Sound: A Supernatural Thriller

By Catherine Fearns

There's a bad vibe.

A professor of psychoacoustics is found dead in his office. A suspected heart attack, until a second acoustician dies under similar circumstances.

Meanwhile, an outbreak of mysterious illnesses on a council estate, outbursts of unexplained violence in a city centre nightclub, and stran

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northodox Press
• Release date: Jun 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781915179937

Book preview

Cover Image: Sound by Catherine Fearns, book three in the Reprobation Series. The cover shows a bald and bearded metalhead, his body is completely tattooed, he has a dark expression.

CATHERINE FEARNS is an author and musician from Liverpool, UK. Known for her award-winning Reprobation series of crime fiction novels, Catherine’s music journalism and short fiction has also been widely published.

As a musician, she is a composer with Universal Edition and her solo albums are available from Blue Spiral Records. She also plays guitar and keyboards in all-female heavy metal group Chaos Rising

Follow Catherine on Twitter @Metalmamawrites

Instagram @catherine_fearns

Website catherine-fearns.com

Sound written by Catherine Fearns published by Northodox Press

Northodox Press Ltd

Maiden Greve, Malton,

North Yorkshire, YO17 7BE

First published by Darkstroke in Great Britain in 2018

Copyright © Catherine Fearns 2023

Catherine Fearns asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Northodox Press.

Ebook Edition © April 2023 ISBN: 9781915179937

Version: 31 April 2023

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For my children

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

1 - Vox Inferi

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

1 - Ars Adrammelechum

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

2 - Ars Adrammelechum

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

3 - Ars Adrammelechum

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

2 - Vox Inferi

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Epilogue

Extract from Lamb of God - Book 4

Acknowledgements

‘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

CHAPTER 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’s a sense of intangible yet profound unease. Present for weeks, perhaps even 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, 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 could be the mobile phone mast overlooking the estate. Or the nearby wind farm, permeating a white noise carried across the waves. Maybe it’s the train from that new underground station nearby, vibrating through the earth. Or there’s poison in the ground, chemicals in the water, coal dust in the air. As paranoia sets in, the possibilities become 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 sound waves 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 the bombardment of electronic media, everyone is a synaesthete. Everyone is a prisoner of over-stimulation, anchoring themselves on the moorings of their senses, striving to pluck the meaningful from the meaningless as the ocean of sound crashes against them. Becoming ever more detached from others as they seek artificially heightened sensations, numbed to the noise surrounding them. However, Professor Neilson cannot tune it out. He is swallowed up by his hyper-rich reality, lost in infinite repercussions and reverberations, too overwhelming to 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.

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, and told to leave it alone. How could he ignore the messages in his 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.

Suddenly, he’s 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.

CHAPTER 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 homemade genetics laboratory, and his living room crammed with scientific textbooks, religious texts, post-it notes scrawled with diagrams, the rantings of an apparent lunatic. 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 there to take his pre-trial statement. 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 little better than the murderers. However, Darren wasn’t 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 ultimately, it was his quick thinking that caught the killers. Now the trial was coming up. He’d 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 redbrick housing estates. A rattling Merseyrail train rushing out of its tunnel towards Southport broke the rumble of traffic.

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 how could he possibly explain what else he knew? Or what he thought he knew…

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.

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 five 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…’

CHAPTER 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.

‘Time of death around ten o’clock last night. Suspected heart attack, although he doesn’t look like an obvious heart attack candidate - he seems fit and healthy. Medical records may tell us more. We can do the autopsy as soon as the body has been formally identified.’

‘Who found him?’ Darren asked the duty police officer.

‘One of his students, guv. Name of Marcel Rees. He’s waiting in the student common room down the corridor.’

‘Right, we’ll have a word with him after we’ve looked around here, then we’ll contact the family. But if it doesn’t look suspicious, why were we called in?’

‘There’s just this one thing - on his desk.’

The police officer motioned to Professor Neilson’s workspace, a disorderly spread of documents and textbooks. His in-tray was piled high, and on top lay a brown jiffy envelope, addressed in blue biro to the Major Incident Team, Merseyside Police.

‘Look at this, Colette. He was about to send us something.’

With gloved hands, Colette picked up the package. ‘Feels like a USB. Yeah, it’s definitely a USB. I’ll bag that, and we can check it as soon as we get out of here.’

Darren surveyed the room carefully. Claustrophobic in its windowlessness, it was an eclectic combination of recording studio, study, and sitting room. The professor’s chaotic desk was flanked by a raised sound board and an array of audio and technical equipment; stacks of amplifiers, cables, microphones, items that the detectives didn’t recognise. Behind the desk there was a seating area with a sofa and armchair, and a small coffee table which had been upended, the remnants of a takeaway strewn on the floor.

‘Something happened here,’ said Darren.

‘Yes,’ agreed Colvin. ‘I imagine the heart attack happened while he was eating. He stood up and then staggered over here.’ He went through the motions of Shepherd’s potential path.

‘But why would he have struggled towards the back of the room instead of towards the exit? What’s in here?’ Darren was looking at a door in the wall adjacent to Neilson’s body. With gloved hands, and careful not to touch the corpse, he tried the door. It was locked. ‘Can we get a key for this?’

While they waited for the police officer to request a key from the departmental office, Dr Colvin packed up his battered leather case and folded his spectacles into the breast pocket of his tweed blazer.

‘Well, Detective, I think my work here is done for now. I expect I shall be seeing you at the trial of our illustrious Calvinist friends. Three weeks today, I understand? I must admit I’m intrigued to finally come face to face with our culprits. I believe it’s the most fascinatingly gruesome set of crimes I have encountered in all my time. Although I imagine none of us are looking forward to revisiting the case of young Chelsea.’

They all nodded at the grim memory of the mutilated body of Chelsea McAllister; the horrific inversion of a baptism that had desecrated the altar of an abandoned church. As Dr Colvin left, the police officer returned with a set of keys from reception. Darren opened the door in the back wall and pushed it open. He and Colette peered inside to avoid stepping over the body.

‘I think he was sleeping in here, look.’

It was a tiny room, probably designed as a store cupboard, but there were no shelves. Instead, the walls and ceiling were lined with dark grey foam shards, hundreds of baleful spikes of them. The floor space was also covered with the same