Speaker 1: The package did not belong among the cracked mail boxes
or the pizza flies that accumulated in a vestibule of
my apartment building. Two days before I opened it, I
had stepped around it three times. I assumed it was
for a neighbor. The labor weather my address only barely
eligible for smeared ink and grime. But a fourth morning,
the postman or perhaps a less patient tenant, had propped
it up against my door, a battered carboard box that
rattleddully when I picked up edges silled with the yellow
tape that had attempted sincerity but was now barely clinging
to the flaps. The wad alone brought me back, unexpectedly,
involuntarily to another box, another set of tapes, decades ago,
in another part of this city, Even before I slid
it open, and os and tank rows through the dented seams,
the way an old Prince former sometimes smells when the
wind picks up dust beneath the static of transmission. There
was no return address, just the fading black of my
building number, and a trace of something else, a residue
like coffee and for garden attics. Inside some one had
packed the remants of another era's equipment of battered verriel
to reel, tape or corder. The chromedled one knob tilted
at an odd angle as metal case stippled with old burns.
Six bools of tape, swaddled and yellowed knee print beneath
the topmost reel, A typer to note with no name,
no greeting. You always wanted to know what really happened,
listened before it's too lay. My apartment is smaller, just
large enough, though the wall seemed to flex him with
some winter nights at that moment, each corner toaster radio,
stack of research books. The podcast here on my kitchen table,
seen sharply in focus, as if electrified by the box
of sudden presents. I sat down, breathing uneasily, hands sweating,
despite the January cove radiating off the kitchen tile. My
fingers shook, extracting the first reel, lining it on to
the tape of cord or spindle. I convinced myself I
would listen only for a minute, just long enough to
file it away, some elaborate prank. In this city where
nobody cared to remember Channel thirteen, the stodger sometimes took
desperate forms. The machine grown weakly, then clicked, and the
tapes stuttered to life. The hiss was overly intimate and textured,
and a roar of tiny pops above what might have
once been some A jingle emerged, or rather its fossil
the original Channel thirteen music, but warped at the edges,
the melody swimming in and out of focus as the
submerged beneath us. Then a voice far off, pleading urgent
in an unfamiliar tone. They flickered away into metallic static,
the tape shuddering as if it wanted to split itself out.
A woman's laugh inverted, an echoing dissolved into a bust
of feedback that forced me to turn down the volume.
The sound was alive, with things omitted. Just as I
was about to stop the tape, a phrase cut through,
half swallowed by the whir of gears. A DJ voice
I almost recognized Peter's or was it Alsi's, but now slow, rasping,
clutching to listlessness to be HEARDD back a press pause,
but the tape slept in protests and winding a final
second of breathless nothing. My palms were slick against the
battered surface. Of the machine. I sat u moving for
a long minute, feeling the faintest vibration in the air,
and certain if it was real or memory. In a
half mirror of my kitchen window, my own face looked older,
shadowed by the fluorescent like the face of someone who
had spent countless nights in small humming boosts that felt
safe until they didn't. This is the story of Channel thirteen,
and why nobody in the city wants to remember, least
of all those of us who survived being heard, or
so we'd thought. People still say nothing happened, that it
was just another casualty of the rusting city. But some
things resist forgetting, and this was one of them. Perhaps
that's wide Even before the tapes, I could never leave
it behind for good. In the old days, there wasn't
much to look at driving out to Channel thirteen, unless
you were the sword who collected stores from concrete relics.
The city lies in a hollow, steel mills to the west,
rows of burned out housing to the east, a wide
river dissecting neighborhoods that never quite blend. When you leave downtown,
you passed the cacases of defunct factories, the signs still
advertising shoes and radios and coff syrup, long after anyone's
bought such things. Channel thirteen was on the edge of
it all, perched at the end of a two lane
access road. It's blinkoed road broadcasting tower, visible only after
you crested a low embanquet lined with sumac and gnarled
rail ties. Even from the parking lot, you could smell
the chemical trace of the river in the air, and
if the wind was wrong, the sire and note of
the treatment plant downstream. I was twenty five, then, grateful
for any any job that paid against the grain of
respectable employment. The other hosts and engineers would drift, as
in time more than geography, a clutch of old dja
clinging to the belief of free from radio still mattered.
A couple students desperate for extra cash, Me and my
press shirt sleeves, with too much coffee and not enough sleep.
Channel thirteen went live at six, but I worked the
rotation from ten pe and to two way m the
dead i rows as we called them back then. The
city slept uneasy, but those of us in the booth
chased our own kinds of insomnia. The need to listen
of the private hope that someone out there was listening back.
Night after night, the routine became its own comfort. You'd
park beneath the halogen lamp, half the bowls flickering out.
By midnight, there would be the obligatory nod from dennisound
engineer perpetually cleaning grime from a mug that probably hadn't
held coffee in a decade, And then you'd step inside,
greeted first by the mural in the entryway. It featured
a white nineteen seventy is Optimism smiling DJ with comically
oversized headphones, the founder's stern gaze beside station's motto, our
voice in the air. Time hadn't been kind to the paint.
The eye seemed to bleed under leaky pipes. The red
and blue brushwork had cuddled into bruce purple. In sight,
the station fell like its own weather system. Some winter nights,
condensation ghosted the window between the newsroom and Studio eight.
There was always a humming, sometimes are contented from sometimes ratical.
Thus seemed to bleed from the walls themselves, as if
the building or something behind it powered the voices that
traveled across its airways. I used to joke with Alice,
one of our more poetic hosts, that the hum was
the city's heartbeat, and she grin and say it was
just the transformers, all slow death and feedback. But sometimes,
when I was tired enough, it seemed like something else. Entirely,
the show was mostly requests, news from wire services, occasional
interviews with the city's bee list variety. No glory, but
steady company callers who became as familiar as distant relatives.
There was Old Tad, who dialed in every Thursday at
twelve twenty eight m with stores about the river, Oisimon,
who asked for blues wreckers and left critic messages for
DJA before dawn. We made fun of ourselves, pirates steering
a leaky ship, finding small joys in the routines, scrolling
a playliss on, grease muched notepads, the ritual of swapping
out calls, a spare quarter enter take, the sharing of
cigarettes outside under the hum red light above the door.
Decades later, when I left all that behind, I told
myself it was only nostalgia that made me remember so sharply.
But when I drove past the old road on the
way to my first apartment as a podcast producer, I
couldn't resist turning off just to see the station again.
This was research, I reassured myself, new material for a
true crime episode, something to freshen up a series that
had become, much like me, a little to sedate for
its own survival. That first afternoon, the city itself seemed
to assist the idea. The shops on my block had
changed hands so many times that my memory failed to
match them with old names. Corners that held bakers were
now vap shops or tax preparation huts. Even the if
out restless, the brittle late winter wind carrying dust from
scaffolding across industrial lots. Channel thirteen had been shuttered for
a decade and a half. Once sneon sign Poll's visible
blocks away, a beacon for whichever poor soul finished a
shiff after midnight. When I pulled up, now the sign
was nothing but a rusted bracket. The windows were boarded over,
the siding tagged with layers of graffiti, only intermittently legible warnings,
tags for fuselys, and the corners of impromptu street dot work.
The big red door was chained. The glass beside it,
punctured by an ancient brick. I parked, taking my time,
maybe hoping some detail would shake loose, a crack and
a caked over memory. A pair of kids on back
swerve to avoid me, their faces blank, uninterested. The city
used to be friendlier, or maybe I just remembered it
that way. Inside my car, A thumb for a notebook,
reminders for questions I meant to ask. Only a few
ex staff was still around as I tracked on social
media through the slanted roomor channels of local history. Most
of them e the shut down My inquiries well, left
my messages unread. I tried to corn a store down
the block, figure the clerk might at least indulge a chad,
if not a confession. The bell jangled above the door
as I walked in, but the young man at the
counter barely looked up from his phone. I asked if
he remembered channel thirteen. He shook his head, I sliding away.
When I pressed, he simply said that place should stay closed.
People didn't like what came through it. That was the
most direct answer I got. Other conversations played at Lexilent conspiracies.
A woman walking her dog paused only long enough to say,
people don't talk about that place any more, before guiding
her labrador faster across the intersection. I left business cards
tucked under windshield wipers, but no one called. That should
have been enough, a local cold case gone colder, a
best of backdrop for a miniature episode, But the box
haunted me. I would catch myself staring at it while
editing interviews, unable to bring myself to open it again,
uncertain if I wanted the answers it might contain my
intent shifted down stream, this would be less a podcast
to more a personal reckoning, an attempt to exume the
simple companionship of the late night and those of us
who found shutter their wants privately. I worried what I
had already begun to suspect that the silence surrounding Channel
thirteen was maintained not by indifference, but by mutual consent.
Maybe the truth deserved to stay buried. But a part
of me, the same part that I used to sign
off just before two a m. And stare at the
empty booth, couldn't let it go. On a Wednesday, Caving
to impulse, I queued up the second tape setting the
ancient recorder on my desk beside my podcasting rig. This
time I let the real spin longer, turning out the
lamps so the only light was the jittering blue from
my laptop. The program began pieces like a puzzle thrown
at the wall. The tape cut through with music that
ought to have been period appropriate to accept. The songs
were always a little off Elton John were there should
have been Foga, a chrotting local garage band's experimental single,
excepts load and reversed. The lyrics peppered with syllables that
prickled at the back of my skull. The djay transitions
were sharp edged, the tone wandering, sometimes a breathless chair,
sometimes a dangerous flat line. Every horror, at exactly ten past,
a jolt of static would puncture the signal, reducing even
the strong mistrackster metallic whimper. One passage caught my attention,
a string of five words almost lost underneath a caller's
veined laughter. One voice not belonging to any host I
could remember in toning we hear you come through. That
voice repeated, fracturing the other sentences, but its tone never wavered.
A patient gently insistent, almost predatory. It played only in
the dead air, those strange gaps where instructions or adds
ought to have been. I tried matching what I heard
to old station Russes, playing back memories of graveyard shifts
and staff meetings, Peter, who had a gift for impressions maybe,
except Peter was gone by nineteen ninety seven, burned up
by too many overnight sobs. Alice had a higher register
and rich habitually ended sentences with a little rasp that
this voice lacked. After a while, the line between remembering
and inventing blurred. Background noises barely audible unless I jacked
the gainer kept for covering a faint, worrying rhytnic and mechanical,
not quite matching any tape mechanism Monu. On the third Tibin,
I detected what sounded like the flutter of paper, thin, harsh,
then what might have been someone muttering behind a closed door.
There was a physical discomfort to listening. I kept feeling
at the age of a memory I couldn't quite summon,
an echo of old shift changes, or maybe something less ordinary,
a fissure in the sense of what belonged to reality.
And what didn't. None of these fragments fit any broadcast
log I'd reviewed, nor did they match the show run
downs craps I kept from my years at thirteen. If
these were malicious hoaxes, someone attained stickingly recreated the logistics
of mid nineties radio fur drive, nobody would understand but me.
Sometimes I simply blamed the failing equipment. The tapex quealed
my headphones based the reels grew hot to the touch
after only ten minutes of playback, But the voices, the pattens,
They lingered at night, with the city traffic a distant rumor,
I'd catch myself listening too closely between the words. After
day spent wrestling with the tapes, I decided to seek
cat antos from some one who might actually know more.
Dennis was the last of the old god, the engineer
who'd spent more time than any one wandering the bowels
of Channel thirteen jury raking equipment and muttering about budget cuts.
I found him by chance's name and the LEAs agreement
of a low rise apartment near a waterfront. The call
was awkward. He sounded distracted, throw gravelly, with age and cigarettes.
But when I mentioned old tapes. The silence on the
other end grew so thick I worried the line had died.
He's still alive, I said, I read your email, he replied,
didn't think anyone come looking? Not now. A wet cough,
then a drag of something combusting. You really want the story?
You buy me a coffee block, no sugar. We met
a dinah beside the river, a place that still opened
at six for the few shaft workers who cared. Dennis
arrived late, hair grayer than I remembered, curt too large
for his diminished frame. He slouched into the booth, lighting
a cigarette, only after the waitress turned a blind eye.
His teeth were few, his nails yellow, but his gay
stage sharp, scanning the empty restaurant for eavesdroppers, even as
he sipped his scalding coffee. I knew you poke around. Eventually,
Dennis said, no one else comes back. His hands fidgeted
with an ancient match book, flicking it open and closed.
You working a book or something? I hesitated podcast, mostly
for myself. I got some tapes. Someone mailed them to me.
There's stuff on them, Dennis, stuff I don't remember airing.
He was silent for a full minute. I was traveling
to the stain tiles above the counter. There were problems,
not just the kind up micstatic, he muttered. He remembered
the surge is ninety nine one. They hit me up
on the roof fixing lines every other week. There was
always a hum, but sometimes wasn't the equipment. I'd come
back downstairs check the boards. Half the logs would be
off by ires segments we didn't schedule, recordings made by
no one I could trace. I prodded people disappearing. His
fingers tightened around the mug. Started before you got there.
I think first it was little stuff, phones ringing with
no one, their voicemails he couldn't play back twice. Then
it got worse, transmission locks changed by invisible hands. I
tried bringing it up to el ye know that manager.
He told me to stop, said the transmitter was an AFRIT.
But he never went up on the roof, never heard
what I heard. Dennis fell into a heavy silence, as
if free playing some private inventory of disappointments and scares. Finally,
he looked up Voislow last year. I tried to look
up the frequencies we used FCC wiped most of them,
but every so often, if you park outside the old
lot late enough, you'll pick up something not quite natural,
like the city's talking to itself. I won't go back.
You shouldn't either. I pressed him for more about any
one else who might talk about the tapes. He shook
his head, stood awkwardly, and walked out, leaving me with
the check and the echo of his last words, if
you ever hear your own voice calling back, don't answer.
After Dennis left, the unease in my chest sharpened. The
way he described the missing time the altered locks was
too close to what I'd been finding in the tapes.
He mentioned broadcasts nobody programmed coming through static. I thought
of the phrase to listen as to be her back.
That evening, driven Beckmu and the LUSTI less thrill of
amateur saluting, I broke into the city's municipal archives. The
building was easy enough to access a side door, j
down nearly off its hinges, lat and cold air in
the light spell of sodium street lamps. Inside, I followed
memories from my old inten days. Down two flights, left
behind the water stained map of the county. I flipped
through boxes marked nineteen ninety seven two thousand one found
station locks, checklists, terminations. What I discovered wasn't so much
a record as a series of erasures. Staff liss snapped
off abruptly named vanishing after a particular week, without any
notations for resignation or payment. I compared the weeks to
tape date, finding a pattern after a final shift. Nothing,
no forwarding address, no further checks. I examined a stack
of censored in sident reports, pages punched with holes where
complaints had been filed after midnight. Several redacted mentions of
unexpected staff absences read like a chorusness in half its verses.
Most curious were the phone locks. Every week, usually between
midnight and one a spike of unlisted in bunk halls.
The numbers were impossible to trace. Each dist appearance had
been preceded by a rash of these culls, growing more frequent,
before whoever it was, had stopped answering altogether. Not one
was resolved. The final notations on two of the forms
simply re color unresponsive issue close. Something in those records
rhyme with the same dissonance, the sense of a presence
too persistent to be a technical malfunction compel. I listened
to more tapes. Some patents persisted. The djay voices grew
emptier in a week before their last broadcast, their powder
collapsing into fragments, word choices, slipping into syntax that didn't
quite belong to any error or region. Sometimes they'd break
form at entirely, making personal aside, pausing mid sentences if
hearing something beyond the music, then resuming in an utterly
flat monotone. It happened across years, cross every person I'd
ever known to work those ires painstakingly. I began documenting
these changes, comparing the voices at their most lucid and
their most altered. Overlaying them, I realized each daffer, just
before their final show, repeated the same critic phrase to
listen as to be heard back. The first tape had
presented it as a slip. Now it felt like a
transmission planted in each fading voice, reaching out to relatives
of the vanished, proofruitless, reluctant siblings, elderly parents. All conversations
ended abruptly, most never returned. One call connected as someone answered, listened,
then hung up without a word. As soon as I
mentioned Channel thirteen. A week later, my own podcast recordings
developed a persistence carratchy under tone, a kind of so
harmonic interference that no filter could shake. By this point,
every new detail pointed toward one inescapable conclusion. Whatever happened
at channel thirteen was no accident, but the result of
some deliberate pattern. As sequence folded into the city's own
deadre If I wanted truth, it wouldn't be found in
stores or papers. I had to see for myself what
lay behind the stations, ruined walls. I returned at dusk,
right as the day flickered out and the city sill
wet turned black against a diluted Crimson sky. My heart,
hammered as a hammered was the weakest board over the
back window. The glass behind it eielded after a shove.
I stumbled in sighed, using my phone's flascight to cut
through the gloom. The interior was a time capsule, tables
laid with mold and spilt coffee, fossilized in ridges, pads
of note pepper gone gray with age. A wave of
stagnant ere struck me in distinctly redolent of dust, ancient cigarettes,
the musk of decomposed insulation. The main studio was largely intact,
A filthy, antiquated tone tables caught scattered across the bat
of the noleum, stray scraps of script in one corner,
amount of an opened mail, birthday cats, a polaroid of
two d jay and a half halc I suspiciously averted
from the camera. The sense of layered abandonment was almost overwhelming.
Every detail scream no one ever meant to return. I
moved on to the back offices. One door pad locked
and nearly few shut by corrosion resisted my first few tries.
I scounged up a pen from a scattered cup, jammed
it into the loch. Heaved with both hands until the
wood buckle beneath the hinges pop with an expulsion of
dried metallic breath. Inside the office was smaller, thus layers
on everything, the ceiling browning with what looked like water damage.
But here things were different. Some unrecently relative to the
rest of the building had moved papers, set things neatly
in a pile atop desk. In the corner, a wall
safe with the handle left pointed lea's que I cracked
it open heart pounding pulse fluttering just beneath my ears
inside reel's large format, marked and read only with dates.
Each date matched a missing staff member's final documented shift.
I counted seven reels in total, dense with dust except
round the most recent, which looked barely disturbed. Alongside them
was a sheaf of faded memos, all labeled for internal
use only, typed and initial dilgibly. Most referenced Project ray Line,
an external program tied to post office box in the
city far west of ires One, with no known relationship
to local media. A final discovery a folded map of
our city southeast quadrant, printed in black and white, with
concentric circles drawn by hand, radiating outward from the spot
marked thirteen studio transmitter slash beacon. Each circle corresponded to
a different interval one mile three five. Someone had made
careful notes law on the periphery, dates, whether notations, strange
symbols I didn't recognize, as if chatting a field experiment
rather than radio listenership. As I gathered the tapes, the map,
and the memos, my phone began to vibrate insistently in
my pocket. The display was blank except for a number
that rolled over to being all zero. I swallowed, pressing
the green econ anyway, as if Hattock could hold me together.
On the other end was a voice, broken, disjoined it
but horribly familiar, scraping the air in the same cadence
I'd heard bleeding through the tapes for days. It rasped
a year out of time, airwaves listening. I dropped the
phone to the floor. The line was silent, but I
could feel a charge twisting through the air, the taste
of copper blending with panic. Even before I left, I
knew I was being heard, and I had already answered.
I stumbled backward over a tangle of cable, clutching the
tapes and the brittle memos until the crinkle of the
paper seemed to fill up my skull. My breath came
in shallow snatches. For a moment, the shapes behind my
eyes tried to reorganize themselves into faces, syllables. Some one
was spring inside a soundpro of booth, just out of sight.
I passed my back to the wall. The office was suffocating,
no moving air, only the echo of my own pulse.
The phone on the scuff linoleum blinked. I snatched it
up thum grazing the screen. The interface flickered, statical lines jumping.
The home screen, replaced for half a second by an
image I recognized only at the edge of my mind's eye,
the old mule from Channel thirteen entry away. But the
eyes were empty sockets, the colors leached out, teeth too
wide in a field of blurring faces. I squeezed my
eyes shut, then opened them again. The scream was black.
My fingers moved through muscle memory, the podcast app the
voice recorder, both present, but stuttering, as if a thumb
print had been left somewhere in cold A sound seemed
to shut her through the building, low and frodi when
I would have called plumbing, except that water had not
run in this place for a decade. I turned half,
expecting to see someone Denis, maybe passed or present, to
step in from the hallway, but nobody came, only the
wind pressing weakly at weather boards, and the gentle, methodical
patter of another rain beginning outside. I gathered myself and
moved quickly, fitting the master rills and the project rail
line file into my messenger back. The weight was heavy,
almost admonishing a counterbalance to my need to escape. I
navigated the hallway toward the back exit, past the main studio,
passed the kitchen with its avalanche of split sugar packets
and patch by doughnut holes. The heavy silence pressed against
me with peculiar force. If I paused, I could almost
imagine other footsteps following in time with my As I
turned the lost corner, a metallic creak ricocheted down the
empty corridor. I stopped, frozen slowly. From around the bend.
A slot of light formed underneath the door to Studio Bee.
It had been windowless in the old days. The switch
beside it was now rough gouge in a plaster, but
a sliver of illumination traced the tile in a vibrating,
unsteady line. My mouth dried out. It wasn't possible for
any power to run here. The box was long shut off.
Service men had torn out the Lion's years back, but
the globe persisted. I approached, at first a step, then another.
The crunch of glass yards under my sneakers each footful
made my nerve shiver. I pressed my ear to the door.
There was unmistakable sound inside, faint, undulating, like slow motion
laughter underwater. The radio was playing, except the stations bled
across each other, snatches of competing songs, bits of weather
reports folded over, a copy, a word here, a half
swallowed phrase there, coming up atwelve, coming up a twelve
our voice on the air. I recognized the cadence, my own,
distorted and clipped through generations of taped degradation. The vose
rose and felt punctuated by ADDICTA felt physical pressing against
my jaw, A sire heat rose in my throat. I
reached for the handle, found its death, then yielding, the
door swung open to utter dark, the snow visible sores
for the light slunted along the floor. The air inside
was thick with ozon, and the tongue of hot electronics,
stronger than in the otter rooms. On a folding chair,
a tape of corridspond wheels turning lazily, emitting that light
glowing dimly from within the seam, as if a bulb
were burning itself out inside the chassis. I moved forward,
every muscle, stiff and willing, but compelled. In the beast's glass,
caught from the corridor's lost, clotted leam, I saw myself
hunch palla jaw set, but beside me for an instant
longer than an explanation, something else stared out. Another face
features blur imposed at the same height. A double exposure
from a camera I didn't know I was holding on
to my skin erupted in prickling shock. I stepped back
and the presence vanished, leaving only the fogging of my
own breath. The tape. Dick's sounds ratched it up. Put
a now something not on my heartbeat, skipping a base
rhythm twined with a tiney jingle. Channel thirteen Zili signal
fractured into overlapping octaves. The urge to bolt battle with
another darkenee, not to know exactly, but to witness, to
have something concrete as proof. I reached for the spinning
wheel out of habit. It was warm and perilously pint
when I picked it up, A magnetic tape flapping disjointedly,
as if it was playing out against resistance. The recorders
played button was jammed partway down, warped plastic, refusing to
budge fully into stop. Then the voices changed, no longer
just mine. I recognized alice strained in toning a wordless litany,
broken up by clicks and tape edits. He dere fast,
asking questions that never quite formed into sentences. Dennis himself
in a his stone, feed at don't let the signal finish.
The buildings are shifted with each phrase, a chill that
penetrated both memory and skin. I stepped backward, the tape
still in hand. The voices chased each other in an
endless recursively growing quieter than louder, until only silence remained.
I said, the real flat on the table. Some part
of me craved to listen to it in a safer place,
preferably far from these walls, with light and an escaper
out at hand. The bulb inside the recorder's cosette compartment
let off a final bright red flicker, then died, snuffing
the glow. Something in the building shifted to maybe only
the wind, but I found my hands trembling, my scalp
tied as if the whole station had drawn a breath
in unison behind me. I left the room, pulling the
door shut so gently the click was nearly inaudible. The
rush to the exit was under rook, guarded by hope
more than's ends. I clambered through the same window, boots
scraping the sail, and dropped to the gravel. Night had
crept up fully. Now the rain was heavier, drumming on
the car's roof as I tossed my back carelessly on
to the passenger seat and slammed the door. Only when
I twisted the ignition did my chest loosen one and
hail at a time. But as the headlights illuminated the
boarded entrance, I glimpsed something movement behind the slats, the
colorless flicker of a face pressing against the gap. Not
a threat, exactly by expectation, like someone waiting for their cue,
refusing to look back. I drove off ties, hissing on
wet tarmac, the city's deadlights blinking in my periphery. Thus
strange tactic lingered a presence, pressing at the spine, and
after image of the voices caught not just in memory,
but in the act of remembering itself. I went home
by a longer streets I had wound tight traveling but rats.
No podcast host should have reason to revisit every intersection
signed only by phantoms, old lives, former friends, the unseen hands,
that ruy tun channel thirteen shift after shift at my apartment,
I stumbled up the stairs, heart racing by heavier than before.
In the cold mechanical glow of my kitchen, I laid
out the nice spoils, the master reels, the project real
and file, the concentric circle's map, the pal of redacted memos,
my skin tingled with the memory of the coll the
cut off phrase aowave is listening. The phrase lived with
me now. I dry washed my face, needing to do
something with my hands, then scanned the apartment, as though
expecting someone to have followed me. The only sounds were
the pluck in refrigerators were in the distant horns of
freight along the river. Cautiously, Ann spoilt one of the
master reels, a date from late nineteen ninety nine, the
month I remember Peter stopped showing up. Nobody talked about
why the tip had warped slightly. The magnetic and coating
rubbed thin in places, but I threaded it into the revere.
My throat worked unconsciously, a reminder of how Off and
I once spoken these boosts, how many iOS were spent
striving for cadence, not me. I press play the first
ten seconds were only his, but a deliberate hiss, as
if some one had ucked out the sound of emptiness itself.
Then music, a jagged iff I couldn't place, neither vintage
nor new, the key shifting every few bars, the temper
wrong for any radio format I ever scheduled. The DJA
delivery was different, soft, almost pleading, as if he knew
he was talking only to himself. At twelve past midnight,
the pattern emerged a break as before, but on this
tape the silence was total, unbroken even by static. Then
Peter's voice, not with words, but with breath alon, awful, sighs, great,
and then the phrase We'll listened once, don't answer back.
The deep mechanical were vibrated in the machine, and the
signal wavered as an outside voice crossed the recording. Not
a DJ, not a caller, something layered over both. To
listen is to be heard back. The words came from
everywhere and nowhere at once. I clamped my headphones off,
pulse thudding at my temples. It had sounded like someone
in the apartment with me. I spun around half expecting
to find a post in standing at the window. Of course,
there was no one, only ste rising from the radiator
and rain poking the glass with effort. I amois on
the tape replaced it in its battered case. I turned
the review's pardial to off, but the faintest humb persisted,
as if something in the coils refused to wind down.
A sound too familiar to dismiss, too close to the
ross islence. I grew up with the broadcast frooons. After midnay,
I forced myself to focus the project rail line papers. First.
The members referenced things I half understood. A signal strength studies,
carry of frequency modulations, city maps with coded overlays, months
of technical logs annotated by hand, and recurring references to
subjects exposed to ray line over sustained intervals. One had
a log attached subject five. Gradual alteration and honest speech
begins after eight nights. Exhibits linguistic drift, increase in late
shifting scheduled callbacks. Transmission continues despite staff absence, followed protocol
do not answer a weight return transmission. The language was federal,
or at least not local, impossibly removed from the blue
collar routine of the staff i'd known. I felt a
sense of intrusion of trespassing into research better left and disturbed.
I looked again at the concentric map. The circle's match.
Neighborhoods that had it always seemed a bit more restless,
higher energy bills, more outages, sudden unexplained brownouts. The distribution
was random. Each ring was labeled with a time window,
a brief note test broadcasts twelve zero two thirty am
monitor for external contact. Suddenly the rain increased and the
crackle ran through the lights my apartment, dimming and coming back,
the surge pulling at my laptop's charging cable. Just for
an instant, my speakers let out squeal than a figt
trees of my own sign off, echoing years after it
should have faded to dead or my phone vibrated. I
checked at no new messages, blank coal lock, but scrolling
up there was a voice memoir I had not recorded.
Thirty seconds tie and stumped. During my drive home, when
my phone was sipped and mewed in my jacket, I
press play silence, then euro being heard repeat my own voice.
They can slurred, uttering a final word that clitched and
disappeared in a wash of static in the distance. Through
three panes of glass inthic city air. The rumble of
a train passed itself into distinct intervals are ryther, not
quite morse, but insistent. The phrase repeated in my head,
skipping like a recordless shy of the grow, don't let
it finish. I looked down at the reels, at the map,
at the stack of memos, and for the first time
in years, I wondered, without any irony, whether we had
been the experiment, not the broadcasters, not the ones transmitting,
but the ones meant to become the message out in
the fire escape. The city started and flickered, dripping with
impossible frequencies. I could nearly see, drifting over the river
and out across the silent neighborhoods. Everyone said Channel thirteen
was gone, but I no longer believed that. With the
tape spinning and the voices looping in a cursive refusal,
it lived wherever there was a receiver leftune to silence.
I was out of time, and whether I wanted to
or not, I was listening. I barely slept after the
last tape. In a half doze. My brain played old
station music out of nothing, jazz with mechanical noise, the
sort you can't mistake for dreams. I kept bracing for
a knock at the door, a flash of old police
light through the blinds, some catastrophic rational consequence for trespassing
and death. Every so often my form vibrate, but no
notifications ever appeared. At four, I got up and circled
my apartment, boot quenching and the loose tapes and wadded
up memos i'd been laying out for iOS. With nowhere
else to go, I finally locked everything in a desk
drawer and forced myself back to bed, but my eyes
never truly closed. The static stepped to my a tension
and my own thoughts liked behind, separated from any sense
of safety by something electric, something waiting for me to slip.
Morning spat in uneven light through cloud and old finishing blinds.
I sat hunched over back coffee, replay knows word in
my heady here, out of time air waves listening. The
phrase had a rhythm, a strange familiarity I didn't want
to admit to. It had been in Peter's, was once
thin in mine, impossibly in something else, not quite human
that called up the line. As I left the ruined station,
I set up my digital rig, the one I'd swore
and would keep no styal jet bay. When I left
commercial radio on my screen, the project file for the
Channel thirteen episode pulls with an air corrupted audio with
segments jacket gaps where interviews and edits had once fowed.
All my original raw audio was compromised in the exact
way that it started with. The tapes underlying segments were
static formed words or appeared too if you looped them
just right. Even my backup bestie kept glitching no matter
how I transferred, re imported. I didn't trust the cloud
any more. It felt like handing off bread comes to
something that read every file and remembered all missing pieces.
Instead of edits, I stacked the physical evidence in front
of me on the kitchen table, a concentric map, the project,
REALI memos, even my original cassettes from my own shifts,
all arranged to hunt for a thread, the compulsion to
piece it all together over roade fear I wouldn't be
the first to all last to thinknowledge might confer protection,
or at least dull the edge of the unknown. I
had an engineer of stubbornness inherited from Denis, and a
vestigial hope for rational explanations. Connecting paper and tape and
city events became my only till left against whatever had
burrowed under my routines. I made less dates, possible, motives, correlations.
I compared every staff absence, I could document mine Alice's
peters to the dates marked and the master rules and
the city wide patterns and real lines, weather and outage notes.
Some things aligned within a good precision. Most vanishings twinned
with complaints logged to the power company, frequencies of readers,
Atmospheric interference, deared animals found in city parks when the
sky pulls with unexpected arouse no one else seemed to
have noticed. In every single case, the outage is centered
with thin channel thirteen's coverage radius ripping outward with a
troubling regularity, like echoes. The more I read, the clearer
the logic in the memos became not crazy, not chaotic,
but methodical. Project rey Line wasn't just a technical trial,
but an intentional attempt to push something through the airwaves
to shape the city with a signal strong enough to
do more than play music or news. The language was
called written by someone who believed people and voices were
simply variables. Phrases like subject, drift or carrier event jumped
out at me. The last set of memos described a
protocol for exposure, keep staff in the booth past midnight,
increase in scheduled content, monitor for a feedback phenomena. Each
time someone went missing, the broadcaster's logs grew less and
less coherent, eventually devolving into wordless loops or silences, like
a mind being erased and repopulated. With the signal. As
noon pressed in, I began to cross reference station lobs
against old news items and emergency reports. One thing surfaced
every time calls from listeners about strange forces behind the music.
This in a week before each staffer's disappearance. The public
had noticed in their own way, but by the time
anything could be verified, it was too late. Dead air
redacted statements, rumors that only grew more fractured with each telling.
I laid out the tip chronologically, determined to analyze one
final pattern before taking any reversible step. With the kitchen
door close and my phone set on airplane mode, I
played the last known broadcast of each vanished staff member,
recording what happened every hour at exactly ten past the
time when the surge of the signal change would strike.
Always without variation, the same freight appeared, either in their voice,
the static or the ovolaid interference. To listen is to
be her back, sometimes the end of pleading, sometimes surrender,
sometimes nothing at all but a clipped tail. The last tape,
the freshest, was mine, my own sign off from the
final week I work late nights. I'd never listened back
to it before, to embarrass by the ruonness I brought
to the roll, the weariness in my delivery. Yet there
it was, at ten past one, just after an awkward
son transition. My younger self mumbled almost beneath his breath
to listen, as before cutting off with a cough and
jumping to the next track. The hairs on my arms
rose and slow measured terror. I had been touched by two.
Maybe I'd just been lucky left before the whole thing
could finish. Desperate for something to break the circularity, I
went searching for a side. Data in old community forms
and amateur radio posts. I found threads about word wide
ben noise picked up around the city in the late
nineties when Channel thirteen was at its peak range. No
one ever tied it to missing persons with a shutdown,
but a chilling consistency remained. All reports described phantom voices,
reverse voices, or calls that couldn't be traced. Worse, some
of these complaints had been logged the very season that
project ray Line's memos labeled as primary window for non
staff exposure over and over at the city itself seemed
to be the real test subject for whatever had been broadcast.
The map's circles weren't ratings. Each was a blast radius.
I started its wedding despite the cold that pressed in
through the window frames. As desk approached, my options thinned.
I had all the evidence any city coroner would go
as story collector could want, but none of it felt actionable.
Interviews led nowhere, recordings corrupted, and no one, no family,
no city official would risk even denial. I couldn't shake
the feeling that something remained unresolved. A final circuit to close,
I thought, returned one night to night. All along the
signal was meant to repeat. That was the only way
Loops ever closed. Some one had gone to the trouble
of sending me the tapes, the map, the box, hoping
or fearing that I tried to understand and maybe, by investigating,
pick up the same broadcast, unwittingly finishing what they'd started.
My recorder started hissing without prompt, a faintacle in the
head funds, even when no jack was inserted. I unplucked
everything for an hour. I paced hands and hair, every
surface in my apartment, resonating with the left over note
of a power search. Could I risk he returning? Hadn't
a signal already found me? My voice was already echoing,
shifting on my drives, muttering in the periphery. At night,
Dennis had worn me and walked away, at least for time.
Peter and Alice had not been so lucky, but they'd
been on air at midnight in the booth where the
equipment patched into a city they assumed was merely silent.
The urge burned to fight the repetition, I would need
to witness it, But why tempt the pattern designed to
catch and transform whatever observe it. When evening fell, I
stoffed the project rail line folder and a fresh tape
into my back, rolled my portable digital recorder and bubble wrap,
and threw on the only clean jacket left. I left
the box of Old Tatee spinning on my kitchen table,
as if hoping the ghosts would distract each other. While
I was gone. The car ride out was rolled with
wind and the swallen malaise of city streets at their emptiest.
I tried every logical argument for turning back, but my
mind looped in the same logic as the tapes. What
is herd must be listened for? What calls out must
be answered? Whether the pattern will simply begin again with
the next unlucky voice. Halfway there, a police cruiser sat
idling at an intersection, headlights stuttering at odd intervals. As
I drove through, the officer glanced from the window, but
seemed more interested in the static buzzing police radio than me.
I tried to, too my dashboard to fempast the dead frequencies.
For a split second in the static, between one hundred
seven point seven and one hundred eight point one, I
heard Channel fourteen's old bumper our voice on the air,
fragment slow and menacing, but there, as if the city
never let anything truly fade out, the station loomed a
heart and of black angles against the frail sky. I
parked a block away and killed the headlights. The neighborhood
farther west was already dark, every window empty. I cinched
my collar and jogged the distance. The side window I'd
cracked days before was still half open, whether having wiped
away even the freshest footprints. With shaking hands, I slid through,
careful not to slice my palm on the jagged glass.
Inside was almost comfortingly unchanged. The studio's tang of dust
and degradation called and being everything with a slow nourish.
My own recent tracks were just faint enough that I
doubted myself. Maybe I'd been anticipated, maybe something else had
come and gone. In the meantime, the master control room
was the station's heart. The big board, static and luminous
sliders kicked up old posts, curl in off a cathodeciatti,
The red on air bulb pundad from its court. Sound
baffles drooped like exhausted wings. I threaded my own tape
into the portable deck and set up my digital recorder,
framing the control surface so I could narrate my process.
Every gesture felt ritualistic, The careful tap of the VU meter,
the rotation of each faded knob. I waited at Breatha's
Daddy until eleven fifty eight, then hit record on the
digital end with shaking hands, press play on the tape deck.
My own voice slayered over the speakers, playing out into
the room, my narration shaky but intelligible. This is a
live attempt to capture what remains a project re line
the failed transmissions of Channel fifteen and whatever present still
lives here for documentation for those who need closure, for
which have a truth survives the static. If you're hearing this,
I'm But before I could finish, the tape deck's bat back,
a jagged surge of noise of feedback wine Sofia's it
knocked the mic off the table. I tried to adjust
the gain, but the room itself began to resonate, the
very walls clicking in a slow, gone rhythm. My own
voice leaped, wors came out of the speakers before I spoke,
them layered and doubled. The syllab was mangled. Then too
fast is there with there? We've listening? I snapped the
power off, but the decks stayed alive, humming with an
insistent mechanical life. Theon ai are bulb sputtering and flickering red,
as if connected to some external pulse. In the studio
Gass's reflection shapes moved behind me, blows that could have
been shadows with a memory of station staff. He once
claimed these ires as their own. For a horrifying moment,
the air behind my chair thick and smelling again of
ozone like cords tearing inside the ribs of the building.
The ritual of the broadcast took over. I queued the
next segment as if still behold into a format lock,
and the studio lights guttered on for half a second,
running off nothing, drawing power from absence itself. The frequency
monitor rolled red lines by secting the green. Something was
happening beyond mundane interference. The sense of performance, the need
to speak was all but overwhelman, the urge to address
whoever or whatever was on the other end, forming a bond,
a contract too old and simple to break. Somewhere between
twelve six and twelve twelve, the entire sound skip changed,
disemboded voices filtered through, not recorded by a love, a
fugue of staff, chatter, sometimes pleading, sometimes resigned. I heard
denis fatigue but urgent. Check the levels. Don't let it through.
If you hear yourself, hang up, don't let it finish,
Alice in a high, hollow tone. I wanted someone to
answer me. Now I don't know who I am any more.
The sense of the rooms dimension shifted. The control surfaces
seemed to deepen to wide and pass sight, as if
the studio extended into all those unlit miles of copper
wire and dead stations starting the city against the far wall.
Paperwork fluttered as if touched by passing footsteps on the
desk material as the folder I hadn't brought a sheaf
of touchcook pages with the header channel thirteen emergency scripts
to be read only on air. Each page contained variations
of the same phrase, tweaked for tone, but always ending
to listen as to be heard back. To hear yourself
is to transmit, do not answer, do not let it finish.
I picked up the top sheet, hand trembling. The urge
to comply was tangible. A compulsion is persistent as static.
My voice cracked as I read if you're out there,
please in the building's low hum ratched to a roar.
Pee buckled through the headset stuttering in time with my pulse.
As I tried to finish the line, my words spun off,
my actual voice repeated, and the speakers cycling faster than possible,
then layering into itself until it became a single pulse tone.
My vision flicker tunneled at the edges studioblasts rippled with condensation.
Something moved on the other side, so wet pressed against
old formed baffles. I knew the shape Peter's outline, or
something like its mouth, opening and closing back it by
impossible light, but islan. The shadow reached for the board,
hands stopping just above the sliders, hesitating as if asking
my permission, as if in hypnotic compliance. I found myself
reading from the script, even as the world compressed, not
the words I intended, but those rising from some deeper strata.
To answer is to be changed. The air is always listening.
If you hear yourself, don't it that last words stretch,
nearly breaking me. Suddenly both her cord is blurred with noise.
My sign off played audibly across the booth, but continued
after I stopped, diverging into new sentences, then devolving into
a broken litany of listening to listen, heard back you.
The shape in the glass stared, its face split not
in pain, not in malice, but in the bottom as
patience of expectation, awaiting not for rescue but for connection,
a contract seeking closure. I reached for the power. Every
muscle siff with loss. The air pressed close, the walls,
compressing the city's inert frequencies, begging for one final signal,
one permanent receiver. Dennis's voice sounded through the FEEDBA couldn't
let it finish, and as slam my palm down on
the tape deck in the digital rig, sending bow tumbling
off the desk, all at once, the noise cut off,
no voices, no feedback, not even the building's inchient hum.
In the silence, my own labor breathing filled the roar
dark air. Time snapped back into motion, the electronics dead,
the red on aile light snuffed for good, nothing but
my own heart in my ears, and a memory of
sound press painfully against the hollow of my fruit. I
stuggered outside, leaving the gear, the folder, and the exhausted
room behind the City's night was freezing, unyielding, but free
of the static that had strangled every street before The
drive back was almost a block out. I don't remember
shifting gears, only how the silence pressed, clean but expectant
around the empty station lot. When I finally let myself
into the apartment, it was sunrise. My hands didn't shake,
They clung to keys and take more as talsmans than evidence.
The tapes themselves were early quiet now. My digital recorder,
when I loaded the files, had captured only fragments, dislocated voices,
truncated words, and unresolved loop ending in nothing but his.
Some days passed before I finished the podcast episode. The
edit was halting the conclusions, satisfying the evidence and complete.
I knew better than to promise answers. Instead, I played
excerpts odd segments from the confrontation, whispers, threading my own narration.
I laid out my research, the power outages, the sec locks,
the city's costo of venice staff. I made my warnings
plain that whatever real line was, it didn't end. When
Channel thirteen went dark, its rescue infected every silence I'd
inhabited since a form of audio haunting, the refusal of
the air to let me be alone. I released the episode,
then breeze for consequences there were none for days only,
the hum for only late night calls from unknown numbers,
heavy with the sound of my own el LA podcast
going back by else in absence where I sensed some
one was listening too closely. My nervous system matched it
up permanently, not panic, but the distinct impression of being
recorded surveiled expected. With time, new symptoms emerged in the
quieter intervals between edits. I started to hear without source,
sometimes from the space behind my desk, sometimes just under
the fridgis whine and neve interference. Sometimes the phantom was language,
a phrase I could almost make out my own voice,
bleeding through headspace where no external input existed. The once
comforting rituals of audio production collapse beneath the new superstition.
Don't play back what you haven't finished, don't listen too late,
don't let yourself become a receiver for what's waiting to loop.
I stopped leaving voicemails, stopped answering late night calls. I
left the tapes and touched the map, blocked away project
re line, filed in a dray silk with shaky resolve.
I couldn't bring myself to dispose of any of it.
Ownership felt like the last fragile boundary between me and
the repetition that took Peter Alice. So many I'd never met,
listeners wrote in a few at first, thin dozens. Most
said they were fascinated to Channel thirteen, now the nucleus
for a city widecamp vitaiale, but a minority left troubling messages.
One cent a voice memo of something they'd picked up
during a thunder storm on the South Side. It's you right,
my own voice layered under the static, intoning the same phrase,
half reactive, half catatonic. Another caller bade me to turn
the station off for good, as if I had power
over what lived in the city's dead spectrum. In my nightmares,
I sometimes returned to the booth, math drive gone, headphones
clewed to my head, The script waits open before me.
My hand's restless. Outside the city flickers and hums, every
window tuned to the same silent plea for recognition. In
those moments, I begin to understand what Rae Line had started.
Not a broadcast, but it opposite, a transmission meant to
convert the listener to anchor pressence in absence to creaticos
that would replace all memory with a single, endlessly repeating
hum life since as remained gentle on its surface and
jagged beneath, the city, for all its rust and blight,
appears to proceed indifferent to whatever lies not beneath its frequencies.
But the silence is no longer innocent. It feels layer expectant,
th with all the things unsaid and unacknowledged. A month
passes in two. The world warms and forgets, or pretends to.
But some nights, especially in the teeth of a storm,
the air vibrates with old ghosts, the city's apartments reached
for a lost voice, and the old resonance tines with
whatever I have become one evening fan forwards a sniffet
recorded off their clock radio during a tornado watch. The
attached file is choppy, distorted by wind, but unmistakable. The
can channel thirteen coal letters decades extinct, stutter in the
margin w q C H thirteen on the air, too
soft to be rebroadcast, much less a prank. Some frequency
nobody claims underneath. Another voice rises, and I know before
I hear the syllables that it's mine. I play and
reaply the file, feeling my skin ice over. My own voice,
modulated and fractured, delivers the phrase I never recorded outside
the old booth. To listen is to be heard back,
turn it off if the signal answers of the foul
corrupts there, descending into a hiss that is not mere
tape noise, but at a presence, a signal that still
knows my name. If you are in the city when
the storms roll over the river, if you scan the
dial and find Channel thirteen's fountain coal sign, don't linger,
don't answer, don't let it finish. There are frequencies that
remember once the comfort was in being heard. Now I
know sometimes the silence is listening back. I set the
phone down on the kitchen table, feeling the final notes
of my corrupt de voice humming dully through the wood,
as if the resent itself could poison a room. The
city outside was silent, yet mayas strained for another recurrence
of those coal letters. The night on station on a
non frequency JACKO tinged with my own dread for several minutes.
I sat there, frozen, unable to move, the unnatural hush
weighing on every object around me. It wasn't just an
audio though. Ever since the fan had sent a file,
I'd noticed my apartment felt increasingly wrong. At night, corner
seemed to tilt subtly when I shifted my focus. Light
bulbs stuttered for a moment each time I spoke certain
words aloud. If I was quiet enough, just before sleep,
i'd hear arabic pulsing from inside the walls, never quite
synchronizing with my own heartbeat, though I sometimes tried, out
of desperation to force them to match. For a while,
I tried routine as a defense. I kept up interviews
for the podcast, now scrubbing each new audio file line
by line in paranoid hob I'd catch the signal infecting
my words. Emails from listeners poured in a new one
every hour, each with a story. Some swore they'd heard
the call sign. Others told me about dreams being lost
in hole's line and to end with blank humming tape reels,
or walking through a city where every speaker, every car
radio whispered with barely restrained longing, turn it off, turn
it off, turn it And every message ended the same.
I hope you find peace, Please be careful, I thank them,
all hoping to reassure and not transmit the fear I
now lived with. Yet each date, the line between reality
and transmission blurred a little more. I began to question
which memories belonged to my time at the station, and
which ones had grown in the cracks left by re
LINEA spliced identity, a trace laid down by feedback. Driven
by the need to prove I still own myself, I
made a decision early one morning, just as the sun
threatened beneath the shelf of clouds, I would try to
triannulate the new signal find its source, not with old
reels or harnted tapes, but with my own hand and
what lettle remained of my technical skill. There was a
suborn practicality in me despite everything. If I found something
hard and physical equipment relay and new paratransmit, i'd of
proof there was a limit to its reach, and perhaps
a way to end the repetition. I repurposed the cheap
best to Yo software to fined radio kit, patching it
to a battered lapt up loaded with signal analysis plugins.
If Chanel thirteen was genuinely rebroadcasting, even as a phantom,
there'd be a spike a signature something the city's background
noise couldn't fully hide. I assembled a portable antendor from
juncture odds and ends, assembled a small field kit, and
waited for the next storm. The weeks crawled, I began
sleeping less, listening more. My apartment turned into a nest
OF's spectral frequencies. Radio was tuned to static speakers, hissing
low and a wet noise. The oververe position like an
altar in a living room. I drew maps marking neighborhoods
where listeners described the signal as strongest is out near
the river, often during high wind or atmospheric pressure drops.
It matched eerily the concentric circles on the project Reline
documentation rain Blood on the city three consecutive nights before
and east. When finally pulled in something wild and dangerous.
I packed the se R notebook in a battered flashlight
and drove toward the old station. But when I reached
the city's edge, passing the same factories the vanished red
glow of the broadcast tower, I stopped abruptly a few
blocks short. The urge to return full circle to channel.
The team was palpable, but not quite right, the reported
new transmission, every email confirmed, never centered exactly there. Instead,
I doubled back and zixigged through back streets, pausing every
few blocks to raise the antenna and scanned for strong surges.
The search became a ritual. Popped the trunk, raised the
whitby's clothes, listening for any phrase or jingle, static most times,
sometimes snippets of distant traffic or dispatch. But as I
crossed into the old industrial quarrid between an abandoned rail
yard and what was once a bottling plan, the signal sharpened,
first a war, but then a brief blast of unmistakable
Channel thirteen sound design, the station jingle just off key,
followed by silence, then still listen is to be. I
dropped the antenna, pulse roaring in my ears as the
phrase dissolved in a metallic rasp. The source, if you
could call it that, was mobile, pulsing, sometimes from one alley,
then another block over, as if the city itself redirected
the message through the wires, telephone poles, and half ruined
reey cabinets no repairman had touched in decades. On the
third try, in the lee of a sagging viaduct. The
signal nearly overloaded my headphones. A burst cut through more
complete than before, w qc H one three, turn it off.
In that moment, standing in a wet sodium, led half dark,
and memory glided against the present. The first year I
worked a channel thirteen, there was a week when a
sequence of phone calls arrived to the request line, each
from a different number, but all beginning with the same
flat halting phrase. This is wqc H. Do you hear me?
We chalked it up to pranksters, but now I heard
the same cadence. The pattern was the thing lightning down's
far south, temporarily flooding the alley in sharp edged white.
With each flash, my unshadow flecked against the brick, doubled
by some other shape at my back, longer thicker at
the shoulders. Martha jar and frozen. Expectation determined, I marked
the precise GPS coordinates of the signal's peak, took photos
of the street, and returned to my car nose flay.
But my resolve battered into clarity. If it was an
electrical relay or some old city hard where commandeered and
realize's final days, I'd find proof, or perhaps I privately admitted,
I just needed to know that whatever haunted the airs
could be found in matter, not solely in me. Dawn
broke pale and faint. As I returned home, the city's
pace resumed, trucks in the distance, a sharp cat streaking
across a puddled lot. I captured the field recordings into
my laptop, faltering and replaying the specific moments when Channel
thirteen's voice played through. I applied every digital noise reduction
and spectral analysis TRECKENNU. None of it wiped the signal,
sometimes beneath my own spoken field notes, the station's old
coalsign powles like EKG, looking beneath the skin of static.
The more I listened, the more convinced it became that
the piece of the transmission had latched on to me.
In the process, my SD card corrupted itself again, refusing
to play back, accept for a mangled looping to be
heard back, heard back, heard, panic, layre then faded. I
recognized the impulse, fear becoming ritual, ritual becoming patten, patten,
cycling to compulsion. If the project re lined files were
to be believed, Attempting to isolate the signal only cemented
its grip. I attempted to sleep, but hallucination scraped. At
the edge of waking. I saw the abandoned control room,
the green glass indicator lies flirting in the dark. Denis
louched in his chair, chaining together in comprehensible warnings, and Peter,
looking up from his playlist, lips forming again and again,
don't let it finish. I heard my own voice, barely
older than a boy, whispering the phrase at the core
of every tape. A sudden pounding at my door shocked
me away, first once, then again, Larry Heart hammering a
grope from my phone, but there were no notifications, no
miscalls showing. I shambled to the peep hole, puring down
on to the dim hall. A figure stood on the landing,
mid thirties, trenchcoats soaked through hail, long and unkempt. For
a moment, I thought one of the vanished had come
home or resuscitated. Alice or some version of Peter. Shuffling
forward to ruind the tape and started all again. The
figure noticed the movement and looked up. She spoke softly
enough I almost didn't hear. Here're the one from the podcast.
I opened the door cautious few inches. That's me yea
is there. I'm Meghan, my brother. He worked at Channel
thirteen back then. My heart skipped the last roster at
only two. Meghan's one attempt, who vanished after two weeks.
The other an engineer sibling who had called the station
in the late hours, sometimes just to hear a familiar
voice across the lonest sprawl of the city. She hesitated,
glancing down the stairs, as if measuring whether I was
worth the truth or a warning. I heard your episode,
the one with the final sign off. Tried three numbers
to reach you, my brother used to say. In the
last weeks he found felt like he could hear people
talking through the wires, not just behind the glass. He
left a note. I want you to read it. Her
face was drawn, creased with the exhaustion of someone who'd
lived in the margins of the real line shadow newly
as long as I had. She handed me a carefully
folded scrap, which I took would deliberate ritual care. For
a moment, both of us seemed to listen, not to
each other, but to some third presence, hovering and quiet
between our words. I nodded her into the apartment. She
pushed on the edge of the kitchen chair while I
opened the note, feeling both hopeful and vaguely mortified to
let a stranger into the heart of my haunted routine.
Her brother's handwriting was lipping, almost childish. The square read
I see them sometimes in the jack, where the phone
line runs in and the walls bleeding out behind every circuit.
They never want to speak. They just want someone to
hear their names, even if the names are wrong. If
you ever hear your own voice, hang up. If you
feel the signal pull at you, don't answer. I love you,
don't listen for too long. They are always waiting for
the silence. There was something unmistakably etchingly true in the note,
child as shape, more vulnerable than any broadcasted warning because
it was meant for no audience. It'll Mygnix's failed trembling.
He left that tape tunder my door the morning before
he disappeared. She trailed off, swallowed, and fixed her gaze
on the mount of tapes and equipment cluttering my counter.
I listened to his last broadcast. You hear it too,
don't you? You know the signal isn't gone. I tried
searching for comfort, but only found the exhausted sincerity shared
by survivors. It's not gone, I said, it's everywhere. I
think we're still inside it somehow, or maybe it's inside us.
Megan nodded, looking pained but also relieved. I thought so.
I thought, if some one else says it out loud,
maybe it breaks the spell, maybe it makes it less hungry.
There was much to say beyond that, so we kept
our silences, lighting the room's faint mechanical humpful of gaps
through the east window. The sky was beginning to clear,
but the city below was still thick with the aftertaste
of the storm. She took her lea soon after, but
not without giving me one final searching look. If you
figure out how to end it, tell the city, tell
them to stop listening. She hesitated, then opened her palm
to reveal about it old quartern's jack, possibly from a
radio or agent phone, a talisman against whatever lived in
the lines. I took up, weighing at pitted solidity. After
she left, I sat for a long time, holding the jack,
the letter, and the se ar kid in my lap.
If the answer it was anything. It felt like this.
He cannot resolve a transmission built on longing. Nothing that
had happened to Channel thirteen was ever truly erased. Every
warning was a wish for closure that, when repeated, only
prolonged the loop. For the next few days, I barely
spoke my own fears, drifting towards resignation but not defeat.
The city moved on as always, but my in books
filled with similar stores, people who lost siblings, partners, friends,
after a long night's tune to frequencies that never appeared
on any schedule. Some wrote about tapping lines just to
hear static, searching for a Nannza because the absence left
by Channel thirteen was louder than any broadcast. With a
quarter inch jack in my pocket, I retraced my route
to the signal's epis into the really box beneath the
viaduct early evening. The city's lights filtered through thin mist.
As I crouched by the box, tills ready. The padlock
was half rusted, and surprisingly it leaves some one had
been here in recent months, perhaps even weeks. Inside. What
I saw was at once per sake in disquieting. Why
as Chris grossed the terminal's in improbable tangles. Tape to
the inside door was a schematic burying the faded Channel
thirteen logo and a project re Line reference code, along
with a tiny sticker that wreathe a silence persists close
the circuit. The relay it self ran silent, but if
I pressed my ear to its shell, I could hear
the faintest of oscillations of pulsing modulating in time with
the phantom transmissions had held for weeks. It was a
live installation, and possibly the backbone that made Channel thirteen's
echo possible even in technical absence. I reached in, retracing
the hand labeled wise and finally finding a port size
to fit Meckin's jack. With hands that trembled, I plugged
it in and waited. The pulsing tone surged, then faded,
replaced by absolute stillness into that hush. My own breath
sounded two loud for a moment I feared had made
it worse, awakened. Something that had thrived in feedback now
set loose. But when I raised the SDR and tenants
found the local bandwidth, all I heard was the soft
and differentiated ocean of city static Channel thirteen jingle had gone,
its aftermath, routed silently back through the void. I stood
in the alley for some time, kneeling before the relay,
half expecting some sign, the flash of a face, or
retry from beyond. But nothing emerged, only the ordinary hum
of wires, the breathing of the city regaining its autonomy.
As I walked home, the air felt different, no lighter,
but less expectant. The absence was not peace exactly, but
it was closure of a kind. When I climbed the
stairs and closed my door behind me, my apartment felt normal,
or as normal as it diver could be. The Revere's
light was dark. My voice recorder was started, with no
files added, no sign off played from the drawers or outlets. Still,
I kept the quarter inch jack in my hand, rolling
it over my knuckles like a prayer bead. For years,
I'd believe the only thing separating us from repetition was
the wilter step away to refuse the urge to perform,
to cease the hunt for some one listening back. Now,
having found the last circuit and closed it, even if
only for a time, I found room finally to rest.
These passed. Then weeks, the podcast faded into the background
of the city's endless churn, the odd stranger still the
milling him with faint, anxious queries. Once or twice I
awoke from a half dream with the shape of those
vanished voices in my mind. But the urgency had gone.
I could listen to the city's silence and find nothing
but my own thoughts there until one blistering night, when
thunder crack close. A new message arrived, a single audio
file from a listener across the river. They opened with
white eyes, then a sound of a distant laugh, echoing
the cadence of some one I used to know. Then
one final phrase, never quite finish. If you hear channel thirteen,
the file ended abruptly, the warning consumed by a surge
of static and rain. Now in the middle of the night,
in a city that refuses to remember, I keep the
old jack on my desk, the last and broken loop. Sometimes,
when storms threaten and the air tingles like an open channel,
I unplug everything and wait. Listeners might call, stores may
spiral on you. But the best advice remains unchanging. If
you hear channel thirteen, turn it off. If what's on
the other end speaks in your own voice, don't answer it.
And above all, if the signal answer is back, don't
let it finish.