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 been netstaffed since the turn
of the century and routine settled deep into my bones.
I poured a copp of Staley net 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 of 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 Rea 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 iyres
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 dare 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, and the floor a breathed 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 wall 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 in threy. 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 the 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 collar waited, hung up framed. In the context of
the plain logbooks, these marks seemed 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 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 or 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 book, 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
power 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 roff
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, 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 listen, 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 scutched 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 checklist 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 overe 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 lift.
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 anewage, are 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 iOS, each one.
A faint echo of the old language had found the
rest of the crew. Datimers and weakened ers continued their
oblivious journey 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
newest 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 battered 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 nazzal 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 record'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 deca 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, their 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 coal Karl, 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 occadence. 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 ache 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 shuffled 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, clipped
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 faded 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. Dls 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 virtual
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 set
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
space deeper than the room could holt. 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 white
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 q H 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.