Speaker 1: The hallways carpet absorbed every footstep, but the hum was
always there, low familiar buzz behind the walls, something more
than electricity and lessen silence. I was halfway through my shift,
the storm outside pouting the glass block windows of w
qguem with hard southern rain, and the transmitter room smelled
of melting dust and old coffee. The station at night
was a well built for ghosts, a honeycomb of bose
and old plywood desks, ancient posters curling at the corners,
silent rock mounts, and obsolete tipedecks lightning the walls like
museum pieces. Alone, I could feel every shape and wire,
every scratch of adhesive label from broadcast paths, each one
telling stories long since faded to static. I didn't much
like storms never had, but radio waits for no one.
The building was an island to night, the red Dino
sign across the street of blurred smudge, and the surging
river behind it already threatening the loading dock. I logged
the thunder and counter lightning on my clip or counted
out the seconds, and told myself, not for the first time,
that this was the safest place to be. An all
brick temple sealed off from the city, humming with secrets
only transmitters. Heard a weak bulb flicker buzzing intermittently above
the tech bench, and I instinctively ducked, careful not to
hit my head on the loose fixture. Officially, my job
was glorified janitorial, a wark circuit every ire, checked each
meter and load balance, watched for surges in a power
read out, and verified backups running. But this boothed the
heart of it. What we called the cradle needed old hands,
nearer text criped, but I'd be netstaffed since the turn
of the century, and routine settled deep into my bones.
I poured a copp of Staley night Folgers, a bit
of reek, waking me up. I made my way to
the engineer's corner for the log butkue of those battered
useless sledges nobody bothered with since everything went digital except
in emergencies. To night. It sat open to a fresh page,
one whose sharp white looked bizarre after so many smadged
yellowing sheets. I almost turned it over and moved on,
blamed the damp for the flicker in my skin, but
on impulse, a leank closer There were columns of dates,
cramped initials, and then the oddest bits, lines of text
and our blocky print. One ree left during storm, not
seen again. Another underneath was a quote of voices under static,
someone humming at the margin, a skull, two jagged peaks,
an M and a D are mistakable, and the nervous
flourish stood out in exet blight just so into the page,
M Danel, I froze muck hovering above the batter mass
night's surface. That name belonged to a legend, a dead
radio myth. When I was a kid. The story went
that Danel was the best engineer anyone ever had. A
living Swiss army knife, could jerry rig two and tennis
into one off, fix a frying boat with a paper clip. Then,
after a run of especially bad storms in two thousand three,
Danel didn't come in, hadn't clocked out, hadn't called home.
Please searched the alleyways and riverbanks, but all they ever
found was a badge and a handwritten note on air back.
After weather clears. To locals in the know, it became
a kind of black humor. Someone missing maybe there with
Danel haunting the airwaves. But this handwriting, that unique steeple
like m, had not been on any old lad I'd
ever seen. How had it ended up back in circulation?
And who took the trouble to tear a page away
only to replace it careful to liber almost like a warning.
I slipped the page loose from the rain, tucking it
into the inner pocket of my windbreaker. It left a
phantom pressure at my chest, as if it weighed twice.
What paper should I glanced at the security feed, nothing
but empty holes and the pulsing blue white of lightning.
The rain knocked in uneven rhythms against the glass. I
tried to try harder to convince myself it was a
clerical joke, someone's idea of grave nostalgia, But my fingers
trembled anyway. I left my coffee and finished in the table,
and made another round, counting the lights and humming distractions
until the tone for the next outstop of the clock
broadcast snapped me back to routine. But there was no
routine any more, not now that the quiet had a name,
and it stared up at me from the pocket of
my coat. Most people thought of late night radio was
a graveyard for cranks and burnouts. Before a certain breed
of tech, it was a life line. I can trace
every road in the parking lot, every faintly sweet patch
of milky by the back staircase, by memory alone. My
first job was the ancient sat a day graveyard slot,
living off Staale, vending machine crackers and half spilled cans
of cola. For a while, before computers did everything, every
minute of air time was negotiation. Werewouting dead wires, patching
together receiver stacks from other people's scrap. It suited me.
The world outside spun too fast, too loud, and in
the booth time and sideways that routine started at sunset.
Would bark beneath the flickering sodium lamp, walk past the
half bordered win till wishtray cats sometimes watched, then through
the heavy door with a faint smell of machine oil. Inside.
The staff was perpetually and flocks a handful of life
or sandwich between clusters of new hires. Night Djay fresh
from college, and the old guard who never left a note,
just drifted away. Some memories surface. Edna, the jazz host
who trade slices a day old linen pie for cheating
the delay just a fraction, so her good Night's sounded crisper. Downie,
who once managed to take a country ballad over the
Maya's speech as a prank and never lived it down.
Thursday morning crewe, those who caught the dawn sliding up
over the city like a cold hand, always blurryed and
hopeful for gossip. The day's shift has kept their distance.
After all. Night people shared a secret language, the eyres,
between midnight and summrise, on the same as the workaday world.
They never felt neighborly. We built traditions. Old Mickey kept
a row of duct tape in every room just in case.
Every Halloween someone snuck a squeaky clan horn into the
newsman's booth. A handful of us exchanged Drift's store gifts
on Christmas. One year I found a Tory receiver that
could still pick up short with and we spent a
week talking to each other in moss code, up and
down the hall. The normal look book before last night
was a record of those tiny rituals. Marke a tape
here local transmission there wrote down who spilled coffee, who
found a mouse in the transmitter cage. For every moment
of boredom. There was an equal and opposite bit of weirdness,
the overnight game of guessing which color would be first
to threaten a lawsuit or which Sigmund would ride day
a long as before some one slept and cursed live.
Yet nothing ever seemed truly sinister. Not then. The weirdest
to got was an overact of teenager calling in with
the UFO sightings. While that one year the power failed
and we did a half hour of succumb recreations by
flashlight for me buried in the gentle, static and hum
of unremarkable stores, those were the safe iires, even the
parts that dragged at a rhythm, checked death draws, rotate
reels scanned the ledges since the chief engineer might pop
in for a surprise audit. Whenever there was an anomaly
in not ridden in reading concert of blue, or a
log entry that trailed off in mid sentence, it was
always blamed on a sleepy hand over or too many
shots of espressa. The only time any one looked for
intentionality was when ratings dropped or the FCC did their
rutting audits. No one paid attention to the fragments just
under the surface. I were in my way through the station,
the structure itself colored out of two worlds, the street
side front with a bat of metal signs still late,
and the rear ex factory offices, though all ware house
bones evident in every water stained ceiling tile. The buildings
behind the station were mostly gutted brick throughbucks to some
collapse passed. One had drag Goods Goes painted across fourth
story windows, another strictly condemned junkies smoked up by the
city to spring before our only neighbors after sunset with
those roving cats, city pigeons, and the lone night wairess
at the twenty four hour diner. The hiss of freight trains,
sometimes no more than a trimmer in the floor, a
breed warning through the dark. The alley leading to the
station ran west, collecting runoff every shift. I skirted puddles
left by broken gutters, following the dim red glow of
the on air sign between the time clock. In that
ancient front desk lived another relic an all police scanner
turned down low, still picking up left of a city
dispatch calls from neighborhood's nearly gone. The well outside was
endlessly changing warehouses shut it, new factories rising, their product
lines brief and anemic, but the stations were quick, barely flinched.
It made you feel protected, especially in the deathless dark.
Inside they are held its own logic, the rotary knobs
on the master board, the sticky gaff tape holding together,
the cracked poam cradle, the soft blue glow of the
working clock. I ram my hands across the board, each
dial and took them mat by IROs and years. Even
the hailllines scratch under a line interrey. I checked cartridges
in their wall slots, flicked the buttons in the ancient
delay system. Didn't trust the automations, not really. The logs
were always on my side, confidence growing with every name, date,
and signal checked off the ritual list. All this I
did in the presence of others, and later in the
common brace of solitude, there was peace and scheduled madness
in the way of pulses static. My signal arranged storm
rolling through three highways away where a lost cat report
marked a change of seasons. My parents thought the irons
would be bad for me, but I found my anchor
in the cabling, the tape heads, the nightly proof that technology,
when carefully nursed, could hummer person's anxieties to sleep. It's
not that I never saw strangeness. The night crew sometimes
jerked about the weird an callers. Norman the oracle whose
advice made perfect sense until he tried to repeat it
to anyone, saying Murrow from Third Street who called to
confessed to petty vandalism. The infamous Monday Guide who played
harmonic and til Edna had to mute him. When prank
calls went too far, we showed them off, just another
symptom of the city's nervous insomnia. Sometimes we challenge each
other at ten Bucks, says, no one calls before two
a m. Winter picks Nixon. The odd pauses are static.
Chalk it up to the river or aging transmission lines.
Rarely did suspicion at pace routine. That was, of course,
when the law books had only ordinary errors. It wasn't
until the night I pulled that strange replaced page m
thenal signature unmistakable black and trembling beneath the rain dimmed light,
that I understood hob blind routine can mick you. I'd
spent year's catalog and technical problems, never once thinking old
human habit might be their own hiad and signal, Quietly
beaming unsolved riddles into the night. Prettle scrap in my
pocket carried more static than all the dead air had
ever broadcast. I spent most of the next morning wrestling
with my own skepticism. Surely this was a prank I
left over from last year's April Foll's marathon, or an
over eager into in dusting off local legends. But the
feel of that page, rough edge and wrung, surely that
was real. After my shift ended, I lapped myself linger
by the locked brecker's closet, staring at the painted gray
door behind and not an exit sign. The logs belonged
back here, decades deep, but the official binders had been
left to dust and damp, rarely checked except for the
annual audit. I fished out my own ring of keys
and worked them one by one. Still the muscle memory
was strong. The door gave with a reluctant click, the
smell of old books and cold metal creeping out round
my ankles, careful not to trip any alarms or curious
supervisors if flecked on the dim record room light and
started on the stacks, shelf after shelf of hundretten lodges
from every year, yellowing softly toward time's blankets. I pulled
three at random nineteen eighty six, nineteen ninety seven, and
a batted soft bound mark two thousand four. Some were thin,
crowded with numbers and SI signatures, others thick with inserts
ulf receipts, flashcars crammed in at odd angles. I sampled spines,
looking for curling corners that might belong to replace her
torm page des rose every movement, pricking my nose and
crawling into my throat. The first few logs were a glance,
as boring as ever FCC checklists, DJ's ion ins, notations
for broken microphones, off air accidents, and power outages. I
started to zone out until I noticed something odd. On
a late autumn night in nineteen ninety seven, a full
column for the overnight shift filled with blocky redinitial spidery
where everyone else used blue SK minus three, followed by
signal trouble no callback. Two nights later, g G minus two.
At this time, Coller interrupted static for five men. These
marks weren't lockered by anyone from my eard. Handwriting was
old or formal, and whoever asked k RGG where those
weren't any DJ or engineer I'd ever worked beside? I
turned a three ring binder closer this one in nineteen
eighty six relic and found a similar oddity in a
margin next to scribbled phone line of set rain fade.
Someone had written LB Hurricane not returned, Just initials, small
clues that meant nothing, but on a second look, they
ran through every season as sampled sporadically, but with method,
each odd entry marked to break in time, a skip name,
a slot left blank after midnight, sometimes replaced by a
jagged underline, and a coded word gone left bore out
now returned. The more scant the twitchure I became. I
fumbled from my phone, chewed at the inside of my cheek,
and did something I hadn't done in months. Searched our counties,
missing persons recor as an informal archive, half index through
the local library, half anecdotes remembered by pensioned off cops.
Scrolling through, I started matching initials to new stories piecemeal
and halting des kay A Samoan the Kleine Late Night
DJ disappeared nineteen ninety seven. The Gig a George Gregory
temp engineer, last seen gen. Two thousand and two. Lb
Lori Bascam vanished after a late shift in eighty six.
Story still traded in the local bars, meet raffle crowd
Beside the initials on each page, the same slips of language,
always a phrase that made no sense to any one
not listening for patents not home since the fifth went
up for coffee, not back, a caller waited, hung up
Framed in the context of the plain logbooks, these marks
seemed to deliberate, not just a nod to lost friends,
but a message or a warning, one no one ever
really acknowledged. I foreso laugh. It could have been a crowd, sure,
but it was just as likely the kind of lazy
short and night shifters invent to cover for boredom or mistakes.
But as I shuffled back toward the tech bench, that
nervous crowling disguy from the m Danel page lingered in
my chest. I had to know why were these notations
only present on overnight shifts, never during the break safe ires,
And who other than old hands like me even bothered
with paper logs after the mid oughts except in the
weirdest emergencies. Was this some one's prank or a map
left for those of us awake during the city's loneliest hours.
My own reflection in the beast glass caught sharp in
the next flick of lightning, seemed smaller somehow, You always
think he'd spot a pattern before it gets under your skin.
But the station, as it turned out, was very good
at teaching people to miss what mattered, and to night
the static behind the air was letting me turn away.
It started the way these things always due, by leaning
in a little closer, straining my eyes for one last
hidden mark, a fingered tot, grease print from the past,
or something as ancient as radio itself, a cry for help.
Riding through the hissun noise, I realized, with an easy
thrill that maybe no one else had ever looked twice.
That may be, just maybe the mystery was waiting, precisely
because night after night, the rest of the world slept
through its signal. I tried to shake it, blamed the
weather and lack of sleep, and returned to business as usual.
But the locks stayed with me, heavy and strange in
their silent accusations, while another knight pressed down and the
outside rain made its own kind of gentle, relentless static.
By the next shift, the storm was blowing itself out,
leaving behind a city selict in water and neon. Some
subtle pressure nudged me to return to the old arcoves,
and I obliged. The locks hadn't changed, nor had the
scent of drying paper and distant meldy. I slept in
and grabbed a handful of logs from years that matched
key disappearances, triple checking that the quirks repeated themselves. They did,
always initials, always weird times, spanning not just months, for years,
sometimes decades. One age dog eared and creased boor note
in blue ec to slash fourteen coal to report weather
line dropped gone, Another in sharp black marker simply never
came back in from smoke. The margins failed, with scribbles
mostly hurried and n quite matching any document at hand.
When I lined up the lock anomalies, the odd initials,
the rogue phrasing, the precise times of date, I saw
a cascade of vincent's fitting profectly with the cold cases
that haunted late night Rumor. Each one came with its
own echo of silence, some accompanied by technical notes carrier
feeder two thirteen, a deared er at three one, others
by fragments I could only read as intentionally cryptic warnings
left in quiet ires. Again and again. My doubts started unraveling.
If this was a joke, someone had committed to it
for generations. But it also felt absurd, as the idea
was like pieces of a message, not for the outside world,
but for someone inside, someone like me who read locks
and chased feedback, who lived out their IROs in the
hum of electronics and the company of old ghosts. Determined
not to get spooked, I made a real, methodical project
of it. The next grave out shift, I started pulling tapes,
old sets and reels from pull up bins boxy digital
backups from the first wave of automation. The storage clouset
was cramped, filled with brittle boxes, stacked ats slanting angles.
The tapes went tight and silent. I carried an Armlok
to the back booth and set up an old deck,
prepping an external monitor and blank notepad. My plan was simple,
layout a timeline tape by tape and catalog oddities. Any
interruption for ye or bit of background static that lined
up with one of the notes. I spent long minutes
queuing sources, marking counter ticks is each minute roared by
ambient studio home, bracketed by formal intro as this is
wqh R friendly over night companion, and the background music
of NAT sound beds and clacking vinyl. At first, everything
sounded as routine, as I remembered a DJ bound to
highway accident updates, generic late night dedications. A few hours in, though,
at I bled into an old tape marked Mar three
nineteen ninety seven, had caught it a hiss of flicker
and an even rumble beneath the DJ voice exactly two
of a teen a m right as the logs noted
name I suspected belonged to Samantakline. It was a nothing
at first, the snatch of silence, then a heartbeak wick
repeat of some warp background noise. Irwan turned up the
monitor and fell a display of a knees break down
the back of my neck. When isolated, the static grew sharper,
almost structured, a less white noise than an easy repetition.
Flavor went slow down speed up. Once in the gap
following a dead air incident, I caught what might have
been a whisper, short and muffled, unpeaceable something maybe like
seven voices, or maybe it was send voices. Each playber
carried a different layer and new ghosts. Gesturing at the
edge of hearing. I logged every anomally, writing down the time,
stump and associated initials. When I cross referenced those times
against the logs in my battered note brick, every instance
of missing DJA vanished temptex, a sudden carrier fade match
perfectly with some extractable art fact, a repetition aclipped off phrase,
a burst of distant laughter or near sobbing that no
normal broadcast would have carried. Not every tape gave evidence,
but enough did the once tie to my list of
initials that my skin prickled each time I keyed up
another year, I grew reckless. I took my discoveries to
the only people who might care, the scattered old host
and DJ, those few who survived the churn of night
side radio. My first calls were to Edna, whose JADGE
show rescued me from total border my first winter. She
said she remembered weird callers always late, insistent, something off
about the pitch of the pleadings they had asked to
be heard, she recalled, never named a tune, she just
said to keep the frequency open. Sometimes, she said, she
caught their voices laid over city noise, sounding older than
the lions themselves. I asked about tapes, loakes. She laughed
a little too quickly. We always blamed Griminin's didn't want
to think too hard. You learn not to ask working
IROs like that. I pressed her, really pressed her about
the people who went missing. She paused, then muttered patterns maybe,
but who'd believe it, and hung up before any one
could say good bye. My timeline grew sharper oven nights.
I mapped initials, agains, stuffs, schedules printed in old binders
and drawn from my own, and even memory, names that
hung like ghosts between broadcast blocks. When the evidence ran cold,
I thought of Danel again. How their old badge was
found damp beneath the back of generator. How no one
ever found the keys occurred. I wondered who had signed
at last page, or if it was a warning meant
for some one who would know enough to be afraid.
The pattern kept up, as if each rush of static
marked changing of the god. The old voices replaced the
familiar name's gone. I fell asleep twice at my desk
while rewinding tapes, my head buzzing with alien rhythms, not psalms,
just unexplained signals in the reflection of my monitor. I
sometimes thought I saw a shadow of Flecker, some one
at my back, tracing the movements of my investigation with
unseen eyes. One night, deep in a thunderstorm that snapped
powered for blocks, I stumbled into the boost just as
the search triggered an automatic playbo one of the oldest
backup emergency tapes missiled under incident. The recording started rof
warbling in an out of a steady hum, nothing more
first than artifacts of a failing head. Then a voice
cut through, clear as a struck bell. Not a caller,
not a DJA, but an off air whisper, perfectly mashing
a phrase lifted straight from the love Brooks left during storm.
Not seen again, I scrabbled through my memory. I knew
that voice better than my own. It belonged to donn It,
the host who vanished a decade ago, presumed to have
moved away for a job nobody ever confirmed on tape.
His voice was slow, disjointed, as if reading a line
written for him by someone else, more static, more shifting overlays,
as if two tapes ran together. I reaplayed it a
half dozen times, freezing at the exact spot his voice warbled. Impossible,
I told myself, But there it was, Donny's easy immability,
stuttered with flat rehearse train line, trouble if you can
hear me, and then a squeal of feedback, overwhelming everything
before cutting dead. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. It finally
hit in a pit of my chest that all these
and complete stores were more than accidents or fatigue. The
evidence was undeniable. Now scheduled times, scheduled absences, and cryptic
warnings tailored to each disappearance, a chain of inheritances, each
passing to the next graveyard watcher. I knew, though, I'd
need more than ghostly forces and sleepless paranoid to prove
what I feared. There had to be something material, something
that would show me this was not just collective anxiety
or worse imagined. When routine falls apart, people look for
ancas I needed mine. So night after night, I circled
closer to the hidden heart of w Qtchew. My logs
sprawled across the booth, scattered with names lost to decades
of static. The more I followed the echoes, the more
the boundaries between coincidents and intent blurred. It was near
dawn on my sixth night of search, and when the
lost piece found me. The cold arc haff room, sealed
in dust, held a secret. Had never stumbled upon a brick,
one of dozens behind the main real vault, loose enough
to slip free with the twist behind it, which, with
a caution that broke my breath, was an envelope, dry
and brittle with time AND's numb. I pried it open,
scattering grains of scent, and discrossed the desk inside. More
love book pages, torn in fox and receding in zebia.
Every page, more reference, as always to some one missing,
always traced to the dead eyres. The handwriting shifted to
some shop, some childish one, unmistakably my father's. He'd work
nights when I was a child, briefly with sickly tension,
and left with that notice. Some of the entries were
coated with the same little signals he'd used at home
for notes to my mother, Dots and slashes where vowls
should be backward, as is for guilty secrets. My heart thudded,
pulse roaring in my ears. The implication was sudden and inescapable.
This was not random. This patent coal inns vanished, distressed
statical ink generations, looping every graveyard keeper into a ritual
no one could name, but from which no one escaped, unchanged.
The line between victim and watcher, bystender and participant was
thinning by the eyre. If I kept following, if I
scratched even a little deeper, maybe I'd find out who
was making the list, on who'd be next to sign
beneath and suddenly routine was more dangerous than any storm outside.
The last shimmer of lightning faded the quiet eyres. Those restless,
humming memory soaked diers stretched ahead as if waiting for
my next move. The fullorescent light above the vault rattled
in its sleeve, casting a winded hail across the desk.
As I shuffled through the envelopes jagged stack, my father's
coat leaped out at me, backward letters and punctured zero
slipped in between cramped lines of shaky black script. One
fragment read listen at three seventeen lined eye cannot reach
another bore or only numbers dates I recognized as both
the local branaut the summer I started, and the dates
a matha cleone had gun missing. Two pages were glued
at the corner by what looked like ancient tape, carelessly
peeled apart and then rejoined, the residue, sticky even now
so many years off. The more I read, the less
I understood, and the more my own name scrolled in
my father's hand only half finish needled the edge of panic.
A muta clang echoed down the corridor, as though a
door its one shirt in the dark. My pulse leapt.
I pressed the page's tight in my fist, straining to
hear over the building seendless mechanical exhalation. Silence follow broken
only by the tide of rain against glass and the
faint electronic tick of a breaker in the wall. For
a moment, every hair on my arm stood up. I
stuffed the envelope down the sleeve of my windbreaker, breath
fogging in the cold musk of the archive. For the
first time in months. The sensation of being watch prickled
my neck, not just the surveillance feed, of the indifferent
gaze of cameras, but the sense that someone or something
followed the movement of my thous through the ancient paperwork.
Clutching my evidence, I foot back to the hallway. A
red exit signed cast its sullen glow onto the carpet,
barely illuminating the scarf baseboards and the half sealed fire
door at the far end. I forced my steps casual,
trying not to show the jitter beneath my skin, shoving
speck Key's back in my pocket, the envelope crinkling at
my ribs. Half Way to the control room, they undercompassed alive.
A burst of static first, then Edna's crack laugh. Rain's
got you jumpy, eh, if you're here, deal with Studio
Two's phone line for me keeps on blinking. I pressed
the talk button to answer. Voice drained, Sure, give me five.
Edna wasn't supposed to be on to night, but her
voice was a comfort, bretting me back toward habit. I
ducked into Studio two, flicking on the desk lamp. The
phone console flashed in airrow lines one and three blinking,
both unlabeled in the schedule. I thumbed through the coal log,
double checking. From somewhere behind the console, A faint distorted
feet back rows, not music, not voice, just that modulated
ridmi pulse that always seemed to hover beneath real audio.
Wire is tangled beneath the desk, A snarl of adapters
and faded masking tape. I braced myself, crouched and started
checking connections, my breath pressed hard against my chest, sweat
prickling despite the draft. On a whim, I picked up
the receiver and listened, hoping for nothing but the flat
drone of a vacant circuit. Instead, a faint sound cut
through a scrape and click of a shuffling movement on
the other end. I held my breath as static swelled.
Then a string of whispers, indistinct tumbled through far away,
yet urgent. I pressed their recording button, praying the ancient
mini tape deck was still functional enough to capture this.
There was a child like cadence to the muttering, high trembling,
as if for citing a memorized list or prayer. Then,
just as quickly the line went dead in silence. Pulled
in the cradle, a yankedophone, cord loose, nerves ragged. The
only sound left was the gentle fizz of rain. I
placed the receiver back in its holster and cradled the tape,
marking it hastily for later. For a moment, I sat still,
staring at the scuff surface of the phone. Out of habit,
I s called another note into my own pocket look book,
handshaking as I tried to capture the rush of details
before they faded. Studio two two thirty one are child
voice listing names. Back in the corridor, the lights flickered
once twice, and then started on a good night. Such
quarks were barely noticed to night. They felt like the
building's own polls, one beating in time of my fear.
When I made my way back toward the nerve center
of the station, Edna had left a note pin to
the console, lying cleared good night. The pen was her
usual thick green, but the flourish at the end wavered uncertain,
as if she too had been interrupted. Maybe she'd gone
to the break room, maybe she'd left for good. The
sort of thing that was supposed to be impossible, but
now struck me as the only logical move. I hankered
in the booth, closed my eyes, and forced myself to
piece together everything there was largericire. I could feel it,
every missing person, every code, every instance. The air whives
were patented. These were not exidents or prude a stokes
among board employees. They were signposts, a language demanded by
the wild hum of the station after midnight. Some one
maintained this ritual, no one dared end it. The envelope
on my lap felt like a blade. I spread out
each page, layering them according to date, cross referencing names, forces,
and transmission times. I isolated the moment my father's handwriting
first appeared, marking a shift for a handful of views.
In the late nineties, there was a spike in report
of malfunctions and disappearances, pages thick with new simples and odd,
trembling notes he'd left suddenly, no real reason ever given,
just a letter to my mother and years later, a
tight lit silence whenever I brought it up. What if
this uppoint the night watch was not a coincidence but succession.
Had I been offered this job because some one needed
the line to stay unbroken. The thoughts sat poorly with me,
but I couldn't shake it. The deeper I look, the
more the quiet iro's press around me dense as fog.
I stared at the studio glass, watching the rain refract
distant street lights and split every reflection into a dozen pale,
twitchy after images. I remembered stores I'd heard growing up,
a city where things slipt out of time, where the
river could cling you with tide and static alone, and
no one would remember your absence except the machinery that
hummed you softly into forgetting. The phone rang a sharp
trill in the hush. I jerked toward the monitor, standard
color id e blocked unknown. I hovered over the answer button,
dragged blooming at the base of my spine. I pressed
it for a moment's silence, then layered and almost lost
beneath the hiss are phrased the same as the one
etched in my father's code. We listened, quiet eyre as
we listen, Then nothing but static, though low, hushery, arranging
itself as if waiting for my reply. Lightning flashed again,
splintering wide across the parking lot out by the loading dock.
A shape linger to blurry figure. Neither staff nor vagrant
caught for a flicker in the blue glare. Then it vanished, gone,
in the next sweep of rain. I waited an hour
for the cul to return, stacking the envelope's contents with deliberation,
binding them together with a strip of gaff tape. Whatever
it started with the torn page and a lingering legend
had now rooted itself into my life as surely as
any job or inheritance. The feeling of being watch grew
with every tick of the second hand. There would be
no simple quitting now, no comfort and faint ignorance. My curiosity,
my own place in the chain had already marked me.
The logs knew the air waves would remember, and still
somewhere in the valdostatic a hundred voices pressed to be heard,
relentless and unsatisfied, promising that whatever haunted the radio in
its quietest IROs was not finished with meat or with
any one else whoever sat watch under the trembling lights,
though never fully claimed. That night, the storms hush lingered,
muffled by rankling into the eaves of w qachiw, and
every window pin warped. The encroaching grade to something laden
and a note. I paced slow laps around the dim
studio with the stack of lob book relics pressed to
my chin, catching myself listening for patterns in the drip
of gutter water Life's rivic assurance. But below that, a
second pulse persisted in the walls, in the heads of
the patch panel, in a stack of tips. I dared
not reply just yet. Exhaustion fizzed the edges of everything.
By the time Terry, the morning engineer slogged him with
his usual beat up thermos and non script bull cap,
I'd already stashed the envelope and most of my nose
deep behind shelving and the archives, willing myself to act natural.
He looked rough, He grunted, not quite looking up, as
he said about his routine meter checks. Didn't sleep, I muttered.
Storm didn't let up till nearly five. Terry grinned with
a faint list of private amusement, something halfway between commiseration
and suspicion. Weathers like this always bring out the paragramlines. Yes,
something like that. My voice sounded thin, but Terry wasn't listening.
His boots squotched down the hall oblivis to the dark
undertow churning beneath the station's surface, with the log pages hidden,
a thin film of Bravardo returned. I kept close to
familiar habits were and drew morning hand off, checked our
diagnostics and tapped out the stand of daily checklists for
the next shift. Tech. But under every all clear, under
every dick of the system clocks the revelation not that's code,
Danal's signature, that hush in the line, and the list
of absences marching like spectral footprints through WQH shused decades
of ledgers, the hidden pattern was all but screaming. By
mid afternoon, I wandered my one bedroom apartment in a
state of useless destruction. I had the tapes, my own
scraggly spreadsheet of names, initials and dates, and the envelopes
battered leaves tape five for study. I set the pile
on my bat of kitchen table, doggedly cataloging as if
assembling a crime board, and ends highlighted arrows drawn, the
routine of explanation collapsing under the weight of so much darkness. Eventually,
a crude winter branch diagram spread across my note book.
I wrote them as in names, tracked the dates to
each corresponding strange log notation or quiet eyros entry map,
repeat occurrences of the same in human phrasing. A sick
rush of clarity swept through every interval, matched storm nights,
signal outages, or rare staff transitions. Sometimes these clustered every
few years. Other gaps stretched along, as if giving the
place time to breathe or rebuild vigilance. Even in the
years I had been away, the line persisted, a passing
of the baton I had never noticed, for each hand
off a cryptic notation. They listened in your continuity. The
quiet eros must not sleep. Tracing the lines back, Furst
revealed another detail in the earliest it, his handwriting so
antiqus to be nearly in decipher a black or labele
at the top of one page, a different kind of wreck,
not a shift lock, but an inventory from the year
the radio station first took over the building. More than
half the items listed were initials, paired with an age,
all under fifteen. The coldness of it, the over a
matter of factness, left me trembling. History's current threatened to
sweep me out. The map in front of me implied
either that every graveyard shift crucince the buildings are this
years had served as witness to vanishing, or in some
collective denial, become accomplished to an endless vigil. Neither fully
knowing nor fully ignorant. I saw my father's marked dead
center among the late nineties entries, and my own initial
quady penciled in the margin, almost as if awaiting completion.
I stared bleak and wide eyed, until the sun dissolved
behind heavy cloud and it was time to return for
another ship. That evening, I slipped back through the alley's
hush puddles reflected oaku street light, and the red dinosine
wavered haloed through mist. A fresh sense of ritual overtook
me as I keyed myself in palm sweating, remembering that
every routine might have been a rehearsal for something larger
all these years. Inside, the silence was thick, almost pressurized.
The holes exhaled dust, an ancient air inflected with sharp
oily tanks. The control boosts blue cloth had a new age,
a naturally perfect a kind of surveillance, you could feel.
I checked the locks for that day there in block
script midnute slot be M signal anomaly drop A two
forty seven, precisely the same cryptic phrasing that had marked
so many disappearances. Was someone warning me, repeating a ritual.
I paged through other locks. The new entry knit tightly, compulsively,
always after eyos, each one. A faint echo of the
old language had found the rest of the crew. Datimers
and weakened ers continued their oblivious journe To the untrained eye,
nothing had changed. Only I saw the chain. I knew
the okave room wooden to answers, not any more, not
in a way the world could see. But the tapes
tho zoddires of call and shows and midnight music hum
the living record. I needed to break it wide open.
I cleaned across the heads of my sete deck, plugged
in headphones, and flicked through my love book for tens
tied most closely to missing staff. I started isolating audio,
boosting spectral layers, nudging me frequencies, spooling and respooling through
walls of static. It was mind numbing, like decoding a
signal under deep sea pressure. But the disturbances are uncovered.
They want normal tape flaws one three recordings, the oldest
from nineteen eighty two, the news from my own first
year of solo shift. I identified points where under the
broadcast host voice, faintant like sounds swelled and faded, never
quite decipherable. My loading cop is into my batted laptop
and running cheap engineering plugins, I started to peel away
layers of hissing, then overlay spectral in versions to make
speech patterns leap out. On my second night running the scotlet,
I found it wedged under a DJ drove farewell, just
beneath the dead deer gap and the white forth of tape.
Hiss A sequence emerged, a triplet pulse, then a phrase
repea did and whispered rounds of quiet IROs remember us,
not once, but in slight, disorienting intervals, as if a
crowd encircled the microphone, cycling in an out of phase.
It was chillingly childlike, the cadence that of recitation lesson
or prayer frozen. I played dissection over the sound sent
a jolt threw me each time, the way the voices
would have lap move apart, then collapse into a burst
of static when the staff returned on air. Always this
happened at the hour between two ten and three zero.
Each log and normally each coated absence traced to a
point where the remembrance freezed surface in the spectral doubt
of the recording. Then, like a poison seed, a second
realization in one segment, recorded a summer night, when I
myself had taken over the midnight slot of voice beneath
the chant recited a list of names, not just the
older initials. One was clearly audible, a soft naisal Mickey,
then Donnie, and a garbled inflection that unmistakably sounded like
my own. It whispered Benjamin. No reply, next watch. Hearing
my name uttered by a child's voice that couldn't possibly
exist made my vision swim in the headphone's heat. As static.
The logs held facts, but the tapes held accusation and worse.
In debt, days blurred as I mentally cataloged build out
the chart on my kitchen wall, pages tacked with cold sweat, names, times, connections.
I called old friends again for confirmation, but none wanted
to linger over anecdotes, just stores set. One hated the
over nights. The quiet gets in your head, said another.
No one admitted to having seen the patent, but their
jittery manner, the way they felt silent when I said
quiet iris made clear that this was a shared affliction,
one you could only circumnavigate by pretending it was just fatigue.
At night, my own phones started ringing offshift. Twice. The
line was dead when I answered in no sound, just
the long exhale of the city pressing to the edge
of hearing. The third time, a pale synthetic voice hovered
under static. It do not break the chain. I recorded it,
but the audiophile shrank to nothing. Each attempt to isolate
the collar's toe. My own complicity inevitable. As blood weighed
bitter and hot. Was I keeping the vigil or simply
next in line for a reasure? Each detail I uncovered
seemed to verify both. I craved the presence of anyone
who might verify someone with bespit. Outside the coil of
radio knights and encrypted rituals. My mind went Carl the
street is sex coop, who now lived in a rented
room about pawn shop, matter of fact enough to make
sense of city systems, and who once called us for
weather updates before lawn stakeouts. I dug out his number
and dialed, voice trembling, Carl, it's been something's off at
the station. Have time to talk A grunt, hard thunder?
Did a number on your block? Everything covasatic? Not really?
You remember the stores the graveyard, chief, folks, the ones
who just disappeared, Carl, silence tightened. Then always wonder boid
a place had more missing persons than working light bulbs.
I swallowed. Ever hear about any other stations, same kind
of patterns, Another pause, all hesitation and gravel. This room
is old kazo out by the river, two or three
lost in the seventiest Even the u f M joined
to a sign off who never made it home was
not on any police sheet IVRI. But we talked. Some
things better left and solved. Benny sometimes quiets its own
sort of program. Is it local? My voice trembled or
older call side sound old as fatigue? Stations are strange,
Always someone lessening who isn't on payroll. Some folks said,
cold storage buildings often at basements. That's what those old
places used to be before wires and glass. That sort
of history leaves holds no tape fixes. Watch your rows bent,
don't let the radio use your name. He hung up
before I could reply or thank him. The warning echered
cold storage, orphanages, holes beneath the city's tire brick through
my chest. For the rest of the night, I slept
and nervous fits. That day, half dreaming of flicker in transmitters,
the city endlessly rewritten by rain, lines of coated handwriting
culling into the dark. I worked before dusk, bile in
my throat, and resolved to spend the next shift with
rerecor's municipal old news city assessment files, anything to pin
down how deep the pattern lent. The first break came
with a visit to the city's digital archives. Hidden within
mortgage affidavits and land transfer microfilm was w quate Chi's
original property before the station, a cold storage warehouse deeded
in the nineteen thirties to aim municipal children's home. A
paper trail grew the first lease list in the spaces
quite room after ires were restricted in faded cursive, someone
had notated beside set of listed child residents move unknown
again and again. My heart galloped skin prickled at every
transition from orphanage to storage, to radio relay, and finally
modern stations staffless shrank after large storms. The records never
directly said and disappeared, but the names they echoed in
the ledges matched initials and strikeouts. It was disgustingly obvious.
Whatever this was, it had grown fat on loss, and
the building skeled in its long bones and shattered hollows
had grown around the need to forget. I scowled the
timeline out pencil, tearing thin paper, and looked for any
entry that explained what, besides time and repetition, could break
the cycle. If radio was just a medium, were its
prisoners or its chosen witnesses? Every quiet Eyre's phrase in
the loge with hevery remembrance request on tape suggested something
more eager to be heard, unwilling ever to be forgotten.
No snapping. I decided to force clarity through confrontation. No
more hiding, no more passive listening. The pattern required participation.
It I could disrupt it, reveal its dependence. Maybe, just
maybe it could be broken. The next crave virtue I
arrived early, touffel packed with tapes LOPPACOPPI is a battered
field recorder, and my laptop twisted up with signal analysis programs.
The station's hum always faintly threatening during stormy weather, felt
expect into thousand ears. Pressed to the walls, I ragged
microphones and studio one, pointed a camera at the engineer's desk,
left every phone line open and a special programming notice
ready to air. The old analog tape decks waited, stacks
of reels poised with the greatest hits of each vanished
shift manuals lined every surfa's evidence or at least warning.
I felt the eyes of the building. The broadcasts at
first was chao, snow collars, just dead air, punctuated by
my own voice, deliberately reading old lock entries, reciting the
code phrases tied to every disappearance left during storm, not
seen again, the line drop, not home since the fifth
My voice sounded brutal eurie and the monoitous deco like rehearsal,
like summoning a ghost. I read the whole list of
missing staff from Daniel at the top, decline, Donny Mickey,
then my father, and left my own name at the end.
The phone rang a shrill startled back in the dark.
I snatched the receipt, breathels a first only a faint
current of static, then the unmistakable shape of a human
voice filtered through hullo. My voice cracked, A woman's monotone crushed.
Then I remember, Then a flucks, A burst of noise,
lay as twisting together, childlike trouble, old man's mumbling, a
muddled polyphony. Hear us, Quiet irons, you list are a
list always someone new while you listening. I forced myself
not to flinch. I am, why what does it want?
The phone line clung to silence, Then quietly the repeated
I kneeling chant, quiet irons? Remember us? Another voice, deep, eloping,
familiar cadence, tawny or was it my father's? It recited
names ending with mine, then fell back into static. Sweatslicked
my collar, palms aching from how hard I gripped the phone.
Did you choose us? I demanded? Who ends this? No answer,
then a chorus, as if the whole building was on
the line at once. Someone must keep watch, someone must remember.
No one leaves a chain unwritten. The line rattled, then disconnected.
I fumbled back to the mixer, forehead beating with colds wet.
My hand shook as I cued the oldest back of tape.
Daniel's Lost Ship with the hidden quite Iy's fragment. I
played it over the live frequency during some retribution, the
studio fluorescence burnt out, plunging the room into flickering monochrome.
The console lights fluttered and steaded, and then without warning,
all power failed. In the sudden darkness, I heard them
a burst of whispers, first electric in the wires, then
somehow free in the room. The air shelled, as if
a vault had opened. My skin cold, not fear, but
the sensation of every cell prickling, every hair alive. From
the shadowed glass. The blowed reflection resolved into NT one,
but multiple faces shallowed, like adult ancient hell, lattice, work
of presents, edges mirrored, as if seen in shifting rain
smeared glass. The ship stared, and I sensed them, weighing,
measuring my refusal to except mere remembrance. A voice sharper
than radio feedback. Do you accept a watch? I tried
to answer, throw dry words informed the silence crew, gravity
bending toward collapse, then as sound like a tape deck
fast forwarding, a rush of names, and a final voice whisper.
If the list is broken, the quiet iron falls open.
The faces flickered, are now all features now none? An
impossible tangle of memory and longing pressed to glass. Power
surge flickered, then cut again. My lung shrank an animal panic.
I felt for the exit, not trusting the floor, not
trusting memory. As I stumbled, the voices closed in, not
just over the air, but in the walls, the vinyl tiles,
the old bones beneath the floor. Someone must keep watch, repeated,
No longer plaintive, but imperative. Something touched my shoulder, a
hand impossibly cold. I whirled, saw nothing, only felt the
pressure signature pressed on skin. My vision washed gray, and
I collapsed, knees giving under the weight of all those ears,
all that unspoken documentation. Consciousness did not slip away. It
broke like a snap tape. Sometime later, an hour perhaps,
or eternity. I worked a hard morning, lights lashing in
through the broadcast rooms, partial blinds, the familiar rays of meters,
consoles and cables were all there, but somehow altered. The
loud book sat precisely, arranged, every page intact, no sign
of missing leaves. The tapes had laid out, gone. There
were open reels replaced by fresh labels, index cards were
positioned to reflect nothing but routine or cord keeping. No
ghosts moved, only the hum of her return to order.
Outside the wet citygow brittle with the after rains on,
I staggered out into the hall, knees weak, her hammering
at the front desk. Police and city workers milled about,
arguing in low tones, lugging extension cords, and mourning cones.
None looked up as I passed. Their concern fixed on
damage to the power lines, not the mysteries sleeping beneath.
One officer stood by the door board collecting incident forms.
Had to check your lines, she said, not meeting my eyes.
He folks do back up logs. Everything all right. During
the outage, I wanted to tell her everything about voices, disappearances,
layered rituals. The words would not come, just technical Vray
knocked it out. I managed. She checked a box and
motioned me to move on. Under her gaze, I could
almost convince myself it was all a night mare. One
lawn fever spun and the sleepless be hunched in a
room made wholly by repetition. But when I drifted back
to the engineer's corner, the only thing left of my evidence,
gone from the tapes, vanished from the lowbrooks was the pale,
batted remnant of them danal page. It's in faded and
fragile at the margin's. I ran a finger across the
two jagged initials, the paper dissolving at my touch. That afternoon,
management summoned me a half apology about the storm, a
vaguely threatening nod about fragile equipment, but a definite absence
of curiosity about anything beyond insurance. Old tapes go missing,
logs get smudged in the rain, The director muttered, gaze
fixed on something middle distance. I returned home in Collkarl,
but the number now gave nothing but a slow, a
countical busy signal. The city's bureaucracy pressed to move by
insurance suggesters what the incidentt cleaned, Nothing lost but power
and a few eyes of brocathad air. My own phone
ran for a moment, I hesitated, half afraid the next
voice would dragged me back into the loop. The line connected,
at first only a faint, dreary hum, then a synthetic
whisper quiet ires. The call ended. My hand singled, numb
on the receiver. I slapped poorly. Each time I closed
my eyes, the chamer turned not loud, but persistent phrases
thirty my dreams. The next night, I found myself tuning
about at hand held radio, old habit, nervous to expending
the dial into the deepest trackle of amstatic. At three
thirteen in the morning, the world outside had all but vanished,
and no cars, no watchers, only the careful hum of
some secret, inexhaustible power behind the walls. In that hush,
a signal bled through, weak but unmistakable at first, only
a child's voice, faint patched by static, recited a less accadence. Precise,
ritualistic names spilled out, plucked from memory and log books alike,
one after another, weaving a tapestry of absence. Dane, Old, Dawney, Laurie, Samoantho.
At the end, the voice grew even softer, almost apologetic,
a breake. Then, in a hush of static, it was
but my own name. I jerked upright, mouth gone dry,
heart thumping, with the certainty that this list would not stop,
not now, not without my reply. The broadcast faded, swallowed
again by wet hiss. I stared at the radio night,
pushing at the window glass, suddenly sure the ritual extended
beyond Collins, beyond graveyard shifts with stormy nights. We tuned
in and someone recorded. We listened, and the silence gathered history,
reclaiming voice by voice. The station clock blinked, stubborn and
read as if asking what I would do when the
next doorm rolled in, as if it knew its watches
would always answer the colden that though quiet, eye is
only needed to wait for someone knew not to sleep,
and so it continues. The eyre is unbroken, the vigil kept,
the name's never fully gone, always present, pressing gently from
the other side, the remembrance current quiet and ceaselessly humming
through the dark, even when the city and its watchers
try to forget. I left the radio spitting static and
the window still, and walked to the kitchen, fingers drumming
against the scarred for mica. The eye hadn't changed. Three
thirteen glared into greens from the microwave and the bat
of clock above the stove, as though all the machines
conspired to weld me to this moment. On the table,
the envelope rested, folded and weathered, its cut, tangling weight,
still unanswerable. I traced my thumb along the rim, trying
to convince myself all this irrational explanation, a trick of notes,
a tapestry woven by fatigue and too many years, beneath flickering,
head ach inducing lights. But the hush wouldn't leave. Every
inch of the apartment was thick with it. The faint
metal tang of cables, the waxy residue on my finger
tips after handling ancient tape, the sick echo of my
own name spoken by a mother i'd never seen. I
paced between kitchen and living room, then window, and back again.
In the darkness beyond the glass, nothing moved. City lights
touched and guttered. Conveyor belts in the nearby factory shrug
laboriously onward, But inside the quite grew until it pressed
on my skill. I couldn't resist a final test. I
hurried to the bedroom, dragged the box of old equipment
from under the bed, my first portable short wave, an
ancient filled recorder. It had a pair of over rear
headphones with one cup already tipped. I wired it all
up radio to recorder, headphones jacked in gained, dialed high
and trembling. I wanted needed to hear it again, to
confirm that these strange transmissions weren't just ghosts in the air,
but signals any one with the right tools could pull
from the ether. The radio was tiny, orangelly, de flickered, alive.
I dialed through the frequencies, passing gospel, sports and a
horde of anonymous, before settling on the familiar noble space
of the air. Bent hand hovering over the tunair, waiting
to catch the sudden slip between channels. On a high lunch,
I set the recorder, rolling red light blinking weakly, static
grain in my ears, A snowstorm of sand punctuated by
the odd, impossibly distant fragment, A shuffle foot of breath,
A chine that could have been a child's toy, orn
off frequency clock, then a voice, not the same song
chat of a child, but the harsh, congested droll of
I couldn't place it, keep it running, It urged, clip
and metallic, make the list de your eyes. There was
a shudder in my hands, a click like someone flapping
index caused at a desk. Who remembers if no one does,
who keeps the line if not you, It cut out
and abrupt wolf's breath and static surged in. I pulled
the headphones off, put my head down on the trembling
edge of the table, and pressed my knuckles to my forehead,
counting one, two, three, four in time with my pulse.
A rational man would call at auditory prodolia, stress induced illusion,
some coil of childhood memory on whining into ellucination. But
even as I recited these lifelines, I felt the truth
mounting behind my teeth. Heavy and bitter nights still held.
I peeked at the window. A young man in a
faded hoodie was walking by across the far side of
the street. Gaze pointed at his shoes, shoulders hunched against mist.
He stopped beneath the corridors, only a lit street lamp,
blanting up at my window, then away, quick as a
guilty flinch. He passed out of sight, and I was
left with only my reflection and the glimmer of the
radio's orange eye. Sleep was useless. I showered in cold water,
dressed in my feted station jacket, and when the city's
first ambiguous blush split the clouds, I returned to WQH shoe.
Arriving before sunrise was an infraction, the kind of thing
we were warned about by day's staff. Burules had begun
tossolving at the edge of what I had heard, I
let myself in. The place was dark, but not empty.
The main hallway had the scratch after taste a fresh
cleaning fluid, and the entry log on the front desk
usually blanket. This aire had a new line in the middle.
Three seventeen a M. Visitor, no name, no signature. I
picked up the pen, testing it weight, then wrote beside
it four eight a M. Still here. A scuff echoed
from down the hall. A pair of hard souls toop
risk for a stray cat and too steady for a
night wander. I steeled myself turning passified door into the
main studio, bracing for a confrontation with management ar worse
the kind of shadow I glimpsed in reflections ever since
the storm. Instead, I found Dell, the week end news reader,
staring at the bank of dead monitors. He looked up
as puffy with sleeplessness, beard fleck with white that hadn't
been there last time you left the phone lines open,
he said, work The boss did you answer any My
voice was thin, but steadier than I expected. Didn't have
to just listen, nothing but silence. DALs quinted, leaning closer,
as if reading something from my posture. Except for four
minutes ran Forrey. When the intercom light blinkedon, wouldn't turn off.
He pointed to the board, where the coalbulb was still
jerking between orange and red, despite no line being plucked in.
He was about to say more, but stopped. You look
worse than I do, Ben. I can finish the board checks,
go home if you want, But I couldn't, not with
the sense that every month, every name in those books
hung now like an accusation or an invitation above our heads.
I'm mutter thanks, but hung back, crawling the racks, checking
the bins, circling slowly back to the hardware cage. There,
in the clarity of dawn, the world felt balanced on
a blade. The silence wasn't boredom now, it was pertinent, vigilant,
a'll aer for any break from the script. Before he
left del Pau's at the door, You ever see weird
notes in these logs. He didn't meet my gaze. Code
words not rumors, more like reminders you don't remember riding.
I wanted to laugh to comfort him. His hand shook
in the door's metal push plate. Go home, deal, catch
some sleep. I'll close up, he laughed, in a hurry,
the tension in his shoulders lingered with me. With the
place deserted, I took the air danal page from my coat,
flattening it and the faded for mica. I set the
tape had captured I as ago beside it to quietly
flip the old fern receivitue into calm, and sat waiting,
staring at the bank of clocks. The minute hand inched
toward three thirteen, again calling with the inexorable patience of ritual.
I knew, with a bruising certainty that I was expected now.
I was the only one who understood the rules, even
as those rules were written in vanishing ink. Across the
edges of the air. I laid out everything, a graph
of initials and log entries, taped with blue masking labels,
sticky with tape residue, every tool an engineer or a
chronicler of night time absences might need. I turned on
every phone, set the mixing board to the lowest possible hum,
and when the silent settled, keyed the inter conto record.
I'm here, I said, voice steady. Every night I can
list the names I have the code stirr you listening,
A moment of static, then a breath, the bearer's flutter,
almost insectile, at the edge of my adrim, Who do
you keep watch for? The voice came not one, but
laid a female than a male, Then a dozen smaller voices,
always spring in synchrony. I didn't flinch, something in me
sharpened by sleepless weeks. Answer for every one who went missing,
and every one whose log remains, For Dame, for Donny,
for Laurie, for my father, for any one who sat
these ires and signed a name, knowing they might disappear.
It rustled a tapestry of voices, each reciding if you
remember us, who will remember you? I choked? Is that
how it works? Passing the watch one to another forever?
An audible exhale wind in static merging. No line may brick.
What are you, I asked, not caring how wild it sounded.
The air color lapsed, then swheiled again. A sa onic
spaced deeper than the room could hold. Voices tumbled overlapping,
some crying, some laughing, some so small in the pain
that it made my hands bawl into fists. And the desk.
We are what the building remembers. Those who waited too
long to go home, chovedren slept in boxes beneath the floor.
Voices drifted up the quiet eyros. They recorded, always recording.
There must always be a watcher, one who listens, one
who refuses to let silence have the last word. I shook,
but held my head high. Why do you single us out?
Why make a sign? A shiver of anger, child's voice
rising up, piping with urgency. No one can leave unless
another takes the iron. No one gets to forget until
some one promises to remember. I suddenly saw the envelope
of loop pages for what it was, a chain letter,
A real lady, troluctant participant drawing up their own next link,
my father's code, my own initial scrolled by accident or invitation,
A generation packed, drawn not by malice, but by the
need to hold the pass together, to keep it from
disintegrating into the void below the city and the airwaves.
My cheeks were wet. I pressed the heel of my
hand to my mouth to keep from subbing aloud. I
didn't ask for this, I whispered a rustle at the doorway.
Footsteps slow, sure, impossibly heavy. The glass in the control
room window warped, reflections swirling, dozens of faces drifting in
the distortion. Some I recognized, an arrowing of Daniel's eyes,
Edna's pinched scowl, even my father's type mouth. Others were unknown,
features half shadowed, some childlike, some stoic, as if lifted
from fifty years of orphanage polaroids. Their lips moved not
quite in time. You answer, You kept the register, You
heard us. The intercom has to feedback the threatened ear
drums clipping out every few syllables, but still audible beneath
the distortion. Next time the ring falls and the city sleeps,
you will call the register. You will open the land.
If you do not, the io closes. Name's loss, no
one left to remember. I met my own eyes in
the smeared glass and nodded, not in defeat, but in resignation.
Will it end? I asked, desperate for some relief, some
promise that this would ever release its hull. The voice shrank,
a tide sucking away. If one night the registers empty,
if no one mates, if the watch is refused, it
in silence falls gone, all gone, no line, no witness,
no memory, And that the heart of the ritual laid open.
Not a curse, but a cry against oblivion, a contract
angled against rasure. I sat nom the dawn, finally brushing
pail along the windows. The faces blurred, faded, fell back
into the domains of electricity and reflection, leaving only me
in the busing stillness, a lot book between my hands,
and the memory of every name I had ever failed
to protect. For the first time, I understood the paradox
of service. We are all in some way complicit, the
witnesses and the vanished. We hold the lists, and the
list holds us. I curlled the intercom, powered down every deck,
locked the logs and takes away, and carried the dam
Dane not pitch out to the salt. Bright morning, its
edges trembling in the smallest wind. The city was newlits
grobed by night's rain. But when a hundred of windows dark,
puddles white as rivers in the side streets, a soundless
current pooling in every alley, I walked home through the
salted well, every foot flecking in my ears for blocks.
No one stirred. I stopped at the diner while coffee
richel greeted the lone waitress by name. She didn't finch
at my appearance, only nodded, as if she had known
all he worked nights, don't you, she asked, pouring the
coffee into stereophone cup. Her tone was gentle, but there
was something else, a hidden understanding. Yeah, it's I listened
to things most people sleep through, she smiled, tied, almost kind.
Someone's got a The city's never empty after dark. Don't
let it eat you up, honorable. I left, wandering the
city's belly, the coffee warm in my palm, but not warming.
Every shadow felt denser, Every crossing hung with the knowledge
that some one might disappear without a trace, and unless
another vought to remember them, thir name would melt away
beneath all that static, all that horror, traffic and neon
and time. Home again. I set the log pages out
my batted pocket journal, closing it. The phone didn't rain,
The sky grew bright somewhat, Trains rattled over cross of palings,
and the world of ordinary problems spoll back up automatic
as the sunrise. But that night, and the next and
the next, I found myself at the window at three
thirteen radiocue to the same blind frequency. Hand poised over
the tuner, I listened, always half terrified for the chant
that might arrive, with the silence that might follow if
I missed my turn. For a week, nothing changed, The
world spun, the city ground forward, and I balanced between
vigilance and pretending it was only a bad night and
not a lifelong charge. Until on the eighth night, the
voice returned, soft, definitely called the register. The names that
precited were not only those I'd uncovered, not only those
written and faded low books. My own was still there,
but now the list included doubt, the news reader, and
the diner waitress, and her name, too, unexpected and sharp,
rattled me to my core. I realized any one who witnessed,
anyone who cared enough to question, anyone who listened to
the end of the list, risk being enrolled. This this
was the quiet Irish trap as much as its blessing.
As I sat there, hands whit knuckled on the receiver,
heart hurling itself against the bottom of my robes, the
broadcast end of tailing into a long, thin cry, remember us,
some one must. I forced myself not to answer. I
let the line die. The next morning, at the station,
I checked the lulks, a new notation, different handwriting, different
pen three thirteen a M benjie, no reply, the chain
for a moment's stutter. Nothing happened to, no flood of disappearances,
no sort of static, just the trembling, spring loaded hesitation
in the air, as if the building itself held its breath.
I waited, sick with both dread and hope. If I
ignored the line, if no one picked up with the
ritual fracture, or would the names loved in unloved, remembered
in a known slip, forever through the cracks, lost in
the humming dark. When the voice called again the following night,
it was thinner, less certain. Someone must keep watch, it whispered,
not demanding now, but pleading. I left the radio untouched,
resisting the urge to tune in. The love book, stayed
closed the page with them, Daniel Sieal the way the
city spun on dawn rose unremarkable but hard won. For
three days I listened only to my own thoughts, letting
the old ghost starve in their tapes and registers. But
on the fourth night, the voice crept, and even with
the radio unplugged, threading through dreams and the breath between
heart beats in sleep, I saw faces, friends, strangers, myself
A wolly is caught on a will of endless repetition,
each asking the only question the quiet eyres would allow,
Who will remember when the list is blank? Vigil wasn't
just mine. It never would be. As long as some
part of this city, some dark coming building, needed witnesses,
Some one would pick up the call, open the register,
speak the names behind it all. The quiet remains patient,
as memory, implacable, as static, waiting for the next hanburyst
on the midnight desk, the next voiced answer, whoever refuses
to let the silence win w QH cheese lights flicker,
casting their reflection out into the rain, and in the
city's deepest hush, there is always one more watcher, turning
the page, learning the names, keeping the iron that will
not be forgotten.