Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Knight in the booth never quite
feels like night outside. You'd expect silence, some kind of hush,
But even at two twenty three in the morning, the
air inside w QC why Throun's fuorescent ballast ham fans
rattling at the back of rack mounted transmitters, The desk
surface sticky with the ancient spilt cola on my bed
of nights. I'd lean over the mic, let my voice
roll low and steady against the tidal hiss, and pretend
all of it. The building's late sentry bones, the endless
drone of passing trucks beyond the window. The pulse of
analog equipment was alive this night. Something's wrong. The request
line strobes in the gloom, a cheery point of red,
needing my attention. I squint across to the old board.
The label in pemread's Rachel slash studio away. Though Rachel
hasn't been here for nearly two weeks. The phone logs
haven't shown how number since the search. I hold my breath,
let the moment hang until the third ring. Then thumb
the button. Do w U K s Y You're alive,
I say, verse, a practice mixture of what and resignation.
There's a crackle breathing between bursts of static. A faint
was purblowsed in an abjust above the threshold of recognition
on my nah. It's familiar, too familiar, but slowered as
a forced for a grinding wheel. The bone deep fatigue
I've carried since Rachael vanished sharpens into dread. Rachel, I ask, dumbly,
though I know it can't be. The breath and the
other end grows rough, static pulses spiking across the board's
ancient view meters. A word, maybe a phrase, coils out assichichate,
then va. The catin sets my teeth on edge, but
meaning of aids me a half remembered, too mangled by
poor reception. Then a click dead line. The boards read
alidigo is dark. I look up, as if expecting Rachel
to materialize from the gloom outside to some proof glass.
Nothing except the reflection of my own drawn face. I
end the overnight, said abruptly. My hands move on autopilot,
faded down on air, light off file buckup started the
stillness that follows is not relief. It's oppressive. The air
stag and, as if holding its breath, I reach for
the show's battered paper lock, ready to record the time
of the cut off. Two twenty five a m. The
margins are messer than usual to night gold over in
blue jellink. My skin shills as a spot at a
phrase I saw Rachel doudling in downtime, arouse mere characters
that seemed like nothing before. Nay wah ah, it matches.
The whisper from the phone messy but unmistakable in her
round script. The note must have been from one of
her last ships. Had she been trying to tell me
something or herself. A sun snaps me back. The card
reader on the rack beeps a faint trill I don't recognize.
The computer monitor flickers an all playliss saved under Rachel's
use name Q points all wrong files with titles that
are just strains of letters and numbers. For a long minute,
I sit with the headphones clump to my neck, the
foam slick with sweat, and the faintest whine of feet
back curled in the silence, the night feels less like
a cocoon than a trapped something, folding itself over the walls,
settling in the static. My reflection in the dark glass
blows divided, a shadow with my face in someone else's eyes.
The next morning, official ires in the clock. Life resumes
in the way it only can hear, awkward perfunctory, the
rhythms of routine, restoring the barrier between night strangers and daylight,
still repetition. Before Rachel disappeared, things made more sense, even
if sense was just the awkward clock who cafaded the noleum,
ancient coffee, and a mismatched family of grave eared shift survivors.
Arriving early meant bravely echoing industrial lot, flanked on one
side by a chainling fence, snaggled with dead ivy, on
the other by a warehouse. No one ever seemed to
enter or exit. I liked arriving lawn before anyone else
would trouble to show. The inside welcomed you with a
cold slap, always too much or to little heat, depending
on the decade. The Hvact still believed in the coffee
earthen were maug handle cracked but not broken. There was
some pride in mangling the ancient percolator into producing what Benny,
our engineer, affectionately turned coffee like substance. On good days,
a slice of a doughnut left from the day shift
could be salvaged from the lounge table, sugar fusing with
yesterday's newsprint. Rachel was always next to arrive. She glided
past the lot, toup bag swinging scarf unraveled even on
warm nights. The first move headphones on, sample the levels
in each studio with the seriousness that dwarf the listing
budget and battered equipment. In the break room, we'd exchange fragments,
some trivial, some hinted at more. She had this way
of listening, head cocked, lids pinched, as if passing some broadcast.
Only she could hear. Benny drifted in behind, always humming,
always trying to smooth the latest wave of HEC debt
type port fader, a lining torn on the mic pop shield,
or warning triangles blooming on the aging windows machine. He
brought a calm with him, a solidity, his laugh, he
rarely shared. It made the main corridor feel wider, less, haunted.
The station felt like a well's left of its heart
beating for an audience. It could no longer quite see.
Late night players stitched together from what the advertisers left behind,
and the Knight family short and developed a patch over
the fat. Most of us didn't have somewhat better to be.
At three a m. Beyond the city's bones, pressed clothes,
a rail switches clackson would blare twice nightly. The hollow
clanging of wind against the roof fence often rose up
to full silence. Ons inside patch cords dangled like vines
from monitor arms, and times slit molasses slow from midnight
to sun up. Some week, I imagine every colla was the
same lonely person switching up voices game in our faith
in the night. But we had our listeners, regulars with
stores that meandered, a truck of stuck on the belt
wit during a storm, a nurse on back to backs
calling to request the same warm love song, or retiree
reporting strange lights above the railroad. When Rachel screened the calls,
she dropped notes and sketched faces no one else could see. Sometimes,
when things aligned just right, the presence of some one
else in the dark across the city was all the
safety you needed. The safegrew faltered only once that week.
It was late still an hour before my hand off.
The boar buzzed with autumn storm's roiling distant towers. Rachel
set down her headphones and a tightness to her mouth.
Did you hear that on the monitor just now? She ACKed,
nodding towards Judy. You'll be I shook my head attentions
dear to a prepping into view static, I offered. She
didn't commit to the word mor like an echo, I
thought I heard one of us, but from timing it
loops in the headphones only briefly, like a voice overlad.
From another moment, she fingered the cable, squeezing it till
her ned buckles blenched. Benny appeared in the doorway. Voice. Easy,
if you're picking up foreign radio, let's log it, he said,
too quick to shift the energy. She held his glance,
shrugged it off. I'll check the patch, but her hands
were not steady as she turned away, and for the
rest of her shift she wore the head fronds only
around her neck. After the police finished with the booth,
dusting for Prince checking logs into viewing staff, they shrugged
and filed Rachel among the city's endless list of missing,
no witnesses, no calls home, no digital footprints. After her
final login, her locker was left open, her note scribbles
curling at the edges. Rochid Suddart then staggered on the boards,
still hummed at night, though the idea of family sired
around the edges. My phone no longer buzzed with her
quick text between ad brakes. Benny grew distracted, sometimes muttering
to himself in the transfer corridor before quietly pressing on
with his repairs. The manager just ought, pretending to care
his office door now twice as Tivy shut. A week
slipped by. Still I found myself nursing without admitting the
small things, stacking up segments logged with odd pauses, dead
their pockets where there should have been music, the ats
filled with quick, sharp squiggles written in frantic pen. At first,
it was easy to blame it all on attrition, that
void after a stuff member leaves, when schedules and responsibilities
erode at the edges. But then came the next pattern.
My light chief free night on on me, coming through
past music rotations for tracks Rachel liked. I meant to
dedicate a whole ear to her memory. A staff in
the mixed segment, hoping the familiar music would comfort our
listeners in US. As I sifted lopbooks, I discovered entire
entrant felve with gibberish phrases that a first glance appeared
to be the sort of keyboard mashing you get when
someone is distracted. But there was method amid the nonsense,
the same odd clusters, recurring different handwritings. Margin aliad it
didn't match any one's usual scroll. A heavier une set in.
I remembered the mood among us that week, Rachel's distance,
the way Benny start tumming, the manager's jumpiness. I recalled
seeing Rachel staring at the silent phone during breaks, lions
blinking with no calls on Wrecker, her eyes flicking to
the sandproof glass as if she thought she'd catch some
one on the other side. There was an electricity to
her worry attention that lingered after she'd left the room.
Deciding I needed to hear her voice, I mean to
feel she still belonged to some recent present. I had
delved into the station's arquav room, a stuffy and exploded
with all tapes. I selected the log from her last
on air appearance, cued it and let its pull through
my own headphones. The familiar warm rush of tapis Then
her voice measured smooth, layer in banter for the five
fast midnight crowd. At first nothing odd, but then behind her,
just beneath the cup between trucks or whisper, like a
voice leaking through one of the ungrounded patch bays. It repeated,
quick and almost melodic, the same fragment I had heard
in the call nah ah my, It wasn't pat her noise,
it was recorded, embedded. I stopped the reel. My scalp tinkled,
like when you're alone in the stairwell and some one
you can't see is searching for your shadow. I checked
her old locker, reasoning she might have left me a note,
a close scribbled in annoyance instead empty safe for one
crumpled in Dick's card. It was covered in shapes and
characters resembling those in the show logs, same looping motif
something she'd been working out, trying to remember, or was
it a message meant for us if things got worse.
Her handwriting todd and large, dipped at the edges, the
scent of her hebbelty clung to the paper, slamming home
just how present she'd been here has suddenly gone, she'd become.
I took it home, slipped it between no book pages,
unable to shake the feeling. I'd just retrieved the part
of the station's poles, something vital and mislaid that was
the last to ordinary. NA first deliberate signed that something
threaded deeper through WQC Y arrived two days later. I'd
stay past sign off, determined to piece together what I
could from her ramblings, from the murmured fragments in the logs.
The air tasted strange, electrically brittle. I just finished my set,
and with the kneeon of though on air box now dark,
the station felt vacant. I allowed the low lighting, the
chairs creak to pull me down into that investigative trance,
a kind of forward full we anxiety manifest as energy.
The digital archives Third Sea drives repaired more times than
I could count, presented a tapestree of files official tracks
ahix Rachel made ENTITLEDDA from buff files hidden in rickety foldos.
Cross listening, I started detecting snippets that triggered uneasiness, unlisted
statements tucked into the two zero until four zero rubber
bund iOS, each too short for adfiller but too intentional
for error. In one, Benny's voice, crack of fear. If
you're hearing this, it's already in the static. Don't let
it through. Another the manager, his voice stripped of all pretense, whispering,
something's using us broadcasting itself. I think it speaks only
in cycles. Hidden in the signal, corresponding lock entries appeared off,
each one with a digital time stamp, trailing by precisely
seven seconds from the house computer's clock. It couldn't be drift.
Bunny would never let slippage of that kind stack for days,
let alone. Repeat cost different users, and in every hidden segment,
the whisper the phrase, sometimes cut, sometimes reversed, sometimes mother
beneath fear, static, but always there. Na ah, my staff
female too began to grow shadowy. At first, a single
insign message appeared in the general in books repeat the
phrase shared the truth. A day later another message subject
line blank, landing directly in my in books reading only
arkeye two zero fourteen, A M listen find the break.
I checked the reference arcove. The segments started as a
promo then degraded into a chorus of distant voices, panicked, layered,
and stuttering. I recognized the cadence of Rachel Barney, even
the manager calling out frasers amid a thicket of whispering static.
The undertones suggested a presence riding the edges of this
speech and other beneath their voices. My paranoia already brittle spiked.
I'd begun to glance at reflective surfaces, expecting to see
Rachel's weary face peering at me from the shadowed corners. Once,
during the reear of a syndicated show, the monitor blasted
distortion above normal levels, searing a ghost melody through the night.
I ripped the headphones off. Harp pounding static coiled everywhere
along the patch cables, the bronze of the faders, the
tubes behind the walls. For an instant, I thought that
could smelburning plastic, like the station itself was failing molecularly
through the wiring. I started double of in the transmitter,
watching for the mysterious timeoser. Sure enough, every instance of
the lost staff voices or signals was a line exactly
seven seconds late. If the iro's music block started at
two zero zero. The hon has arrived at two zero seven.
It seemed attentional, as if someone or something had drilled
a wormhole through the broadcast clock, easing its sliver as
an entry point. My mind split, part of me yearned
to believe I was sleep deprived, grieving the rest, wired
on coffee in fear, read mischief in every flicker of
COOTTI light, every briefly blipping coal on their request line,
every half audible phrase leaking him from the head fronts.
Then there was the moment, the archeved drive word emails
innocuously pained You're alive, hauls at the odd moment, not lost,
not gone, still inside the signal, there was no signature
that these notes always pointed me back to specific off
schedule broadcast minutes, to audio that shouldn't have existed, hidden
cues and frazzled admissions from voices that shouldn't have known
the tape was running. My world kept shrinking from the
industrial sprawl into just the booth and me the only
safe place. The moments the on air like glowed. I
started to see Rachel's face everywhere, reflected on the glass,
her handwrite and curled on posts on Earth from the
most unlikely places, sometimes her footsteps echoing in the corridor.
After all humans have gone home. I came to draid
each night's transition, the sense of stepping out of warm
human company into something brittle, something. Using the night shift
as a camouflage. Finally, armed with snippets accorded disaster, I
pieced together the last week's audio clues, whisper phrases, but
backwards play back from the tapes IROs with head funds
clamped so tight they entered the cartilage. I slowed the
whisper from the original phone call, chased the pulsing background
frequencies with the station's battered audio suite. There it was
spun backwards across Rachel's final load statement. Her real last
message lays with panic, almost unintelligible words fighting static, not lost,
not gone. Still inside the signal, my hands trembled, The
implication assembled itself, crystalline and undeniable. The vanished staff witnessing
in any normal way. Their traces were nested within the
ease illicit precisely time broadcast art of facts, part of them,
or perhaps thick or alone, had become a part of
something larger, something inhabiting the seven second fracture in our airways.
I replayed the last week's etcheck, my own voice darring
me dimb from the past, over and over and said
was meant to buffer dead air or smooth a transition.
I caught myself unconsciously echoing coded phrases nay uhle, please
keep listening, share the phrase don't lose the signal words
had never scripted. The chill was total. Now I understood
if something was using us to broadcast itself, it was
learning to puppet, to co opt, to seat itself through
our voices and routines. I stared at my keyed up
show notes, heart rattling on the screen, though on air
light pulls drawn into the seven second interval when none
of us should have been there. The noise in the
heaphones was no longer random. At the edge, voices swarm,
frantic and hungry Rachael Benny stuttering over one another, trapped
or transformed, broadcasting terror and hope like through the static
that was now character in its own right. I watched
the transmit a statuslight flicker. The thalcane staying in the booth,
being near the signal was no longer just dangerous. It
might be fatal. I shut off the lights, crept into
the corridor, and pressed my back to the coulcin to
block wall. Inside the sound booth, the consoles affects me
to a spike of their own accord recording silence, impossibly
incredibly dense silence, crowned by a rising swirl of whispers,
and the certainty came over me. The next transmission was
not meant to be held by anyone still free to
leave the booth. The quiet in the corridor was absolute,
a relief at first, but not the safe cand It
was the sort of emptiness me possible only in a
place built for sound, every square food armored by foam
and Bata acoustic tile. My ears rang in that harsh
pracing for after sharks, as if the building itself still
vibrated from waves I could no longer hear. I waited,
barely breathing, while my heart pounded so loudly as for
it might trigger motion sensors, and whatever was listening from
my vantage, the booth was a dim prism of glass
and restless reflections, though on air panel still beating red.
Behind the sound proofing, shadows mudded the consoles and the
grains of scuff plastic. The meters continued this low rising
dwn's phantoms of activity in the hollow studio. Then the
effects subsided, as if the thing in the signal had
moved on for now satisfied or seeking new ground. For
a moment, I tried to laugh at myself. This was
It had to be hallucination, a spiral of sleep, deprivation,
nerves fried by months of holding everything together on cafene,
and grief. I angled my gaze down the hallway and
made myself walk. I could hear the creak of my
own shoes against the institutional tile. Thus the empty break room,
the station's only a light now falling from exit, and
five panel indicators. Nobody left except me. The urge came
to run, to put the parking lot cracked asshalt and
chainling fences between myself and whatever smoldered in the wires.
But the panic burned away in the chill. I knew
if I left, if I tried to ignore it, if
I went home to blant walls and silence, I'd never sleep.
Rachel's voice would follow the artifact phrase of bou dame,
my spine not lost not gone, still inside the signal,
Still inside the booth, some vital part of all of
us stranded. Night deepened, the city outskirts now wreathed in
oint industrial haze beyond the station's slate windows. I circled
the control room once, then ducked into the archive room,
bore heaviest a vault. The knot in my stomach protested
as I gripped the handle, but I made myself go in,
flicking on a desk lamp and letting its batter like
Carven Island in a sea of real cases and old
station lopbooks. I reached automatically for my phone and thumb
for Rachel's old messages, half expecting something new to appear,
a real message or maybe just an accidental echo. Nothing
but archived banter music requests emoji sent during broadcast months ago. Instead,
I turned to the more physical clues. A hand from
the day she'd gone missing. I'd taken to keeping all
scraps of her handwriting every sticky note and abandoned playlists.
I laid them out across the batter desktops, mithing each
cramped paper by the lamp's cone of light. There were loops, patterns,
overlapping symbols and fragments. They twisted back into that repeating phrase,
the glyps spiraling, always breaking at the same invisible point.
It struck me that she'd been trying to capture something
she could neither say nor write. All the evidence of
her final weeks compressed into these future attempts, a line
which the signal pushed on her, or one it forced
her to invent as she tried not to repeat it aloud.
Mylee snagged on one sticky note that neons squire I
barely remembered tucking into the collection. At first, it was
just another squiggle and nervous hand tracing idle shapes. But sir,
there was something more deliberate about it. Two time stamps
exactly seven seconds apart, one labeled Rachel sign On in
another me from dead Air. There were lines drawn between
the two, underlined, do not fill the gap. She had
found it, the rhythm that marked out the winter in
every corrupted log, the separation in the transmission chain where
the anomaly entered. My breath. Child should not just discover
the pattern. She'd aster risks terras, survived, asterisk sterskit, if
only to leave a warning. Trying to control the rush
of noves. I dug into the file cabinets for real
boxes from her final week. The process became ritual open,
unwind cue listened between the carrier waves, try not to
flinch when her orbunny's voice bent into static. I searched
for a control tape to compare the gap in the
logs against clean air one from months ago, nothing but
son to song, familiar station id, the harmless was of
the city beyond another from three nights before she vanished,
the same pleasant monotony. Then last archive just before she
left for the final time. There in the seven second
lane amid the normal wrap up chatter of the tape
bucked a split second after the identified time, the hush
so thick, it didn't register his silence, but his presence,
like a physical object, not a lack a beat, then
so quietly. I had to rewind four times with the
monitor game patch dangerously high, a whisper barely a filament
in nigh Vah, my share, don't fade, my pulse thudded
that voice two weak trust, too distorted even for ritual aid.
Maybe as if her voice and others tangled together, merging
as a composite of all who'd left the look book
for this dead interval. Extracting the message took everything will,
headphones and patience. I fumbled to keep my focus. What
did it mean? Share or dun fade? Was it a
plea or an imperative? Each time I tried to chase
the answer, the hallway lights flickered in a pulse. A
static crows in my ears, seeming to crawl along the floor,
wine dark outside, now black paddle beneath a lot high fence.
I let myself move with purpose again, cataloging files, highlighting
the seven second deviation, tracking down the pattern wherever it
haunted the master locks. My mind reeled. Did Rachel asters
ciasterus the thing first? Did it reach through her headphone
come into her hands? How far back had this been
going unnoticed? A realization cold as water astro risk Astrusk
had been the next in line astro Riskstrusk. Every host,
it seemed, was tested as seduced into slotting themselves into
that interval. Their were was offering up a new access
path for or whatever smoldered in the static. A sound
in the stairwell wrenched me upright. Not footstep snow too
indistinct for the more like the far off spill of
a nearby radio. Fuzz and wp by glass and dry
oil overlapping with its own slowerco I tensed poisterry the
bolt for the brick room, or stepped back into the
control booth in the gleum. The studio glass vibrated minutely,
picking up its own subsonic resonance, as if waiting for
words to pass through it. My throat went dry, resolve wavering,
until I forced myself to whisper Rachel's Freezing to the
dead space. For the first time, it felt as if
some one was listening on the other side. A crush
jolted me, the sound of a heavy mug tumbling to
the floor in the kitchen lounge far down the hallway.
I flinched her hard. The headphones nearly slipped from my head.
I crept down the corridor, pump scattering over wall places,
all gold scratched, plastic, studio be on air. I paused
by the doorway, watching the swinging oc of the kitchen's
forest and lamp as it buzz, then steaded on the
lamb in a counter. A ceramic muck had rolled to
rest against the sink. The break room was empty, except
for a battered radio perched in the sill, half obscured
by yesterday's schedules and a clutch of paper towels. I
stepped inside, listening first for breath, then for the indefinable,
the wrongness that had crept in since Rachel disappeared. The
radio was on its volume at the lowest faint tick,
broadcasting static lays with a song not on our playlists.
I leaned in for a moment. It almost resolved into
a voice, my voice, the Late Show's last segment, but
not to Night's, one of those buried archives, unnaturally distorted,
laid with a background babble, impossible to decipher, but distinctly peasant,
as if our own aturex lingered long after sign off
and spoiling all by themselves. Once the building emptied out,
I reached to turn it off, my finger posed over
the dial. That single second cot half refelt like a test.
If I let this keep playing, what would happen? Whose
voices would I eventually hear? In that moment, I understood
how Rachel must have fell, headphones off, unable to give
herself over. Fully aware that each repetition deepened the corruption,
I killed the radio electric silence, then the mechanism onn
down with a sigh, hence cold. I set the mug
upright in the sink. Over the Forsat's gold In a
fading blue marker was a phone number, Rachel's scratch the
six months back. Next to it an arrow and the
same notched and shapes quigle from all the show logs. Uneasy,
I bolted back to my office. The phone still bore
her extension in the contact list, and the control panel eight.
With the temptation to dial out to try again, as
a FOSCAKENJRA presents from absence for an instant, I have
then retreated. Better not to tempt the seven seconds, better
to listen and log rather than speak. I paced, pondered
what I'd learned, how it all posed around the empty
interval in the air reach host ferring the phrase along
like a contagion. Unable to resist, I needed another vantage.
I slipped into the engineering closet for Benny's old look books.
Here at the station's nervous system was exposed. Racks of
patch cable, audiometers, lumboxes tacked by decade. Benny had kept
detailed notes, every repair, every dickub of normal registered and
the big analog meters every spike that happened without cause
the week before Rachel vanished, the margins erupted with unmeetable
scrolls in his cramped all caps, too wild to be
ordinary troubleshooting more seven second time codes. Do you not
record a gap and looping over several pages? It listens
through me? I pressed my hand atop the old log
as if the inkud pulse and tell me more. Then
he had either unraveled something real or lost his tevor.
Could both be true? Dry maud? I turned to the
transmitter console. I replayed recent master locks, fingers dancing over
the batter control surface, no scraping each time I approached
the winder, every time, the same effect. At the seven
second mark spike, a bloom of static ghost voices hissing,
layered phrases that didn't belong, sometimes Rachel, sometimes Benny, sometimes
a manager, or even a jumble that sounded like none
of us, but still terribly familiar. Had the pattern existed
before any of this team? Was it something this station
inherited a cursed pass on with the license growing bolder
as the building emptied out, the phone upstairs rang outside lines.
I nearly lapped out of my skin. The monitor and
no number, no road day, A time stamped two thirteen AM.
I stared until the ringing stopped, imagining what would have
happened had I answered? Did all calls in this ire
now belong to the same thing? A blinking cusser on
the screen rested my attention away. My only mill account
was opened, though I hadn't touched it. A draft had
composed itself repeat the phrase, leum fill the gap, don't
let I to die. I deleted it on instinct, palm sweating,
and the mouse the iro blared forward. I kept circling
the control booth, the archive room, the kitchen, the engineering closet,
each base, now more haunted by the absences than the presences.
Each door, each reflection ported Rachel's or Benny's face beside
my own, the churin of routine. All of it mapped
over the understanding that to stay meant to risk getting
stuck inside that seven second limbo. I planned hatch desperate
a mile as the clock pulse toward two twenty five.
If the interval drew power from being filled, if it
needed someone to willingly bridge the gap, I could starve
at of input, pull the fader, kill the broadcast deair deer,
rather than let it steal another host words, perhaps even
let it pass me over, seeking easer prey. As the
minute approached, I braced, monitoring the control board, eyesen the
masserl logg finger, ready to snap the boff air switch.
At two went A four and fifty three seconds, the
board's meter's rattle, voltage flickering across the wreck. Static built
her dense oral fog. For seven seconds, the light in
the room seemed to contract, shadows thickening at the corners,
every surface filmed with indistinct blurry reflections. And then, instead
of the expected silence of force, Rachel's impossible and unmistakable
cut through the static in full clarity, Liam, please don't
let it speak. My hand hovered, knuckles tight. In that instant,
a flickering, sickly interval between intent and action, I recognized
that I was the variable. I could disrupt the circuit,
or I could fall into the pattern as Rachel had,
as Benny nearly had. I slammed the fader down, plunging
the station into dead air. On the monitors, the wave
froms floutlined the noise instead of receding doubled and shimmered,
pulsing as if alive. Silence, Yes, but not peace. My
own voice trembled back at me, faint distended, leaking from
a buckets speaker road at somewhere I couldn't trace, not lost,
kno gone still inside the signal, the air thick and
every autumn prickling. I stumbled into the mean hallway of
the station's electric car. Behind me. In the sudden stillness,
I caught sight of Rachel's reflection, not in the glass,
but in the eiquitous low monitors, her mouth almost forming words,
her eyes rimmed with the same, and saw me the
rest of us now wore. She was trying to tell
me something with her glance, but the message blurred at
the edge of comprehension. I pressed my hand just once
to the cold studio door, I whispered, I won't repeat it.
Outside the city's sodium MARKLT washed the block in a
jawn disclow. The parking lot stretched empty, the chain link
trembling in the September wind above. The sky was smeared
with the pink vapor trails of distant jets. Though sound
obliterated by heavy silence, but back inside. If I focused,
all the overlooked clues, multiplied nested in registered spools, in
digital time code, in cables, in the pain should um
a patch bays left plug but broad kissing nothing. Each
tangible item had piled up, each art fact, layering a
burden of memory. It could barely contain. Rachel's scarf draped
over the back of her abandoned chair, Benny's mug with
a lipstick mark that had never been his. The manager's
forgotten security badge on the window still turned upside down,
as if to deflect attention. Somewhere, a fan clicked on,
swinging a current of coal metallica through the building. The
station exhaled. I held the moment, half expecting the doors
to swing wide and for the missing staff to walk
in blee. I'd but apologetic for the worry they'd cost.
No one did, only my own breathing, syncopating with electric wine,
the only human rhythm left to listen to. If I dared,
I made myself sit at Rachel's old desk, picking up
a pen that still bore the imprint of her fingers.
Just once, I tried to forge the phrase, inscribing it
on a clean legal pad. Letter for letter, each symbol
felt heavier, as if the act of writing could call
her back, or else hasten whatever end she'd been dragged
toward through the thin cut in Our Nights a night,
ah my my bones ate with aching days, every attendant
ghost restless just below muskin. When the lights fluttered again,
the draft swelling called through the studio, I didn't move,
not at first. The air hung with the charged potential
of the inside, the directionless yearning of those who'd stayed
too long, were too little light. I understood somehow that
the story, this patterning, the cycling into evertitle, knots of
static and word, was still unfinished. It would return, it
always did. Hunting another voice, I made a promise to myself.
I would not repeat the phrase again on air, in
a log or in note book. The sound the sequence
would die with me. But no matter how many times erode,
the warning, erased, the scribble, deleted, the file. Somewhere just
outside hearing, the signal continued restless. The silence in the
w QC why booth felt like an entity, the conpulsing.
When I finally forced the studio door closed behind me,
the last vibrations of Rachel's voice, her warning crist o'line
an immediate stayed with me in stilled air, mingling with
a chemical chill from the old tile in her foot.
My hand pressed the glass as if to reinforce the boundary,
my knuckle whitening over the muted on a I L lamb.
All I could do was stand there, willing myself not
to look back. Every nerve tuned to some intolerable frequency
ham in just below the standard human senses. I struggled
to steady my breath, with the main feader dead, the
transmitter finally idling. I realized how badly my heart was,
hammering like an off kilt and metronym in a room
where music once lived, even if familiar souns didn't belong.
Now the really clicking down and defeat the compressor's hushed
before total stillness. I turned the dial on my monitor feed,
but heard nothing, no overlap, no signal, only a while
of ringing in my ears, as if my auditory world
had shrunk and congealed, trapping me inside its membrane. No
matter if Rachel's warning had come through distortion or it
was a trick of memory, I believed her. I kept
the light's low as I walked back toward the kitchen,
not during the main corridor. When I reached the brick room,
even at syracoffee, twing had sharpened an oily trace in
the air. The battered mug was still where I had
left it. The ancient percolator's red light glowed reddy a
dying eye watching over a rink of bitter black. I
sat elbow and the lemnatee and let everything come up
at once. Each clears marked locks the seven second emptiness.
Rachel's phrase Benny's or Cat's margin notes jostle for attention,
crowding my mind, like static vying against a weak MEAs
music bed my joy ached from clenching it. At the
far end of the room, somebody's else sweat hung limply
over event, abandoned like so much here, a ghosts standing
for a presence. I couldn't pretend, not even to myself,
that this was some fever dream or by productive overwork.
The station's careful order, routines, and technical habit night to
night predictability was gone. We become marionettes to a broadcast circle,
neither written nor scheduled. Each of us conscripted in turn
to utter phrases that should never have a meaning. I
approve a lattice of marks and messages that traced all
the way through to my own broadcasts, my own un
wedding roll. What I didn't have was any plan for
what came next. The building had grown nice, sir, A
chilled envelope wrap in the main hallway. As I walked
back to my office, my hands shook as I collected
the loose papers Rachel had left behind. One last time.
I scanned the scold notes, a printed caloquise, overwhelming in
the harsh light of the desk lamp. Do you not
fill the gap? She wrote again and again, growing more desperate,
until the message devolved into spirals and angry chisel marks.
I ran my finger over the deepest grooves, half expecting
her presence to retch turn. With the touch, A faint
cough of stata came from the ceiling speaker overhead. The
whole system was technically dead, feed disconnected, but somewhere voltage
was still bleeding in. For several seconds, I waited, motionless
as something faint. He could swear it was Rachel or Benny,
or a course of all the station's lost memory to
half ward the kittens of seven seconds. In a full gap,
I switched off the breaker to the speaker. I couldn't
bear their voices filtered this way, too far from real,
but too close to ignore. Still, I knew I had
to do more than hyde. Across the room. Maps of
wiring and diegrounds from Benny's hand formed a haphazard calendar
of the station's living history. I pressed my palm to
the white board, looking for whatever had been added or
erased in the days before things unraveled. The transmitters hidden
room came back to me a storage cluset more legend
than workspace, where the oldest technical infrastructure survived the half
century of upgrades. All my nerves pointed me their necks
toward the heart of what we become. I abandoned the
office and let the door swing behind me, walking slow
to liberate through the long shadowed corridor. The transmitter room's
metal door was cold, industrial, left over from a time
when engineers still war ties. Benny's padlock was gone. The
hasp bent backward, as if forced are forgotten. In haste,
I hesitated census, bristling against every caution I might have
once had inside the room blowed faintly dials lit by
the ghostly blue green of gassy vacuum tubes. The ancient
emergency generator rumbold, faint and alien sustaining the cora rays,
A batter to celegraph traced lazy sign ways across a
green band. There were reason footprins, small and precise in
the dust, clustered with the patch cords hung in a
nest from the wall. On the back table a note
bad Benny's handwriting. Again, the seven second coat, jotted more haphazardly.
Now next to it a mug with cold heat laprin intact.
I felt the exact moment when the temperature dropped. My
breath fogged, even in the clothes stuffy space. A surge
of static troll through the radio stacks, the waving peaking
in some inaudible register that set my teeth on edge.
A fine vibration ran through the soles of my shoes,
and for an instant every piece of equipment seemed tuned
not to the public band, but to some whisper program
playing in the walls. Ear The impulse to flee battled
with a grim, fast nation. I kneeled by the main
patch base sliding my hand behind the main trunk, cable
to were another older route round unseen, patched out of line.
Beneath the subfloor, I found a crude switch, half rosted,
embossed with the year nineteen seventy six, some onon Benny
from the ink marks had circled with electrical tape. The
danger interrupt Only a seven window was scrolled in the
metal seven seconds. I shut my eyes, listening to the hum.
If there was a consciousness of broad in the signal,
it was here here, in nested and fared, manipulating us
as shadows, making a language out of our attempts to resist.
Reaching to sever the line, I was beset again by
a flood of half real voices, Rachel pleading not now, Lium, wait,
Benny muttering, don't break the circuit, and then fragments from
my own previous broadcasts recombined and clipped the cadence of
an open wound. I gripped the switch muscle nodded, but
hesitated to caught by an overwhelming panic that if I
severed the main trunk, I might either freedoms trapped in
the signal or doom them entirely, or perhaps more simply
the thing in the static would find a new condriate,
skip the station, extend itself beyond my reach. The floor
vibrated again, a second order pulse. Above my head, the
old ceiling light spat a shower of sparks. The miraculously
stayed on. I finched back from the switch, half expecting
some physical hand to restrain me, but nothing came, only
cold airless pressure on my skin. I let the hand fall,
breath burning in my chest. This was going to be
a clean tide effects. Break the switch, solve the haunting,
walk away. The signal was more complex by far, mishlayered,
occupying every possible path through the wires, the air, and us.
Above me, a loud speaker coughed alive, spitting out static
that bloomed into barely musical chord. For a long moment,
I heard nothing but the sibilant fuzz. Then in the hush,
a reel is snapped and Rachel's voice emerged. Not her
voice as I remembered, but the disordered overlay of dozens
of playbacks trying to nerve themselves into coherence. Liam, it's me,
don't let it cycle again. Break that. She trailed off
over on be shoppy echoes of her own phrase, each
one more torn, more mechanical. The overhead lights flickered in
time with the voice. The radio humratchet attire, as if
the entire room were poised on a threshold of catastrophic feedback.
I staggered to my feet, winded, and pressed my ear
close to the bad I rack between the waves of noise.
I began to pick out another layer of voices, not
only of the missing, but of earlier broadcasts, lay deep
into station memory, every vanished host, every technician who complained
of untraceable crossed ork for a voice bleed. The signal
ran farther back than Rachel, farther than Benny or the manager.
It was as old as the patch lines themselves, riding
every upgrade, every attempt at isolation. I thumbed through Benny's nerve,
pat now shuddering with the effort, the last entry, read
and block a print. When the seconds a line i'dey opens,
don't say the phrase out loud, don't listen. He'd underline
the phrase say out louds three times, each marked, denting
clear through to the next page. My own lips tingled,
half formed shapes, stretting into surface. I clamped my mouth shut,
afraid I might speak Rachel's wood involuntarily. The urge when
it came was not thought but reflex, as though the
speech center in my brain was not fully my own.
The emergency generated chirked him briefly, wine, forcing a low
click through the ground wires and making every light blink off,
thin flared to life. This would be the escalation I'd avoided.
If the signal was potent enough to inhabit us in
no longer needed the old infrastructure. The transmission could jump
through metal, air, dream voice, maybe even into the world beyond,
if given the right signal path. I steadered myself and
reached into the wiring nest teeth on edge from the
residual shock, and unplugged the oldest feed cable, the one
ridgel always cold, the umbilical. At first nothing, then the
static receded, as if drawn backward, sound collapsing to a small,
keening whale. The room's temperature snapped back to almost bearable,
and the light studded. But the primary radio, the battered
one I'd found playing in the kitchen, only an I
or ghost bond itself on volume, climbing beyond the dial's range.
My voice piped from its tiny speaker, spliced for a
half dozen lost segments, stuttering the furze backward forward in
an impossible round. Each time the voice looped a pitchwarp
further until it stopped being human and settled into a
single stretched syllable, like a scream, digitized and slurred past
the point of recognition. I lunged across the room and
ripped the radio's cord from the wall. The air didn't clear, Instead,
the broadcast as my gritted behind my left eye, crawling
along the bones of my skull. Each time I blinked,
the room shadows started, and I felt truly physically the
presence of Benny Rachel and the manager near me, their
faces side ear in the glass, blinking their own message
in time with the power lights dying pulse. It was
not only the signal that had gotten loose, It was
memory itself, patterned. Desperate and able to rest with the
circuit unbroken, I called at the note bed, flipping pages
until my thumb blared, hoping to uncover a clore I
hadn't yet seen. Varied among the circuitry, diagrams and spiral
sketches of frequency ninety seven point two, underlined beside the
single handriton line in Rachel's familiar mix of cursive and print.
Only voice can close the cycle. I reeled. Did that
mean to speak it? Or to undo what was spoken?
As sudden wheeze from the corridor jerked my attention up.
A shadow resolving into a figure are the memory of
one standing just outside the transmit a room door. The
light behind them flickered, making their edges flutter between presents
and absence. I recognized, with a jold of dread and hope,
the shape of Rachel, her scarf, the tilt of her head,
her urgent, silent body language. She pressed both hands through
the glass. I ran to the door, buff found on
in my own reflection, twisted with panic and longing. The
corridor behind was empty but for thin, high keening, almost
like a distant emergency tone. At that moment, every radio
in the building clicked to life, inter comps chand in unison.
Death speakers wobbled alive. Even the ceiling panels in the
break room vibrated a low antiphon. The phrase wound itself
through the station, a rand sung by a choir of
ghosts not lost not gone. Still inside the signal, I
sank to my knees, desperate to plug my ears. The
low frequency pulse drove through the floor, up my spine,
rattling my teeth. In that VOI I remembered something from
the staff meeting weeks prior, a corporate memo about installing
a government mandated emergencies upcarrier, a silent alert men to
ride beneath our broadcasts, but bordered THEE for public safety.
We shrugged it off, just another technical hiccup in an
endless line of compliance requests. But every one who would
vanish I realized, had handled the programming or physical logs
during that mendated test period. A phrase repeated in my mind.
Some signals aren't meant to be decoded, and all friends
warning years ago about the dangers of background carrier drift.
Now the words returned with new dawning, meaning we had
decoded something we'd let its beak. I fought my way
out to the broadcast booths, staggering along the corridor, trailing
a tale of static in my wake. The ceiling lights
faced with interference as I moved, raining flickers of ghostly
illumination over the black glass and battered countertop. I collapsed
into my old chair, swallowing air and shallow panic gulps.
For the first time, the station no longer felt like
my territory. The main monitor gutched in a spiral number
spinning on the master clock, the colon blinking out the
seven second window two zero seven, three zero seven, four
zero seven. The musical library had corrupted. Every track was
replaced with a string of numbers in geebush or fragments
of prayer segments back and ancwing nothing. I set my
headphones on, fingers trembling, and dialed up the master feed.
As I did, a deluge of coals poured into the
request line, the panel cycling through numbers, few with any
actual colla id, the most marked as in slashe. The
lines bled together overlaying right voices, a cacophony. The voices
were pieces of people I knew, worked alongside, or had
heard only once. Rachel beaynied manager old hosts from years ago.
They all pleaded, warned, or sobbed, but their words buckled
over each other, impossible to separate by scent alone. One
phrase dug through the rest. Rachel slowed nearly to a whisper,
yet lucid. Don't listen, don't repeat, don't let it use
your tongue. The signal itself pulsed to long, the seven
second gap increasingly synchronized with the cold timing. Each time
the clock hit seven past the ire, a shriek of
feedback cut the coals off, replacing them with static drenched
in the familiar refrain. I queued up the spectrum analyzer,
half wrecked call from disuse. On the display. Beneath the
carrier wave, another signal flickered like a stroked human voice, sighing,
mapped and inverted swimming through bands usually were served for
dead air. It was speaking the phrase over and over,
compressing itself into the space where no one should ever talk.
I called up a former colleague, Bbridy, who done work
as a midnight deck before shifting to a more stable
nine time. On my last reserves of composure, I left
a halting, barely rational voicemail. He returned the colon under
a minute, his own voice shot through with static. Some
signals aren't meant to be decoded, he repeated. Don't dig deeper,
pull all the patches and walk out to night. Don't
let fill in for you, he paused voice flinching. If
you hear yourself answer, hang up. That's what got my predecessor.
He hung up before I could reply. My hands shook
their nerve, endings of blaze with cold. The rack beside
the glass window glowed, and the transmitter's surface rolled a
diagnostic report. I'd never run. Something had activated it externally.
The delay was gone now, the seven seconds repeated every hour,
every half hour, every fifteen minutes. The pressure on my
head built to a burrow metric cake, my mouth watered,
tongue ready to betray me. The phrase hovered under my breath,
just at the edge of articulation. Not lost, knock one
still inside the signal, I paced the booth, knowing a
decision neared, act or become the next voice in the
signal song into the midnight, with no hope of retrieval.
As though witching irish struck. The main lights failed in sequence.
The only illumination left was the yellow green after glow
of the meters, balancing faintly in total darkness. I peeled
off the headphones and willed my brain to focus the
main patch, bait the analog interlock in the transmitter room.
This was how it got in. This was how it
would spread if not cut off at the source. I
grabbed Benny's old toolkip from under the desk and ran
down the corridor. Every step sounded doubled, as if two
versions of me ran the hall, overlapping by a second.
My eyes darted to each doorway, expecting Rachel or Benny
to peer out, caught half way between presents in signal.
The transmitter room was colder now, the air thick with
the scent of old electronics, burning insulation and ozone. The
line of footprints Rachel's boots a mistakable trail to the
back corner where the soak carrier hardware had been set
up for the compliance test. Her last journey here a
washin adrenaline, I followed the Prince to a battered rolling
chair underneath two patch cables crossed with a length of
gaffer tape marked in fresh blue sharpite break only if necessary.
I knelt hand's numb and hesitated, as the static belt
in my head a precious so intense it felt like
a drill in the skull. I yanked both case free,
rolling backward as the rack lights blinked out and the
emergency generator surged to life, then slowly silence fell, deep
and hard as a locked door. An angerish cry ripped
over the pier. Rachel, this time clear and full, crying, Liam,
I'm here. I scrambled to the micon Benny's control panel
pressed transmit, teeth chattering. Rachel told me how to end this?
How do I let you out? Her voice softer and nearer, resolved,
don't repeat, don't listen, let the frequency go dead. Please,
light stroved at the shadow of her figure, stood behind
the glass, hands pressed to the cold I crossed the mic,
pulse bucketing, and faced the racks. Some part of me
newer voice was now only half real, sustained by the signal,
sustained by my own maligness to chase her out of
the seven second gap and back into life. Can you
come back if I break the link? I whispered, the
question of set on its face, but all I had
a shadow nodded or seemed to dissolving. As the emergency
lights popped and the main transmitter moaned out its death rows.
The signal sibilant, slowed, un whining around my core, then
faded with a last shuddering exhalation. I lay back on
the floor, chest rising and falling. The world outside was
all glass and sodium, ark, impossibly far from the prison crisis,
my mouth dry, hand shaking, I looked back at the racks,
the patch cables now limp, and it held nothing more
than ordinary electromagnetic silence. A feigned residual hum filled the air,
a far off ambulance tone as distant as history. I
crawled to my knees and reached one final time for
the bat of radio static. Now in nothing but static,
no voice, no refrain, only the after image of voices
lost among the Knight's own entry. For the first time
in IRS, I let go. Two hours later, awoke to
the brightness of false storms slanting through the cracked blinds.
The city beyond seemed to mock my efforts, its silence
and no echo of last night's noise. I was slumped
at the main booth, cheek pressed to a sheaf of logs.
The station felt nuclear, dead and humming. It goes shorn
away by the severed link. Security banged in the locked
front doors, their voices muffled by reinforced fire glass. They
found me slow to rise, dazed and stiff. My tongue
thick were the last rays of Rachel's phrase, I muttered
to them as they peeled me off the desk. Words
I could never recall, syllables park course, part benediction. In
the days that followed, the company dispatched noticed the facility
retired all technical looks, seas and box equipment strip for resale.
W q se Y would become a footnote lost frequency,
A brief disturbance on the city's old a M slash
f M band. I wandered the alleys near the yard,
the station's empty shell lick green by a single emergency lamp.
In the radio forums and one dedicated enthusiasts, rumors percolated
something about day haunted frequency, spikes of day directing, careful playlists,
inexplicable bleed throughs. At two seven a m. No one
found the tapes I left behind. No one, as far
as I know, ever played them in full. I unplugged
my own battered mixer at home and led the hard
ware gathered dust, afraid to hear a trace, a ghost,
a suggestion of the phrase. But some nights, when sleep
circled just out of reach, I'd find myself listening, listening
for a voice I missed, so deeply set my teeth
on edge. The last time I truly tuned in the
radio on my kitchen table crackled itself a wicke at
two seven A M's ancient speak are crowded by notions static.
For a second, Rachel's voice childlike to find road, the
noise not lost, not gone, still inside the signal. I
pressed my palm flat to the radio, as if I
could answer her through the wire. In that moment, I
felt herd air, if only for one more intervals silence.
In that moment, I felt her there, if only for
one more interval silence. Then the wave ebbed. Rachel's voice
dissolved back into the lines. The kitchen drowned by a
surge of statics so deep it pressed a breath from
my lungs. I rested both elbows on the table, sliding
the radio away from me as if it might lunge.
The city felt flattened. On the other side of the glass,
the world trunk to one wavering frequency. I couldn't turn
away from. Morning insisted itself sire and too bright, leaking
through curtain, still drawn tight as bandages. I washed my
face repeatedly, but the chill clung to my skin. Every
sound seemed contaminated, hollowed out traffic in the guts of dawn,
refrigerator thunk, the whisper of heating pipes. These days, every
rhythm threatened to form into a pattern, a syllable, the
phrase for a long stretch. I refused to touch the radio,
not even to move it from the table, but as
a weakened bool, official statements schedules to tie off former
colleagues sending me hesitant, generic messages. He was the only
thing that made the apartment feel less like a mausoleum.
The consequences rolled out methodically WQC wise, where prisons evaporated overnight,
no closure enhouncement, just blank pages. A four hundred four
high uses as a blackout curtain. HR made a perfunctory call,
an administrator's voice, careful and dry, express gratitude for my
years in community broadcasting. Beneath his tone was the real
story of technical recoverables in whatever had bled into the logs.
The station's assets scrapped, All tapes and disks transferred to
legal custody pending technical audit. I was not asked for
written statements or return appointments. My access cards stopped working
the next day. Most nights, exhaustion sheltered me. I tried
to force normal routines, grocery runs, laundry, the pretense of
new job. Searches. Conversations with neighbors felt clipt and clinical.
They noticed lights on at the old station even after
the closure, sometimes a glimmer of music mummering under the wind.
All denied hearing anything at two seven, but their eyes
flickered when I mentioned the time, as if some part
of them, against all logic, recognized once by phone buzz
were a text from an enlisted number, don't let it
return Liam. The font was wrong, the time stamp off
by seven seconds from the minute when I replied the
message bounced. That day, I unbooked every connected device in
the flat except my batter transister. Even then, reluctant to
trash it, still, I couldn't help but monitor the radio
bends I'd scanned for irows, recording stretches of static, listening
for any swell of human shape beneath the noise. Sometimes
late I catch faint fragments of speech, for woman's intonation,
an engineer's clipped laugh, or my own voice looping through
all collins. Each time i'd freeze. Was it real or
a trick of fatigue? I called Benny's old number. Disconnected.
I dialed the manager's home land line, letting it ring
until the machine caught but nothing. I searched online for
any sign of Rachel. Her apartment was emptied out swiftly.
Her landlord said she'd left her word stack of notebooks,
then donated the contents at random. Maybe she'd scattered herself
like a defense cross as many hands as possible. A
few days in a city, work's crew arrived at the
station of marked vans in a swarm of utilities jackets
with the tennis stencils. They hold out coils of cokes
and battered rackmont gear. Watching from across the street, I
kept my hands in my pockets, assistantly, urged to cross
and ask what they'd found. If any hardware was coming
up with residue with burnt patches or frozen meters at
the seven second position, but the crew worked quickly, eyes
down and by thus the building was left to itself.
Only an orange cone at the curb is evidence. The
next night, my dreams buckled with interference radio towers and
silhouette meters ticking backward the blue pulse of Rachel scaffrough Glass.
I work at two six radio, already on, no memory
of switching it, which spat out a low tone much
like the old as test. As the clock clicked two
seven a m. The old phrase shimmered out, faint and steady,
not lost, not gone, still inside the signal. I snapped
the set off, but my jaw buzz for the rest
of the morning. I took to writing details and spiral
notebooks as Rachel had time stemps, dreams, odd soldiers, and
static fragments of messages half heard in hum of appliances.
On a whim, I mailed one to sympathetic COLLEAGUEOU transfer
took college station states away. He replied with a single line,
My calendars keep skipping seventh of every month when I
used the old scheduling software. Did you ever notice? I shivered,
then closed the window on his chat. Four progressed local
press posted a five line blobe A long time late
night a m slash FM out the w q C
whyter shutter staff disperse building decommissioned no further comment, but
there were still traces out on the airwaves. I heard
them once on a late train home some Boddy's full
in Glitchen and next row, I couldn't shake the shiver
when a muffled burst of static issue from the speaker,
rising and folding in a seven second envelope. He only
looked at me. Discomfort clear between us. Soon after, a
friend in night yet the city library called to pass
on something odd to patrons in one we could use
hifonson adjoining public terminals, both apported a woman crying for
help at exactly the top of the aire. But there's
nothing on the file. I told him nothing except two
switch devices every seven seconds. For a bit, his tone
grew wary. I hung up before any further questions could
be asked. Within a four fortnight, emails began pulsing through
professional radio forms, talk of a phantom signal on an
unused frequency ninety seven point two active and burst at night,
never on a regular show schedule. Some experienced only random
static bursts. One insomnia cobbyist, an ex engineer in his retirement,
posted a detailed account describing a misaic of voices over
static at two seven a m. I could swear one
of them use my first name, but I never told
anyone my call sign location didn't matter, the boundaries between transmitter,
receiver and human ear rebuckling. The story, I realized was
less about the haunted station more about haunted aster or
scare asterisk, the intangible tissue between voice and signal, a
network for a strange consciousness. I tried to warn off
any listener who pay attention. Sometimes I'd pick up my phone, dialing,
then stopping. Suppose I reached a number of the answered
with my own voice altered or drawn out, or Rachel's
infinitely weary reciting the phrase a shid for weeks before
she faded. Sometimes the urge to return to w kiss
wire overwhelmed me. To walk at sichoing halls, c ifi
scoff still hung over the back of a chair, or
if any residual heat for the machinery linger beneath its
dead panels. Each time, though, I'd find myself frozen at home,
hand flat on the table, unable to move until the
two seven static roll beyond my kitchen radio. I thought
for a while that maybe I could fix things by forcibly,
forgetting go offward, abandon even the idea of radio box
out of the past. But every act of erasure seemed
only to further tide in the phrase's hold, as if
the thing animating the interval grew hungry, scavenging each attempt
to ignore it, replaying all absences material for its own
endless broadcast. Then came the night, the one that finally
forced me to act. I'd been listening radio or two
and lower than human speech, marking down intervals and signal jumps.
At two zero, the air was dead. At two three,
a background tone drifted in measurable only on the battered
spectrum analyzer. At two seven, I've voiced definitely, but not entirely.
Mine rose from the hiss overlaying an unmistakable foundation. Rachel's
voice pleading from the static, louder than ever before. Lium,
it's here, she said, It wants to speak. You have
to close the gap, or it'll go where you can't follow.
The words prickled the hairs and the backs of my arms.
It didn't sound like memory or simul Cumchiastros sounded aster
as present as she is, an old staff lanche urgency,
pressing on every vowel. I snatched a faded program lock
from the station. Reading Rachel's last notes, my eye latched
onto a line underlined three times part warning, pard instruction,
when the time comes, let the air go dead. It
was two seven thirty one. The signal began to multiply,
overlapping words, spiking so high my little radio speaker buckle
on the spectrum. All the frequencies seemed to fold inward,
converging into a single bright line the phrase round had
not lost, are not gone? And now and new claws,
as if the signal itself sought to resolve still inside you.
I felt it in my throat a tickle, and uraged
to speak aloud, as if the language in the signal
wanted to escape, not into the wives but into me.
I staggered to my feet, radio in hand, heartbeat uttering
in my chest so hard my vision speckled. The air
in the room changed, tasted metallic, dry, like the inside
of a long and open amplifier. I did the only
thing that made sense. I yanked the radio's batteries, flung,
opened the windows, and screened in not the phrase, not
any word, but a harsh, incoherent roar of fighting the
impulse to name the intervals or syllables. For a second.
I was afraid someone would call the police, that the
world outside would wake and the signal would leap into
them through my defiance. But instead the room fell at
ale quiet. Only the ordinary city noises felt of back
distant sirens, a heavy truck, rain spitting on the fire escape.
On the table top, the unpowered radio sat in her
a relic. For the first time in months, I felt
nothing pressing at the nape of my neck, no compulsion
Hiding in the static. I sat amidst the paper, debris
and h memories, breast lowing, closed, damp with sweat. The
silence pulsed with its ownforce, institution, maybe by the eye
in a much larger storm. The radio remained dead. I waited.
I waited until the clock take to two fourteen, then
two thirty, nothing more, the urge lessened. I stared in
myself that a loud kindness. I collected Rachael's notebooks and
stacked them gently, resting her words and mine side by side.
I unplugged the phone from the wall, turned off the
Wi Fi, and left the radio face down. I shut
my eyes, listening for any voice. All that answered was
the whisper of rain and the deep, forgiving breath of night.
A week drifted by, with me refusing any routine. I
slept in segments, window always open, waiting for evidence of
signal return. News from the old station must guarce. No
more teams arrived, no more roomors circulated in the amateur bends.
I scanned the dial anyway. Sometimes I scribbled apologies in
margins were wrote to Rachel, as if she could receive them.
The compulsion to speak to echo obeyed it. The internal
commentary the phrase on loop faded back to a thin,
nearly manageable urge of relict trauma. But some part of
me understood it was more dormancy than deliverance. What we
built to Astoris Gastus could repeat. It did not vanish,
only receded, waiting for another mouth, another seven second window.
On the last night, I allowed myself to listen. I
kept my radio off. I sat at the table, note
book copen. Rachel's scarf folded across my knees. Pulse soft
and regular rain in the glass city washed in sodium orange,
every silence loaded. If there was a phrase now, it
lived behind the membrane of ordinary life, deep enough that
I could hear my own thoughts again. Closing my eyes,
I forgave myself. Once outside the city's night healed itself
in static one. Transmission ended in the darkness. The signal waited,
and that is the end. Thank you for listening and
I will see you in the next one.