Speaker 1: It's almost funny, how then I can shrink the world.
You sit alone in a room built from more people
than you'll ever meet, bathed in the weak, flickering light
of forty year old bulbs, and it feels like the
city outside has receded to a memory, a slow dissolving
horizon of sodium orange and sharp, dispassionate shadows. Only the
hum of the equipment keeps you company. The age drancemetter
is low, drown the shiver of fans guarding dyeing circuitry.
The thin has fed through your headphones by the creaking
control board. It's the kind of ire at, the kind
of place where reality feels slaughtered just out of you.
My first over night shift at was left of kiaus
W eight hundred ninety felt Ron. The instant is stepped
into Big Mike Marlin's empty booth. Midnight rain snaked down
the glass from this fourth floor. The city looked pose
and reel. The puddle blow of the traffic lights clung
up of alors in the distant shape of the freewheel
like a string of floating lanterns. I touched the battered
fader and the mic, half expecting it to turn to
powder under my fingers. Marlon was gone, but they'd called
me in any way. I was cheap, supposedly talles an
insurance policy against dead air, my own voice barely broken
in it started ordinarily enough commercial block at twelve six SAM,
A best of the seven is set vaded promos legal adi,
read by a man who died three station owners ago.
When you run the graveyard, you learn early on, and
nobody listens, but the haunted and knee insnack. After the
one unusual wire copy, I was alone with my own echo,
a spilled mug of coffee, and a red plastic clock
whose cut sticked with a tremor. As nervous as my hand,
I yawned, tried not to stare at the empty swivel
chair across from me. When Mike's batted headphones black pham
crumbling hung like some kind of shriveled relic. The collboard
blink twice, then fell dark again, not unusual for this ire.
On the tape deck, I said, a fresh reel spinning.
Every sound was locked, even when nobody cared to replay it.
If you filled dead air with more dead air, at
least the machine pretended not to notice. Then some more
just passed two seven Homo. While I was scrolling through
the playlist, debating with her to slip in and off
the book's request to Jaggy, burst of staf attic erupted
sharp enough to break my focus. I jobbed at the
mixing board, thinking somebody upstairs had dropped the cable, but
the feed was coming from the main channel, cutting for clean.
Somewhere in that noise, an almost musical crackle, A shape formed,
a voice surfacing out of the snow, A froze. The
voice barely rose above the static, but every detail hit
with the peculiar force of the familiar being warped and returned.
It started low, uncertain, and painfully clear through distortion. If
anyone hears this, police doesn't matter what time the door's opening.
I didn't do it. I didn't please if anyone can,
there was an urgency to it, weariness and disbelief tangled together.
But what sent my heart climbing into my throat was
that I recognized it. I'd spent all weeks shadowing Mike,
mimicking his old tricks and the controls, listening to the
way he played up his gruff bartone for his insene
night people. The voice was decade younger, but it was him,
unmistakably him, down to the slip on doors that used
to amuse the call and fans. The sound warped, faded,
then snapped abrupt as a harsh reeli click. The tape
deck kept rolling, the red record light blinking steadily. The
feed was gone, just me and the whine of the
fan again. Dread needled at me and pulses. My hands
shook as I checked every input. I queued up a
rill that had been recording and wound it back, heart
pounding in time with the dull grind inside the machine.
Nothing fifty seconds of soft room hiss, my own breath
popping up, faint and harmless. I let the tape run
to the point where the signal should have cut in.
Still nothing, no static, no cry for help, only the
tired murmur of equipment left too long on air. The
red light blinked at me, a digital wing or an accusation.
Then the coalboard erupted, flooding with four, five, six lines
at once. At this ire loners, pranksters, city cops. Sometimes
old friends of the station called in may be hoping
for a free t shirt, or just to break the hush.
But as I snapped on each line, they offered only fragments,
harsh whispers, the sound of distant radio feedback, snatches of
voices laid atop themselves too fast and then to understand.
Then on every line, upon a new patch of silence,
pierced by a smaller, clearer voice, boy's voice pitch hibe
of the mistakably MIC's repeating don't let them change your frequency.
The phrase looped, lipping, Then the collboard dropped to dark again,
every line silent. I reached for the station lot book,
needing to ground myself, to prove that what had just
happened was anchor to real pencil written sequence. But the binder,
strictly divided for every hour every shift carried its iroly
logs intact, except for the one covering the quarter I
re passed to and the one I ought to have
filled out. As this was happening, the page was simply missing,
torn clean from the rings. Suddenly the night didn't seem empty.
It felt predatory, folded around me with corners as sharp
as secrets. The thing about radio even now is that
you trust in the gridwork of routines. To save you.
I clung to them because the tide survived so far.
I'd been at kieras W just under two months, bounced
out of college with more technical ambition and actual skills,
chasing jobs few still Valley Drell crackling middle of the
dial live radio. For some people this is nostaalgia. For me,
it was fail progress. The building itself was the kind
you only find survey industries that are half were to vanishing, old, stubborn,
stubbornly outdated. The security lights in the hallways always flickered,
as if fighting a battle with the current. The break
room fridge made of nards like distant thunder at regular intervals,
and always always smiled faintly of burnt soup, no matter
how many times some unscrubbed it. There were motivational posters
in the bathroom curling away from the tile, and the
staff microwave had do not attempt to reheve. Fish scrolled
across at unpeeling tape. Most of my colleagues were years
passed disillusirement. Shelley the daytime anker topped so fust you
barely caught half a meaning. Pilots of gossip station politics
and builtings about angry listeners of malfunctioning traffic hams. There
was Bent, the surly engineer, whose patience for Rickie questions
ran about as lawn as his fews very short, and
whose entire wardrobe consisted of grease stain jeans and ancient
concert t shirts. Nobody ever saw the owner, a waxy
airless man named Montague before noon. Sometimes he appeared in
the upper office of the mug that, by rumor contained
only hot water and a single floating slice of lemon. Still,
there was a kind of ritual to the over night.
The station's life blood, Big Mike handled the bruising iyres,
loved by all who called in his big, bounding voice
of comfort to cabbys, Insomniac's truckers, regulars with odd stories
and stranger requests. Every night at midnight he'd queue up
a cover so on, never the original, always a cover,
his way of hinting that reinvention was survival. The playlist
wasn't just about music, It was about connections. Stand from
the bridge with his eternal late rund Charity, whos d
a job nobody quite pinned down. The night watcher who
called only with coated phrases, and the occasional pun if
you weren't loaded in, if your show went off the rails,
you'd hear about it in the morning. Mike ran at height,
You filled every second, loved every ad, never let a
call out through who hadn't been cleared. He could fill
five empty minutes with a baseball anecdote and a weather warning.
None ever made the locks, but every one swore they'd
heard them. The night Mike vanished. They scrambled for any
one with a pulse shy for me at temp'm her
tone wordly flat. He're on to night, all of it,
cover everything, just make it live. Nobody would say what happened,
but the audio engineer started putting away cables and clearing
out empty drawers, muttering about bad luck for night people.
At first I thought maybe it was a sick out,
just a run of bad shifts. Maybe Mike was hiding
in the narrow ways of record library at hatching a prank. No,
you don't get it, said Leelah, the part time office manager,
as she passed me in the kitchen with a folderful
blank invests forms. Something goes run out there and everyone
acts like its business as usual. Don't say his name
to night. Okay, she meant big Mike, but never spook
it aloud. There were rules, fail out everything, all the
station breaks, the song and intros, the commercial transitions. Keep
two law books running, the backup, always in pencil, Never
forget the legal idea. The system was old, but it
worked if you did what you were told. I tried
to treat the night like a marathon. Caffeine comfort, snack
eyes on the time. I filled the tape deck, double
check the stack of pre recorded promos, and smile for
no one. The chair was lonely without Mike's Bolgloman beside it,
tossing Roy Bob's My Way between requests about the way
this city turns inside out. After midnight, Once or twice,
when the iron lag, I found myself replaying Mike's old
opening lines in my head. It isn't the dead of night,
it's the loving of night. This is when you find
out what you're really made of. First, I was crawled
and I cataloged every song, every act, down to the note.
Maybe a dozen calls passed through almost all Regular's charity
wanted to hear a B side blues cover. Nobody could
find stand from the bridge told along ramping story about
fishing gear that I half returned out. The night watcher
said nothing, something I thought was a joking proteste somewhere
beneath it. All subtle and knease grew. The others lingered less,
avoided chary anecdotes about their own time. When the light
shift traded rumors about long nights when the equipment went strange.
Somebody had left a half bone stick of instance, wedged
into the phone patting under the mixing desk. I left
it there, not wanting to disturb what felt suddenly like
a mark of protection. The only glimpse I caught of
Shelley all night was around eleven thirty, when she coasted
through the studio door, dropping a single browning apple in
my palm. To keep you awake, she said, but her
eyes never left the shadow. Pulling under the racks of
old carts and seed, she left with the mutter, don't
worry about the static. So I followed the routine, watched
the clock, recorded every action, and waited for what I
was entirely sure. All I knew was that my normal
would never feel quite normal again. When late schiffrolls round again,
repetition saves you structure lends a sense of promise that
the night is containable, that if whre every lever is
set and each log signed, nothing can truly get inside.
Second night, I arrived earlier, set everything up by the book,
determined to prove myself. The station always felt empty. Niemen
at doors left props, Placard's culling off paint, the humming
din of summer perpetually cooling down. That night, at precisely
twelve zero zero, I lined up a classic cover song,
the same ritual my cut honored. The intro spilled out clean,
the signal steady, but thirty seconds in, just as the
guitar faded and the vocal should have entered, the audio
stuttered a jagged, leaping skip. I reached for manual override,
but the digital playbuck froze that displaced daughter in backwards
ten could flickering as if it knew it wasn't supposed to.
A wash of static blurred through the speaker, not overpowering
but insistent. I slipped, and the old headrones, searching for
bleed or distortion, cost something under the truck I'd never
heard before, A whisper that intertwined with the music in time,
but at a phase straining I caught a few and
mistakable syllables, can you hear me? Not the end to
keep the signal open. The flush of wrongs lasted less
than three seconds, but left a recide. The psalm rated itself,
picked up exactly whord should The station clock digital and
gawless blinked backwards for a moment. Two fifteen became two twelve,
then reset itself to normal. The callboard silent for Neolie
and I are letting a familiar number, then dropped the
call before I could answer for his male notification. I
barely breathed as I played it back. What I heard
was breathy, off key chanting someone maybe a child, repeating
again and again. Change your frequency, Change your frequency. The
voice was sing song, but something in it fell rehearsed,
almost mechanical, as if it had been spliced together from
smaller tears in sound. After the IRA, I turned to
the logs, searching for an anchor against rise and confusion.
The heavy ledger was supposed to serve as a record
of order, a straight line through chaos. Instead, I found
another anomaly. The third lob was kept in pencil for
backped clear erasures and smudges, but more disturbing scattered throughout,
with stretches of notes and handwriting that wasn't Mike's, nor
any one I recognized. Mike's usual lipping script barked out
times and tracks up to a point, then stopped abruptly
in the middle of a line below, and thick, blocky letters.
Some one had filled a half dozen lines with just
one the hidden room. The rest was erased, leaving drag
marks in the paper. No comment, no initials, no follow up.
I flipped through older entries, found a few pages, swapped stickers,
obscuring names, tips marked blank from last week were now missing.
Some were labeled as back up for automation, but never
entered in a digital log. It was as if the
record was quietly insistently being reritten from below. I spent
too long that night reviewing reels from the back room,
all tapes, some from nights lawn before my first shift.
The ones I could find were all clean, static, dead air.
Only the occasional voice break for an iroly station ID
from Michael Shelley, no trace of interruptions, no evidence of
the static or pleading voice that had peace last night.
But at least three reels marked for the right dates
and ires were missing from the slots. I paced the
empty rows, fingers dusted with oxide, heart thumbing with unexplainable
currents of dread. They turned to gray, and the prone
jolted me out of checking the logs for the fourth time. Ben,
the engineer's voice still warned them by too little sleep,
crackled over the line. He screw up the key system
last night. Before I could even answer, he hung up.
It wasn't just that something had gone wrong technically. It
was that I was the only one left to witness
it alone. Caught between the routine and the impossibility of
what I'd heard, I realized for the first time that
the Knight's true currency was memory, fragile, easily deleted, and
I now feared dangerous to keep. By the third night,
caution had become obsession. I built up a system, three
tape recorders, two generations of backups, a log page for
to copy. Before the first diary even started, every malfunction
of skip truck was noted, time stamped, double verified. If
there was a method to the chaos, I intended to
drag it into daylight with pure, stubborn record keeping. First thing, though,
was to find the reels nobody wanted. Found the main
studio had no secrets, but touched behind the bucket cabinets,
where the wiring from the transmitter ran down the wall
like tangled veins. I found a lock driid previously dismissed
as just another engineer's junk pile. A few tugs with
a flathead screwdriver, and the lock gave inside a half
dozen unmarked dullastic reels, glue peeled paper tags with only
the first three letters of what might have been names assenda,
chaw what. Each tape that a corner faded by sun,
like it had been moved from window to drawer and
back over the years, But each also had one thing
in common. The oxide had been partially erased, the smooth
brown surface, showing streaky lines as if someone had run
a magnet over them. Whoever had done it, they'd left
just enough signal to prove the tapes had once held
something downstairs. The stitions may knock, ever, was ripped off
with a sign in dry pinched hand writing no axis
after midnight by order of station owner. I eased through
feeling every childish d will of trespass the mazer, faded
boxes and gray server as hummed would reserve power in
a crate. Mark de Teke Memos nineteen eighty two nineteen
eighty nine. I struck gold a sheaf of stapled notes
written by the same tidy, almost mechanical hand as the
mysterious blocks in the look book. Technical breakdowns alternated with
strange references. Review proper frequency management nightly, no repeat of
February rehearsal loop must remain closed on another operational rehearsal
and complete system acquires analog back see tape marked. Test
four slash fourteen slash eighty two. I rooted until I
found a tape match in the description hidd in the
midst a nests of all bumper cats and a defunct
time delay unit, its tag curling at the edges read only.
Test four slash fourteen slash eighty two do not air
allow raspepus built in my ears as I threaded the
tape for an ancient deck and on the battered station headphones.
At first total silence, then a click muffled voices arguing
in the background, like someone had keued up the wrong input.
One voice was strangely authoritative frazzled, unmistakably belonging to Montague,
the current owner, but sounding decades younger. The other voice
helped with panic, young, desperate, yet again familiar. But no
one can hear this, no one. The loop isn't closed.
You'll hang us all up. Please let me out, I'll
fix it. Scraping tape, rummaging, a burst of static. I
leaned back, sweating. This wasn't just a technical test. They
were recording, or believed they were something off script, something
that was never supposed to reach the air. It was
then that the phone buzzed. The blinking panel taunted me
with another unknown number. I start the answer button. Is
your door locked? The voice was rough, slurred. I recognized
Sam from the bridge, and then remember the cold room line. Dead.
Lights flickered overhead once twice. Then the phones display warped,
showing random symbols. My head set haston between station. I
d picked up the sound of slow, heavy breathing, not close,
not far, just there, as if someone was pacing the
wall between the control room and the silent depths of
the city. I turned all my recorders on, tapping on
glass like it was a lifeline. At that moment, every protocol,
every scrap of grown up skepticism felt small and foolish.
There was something wrong under the skin of the station,
something that wanted to be left unlowed, unremarked. I wrote
it all down, helping paper would anchor me to whatever
this was. I slept poorly, haunted by the sense of
voices whispering through circuitry lawn after I had left the
station's flickering reach. But what stuck with me longest was
the dread, the knowledge that every safeguard, every feeble wall
Ey'd raised, built out of rules and locks, was little
more than scratch record skipping in the dark while someone
else queued up the next blank tape. Sleep from me
is always short and interrupted, but that night my rest
was little more than a bridge between two wells, one
filled with flickering recognition, the other with the certainty of
being watched next afternoon. With hand shaking from too much
caffeine and too little clarity, I started overlaying the audio
I had captured the night before. I wasn't technical in
the way Bend the engineer was, but I'd learned just
enough in college to play with digital frequencies to compare
wave fumbs and surface clues that most would miss. When
I matched the fragments from their test four slash fourteen
slash eighty two tape against the intercepted, younger sounding voice
from the lost overnight broadcast, A chill settled on my chest,
cold as the gaps in the log book. Both voices,
separated by four decades, matched intonation ticks, the stutter on
hard syllables. The argument in the nineteen eighty two tape
Shredded and Panicked was between a younger Mike and Montague,
but the transcript left no solid ground beneath my feet.
On both there was pleading, begging, some desperate insistence that
the loop is enclosed and we can keep him in
the air. As long as the log is incomplete, he
can't leave. I tapped through iOS of log review eyes burning.
The staff rosters for the late seventies and early eighties
were slim to begin with, but the records held their
own secrets. At least three overnight hosts in the ages
were listed as resignations, but all with ambiguous notions that
made my mouth dry. In treatment unavailable for common a
LOGGI complete, most only appeared in one or two group
photos pinned between withered pages in the stations de Crepit
personnel folder. The only photo I found of a missing
staffer was once again Big MIC's face, blowed but recognizable
hunch behind a desk, smoky with the grain of two
photographs coloss side by side. One was dated nineteen eighty two,
the other twenty twenty three. The face was unchanged, only
the backdop aged. I swallowed hard, scrolling back and forth.
How could the same man appear nearly unaltered forty one
years apart? Nwhere truly had he gone? Whatever was happening,
it had started long before I got here. Something was
binding up time itself, not in the city outside, but
in the trembling silence between the walls of this ancient,
crumbling station. Each answer I found was just a back
door into a deeper, more contorted question. I waited all
afternoon for Ben to turn up. He always wandered past
after the sun began to sink, fixing art collecks and
grumbling about hat jobs left Badona. When he showed, I
trailed him into the back storage, armed with a notebook
full of chicken scratch diagrams and a flashlight nearly out
of battery. He dodged my first questions, but when I
coned him by the backstack of all transmitters, he finally
glared at me, pausing as if weighing some internal cuckulass.
You're not gonna let go, he said, nobody does. He
leaned close, voice dropping to a whisper barely louder than
the trembling hum in the server racks. There was an incident,
all right, long time ago, early morning, right after I
started here. Someone wanted to run a psychic investigation. Rig
up a feedback loop, see what you could catch with
a live when scheduled. Transmission management said it was a jerk,
except people started hearing things, echoes, voices, stuff that didn't belong.
Mike said it was just a glutch until log started
going missing tapes to sun nights. The signal would spike
and engineers would come down so swearing they'd heard themselves
talking back at them, but younger or different, or not
even themselves at all. They didn't leave a mark, not
at first, but after nobody wanted the night slot Montague
he said it was all the test, a rehearsal gone wrong.
But he kept repatching the phones, rewiring everything like he
was scared something could bleed out into the city. Ben's
voice quavered. You start looking for patterns, you end up stuck.
People just left, one by one. Lugs and complete records
wipe insomnia, paranoia breaks from it. He drifted off, eyes
wide the loop. They always said, don't leave the log blank.
I thought it made no sense. Now, hell, maybe it did.
I pressed who wrote that in the log books, the
block letters about the hidden room. He almost snorted Montague's handwriting.
He won't talk about it, says the past is only
as real as you recorded. On a hunch, I dragged
him toward the equipment shed of the building's back, the
one with padlocks rusted over and itedges so warped that
every maintenance report recommended its demolition. After three tries, the
dog gave way a revealing darkness and the clinging bit
a wreak of electronics rarely powered down. Three minutes of
wild flashlight prodding found what I hadn't realized. I'd been
looking for. A hollow thud on a back panel that
ran out empty, a section of wallboard marked by a
faded rectangle of old duct tape. Then hesitated. He muttered,
it was always just a rumor. I thought they meant
the coal room down an arcave. But I scraped the
edge of my key against the wood. The panel clicked back,
swinging inwards, reveal a narrow door, its surface popped with
the mockings of many hands, small and horred. Beyond a
room no bigger than a double closet, clad in sound profoam,
airless as a seal box. In the near dark, we
stepped forward, the fast light trimmering on the beam. Inside,
amongst horn cables and batted acoustic tiles, sat a trend
deck reel to reel machine, ancient but still running, spoils
rolling with a whispery stutter away before on a cheap
folding table, a batter microphone and two speakers, each loop
with brittle wire, into which fad the faintest trickle of power.
We powered to speakers at once A see the mishmush
washed over us. Mike's voice, sometimes pleading, sometimes instructing, layered
atop by an end of slooping refrain, the words tangled,
sometimes clear. You must finish the lock. If the page
days blank, you stay here. Please don't let them change
your frequent seat. I stared at the wall. There in
black marker were names of every staff member who'd ever
held the night seat. Next to each was a date,
and next to that, in faded pencil, a frequency eight
point ninety one, nine point ten, sometimes only loop. A
sickening awareness spelled through me. There then the nightly reg
those cryptic perennial collers may be went colors at all,
but despatches signals left over segments of people more recording
than alive. One of the tape reels, Bill Forward, speaking
now in Stand's voice. No, not his voice, but the
familiar inflections broken, lost a voice from the pass forever
running the same tape. Beside me, Ben Fumble panicked, slapping
the wall as if to find an escape switch. The
feed back in the speakers thickened, deepening to a roar,
as every layer of voice tumbled together. Suddenly, unmistakably, Mike's
voice cut through the din fall of tears, trembling, desperate.
I never wanted displease. My heart pounded in my pocket.
The load id carried since the beginning of the shift
rustled against fabric. I pulled it out. It was the
missing page, the one meant for Mike last night, still unfinished,
waiting for a signature, then screamed as the feed back
spun a shriek pitch, climbing the old tape decks rattling
across the table. The radio's voice reached a delirious height, pleading,
coppery and thin. Don't change your frequency or you'll never
get out. I looked up, but Ben was gone. The
door shoot behind us alone, The signal collapsed into a
locked groove, the room locked tight around me, and the
tape never sow, spinning the world of the station city
A night dissolved into his and silent, endless, waiting for
someone to finish what had been started so many years ago.
The whirrying reels became the only rhythm, mapping out time
in lawn uncertain arcs. At first, I pounded the panel,
shouting for Ben, but my voice died in the thick insulation,
absorbed into foam, as if nothing human had ever passed through.
The air in the hidden room had a taste electrical stale,
cinged at the back of the throat. Yet the little
decks kept rolling and spooling, thread bare, take the spools
almost glowing in a thin flashlight beam. I checked the door,
locked from the outside. I pressed my forehead to it,
felt the form of motion from beyond, but nothing answered back.
When I tried my phone, I got in a broken
wall of static drifting through the airpiece. No signal, though
three bars shivered on the display. Every instinct told me
to force my way out, but each time I turned
to the door, the annealing metal filled me with a deeper,
colder dread. I measure breath after breath, listening in the
near dark as the voices curled and locked on themsels.
I was always asking, always incomplete, always waiting for the
log to be finished. There was no pattern. But if
I leaned close to the speaker and squeathed my eyes shut,
I thought I could make out Mike's pleay, looping against
the hiss, growing weaker with every recitation. If you have
to finish it, page twenty three, keep it in the binder,
or no, please, I didn't do it. I'll let me
out do My breath fogged up around me. I fumbled
out the lock page, my pencil, griptight, hands trembling. Every
rule I'd ever learned about documenting, about keeping it on
the record, returned and twisted in my chest. Was this
what they'd all been trying to do keep the ghost up, Babe,
by never letting the routine brik, never admitting on the
lock what had really happened. A metallic pop rang out,
jerking me from my thoughts, the deck rewinding on its own,
the left spool spun faster than physics should allow, tape
flapping in a storm of recorded fragments. I strained to listen,
stepping back in panic, but the door held like an anger.
Then the speaker shifted, a sharp click echoing overhead. A
voz came through, unfiltered and heartbreakingly raw. Not a recording now,
but someone truly their mic, not as the echo, but
as something reaching racked living in that moment. It's me, God,
if you're there, I can't get out. You hear me. Please,
It's not dead, It's never dead, not in here. His
words bled and doubled, caught in something more alive than tape,
weaving between the loops and the older fractured Please. For
a moment, it felt like two Mike spoke at once,
one exhausted and resigned, one angry, determined to survive the
bleed between signal and loss. I pressed my hand to
the walt desperate, Mike, can you hear me? What do
I do? Asighed? Then his voice so close it could
it been my own signed the page, Give them a
complete lock closer, or this room just goes on night
after night. Please don't change your frequency, keep keep my
name on air. With trembling fingers, I glanced at the
low page, signature line blank off, the song Leston finished,
the ad reads omitted. I dug out my pencil, intent
on writing, but every time I tried to mark the
paper the radio's pitchfluctuerator, the deck stuttered and the point
of the pencil snapped grave at dust scattering. I stumbled
to the table, searching for anything to write with. My
flashlight flickered, then started to illuminating a drawer beneath the
deck with a strain yep. I young it open and
found the stack of dried ancient pens and one battered
crayon Midnight Blue. I took the crayon, sprowling my name
where Mike should have been filling out the remaining times.
Everything I could recall outside the door of footsteps. Then
I called up, but heard nothing, only the sound of shuffling,
distant as dream somewhere Beyond the wall, a phone rang,
its bell, echoing off pipes and tile. Suddenly the tip snapped,
spool spun on. But now the room was filled only
with the sound of my breeding and the faintest chess
or mistakable sound of something shifting in the air behind me,
another door or a passage, only audible to those tune
painfully to the strange enages. Here a dozen voice fragments
stammered from the speaker. Don't let go, don't change if
the page is blanket. As I've finished a log line,
pressing the waxy midnight crayon into the last box, the
reel to real hund him relief static pulsed, and then
for an instant utter silence dropped her, deep gravity, socking
silence that ached at the bones. The door eased open
with a soft, reluctant hiss, no visible hand pushing from
the other side. A gust of cooler air swept in,
carrying with it the faint fragrance of rain so cold
concrete and hot shielded electronics. I stepped over the threshold
on wooden legs, log page clutched him my fist. There
was no sign of Ben, no movement in the hallway,
except my own shadow of stretching out elongated an uncertain light.
I reached back, hesitated, then closed the secret door, feeling
its edges melt seamlessly into the wall. Might eas ran
with left of a static and the weight of the
crewmpressed lock bit into my palm like an artifact dredge
from lawn bared ruins. Behind the hidden panel, the tape
decks resumed the endless spinning, the memory of voices still
winding away along a path that refused to end. From
the corridor, the distant, muffled tone of the illy legal
idea cut through, just as it always had and changed,
but perilously thin, as if nothing in the world, once
recorded could of her truly go silent. From the corridor
at the distant, muffled tone of the ioly legal idea
cut through, just as it always had, unchanged, but perilously thin,
as if nothing in the world, once recorded could ever
truly go silent. I hesitated outside the door, senses tipped
into hypercuity, the studio for a breathless moment, seon paralyzed.
No elevator drone, no hump from the vending machine in
the lobby. The usual click of relays and fluorescent ballasts.
Even the weathered clocks or out of ticks had slipped
into quiet, like the signal had bled the place dry,
leaving only my presence to fill the gap. My footsteps,
ordinary sneakers, un poclinoleum landed far too loud in the hush,
the control room beckoned familiar, safer than the grip of
the hidden room's ghost darkness. As I entered, light from
the rain fort window found me scattering silver across the
bat of control board. Something in the air was sharper,
and for a flicker I caught the faint copper os
incent of overheated wires, layered on a memory of cigarettes
and Vnila air Frishennaire, the kind Mike used to smuggle.
And despite the rules, I set the logbook down on
the countertop with unsteady hands. The crayon marks bled in
the page, the wax faintly gleaming beneath the overhead lights.
My name Spidery, and like Max Bolts gripped hankered the
iron in a way that felt dangerous, almost sacrilegious. I
forced myself to breathe, to run a bit this tangible world.
Dial sliders, glowing numerals, stuttering quietly back to order. The
blinking amber air signed and watched like a sentinel. The
tape dicks still spot, but when I checked its progress,
I saw the last ire recorded nothing except a gentle
rise and room tone, the heart beat soft pop of
a distant transformer. I scrolled back, hunting for any irregularity.
No static bursts, no cries laid beneath the track, just
the ordinary hush that somehow now felt foreign, dead air,
but not the haunting kind habit overrote fear. I started
filling in the mist ad spots, timing them against the clock,
sharpening each line with unpredictable urgency. As I entered legal
ID two zerom, a surge of vertigo traced up my spine.
It was after three, but the tape stumped the first
marks at two seven. I blinked, swept my eyes from
digital clock to wristwatch. The times didn't match, both, in
fact read different. IROs something had shifted while I was
locked away. The phone rang once and stopped, a single
truncated ring that left an after taste in the air.
I resisted, answering. A glance at the coalboard showed all
lines dead, no last number filed in the tiny fluorescent readoute,
not a trace of the flood I'd weathered, ol of
only silence waiting to be filled. My vision blurred. I
steadied myself, blinking away exhaustion, and forced my focus onto
the screen, the creaking dials, the loose collection of note
beds and snack wrappers. Machine. If anything could ground me,
it had to be the rules. Yet each action felt
newly perilous, as if every button or notche set off
sequence couldrigger the machiner as buried resentments, some head and
kohdishing to unravel. I reached for the worn headphones, half
hoping for the fizz and hum of a regular background loop. Instead,
I caught just a single tone, then distant, nearly melodic,
but cut short, as if the studio itself was still
trying to make sense of newly added layers. I left
the heads at Hanging Hart, roarting at Dulphorum that sat
my teeth on edge. There was a cool den, still,
the settling now, the feeling of a room holding its breath.
The hands goold looked page, my own midnight handwriting, barely readable,
sat at the center of everything. Finish, yes, but in
the same instant unfinished, as if by the act of
closing out this one cycle, a fresh blankness somewhere else
had begun. It was fear, not exactly, but an awareness
that this placed, these miles of cooks, these rooms stitched
with taper memory, had its own inertia. The signal was
always hungry for a final, haunted moment. As at the booth,
Pomp pressed at the battered plexicles down below, the rained
again again, painting thin veins on each window pane, and
in the distant hum of the transmitter, I started to hear,
or maybe imagine, the faintest suggestion of a voice asking
again for rescue trot somewhere behind the cascade of statica
and the implacable beat of the eyre. But on the
control board only the ordinary lights burned, steady and indifferent,
as if everything was and always have been, business as
usual at hers w There are only so many ways
to measure the passage of iOS. You remember living but
caun't quite recal. There's the groan in your legs as
you walk, the dry click in your throat, the way
daylight stings when it floods your eyes after at night,
You're not sulready survived. Emerging from the hidden room felt
like surfacing from anesthesia. Color blowed back into the world
so quickly it smudged the edges sharper and wrong. My
hands remembered things I didn't, how to grip the pencil,
how to line out a lock. But beyond that, my
mind picked up only static in the faint, persistent acrevoices
that weren't quite gone. I stood in the corridor, one
foot still half inside the seeker closet, half out. The
hush in the building pressed close above me, erevents hum
fitfully straining to full the void left by machines laboring
all night. The sound was ordinary, mechanical, yet now every
whisper felt as though it might resolve into a hidden word,
some one breathing just too softy to catch. I turned
the heavy cover panel back into place, nudging the dust
rough edge until the seams vanished, and for a moment
I was paralyzed by the idea that the room and
what happened and there might be nothing but a hallucination
conjured by exhaustion and the night's endless machinery. But my
knuckles held a graphite smear and the Lord book in
my hand was real as page sticky. With a pressure
of my riding, I was the only person moving through
the halls. Some primal urge kept me alert. I paused
by the break room the office door of the stairwell
down to the lobby, half expecting bent appear rumpled and
bristling with explanations or from Mike's goest to greet me
on their No one came. I checked the pavement outside
from the window. The lot was bare. Rain swirled in
the black top, shining in sick cocks below the security lights,
casting spots of yellow that faced at the edges of
my sight. Only my own footsteps disturbed the cush. Making
my way to the main booth was like retracing ground
that had been scrambled and rebuilt in my absence. Each
object in its usual place, but the order faintly off.
Antique coffee cup, once on the left, now shifted right.
Winders of old commercial stack higher than before that. Best
of the seven to set, which I had left midplay,
winding to its last notes, but with two tracks run
backward on the digital display, alien and unreadable. Settling into
the chair, I ran a hand over the faders, quietly
testing if they move as expected. As always, the mean
consolesid under my touch. The clock, previously unreliable advanced like normal.
There I glowed red, impassive. I tried to pull up
the real tape. I made a machine wheeze, then spat
dead eu. Forty minutes of silent nothing, cut through by
maybe three seconds of cough static. The real, marked final
iro from the hidden room was gone. The deck wipe cleaned,
no trace of any voice, only the quiet scuff of
the recording had drifting away from the tape. I fumbled
in a stack of logs. The missing page with my
midnight score was nowhere to be found. The backup pencil
log showed all entries up to two sevenon, then jumped
a page, torn loose and missing, as if those minutes
could never have been ridden. The gravity of what was
truly gone hit me only when I searched for Ben.
His tool books, battered and bright with stickers, sat and
opened by the racks. His jacket always slung over the
back of the folding chair in the machine room, was missing.
I left forcemills that rang and rang before disconnecting. The
only clues left behind a faint robustcuff on the stairways
for a step and a log in his handwriting March
nineteen eighty two, slipped between spills in the archive room.
It ended midword, shoddering off like a tape cut short.
The official explanation waited for me before noon. Montague, stiff backed, stirring,
already annoyed, appeared in the doorway, surveying the stacks of
tape and smelling faintly of lemon and moth balls. Rough night,
he said, brittless onion skin. I couldn't speak at first.
I just pushed the lope toward him, shaking my head.
He glanced over it shifts will do that after a while.
You know, midnight's bad for the nerves. He thinks he've
seen odd things. Its nerves don't dwell on it. Pull
the midnight logs from digital and enjoy a night off.
He made no reference to Ben. When I pressed, his
answer was only technical staff take sick days. They come back.
Returning to the booth, I saw the reel to reel's
heads were clean, as if some one had stripped and
wiped them with rubbing alcohol. The missing real stand Charity
water were replaced by new blank's tags gone. The buck
up logs, which should have shown every action and anomaly,
had been hastily reassembled out of sequence, with the pencil
lines redressed by what looked like Montague's own fastidious hand.
Every record of the anomaly, not just the tape, but
the physical, tangible evidence, was replaced, overwritten, or simply vanished.
I was left with only scraps, my own unreliable memory,
smudges of crayon on a missing page, and a sickness
in my stomach appallsed when I looked too long at
the blinking red on air's sign. If the night had ended,
the aftershock was just beginning. After a night like that,
habits failure, I rotated through routines like a lab animal
made coffee tore apart. The deck again scrolled new log lines,
even though nothing felt anchut. Each time the station phone trolled,
adrenaline punched through me, but it was always a wrong number.
A telemock eater shrey with the question about news copy.
When her shift ended, she lingered a minute by the
glass booth, watching me as flicking to the control board.
You are not okay, or you, she said finally voice
shake you with fatigue no, I said, and the honesty
shocked me. Something isn't right. Have you ever heard things
in recordings tapes that shouldn't be there? Chelly bit her lip.
It's the station. Stuff happens, she hesitated. People get words sometimes,
the specially overnight. Just try to be careful, don't overdo
it all right, Others moved quickly these days, blackness like
armor lel out. The office manager offered no jokes about
late eyos. The newswriter Will left his music of blood
in isolation. Bruth and never met my eyes as we ben.
Days passed with no sign. His car, once a fixture
in the lot, never reappeared. Nobody asked about him outside
of the occasional sidle and Mutter just been taking his
walk about. I guess. A routine medical absence for technical
staff was posted on the note spot in Montickey's cramped,
shadowy handwriting on sabbatical. No further comment. But each time
I forced myself back into the booth, determined to act
as if nothing was broken. Something inside the station resisted.
Studio lines flickered on and off, certain channels on the
board when suddenly dead during routine checks. The main digital
clock slipt by seconds, then snapped to the right time
when anyone walked past. The air, once filled by comfortable
white noise, felt charged, angry, and saddled. Even worse were
the moments when the silence turned menacing. Sometimes in the
hour between three and four, I picked up a ghost
of radio feed back, indistinct bload, skimming the edge of perception.
More often it was the phone, a ring at three
one am. Abuzza four thirty six always dropped as soon
as I pressed answer. The logs I kept on These
calls were marked for follow up by Leelah, but no
pattern emerged, she said at the weekly meeting. She couldn't
trace them. At home, sleep was a rumor. The tiny
apartment above the Peta place now felt cavernous with the
hum of running fridgis the distant echo of passing traffic.
I played back old shift recordings, listening for the hidden
groans or sighs that had seeped into my psyche. When
I tried to rest, faint dreams unspooled and less corridors
lined with sound through foam and sin footsteps just ahead,
pleading voices folded into the static. Every day I tried
to drag the memory of the hidden room into focus,
to draw its outline with words, or find it to
me by sketching. Each attempt dissolved blur into a gray haze,
but the fear remained sticky and clawing the certainty that
unfinished business, logs, broadcasts lives could lock a person in place,
trapping them in cycles impossible to see from outside. One morning,
Leol cornered me by the vending machine. Her voice, oddly flat,
carried a note of pity. You've got to be more careful.
The building's gofflet's call it history Monticchy's not going to
help you if you're smart, or get up before you
start seeing things that don't leave. I tried to laugh,
but the sound died on my lips. There was no
comfort to be found, not even in company. By the weekend,
I knew I couldn't let the questions fester. I made
a decision to confront what remained, not just echoes but
living factual ties. I started with the paper trail. The
daytime routine at krus W was as dull as ever,
but access to records, to emails, to the stacks of
old locks and station minute books now felt weaponized. A
material link to everything that had come before. I poured
over lock book sticky by decade, running my finger along
the cracked bindings, noting where inches became. A radical vanished
her trade. Most Night's ended normally, but every few months
the gap appeared in a complete page, a missing tape,
a call and show replaced by one of Mike's cover tracks,
always a cover, never the original. I dug deeper station
leave records filed by hand long before email. A chilling
pattern emerged in eighty three, eighty nine, ninety seven, even
as late as twenty fifteen, Knight staff left suddenly with
only golled lines family emergency or unavailable for comments scribbled
in the margins by unknown hands in a pus now file.
Free envelopes bore only first names Alex, resign, reason unreported
read a sleep study, recommend no contact, a Louis transfer
request not process, presume LEF for each all leaving nodenmant
to use Crawd's gripped log incomplete. Public records too had
their dark rhythm. Local news archids carried brief and sentimental notices.
Belove station DJ missing after night shift, orgearis W staff
are presumed gone always in the graveyard rotation. None cited
criminal involvement. COPPX noted no indication of foul play, absence
voluntary or temporary. I checked all staff chat locks, training protocol.
A chilling realization surfaced. None of the longest serving employees
had ever worked more than six consecutive night shifts without
a break. When one or two had tried, their scheduled
hours vanished from the roster, gapped, widening into weeks for forever.
I tried to contact those who left emails, numbers on
out of dateless all returned in the liverable. I tracked
one at charity, the late night regular, through billing records.
It turned out to be a placeholder surname in archives,
no matching residents, no trace in local phone books. Stand
from the bridge, a trucker from the old days had
a disconnected number, the address given a defunct bridge maintenance office.
Even the night watcher, whose clipped cryptic calls were a
staple of krs W frok or no legal name listed,
no home address, only a recycled phone number pinging to
a peeper box that hadn't been checking over a decade.
When I mentioned it to Shelley. She shook her head.
That's just something night radio does. Night watchers. Half a
dozen people over the years were none out again. Listening
again to voice mails archived saved index week after week,
piecing together to the calls from irregulars. I found their voices,
caden even their jokes were recycled splice from old taped segments,
some dating back to before the first digital archive. One
line from stand in twenty fourteen would resurface a year later, unchanged.
Sometimes charities giggle, always in the ire, tripped in the
same place. Escit sample from a set decades, all now
returned by automation, as though alive. I brought this to Montague.
He was silent, then shrugged, drumming his claws on a
file folder. We recycle everything, these people of their routines,
and so do listeners. Its tradition wide well, Honor. I
wanted to scream at his evasions, to break through whatever
shield he constructed. Instead, I returned to the booth day
after day, it helpless to do more than document what
I found, catalog in each new irregularity, and then I
started noticing changes in myself. Sleep was almost impossible. When
I closed my eyes. I counted blinking lights, the shoal
pitch of failing tape reels, the chill of sound proof
walls closing in. The luck book in my bag grew heavier,
though I rarely used it. By now I could recall
every entry without looking. Sometimes when I reached for a pencil,
my hand hovered, refusing to commit to the page. Most
in settling, I began hearing my own voice spliced through
the static. Once running prom was in the early morning,
the feedback from the monitors jerked in perfect time to
rephrase them. Sir, the night whispered only in my mind,
don't leave the page blank. Another time, the air break
at tooth if anon Weepli's slow to exhausted version of
my introduction down to the paws and nervous laugh. I
thought I'd erased on the first night. On Sunday night,
I unplugged every extraneous taped deck, shut off the studio lights,
and aimed to ride out a silent shift. But at
two seven the main mix fell out. My headphones filled
with a loop stands voice, then Mike's overlapping and pleading,
as if leaking from a cut in a feed The
computer cunsul froze time, jumping backward for ten seconds, then
snapping back to the present. Later, checking the logs again,
I found three pages stuck together or missing from the
last ile. The shift had passed in a haze, the
logs barely illegible. The note's column simply read a signal
crossed dead air. I stared at my own handwriting the
loops gone annula. Panic in every line. Phones began ringing
at home, and ever more than once, always cut off
right as I snatched a receiver. When I read I'll,
the only return was the soft hum of radio static.
My name layered him by some effect I couldn't trace.
Each morning I woke with a fainting behind my eyes,
a sense that I had failed a test I hadn't
known I was taking. The pressure became unrelenting. Even ordinary
equipment started acting up on air, light flickering without reason,
wall's humming with voltage at random. IRE's shelley quit leaving
small gifts fruit a SODO on her way out. She
stopped talking about the night shift at all. I vanced
into evermore frantic, compulsive tracking. Each night, more signals cross, machines,
ticking out of time, at the same moments, especially at
two seven digital logs, we replaced by scrolls of numbers
that meant nothing, promos for shows that hadn't aired in years.
On the third attempt to reset the main log, a
line appeared to type not handrtten finished the lock. Don't
leave it blank. That phrase repeated in my head whenever
I tried to sleep. Even the muted jingle from the
station's morning slots sometimes wapped syllables not attached don't leave
blank until I changed the dial or turned the machine
completely off. On the monitors reflected in glass, I sometimes
caught a shape, a man, middle aged, broad shouldered but tied,
pacing by the rocks, face impossibly like Mike's. Sometimes in
the shimmer of street lights in the lot outside, a
wavering figure waited by the emergency exit, vanishing when I blinked.
The more I searched, the less I trusted my senses.
A Thursday escalation was everywhere. The cases began to blow
as audio fragments started bleeding into every attempt to reset order.
At brakes station ID live traffic readoubts, each anomally stacked
one on top of another. Missing locks replaced by ol
TAP's bulls, brand new staff notes typed by an unknown,
stiff fingered hand. One night, desperate to try anything, I
called the old request line and left myself a voicemail,
hoping to break the loop. At two seven that night,
the message replayed on air, my own voice cracked and
pleading layer beneath decades of static. I destroyed the recording
out of pure fear. But when I checked my email
the next day, I found a note from a no
reply he rsw address. The signal only ends with all
up begins. It wasn't a threat, not exactly, ors it
sounded like an invitation another test. The machine began to protest.
At times when I tried to run live music, the
tape heads locked in plays, spinning only the same seconds
of static and overlapping crushed forces. Automated programming would leap forward,
then pause, freezing the digital feed for up to a minute,
a technical impossibility according to protocol. The few listeners who
called in at night ass about it. Therefore, is soft
and nervous? Was that on purpose? The buzzing at two
and I heard a repeat? Is that big? My coon
re run? Eventually the studio clock stopped tracking minutes completely
advancing only by the ire, then resetting red led dials
flickered between numbers, refusing to hold to any sequence. Each
change in the air, every new shaft recorded retriggered the
same spectral sequence. Machines forced their own order into the chaos.
The next escalation arrived as a message left at the
main switchboard at three in the morning. The audio was
crackly old tape out of facts are remembered from earlier
expeditions to the stacks, but this time the voice is different, sharp,
are familiar in a way that made my blood eyes.
You are now part of the loop. Don't leave the
page blank. The call came from an entrace number too
many digits none in local sequence. The voice on playback
looped once, then twice. After that, the voices came closer.
A night later, as I stared at my own reflection
in the studio window, I thought I saw Mike's mouth,
moving lips, speaking words I couldn't make out. The glass
fogged with his breath, not mine, condensation forming a shape
of question I didn't know how to answer. At this point,
nothing felt like it belonged to me any more. Even
my sleep was broadcast. I awoke to my own voice
in the car radio, repeating a song title i'd only
uttered in dreams. The only option left was action. I
focused my fear, turning it into a system, cataloging, logging, transcribing.
Night after night I held to the safety of writing
things down, filling entire note books, list of signal anomalies,
of culls left unreturned but missing tracks. But every time
I played new tapes of faint ecod, my own voice,
tenney and urgent, wove itself into the static. At first
I blamed fatigue. Then one night I recognized a turn
of phrase and offan joke meant only from my own
amusement spliced into a break from the best of the
seventies set exploring a day music channel i'd never ay
out live. Trying to stay awake only seemed to worsen
things in saw me buried confusion. I was drifted in
and out of focus. Logs stopped matching the passage of
real time. Sometimes I'd know its signal at one fourteen,
only to find three inches later that the machines had
stamped two seven over and over. The unrelenting clock crockade itself,
dragging me into its ragged orbit. Desperate, I made an
effort to seal the hidden room. I wrangled a heavy
filing cabinet into place before the false panel, wedged its
wheels into the pitted linoleum, and stack spare monitor boxes
to block access. Yet each night, as the cycles repeated,
I felt myself magnetized, drawn by the sense of something unfinished,
the ache of a story demanding and ending. Eventually, no
matter my intention, I wound up their doorskew air cold
and dry, tapeeril spoiling quietly into darkness. My efforts to
dig deeper lead at last to an unlikely discovery. I
was combing through the oldest stack of occo's handritten by
a nearly illegible engineer's hand, pages yellowed, dark, tip cracking
along the seams, when I found a sheaf of notes
titled loop event four slash fourteen slash eighty two four
staff report. The pages meant as an internal memo rolled
out a hiad in history. The engineer wrote attempt to
determinate the loop. Several staff tried to destroy the locks,
to smash recorders, to wipe the tits clean, but after
the incident everything tape room tone staff was imprinted. If
you work the airways at night, you carried the mark
voices bily through cycle over cycle. Only way out is
to finish the record. If anyone finds this, don't let
them skip the lock. Don't permit the air to die
in silent. I looked for more clues and news bulletins,
local police reports, listener complaints. A disturbing pattern re emerged
after the nineteen eighty two event call spiked at oddire's
reports of strange signals in place of music, voices pleading
for help on frequencies that should have been dead. Air
police reports cropped up as well, offices called to investigate
claims of disappearoring voices, radios flickering on by themselves, neighbors
posting about hearing arguments with no one in the room.
The more I document, the flimsy of the boundary between
my routine and the world outside became. I find myself
up before dawn, listening to the reports again and again,
tracking voice mal signatures, shadowing the paranoia trace to this
one tight orbit, people, voices, memories, all subsumed by the
whirling signal. The unfinished pattern attempts to intervened live broadcasts
replaced with ark of music, impromptu talk segments with dead
ERBONI deepened the disocations. The less I participated, the more
the station seemed to hunt for me. My perception for
aid lost, the threat of ours must read, shifting clock hands,
confused conversation for feedback, isolated memory for real exchange. Once
monitoring the towers from outside the building, I thought I
saw lights of lick a letter, spelling words half on
before fading again. Finish. My phone powered off, rang with
the message from a forbidden number. Hiss, eustatic, My own
voice gasping, signed the lock and the loop. Then things
began to break down in earnest technical failures spread from
inconvenience to existential crisis. The broadcast system, normally menacing only
in the petty ways of altech, started eating itself. At first,
there was only the odd silence A minute's dead air
here escaped idre Soon blocks of music, entire news bulletins vanished,
replaced by intervals of humming, rumpling into supper patterns. Even listeners,
sometimes the only real link to reality in a late shift,
began to falter. Calls from the night watcher arrived in
flour as his cadence, more urgent, less coated than before.
You need to stop it. Find the tape. It's always
the tape. Don't wait until you can't write any more.
At my WIT's end, searching for anything that could close
the breach, I began spending more and more time behind
the main mixing board, tearing apart every nest of wires,
digging through boxes labeled only in miss garkalve. It was there,
sifting through tangled patch cables and forgotten connectors that I
found it, flat, battered, tucked hard against the wall, labeled
in black Shop, very final input. I stared at it,
recognizing Mike's gript immediately in the dim sodium spill of
the overhead fixtures, the cassette glinted sticky with residue where
a label must have been torn away. I threaded it
into the only play I left, working, knees trembling, and
hit play. Mike's voice billed out, not the bombastic baritone
of his on air persona, but the stripped with ited
sound of someone at the edge. If you're hearing this,
you're a part of it, he spoke, pauses, hissing through
the tape. It was supposed to work like this. The
experiment was to cast more than e'er loop to see
if memory, consciousness, something could carry beyond the single human
didn't work, should have been nothing but the coverage. It continued.
Every blank in the lock, every missing sign in is
a piece of someone trapped here, running the night with
no exit. Someone has to finish, or the air never clears.
I never wanted to stay, but they made the rules.
Whoever you are, you're next unless you finish the record.
Don't leave the page blank. The final syllables Judd cut
by a swirl of feedback, The tape old and rough,
catching on itself until only a dim approximation of his
voice remained. Good luck. The playback died before the reel ended.
I swallowed, the room pressed in, suddenly hostile, every wire
and seem leaking static. The phone rhine, not on the
studio line, but my own cell, somewhere in my bag.
When I fished out the collar, idea was blank, just
a line of underscores. I hesitated, then pressed answer, desperate
for something, someone still outside the spiral. What answered was
my own voice sign the lock and the loop. It whispered,
full of exhausted panic. Don't let them change your frequency.
The coal dropped. The time had come. If anything was possible,
if there was a way to break the spiral, to
unlace myself from the feedback and the broken procession of goss,
it would have to happen now. I returned to the
main booth, closing every door behind me. As midnight ticked over,
I lined up everything needed for a broadcast that would
end this one way or another. A new blank log page,
the battered final tape from Mike, the old wax crayon
blew as the deepest night that had survived the collapse
in the hidden room, I chewed up the final improtit,
dialed into the monitoring system and switched the fados to live.
My hands trembled, but I steeled myself with ro action
testing and puts triple checking clock times, breathing in for
a countdown. The studio for a moment was soundless except
for the hum of air conditioning and the tents nervous
buzz offluorescent lights. I held the log in front of me,
pencil poise ready to fill every blank to record this
iron away no one ever had. While setting all this,
things began to fail. Studio doors jammed, refusing to close,
no matter how I jiggled handles. Alarms on the board blared,
covering the room in red and amber light that spun
like police beacons, light's flick coat, brightening and then toming
to near darkness, snapping back only as I not the
mixing board and frustration, I pressed on, howse surged, each
outlet alive with nervous energy static, Looking at my arms.
As I reached across the board, the speakers echoed was Perziffer's,
then rising distinct voices layered one atop the next, a
course of the past, every missing staff member, those resigned
within complete logs, their phrases tumbling, rising, fragmenting, thurn, change
the frequency, don't leave the page, band to please, not again,
not again. I grit the arms of the cher's visions
flash scattered in the flickering overhead lights. People hunched over
the decks, faces twisted with sleepless confusion. Someone may be Rita,
maybe Alex, fighting to speak, mouth open words stolen by
the roar of static. I saw Big Mike himself, visible
for only a split second, desperately spinning the reels, sweat
coating his bra They blurred became one shifting composite presents,
all hands at the mixer board, all lies on the
cycling look. As the feedback creached, fever, pitch, ear thick
with voices and their timeless ake. I snatched up the
crayon and forced my way through the log page, filling
every square, etching out ad brakes, shoos, even the stakes
letters bled together, blue wax mirring under my palm. I
pressed harder, feeling the world shrinked to the single point
of pressure, where simple memory and dread all combined. I
began to read aloud from the log, the signature, the
eye of the confession, everything I could remember, no pause
for shame or lost minutes. As I spoke, static pressure lightened.
I looped the final tapes audio through the station feed.
For one instant, everything backed, signal shuddered, clock spun backward
and forward. The room stuttered at the edge of collapse,
but a press on, refusing to leave a single line
empty outside exactly to Savenam. The rain broke on the roof,
stoutic peaks then died. A simple, clear voice cut through
big mike, unmistakable, laid bare by relief. Thank you, he said.
The loop diminished, then finally fell silent. A harsh, tender
and absolute replaced the fury, the lights not steady, the
room salt breathing with me. For the first time in weeks,
the decks went still. My hands trembled, fingered, its icy
and damp with fear and sweat. But for the first time,
the silence did not chase voices or memories. It merely settled.
The sensation that followed was not triumph, not relief, but
exhaustions so profound I struggled to remain upright. I unclenched
my crumping hand from the lockwock and let the crayon drop.
It rolled towards the feeder switches, and then fittingly stopped
short behind me. The booth window showed nothing but the
city at rest, the rain's luck, and the streets empty,
the lonely towers glowing a soft, patient cold. I sat
for a moment longer, waiting for static, for the voice
in the air, for any sign that the old cycle
would resume. But the log was complete, and in the
stillness nothing returned. I stood and flicked off the on
air light for the last time that night. Let in
the darkness, clean and simple, reclaim the studio across the silence,
the station finally slept. If you stand in the studio
long enough, in those last seconds after a broadcast dies,
you sense the shape of absence, how it finally fits.
The city outside remains indifferent, But something within these dusty walls,
something patient, hungry and endlessly returning, has been stated, if
only for now. The local eyes closed, blue stained and
rugged with final use. And though every muscle aches with aftermath,
I know that, for the first time, in this room,
carved from the lawn ache of old tip and must
put memory, the air belongs to no one but the
silence itself. But sometimes with the last breath before leaving,
myers catch a thin resonance, like a strounded voice, waiting
just beyond the dial, proof that not every cycle closes,
And for those who truly listen, the missing signals and dure, shapeless, persistent,
waiting in the static for just one more unfinished entry.