also registering it loud, clear, and accurate. And someone knows that he knows. Professor Neilson has been followed, warned, threatened, told to leave it alone. But how can he ignore the messages in his own head? He doesn’t know who to trust – his computer has been hacked and he suspects spies everywhere. But he has taken precautions. The recording he has made lies on top of the in-tray in his office, ready to be posted to the police in the morning. He wonders if it will be enough.

  And then, suddenly, he is aware of yet another frequency on his register. A hostile frequency. A binaural assault with a timbre so agonising that he would do anything to stop it. He can’t actually hear anything, but the pressure in his eardrums builds exponentially until they both burst simultaneously. Horribly aware of what is about to happen, he lunges for the store cupboard, where he can be safe in the chamber he has created. But the door is locked. Why is it locked? Someone has been here, set this up. He pulls at the handle in desperation, willing it to open, because it is too late to search for his keys. Every organ in his body quivers with increasing power until he can feel his liver, lungs and brain being crushed, his skin contracting around his bones, the blood bubbling and forcing itself in and out of his heart. He clutches at himself, staggers about in terror, screaming, although he knows it’s too late now. He wishes there was a window to jump out of, anything.

  But there is no need, for the sound has upset the rhythm of his heart as much as the rhythm of his thoughts. The muscle pulses out of time, then judders to a halt. In the infinite silence of death he will no longer be troubled by noise.

  Two

  ‘You know, don’t you, Detective? You know about the child, I can see it in your eyes. She needs to be protected. You can protect her for me.’

  Detective Inspector Darren Swift and Detective Constable Colette Quinn were back on the eleventh floor of Kenilworth House council block, perched on a coarse two-seater sofa in Dr Andrew Shepherd’s flat. It was almost exactly one year since they had last been here, when Shepherd was the prime suspect in a horrific murder case. Darren and Colette had discovered his home-made genetics laboratory, and his living room crammed with scientific text books, religious texts, post-it notes scrawled with diagrams, the rantings of an apparent madman. His experiments had resulted in a series of brutal kidnappings, torture and murder, but they had also resulted in the miracle birth of a baby, who was now in foster care.

  Andrew Shepherd was very fragile now, after weeks in a coma suffering from severe hypothermia, followed by months in a psychiatric unit. He had aged, and was painfully thin, but there was a light in his eyes. He had been released from the unit and deemed fit to give evidence at the forthcoming trial. Darren and Colette were here to take his pre-trial statement. And, despite the psychiatrist’s ruling, he had clearly not changed his mind about anything; his walls were still covered in frantic drawings and Bible quotations, and there were signs of ongoing research everywhere. As far as Colette was concerned, he was a nutter like the murderers. But Darren was not so sure.

  Darren had struggled with the Shepherd case, his first as a detective inspector, and after several weeks of false leads Superintendent Canter had removed him and replaced him with the more experienced DCI McGregor. But Darren hadn’t let go, and it was ultimately his quick thinking that had caught the killers. Now that the trial was coming up, he had been assigned the role of Officer In Case. This meant preparing the police documentation, liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service, and keeping witnesses informed of the processes ahead. It also had the convenient benefit of keeping him in a desk job while he recovered from the horrors of the summer.

  ‘All right, Dr Shepherd, I think that’s everything. Your solicitor will be in touch, and we’ll no doubt see you in court in a few weeks. Nothing to worry about if you just tell the truth, as you’re doing here.’

  The detectives got up to leave and were followed by Shepherd, who shuffled behind them to the front door. As they turned around on the doorstep to say goodbye, Shepherd suddenly gripped Darren’s arm.

  ‘Remember, Detective. She needs to be protected.’

  Having taken their leave, Darren and Colette leaned over the balcony of Kenilworth House, one of the grimmest buildings in Liverpool but with the consolation of a spectacular view. The city ranged out before them in all its miscellaneous glory. It was a crisp autumn morning and a pale sun sparkled on the silver buildings – the Catholic cathedral, the mirrored Pinnacle Building – while bringing out the richness of the auburn Anglican cathedral and the red-brick housing estates. The rumble of traffic was broken by a rattling Merseyrail train that rushed out of its tunnel towards Southport.

  Colette shivered in the chilly air, inched closer to Darren and gave him an affectionate shove.

  ‘Mate, it’s so good to have you back. How do you feel?’

  ‘It’s good to be back, yeah. I was going mad at home.’

  ‘I know someone else who’s going mad at home, and all,’ she said, motioning behind her to Shepherd’s front door. ‘Is he really going to say that stuff in court? About genes for sin? It gives me the creeps. He really thinks that baby is some sort of angel.’

  ‘Fortunately he’s not the one on trial.’

  Darren gazed out towards the river where the Mersey Ferry, with a friendly honk, began its journey from the docks across to Seacombe on the Wirral side of the river, buffeted by gentle brown waves. As if in reply, the twin Kingsway vents on either side of the river emitted deep moans, one after the other, as a breeze no doubt gusted through the tunnels underneath. Darren and Colette smiled at each other in recognition and said simultaneously, ‘It’s the ghost!’ Listening out for the tunnel ghost had become a minor obsession amongst Liverpudlians recently, and a source of much hilarity. But Darren’s amusement faded with the familiar stab of guilt he felt these days every time he smiled.

  Preparing the Shepherd case for trial should have been a way to ease back into work after Darren’s compassionate leave. It was three months now since Matt’s death, and he had festered in the house for far too long. Most people assumed he had been dragging himself through the days, drinking, sleeping, crying. How could he explain to them what he was really thinking? Everyone knew he blamed Shawn Forrest for the fire that had caused Matt’s death, that his vendetta had moved from Max Killy to Shawn Forrest. But could he possibly explain what else he knew? Or thought he did…

  She needs to be protected. Shepherd’s words echoed those of Thomas Kuper, that day at Matt’s funeral. That made two children Darren had been asked to protect. Shepherd’s baby daughter, living with foster parents in Blundellsands, was believed by Shepherd to be a sort of Second Coming, a child genetically modified in the womb to be born without sin. And across the road was footballer Thomas Kuper’s son, almost the same age, whom Kuper believed to be in the clutches of a demonic cult.

&nbs
p; It doesn’t matter what is true; it matters what people believe. Helen Hope’s words also rang in his head. Thank goodness for Helen. Despite his well-meaning friends and colleagues, his odd relationship with the ex-nun was the only thing that gave Darren any comfort.

  Colette’s radio crackled into life. ‘Any units in the vicinity of L69, please.’

  ‘This is Delta Charlie, on Kenilworth Street, over.’

  ‘A body at the university, Oxford Street 30, Science Building. There’s a potentially suspicious item so we need officers at the scene, over.’

  ‘On our way, ETA 5 minutes,’ said Colette, raising her eyebrows at Darren. ‘A body at the university? Just when we thought it was going to be a quiet day. Race you to the car…’

  Three

  Darren and Colette parked behind an ambulance that was stationed outside the university’s Department for Architecture, Engineering and Acoustics. Inside, the corridors were lined with anxious students huddled against the walls in groups, their hushed mutterings leading Darren and Colette past signs to Listening Rooms, a Reverberation Chamber, Wind Tunnel, a Robotics Lab; a whole other world only minutes away from police headquarters. When they arrived at Professor Neilson’s office they were greeted by duty pathologist Dr Colvin, accompanied by the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene. Professor Neilson’s body was slumped face-down against the back wall of the room. Dr Colvin read to them from his notes.