Speaker 1: The night didn't begin as a haunting. It began, as
it always did, with a wine from the transmitter rack
and the slowest daughter of ancient fluorescent bulbs. I walked
the dim hallway line with yellowing promotional posters, and passed
the office where decades of bills, station id and coffee
cups were stacked like forgotten fossils. My name is Morror,
and for years I've kept the bones of Worx as
easily it sought alive. Most of the city sleeps through this.
Iire lost to dreams or despair. Out here, just beyond
the industrial outskirts, the station grip its little patch of
existence by the thinnest wire in the booth. Sodium street
light painted the window with a color i'd never found
a word for, more amber than gold, more dead than war.
The air conditioner rumbled even when set to off, and
every so often dust shifted under my elbow as I
arranged the rundown local coll Ins city events, lost pen notices,
sometimes the low drone of jazz or the aimless chatter
of pre recorded news. After midnight, my only companion was
my own voice, bounced back slightly out of sink in
the headphones. It was familiar and odd comfort, this subtle lag,
as if a future version of myself was always a
second behind, trying to keep up. That night, though as
I queued the first track some hollow eyed India folk
had spun a thousand times, the signal folded. Not the
gentle static that sometimes called an no human night, or
the power dipped when the h shark cycled, but an
abrupt frame of reality in among other speakers. The songs stuttered,
unraveling into a garbled, piercing hiss. My finger froze on
the board, and the room seemed to tighten. A warp
force bled through. It didn't belong to anyone I'd ever
heard on the air, or to any of our usual pranksters.
The distortion was impossible, chopped syllable stitch together with static,
sometimes mal, sometimes slurring into a cold, distant falsetto that
defied gender. It intoned on the hill where the pines bent.
It saw the red and did not forgive. If you
know what you did, That last sentence culled with an
ugly intimacy, and I felt my scalprickle. My throat went dry.
Nobody had a key to the booth, but me and
the day chief engineer. I killed the fadere, but the
hiss continued, crawling between tracks, wrapping its strange story around
the empty intervals. The tale it told was old, something
about the Lanton woman of Potter's Fuel, a local legend
half buryer by decades of retellings, But its kittens didn't
match the rambling foot tales I'd played before. It was urgent, fragmented,
and each time it mentioned a place on night, details
changed plausible but off. Then it added accident before at
the dawn asked who stood witness, but Silen's answers. My
pulse thundered. I muted everything, but the bleed was inside
the feet, not above it. The signal ran cold, and
then as quickly as it had come, vanished. Music returned
like a dying patient, catching and uneven breath. I pressed
record on my private hit deck. My finger is numb.
The w x o' ze midnight journal personal lock. Thee
muttered into the little hand held mic on scheduled transmission
signal hijack. I tried to keep my voice even though
I could hear it trendlin. What caught me hardest wasn't
only the malfunction or the cleaved, knowing voice, but the
sense that the narrative was random, There was a calculated
by It meant for me to listen. I peered up
toward the transmission to how beyond the pucking lot through
the growmy window, it looked skelettal hemdon by Haze. I
pictured the night crawling off, the industrial lots, sliding in
through patche insulation. The sodium light, the washed up blewe
of the display, the bob tists of adrenaline on my
tongue had all lay together, turning routine into threat. Either
wrote the incident into my lock hands, shaking faintly, I
caught myself glancing at shadowed corners. The silence after the
signals leaving seemed deeper than before, swelling to fill every crack.
A few minutes later, a column light blinked, but the
line was dead. When I picked up, the loneliness was absolute.
The only evidence that something had happened at all was
my note, my private recording, and the static still crackling
faintly in my headphones, refusing to disappear entirely. That was
when I first wondered not if the radio was haunted,
but if something in the wires had learned my name.
I reached for my thermis slush cool over steep coffee
and retreated to my routines, hoping they'd wall out whatever
had tried to bleed through somewhere inside. I doubt it already.
I suspected nothing about the night would return to normal again.
In the weeks before the incident, my knights at wxl
Z blowed together with a consistency that was nearly richual.
Every evening a round sunset, I'd swipe my badge at
the side entrance, the reader giving its sleepy beap as
it eased the heavy door open. The lobby, half museum,
half dumping ground still held an air of dignity thanks
to the battered walnut receptionists desk, no one ever manned.
After six p m. I moved past it, shoe scuffed
the cracklinoleum, harming the tail end of a tune from
that afternoon's drive. Inside the main hallway, the fluorescent bowls
flickered their stubborn electric blue. The ceiling tiles were water
stained in rawstatch shapes. A few sporder brown scouts where
leaks had been fixed but never repaired. I could have
traversed the corridor blind folded right the brake room with
its never cleaned microwave and suspicious fridge. Left the glass
in booth where I lived from ten till four. My
first stop every shift was the tech closet. Marcus, our engineer,
left the post it notes in the rock, cryptic stick,
figured doodles, reminders to wiggle, excel law cables, don't trust
a rosary compressor, and always a cartoon. Casett labeled the
ghost in the machine. I'd grin, pass my badge again
and double check the automassionary w XRZ ran on a
cocktail of patch together the software old taped decks at
our relay we decorated three times in fifteen years. Most
nights it worked, except for the odd burst of static,
sudden skips, or the occasional ton test schedule for the
wrong frequency. Marcus joked about the console's oddities. The board's
main channel sometimes play its own signal. The monitor lights
were dim for a second, then burned twice as bry
and every third Friday at three thirteen A, and the
backup system rebutted of its own accord. We called at
quirks the daytime staff claimed it was only old equipment
and union cuts, not levels, keeping the place haunted. Weave
and night crew clung to our superstitions as a way
to survive loneliness. I came in early on Friday to
swap out log tips and warm up the board. My
prep was meticulous, level checks, spreadsheets marked up with colar histories,
music beds, new stings, and call in numbers ready to go.
My coffee ritual was equally precise, if less satisfying. The
break rooms industrial pod always burned the first batch into
a bitter tar, but by eleventh day in the summer
tasted comforting. Sometimes I brought a thermis from him and
shared a cup with Marcus or Donna, our Alley newsreader
for Schiff Ranleigh. Our banter was affectionate, touch guarded. Mara
is still trying to resurrect that ghost story. Call in
Marcus with tease, his round face slipping easily between seriousness
and cynical humor. I'd folly back only if he promised
to finally upgrade that analog switcher or is the gashinianized
now too? Truth was we ran lean the glory days
when a city tuned him by the thousands, and our
lines burned with requests and gossip had faded with the
rise of media giant and the slow leeching of community.
I caught echoes of their time, and the photographs tacked
to the back wall. DJ Motvascal Kid's charity car washes
even a rare holiday feast. In the break room. We
were a skeleton crew, holding on to embers. Donna told
me once, over a smoke behind the tower that she
missed the feeling of being the heartbeat in a silent house.
These days, he felt like a nerve ending maybe, but
neverthe hoar Stelle. These holes gave me room to breathe.
I fled the newsroom for radio store telling, precisely because
I didn't have to meet anyone's eyes or chase down witnesses. Here,
intimacy could exist a controlled distance. The human voice, stripped
of image and pretense, beamed visible through the city sleeping grids.
Night broadcasting, I always believed was a kind of stewardship
over the drift between waking and dreaming. Of course, osolation
wasn't the only thing working at night delivered. It meant
absorbing the auditors. Hearing rumors layered into the station's bones.
There was stores circulated lawn before I joined, about a
morning host who went missing during a bad snowstorm, or
the silent engineer Henry who'd vanished, leaving only Crype code
in the automation locks. Every so often I'd wonder if
I'd see one of them reflected in the glass on
a truly quite broadcast. Things happened here. You could learn
to ignore electrical snap as the centralize cycled, the phantom
pinging of an empty line, or the feeling rare but
a mistakable of eyes at you back as you monitored meters.
Once I caught a voice overlapping my voice and headphones
whispering let it lie on a call in segment that
was years ago, and I brushed it off as a
feedback loop. Mostly, I cataloged these anomalies and dismissed them.
The station was an ecosystem built on decay and habit.
The supernatural felt like and entertaining harmless by productive of
work and neglect. Nights were mostly safety and routine. The
hum of the board, the circuit of famili voices, and
the knowledge that every morning would bring fresh air, sunlight,
and the next engineer's rye jokes. But underneath it, all,
I suppose, was the question I never fully formed. What
exactly was the signal really carrying when nobody else was
left to listen? And if there was something else in
that silence, would I even want to know? I convinced
myself nothing truly out of the ordinary had happened at night.
Perhaps it had just been rogue interference, a special prank,
another symptom of failing hardware. Still, by two a am,
I was high, persensitive to every stray signal and shadow.
I drove home for sleeping suburbs, barely remembering the journey,
the words you know what he did running on a
loop in my head. The next day was uneventful, save
for Marx's text apologizing for a skipped meeting and promising
again to fix the glutchy router. I tried to forget
the incident, but as dusk arrived at tense impatience crept
over me, eager for routine but wary of its betrayal.
The second broadcast came without any warning. It was a Tuesday,
not a busy night even for late talk radio. I
was alone, again, reading a story about city council drama.
Half listening as my voice filled the booth. The board's
green lights clode steady, the faint wheeze of the taw
bleeding through the glass, and for a long hour everything
seen set right. At one fifty two eh am, the
fee dropped me track just as I was fade in
out a pre recorded traffic advisory, A brutal bust of
static grutch at the monitors, the visor of my headphones
flickering as the imp of will from channel at her
mystery channel sea I had never configured. The voice returned
at this time, steady, more deliberate, its cadence, lurching from
fouchhor into something like news reportage crashing black sedan, too injured,
siren never called, a man left behind in silence, brown jacket,
white scarf, seen last walking easts, never reached home. The
words were crisp, detailed, but this specificity turned my gut.
I stared at the newswhere on May I pound nothing
matched yet the tone, the layering of details felt heavy
with implication. I scrambled for the faders, but the board
read normal. The automation log shured the scheduled kept playing silently.
No sign in interruption had registered it was as though
the fief wasn't hijacked, but overwriting itself, briefly rewriting the
night's story while nobody else watched des I switched head
four channels and listened again. That's when I heard my
own voice, distorted but mistakable, reciting a call and station identifier.
This is Mare on w x OZ, keeping you company
on a quiet Thursday. The problem was it was the
exact phrasing I'd used in an off our chat two
years ago, a late night when Donna had joined me
after a funeral, when we talked in private about a
missing woman who'd once called the station week after week.
But that dialogue was never broadcast. It shouldn't exist except
in my memory, and I assumed in Donna's now it
was wrapped in static seamlessly woven with official scripts in
the new folklore. It was as if someone or something
was supplicing together secrets known only to me in those
I trusted. When my shift ended, I found Marcus in
the maintenance room, head bent over a wiring schematic, glasses
low on his nose. You got a minute. My voice
was smaller than I meant it to be. He didn't
look up. What's up. He got a grand hum again,
something stranger. There was an unscheduled interruption twice. Now did
the logs show anything? No blip. Systems ancient, but it
doesn't fake logs. He we're in, but it was then
unless the ghost learning coadeh He toggled the server, but
everything read clean. Only weird thing system did a fast
tribute last night. Roundury happened sometimes solo winds. Maybe he
gave me his usual half shrug, too much lake coffee.
I thought about telling him the full truth, but already
in daylight the story wavered and threatened to evaporate underscrutiny.
I made a note to check the logs myself during
my next shift, and not to mention it again. Not yet.
But that night, as I sat at my kitchen table,
the memory didn't lose his grip. I could still hear
the distortion. My own words, private and guarded, woven into
something foreign and rom Sleep was then broken into anxious intervals.
My mind chased the possibilities software glitch and secure line prank,
but nothing logical explained what I'd heard. The voice was
too knowing the pattern intentional. I returned to the station
with my senses roar, ready to track every anomaly. The
boose at tenpee I am felt unfamiliar to sound insulation
closing in like a warning sigh. The early part of
the shift round seamlessly call ins from them, the city's
night side regulars a week request for an old psalm,
the hum of the eight track, but I was attuned
for anything, and soon addit is cropped up the logs.
When I accessed them through the on air software, it
showed rebute to at exactly three thirteen a m both
nights of the interruptions, no other points in the week matched,
and always the glitches came at one fifty two a
m thorn nearby, early enough that someone still living in
the city's time zone might notice, late enough to escape
much scrutiny. Digging deeper, I queued up recordings of earlier nights.
The spices were subtle, almost imperceptible unless you were hunting
for them. Interstitial static, a stretched pause, a faint double echo,
and a voice over. When I isolated these segments, every
single one reference to piece of local history in a county,
detail of robbery or runaway a fire, some events, I
realized with the cold shiver hadn't even made the news yet,
but within the coming days, the station's late night broadcast
was pleading into the future before the city could even
hear it. Complain. I digitized every tape for safekeeping and
began scribbling physical logs by hand to an all trick
from training one obsolete and digital radio. But some hurw rear,
the dates, the anomalies. The name spoke their own pattern
when inked in black boupointon yellow legal paper. One night,
early in the shift, I found a folded Nord in
my locker, an anonymous sheet of computer paper, torn roughly at
the edge. The handwriting was shaykey but bold. What's heard
at night echoes forever, No signature, just those words, the
ink pressing through as if insistent on leaving a mark.
I read it three times, but it didn't change, didn't
clarify itself. Only later did I realize how closely it
mirrored what had happened in the tapes. Before the shift.
I tracked down Donna in a makeshift newsroom. She was
perched on an office chair, feed atop a box of
unused t shirts, scrolling through social media with familiar easy contempt.
She gave me a look equal part sympathy and exasperation.
When I told her about the strange logs, the phantom broadcasts,
the creepy timing. You know the system hates you, she said,
with the dry affection served for only the closest coworkers.
Marcusis a backup sussension fungus by now its shoes apaf
his notes. She looked at me and added, there's always
been roomors old staff listening in pulling Prance. Remember Henry
came in after Ires left word tapes in the lounge fridge.
She caught my reaction and laughed, quick, brutle, If there
really is a ghost, it's board as hell. Don't let
it get to you. The city's full of people who
want to be heard and nobody listening. I tried to
believe her, borrowing her skepticism as armor, but something infected
the air at which a paranoia that refused to leave me.
That night, as I prepped to go on air, I
triple check every input and up but tracing the boards
spaghetti of cables, looking for anything out of place. During
the midnight segment, the interruption struck again, softer, now almost
seductive in its familiarity. The voice recited a conversation forbad
him from a week before, when I'd shared a private
joke with Donna about the Mayasiku divorce. The context wasn't
just right. It was too right, layered with details I'd
never said loud but had only thought, then later written
half heartedly in a notepocnamosin from my desk, alarm rose
edged by anger who had bugged the studio? Was it
a sick prank or worse a breach? After my shift,
I began as a somatic sweep every event, every power strip,
the ceiling panels, over the desk. I searched for whiles,
tiny microphones, anything unusual. I nearly gave up until behind
one faded acoustic baffle, my hand caught on a corrodive
metal device taped to the drywall. It was a transmitter,
or what was left of one. Its battery was dead.
The sauder joins blackened from age, and the frequency dial
was hand at tuned to an arrow and just outside
our FM ray. A slip of paper folded three times
was crowned behind the device, like a forgotten prayer heart hammering.
I carried the packet to my booth, locked the door,
and insialed it. The envelope inside was stained and brittle.
Pages spilled up, scribbled on both sides, and handwriting that
shivered with urgency. List of names, staff, birthdays, nicknames, old
transmitter ID, and notes on shows long dead. There were
narrative fragments, two snippets of odd stores fire at saint
outness one fourteen aimed on and says she saw some
one run, but he was gone before police arrived. Maro
noses jagged time lines and what looked like crude maps
of the neighborhood mark with red dots. It was uncomfortably precise.
My birthday was underlined. Details of conversations there should have
been private late night confessions. Things I only of a
whispered and half light were mapped out, along with similar
incidents from other staff. Some stories echoed exactly what had
surfaced in the ghostly broadcasts. I scanned the notes and
felt my stomach not too much detail, too much specificity,
to be anything but the work of someone obsess or
something else entirely. Back in the studio, I paced in
slow circles, the transmits end notes laid out onto the
green glow clock. If the device was old, abandoned, why
was its force still alive in the station feed Why
even now did the audio system sometimes catch and skip,
as if hunting for something lost. That night, I didn't
go home. I slept in the battered couch in the
break room, haunted by looping snatches of memory and the
endless room of the tower outside. I woked before some
eyes to the sound of music beds circling through empty rows.
No we answers waited, only the lingering dread of his historians,
pulling itself around me. Powered by secrets I couldn't recall sharing,
and watched by something that had always known the frequency.
I spent the day pouring over the transmitter and the
stack of jittery notes, every line a tremor of memory.
The handwriting nagged at me, its looping capitals, the imbatient
pressure of the pen. With every comparison to the old
engineering logs, one name drifted to the surface. Henry. He'd
been an odd presence in the building, intents, scruffy, always
muttering to himself about frequencies and ghosts in the relay.
For months, he'd claimed the station was leaking both signal
and memory. Then, after an outburst about dead channels during
a heavy spring storm. He disappeared. No official explanation, only
whispers that late IROs and winning staff had cracked him.
Every One moved on uneasily. But this was his hand.
It was Henry. He'd loved complaints in the margins for
on circuits with commentary like witnessed, but never aired, unlaud
warnings through technical jargon, signals preserved confession. Only the listener
can kill an echo. This note mixed disaster, narrative, fire
alarm failed. Witness ran covered up with transcriptions of our conversations,
sometimes even pointed references to me. A cold certainty wormed
through my chest. How much had Henry seen or believed
he'd seen? How had he hiden a device in the
studio and quietly collected our secrets, only to vanish his
transmitter still bleeding signals. Years after that night, the first
I was passed intense anticipation. The regular callers aired from midtime.
Louise with her long lost dog, faded out, and the
city seemed to draw a collective breath. As the clock
click passed two a m I braced my hand, hovered
over the mute. I queued a backup track and watched
the looks stream by, but the interruption came before I
could act. The voice very nearly clear. Last witness at
Saint Agnes, Donna said she saw you hesitate the knight.
Henry hid what mattered? You know what? You kept silent.
A cold white pressed down on me. The story had
changed again, merging Hemy's disappearance, the fire from years back,
and my own uneasy memory a night when I had
killed Colin about the fire. Before the police report had cleared,
there been rumors of arson, a missing caretaker, and Henry
pacing behind the glass, asking if I would let it
lie for the family. AD complied, We all had. It
was easy to take away the ugly trus in favor
of the tidy story. The signal spat static, then resolved
into you helped them bury it. Not shouted, not scolded,
It just flat, irreversible, as if the wires themselves had
long since joke us. All the rest of the shift,
umouin through a Hayes, I found myself playing pre recorded
music rather than speaking, unwilling to risk carrying my own voice,
looted and twisted again. I scolded notes and tested the
bat a transmitter, but it was a nurse yet somehow
its ghostly hand remained on the station feed. As morning
pressed through the crystalline window. I looked out at the
empty parking lot and asked myself what exactly I had
missed all these years. If the station was not just
a vessel for ghost stories but complicit in weaving silence
around real winds, what had I become a custodian or
an accomplice. It was no longer possible to feign ignorance
of blame. The oddity's on stress or age, whatever was
haunting the frequency ghoest memory, with the poisoned residue of secret,
was around him. The station wasn't merely a passive witness.
It was a co conspirator, and now it had made
me its next confession. Uncertainly bled interferes, I realized for
the first time I wasn't the one telling the story
any more. The story was telling me, and it had
only just begun. I spent the remainder of the morning
inside the booth, lingering. Long after my scheduled sign off,
the city woke beyond those bleached window panes, delivery vans
grumbling through lanes, the distant hush of commuter rails, the
fleeting toll of a bell from Saint Agnes. I studied
the transmitter's pitter case in Henry's crumpled notes played across
the consoles, salted by Dressa's certaintied that some crucial connection
still eluded me. Routine no longer shielded me. Chicken lamp
filaments and dusting the old fader knobs felt like acts
of penance, Almost poudy. I replayed the latest broadcast artifact,
first in the main monitors, then nervously through the battered
headphones I used for life calls. Only it was all there,
the voice's chilling accusation, a breath after the unmistakable slant
of my own frightened reply from years ago, ecoyn in
a new context, my words retrieved from the dark channel
of memory and twisted by a force both intimate annalien.
By the time Marcus arrived for AZERI check, some light
had cracked clean across the booth glass. He stopped short
at the sight of me hunch wild eye. You look
like you've seen a ghost, he said, setting his laptop
down with a little more care than usual. The jerk
in his tone faulted as he clocked the scattered papers.
The small scar transmitter perch beside my thermous I might have,
I murmured, not looking up. He whistled, low, you all right?
He reached for the transmitter, peering at the odd frequency window.
Is that Henry's old band? Christ? I thought that pile
of junk disappeared years ago. Didn't even know it was
still in the building. That's the thing it shouldn't be,
I answered. I found a tape behind a panel, still
patched for output, and there are notes, I said, the
nearest page toward him. He scanned a few lines, frowning
at the tangle of names and tan stamps. He was
always scribbling. Didn't think he'd wait. He paused, brow furrowing.
He logged, you name a law, didn't he? When I
didn't speak, he set the page down carefully, as if
afraid it would compast. Together we rummaged through what remained
of Henry's notes, shuffling stacks and flipping pages. Certain themes,
repeated lists of late night callers, cryptic references to system
locks under a line, names of former staffood left without ceremony.
Each note suggested a chronic exhaust of surveillance, the accumulation
of hundreds of invisible eavesdroppings. Some were only fragments, as
if Henry hadn't expected or been able to finish them.
Emergency taped on a VOS pitch modulation des Marino, and
if you bury one's story, it grows in the static.
The signal remembers everything. I could feel the undercurrent of
discomfort and marks a creeping realization, though he tried not
to let it settle in his posture. He found at
the transmitter's corrodied battery copper. No way this powered anything now,
he said, But there was doubt lurking there. I hesitated
my voice. Rof, Have you ever heard anything on air
that shouldn't have been air? Not just interference, but something
that knew too much? He looked away. There were times
odd feedback in the booth, A sudden monitor clicks back.
When Henry worked nights alone. I brushed it off. He
told me the wire was singing. Sometimes we joked, but
he'd stare like he heard it for real, like the
wire was talking just to him. Unnerved, I busied myself
straightening the mess. Can you run a trace on this frequency,
see if there's a loop anything? So piggybacking, He nodded,
pulling his laptop closer and patching into the automation rack.
I'll try, but if it's an analog, got something patched
direct into our panels all those years, Who knows what
it left behind? Right? That possibility filled the booth radiant
with implications I didn't want to voice. We worked in
silence for several minutes, the air stuff of unspoken worry.
Eventually Marcus straitened. I'll run some diagnostics. He hesitated, then added,
get out of here, Mara, get some arrest. You're not
supposed to stay this lone after the all nighter. But
I lingered, moved by something stubborn and unfinished. The old
radio sensed the conviction at a signal properly tuned could
drag the truth from silence, refused to let me retreat.
I stuffed him as notes into a battered file, tucked
the transmitter under my arm, and left the studio. Only
when the new day shift d J arrived, coolis and whistling.
I nodded, politely, wordless and outsider in delight. The city's
heat pressed on me as I worked a few blocks
to the coffee shop and old Haunt for station rats.
I ordered a cup I barely tasted. Scanning headlines among
the parking lot. Letter traces of names from Henry's lists
flashed in my mind to Serah, the night cleaner who
disappeared in two thousand and nine, Tony last heard from
when his car broke down after a storm. Too many
odd departures, their patents familiar in retrospect. Back up my apartment,
I laid everything out on the kitchen counter, at the
stack of notes, the transmitter, even a tape of my
off air conversation from that night with Donna. I played
the tape twice when sing at the echo of my
own exhaustion years prior. The conversations and the broadcast and
the tape ran almost parallel, same subject, similar accountants, but
the recording on air twisted. My worries were purposed, spliced
into Henry's haunted narrative. By a late afternoon, anxiety had
merged with memory. I found myself digging for Artifact's old notebooks,
of battered box of station paraphernalia, addated software back ups.
Each item felt loaded with unseen meaning. I scrolled time
lines on ruled paper, matching staff departures, with all broadcasts, occurrences,
and station equipment upgrades. What I saw forming was a
lattice work. Every new incident in the building, every outage
seemed to map to either a disappearance or rumored that
the station had cleaned house again. I couldn't bring myself
to sleep at sundown when the city took on that
peculiar violet gloom. I emailed Donna, asking her, without revealing details,
what she remembered of the days around the Saint Atmasphire
of Henry's breakdown. Her reply came swiftly. He started muttering
about debt it being safer and locked himself in for
eyes to listen. His last note in the calendar was
just three thirteen slash less and close slash its our
turn now you okay, Mara, you sound off. Later that
evening found me back at the studio and official unsanctioned
a tresps we, grasping at the familiar machinery as if
it could anchor me. The corridors were even more deserted
than usual. The power saving lamps cast word oblong shadows
in the main booth. I unhuked the ancient phone line
and scanned for tats or foreign adapters. Nothing nearly out
of place, but the caral foreboding remained. At three twelve
a M. I prepared a small digital recorder, patching it
straight into line out, and watched the second clock. The
system has always rebooted itself at three thirteen in the dot.
This time, though, there was an added hitch for three heartbeats.
Every light on the panel blinked at once impossible stroke
before resettling into the preset patterns. The broadcast held steady,
but in my head funds near whisper not printed by
the game. Meat of the voice again ragged, pressed into
the noise floor. This is mara on w x RZ.
The tower so u hesitates that it keeps your secret
buried in the relay. You remember what you took away?
A shudder twisted through me. I leaned into the mic,
not broadcasting, but speaking aloud, who are you? The words
sounded absurd and empty air. Nothing replied, Not then, but
in a day's log under automated system events, a new
and documented command flashed up before vanishing. Archive equals false
echo equals true. Witness equals m just once. I copied
it by hand, then blinked, uncertain it had ever appeared.
I killed every open input, shot down the booth, then
retreated to the arc of room where Henry had once
spent strange, isolated eyers. The air was thick with dead
air tapes and back of browders. I sat, surrounded by
defunct equipment and studded the transmitter's dial. I powered it,
no response, put a click in a wall socket in
a faint but suggested something connected, deeply hidden. In a
last act before dawn, I assembled Henry's notes and my
logs into a single file pot confession, part evidence, Darcy.
If I didn't understand it yet, I hope someone might.
The note book was heavy smugerink, and the scend of
cheap coffee felt for the first time like a boat,
and I could no longer set aside. A final time,
I swept my gaze around the silent archives, half expecting
to glimpse a shadow huddle by the stacks, to echo
made flesh. There was nothing, but in the hush, my
breath drawn shallow of the sense persisted. The story was
not only alive, but listening, always listening, and printing each
act of silence and complicity into the pulse of dead frequencies.
Before I left, I shut off every light save the
sodium bulb above the main entrance along. Weary looked back
at the booth. Revealed nothing out of place, no movement,
no sign. But the certainty remained. This frequency had teeth,
and the past was rattling its Jane. I stepped into
the pre dawn, last to leave, carrying secrets I could
need a name nor abandon. The city exhaled around me,
dense with the weight of things left and said, and
above the roof the tow flickered, casting silent coated pulses
far into the thinn night signals I now knew meant
for me. In the brittle gray light after the overnight shift,
I found myself outside the building, the binder press so
hard to my chest, the plastic ducker grove into my skin.
My hands still shook, sweat slick between me, a palm,
and Henry's transmitter. Every step along the broken sidewalk was
in negotiation with exhaustion and the feeling that some invisible
thread still pulled at the base of my spine, as
if stepping too far from the station might unravel something
both vital and damning. The air was wet with coming
rain of flat metallic taste. Marcus had linger out at
the south entrance, even after his shift should have ended.
He leaned on the support pillar ice, quinting at his
fern but not reading. The click set of his jaw
suggesting a restless mind. The silence between us was new, foreign,
and more brittle than it had ever been during our
years of station jokes and haphazard repairs. Are you sure
you're ok to drive? He asked, but his tone had
drifted into unfamiliar territory, urgent, almost pleading. I'll call a cab.
My throat rasped out the lie. The well felt inclined
at an nott angle, as if all the sodium lit
knights had pooled waiting for this daunt to expose them.
I saw him glance at the transmitter topped beneath my arm.
But don't lose that, he said, quieter, as if aware
something depended on it. That's the core of it, isn't it.
I turned the transmitter in my hand, thumb brushing the
cereal plate. It's proof or maybe just another haunted artifact.
I don't know. I'll be in at noon, Mark said,
but it sounded like an apology. You don't have to
face all of it alone. Morr I managed only a
nod before cutting across to the parking lot. As I left,
I imagined the station's tawl hunched above me, feeding on
another day's anxiety, and felt it to broken attention. A
step behind the drive home was a blur of radio
silence and exhaustion's dull pressure. I resisted the urge toitunyan,
the idea of hearing my own voice I could back twisted,
re engineered by something hungry, kept my hand angle far
from the dial. In the apartment, I laid everything out
on the kitchen table, transmitter, Henry's pages, my own scribbled
looks don as brief emale printed unfolded. They urged to
shower off the night, to find some remnant of normal.
Lasted only until I caught myself flinching at the muted
hum of the refrigerator, at the tick of the pipes
in the wall. The apartment was too quiet, too open
to whatever new channel the frequency might choose. Sleep, when
it came was fitful. I lapsed in and at flashes
of the station were cast as ruined lights, flickering, and
endless moss named being raised one at a time from
yellowed stuff, rosters, static voices crawling from the acy vent.
I awoke just before noon, shrenched in white. The sense
of a presence faded, but not gone. Pulling clothes from
the floor, I assembled myself with the nervous efficiency of
a cornered animal, bundled the evidence into a battered messenger bag.
I made for my front door. As I cracked open,
a draft ran along my ankles, sharp as ice. My
building's hallway was deserted, aside from damp footprints trailing away
from the stair wall, too large to be mine, and
smaged at the heel, as if left in retreat outside
a flat rain had begun to fall. I hunched the
bag under my jacket and walked toward the station, mine
buzzing with half sketched possibilities. Each step felt heavier, as
if I were walking into the mouth of something that
had already started swallowing me. I pushed through the side
door badge, stuttering in the reader before giving its grodging green.
The back hallway was deserted, save for a cleaning cot
and the faint reek of bleach, a ghost of activity
of voline obuican d emptiness. The only light came from
the cracked open booth. Even at this iro of sound
insulation held in a hush, I listened, just for a
second for any sign that the station had righted itself.
I set the transmitter and binded down at the producer's desk.
Thence gowned the patch bay for any hint of recent tempery.
Nothing obvious, But when I pressed the sleep button on
the automation board, a faint hum sounded behind the wall,
almost like the purr of an old radio warming. I knelt,
running my hand along the baseboard, hunting for heat of vibration.
My fingers found only cold dust, but something inside the
dark recesses of the panel tacked, as if aware of
my attention. It was Marcus who interrupted my focus, the
sound of his keys tapping out Norse against his palm.
He stepped in, coat ripping. I ran that trace, he said,
in a low voice. Some one else was patched in
at three thirteen a split second. Audio logs clean, but
the diagnostic flight outside modulation digital ghost maybe or an
old script still alive behind the main drive. Was it broadcasting?
I asked? His look told me he wasn't sure, not
on any standard frequency, but something used us as a relay.
I lifted the transmitter, said it on the counter. I
need to know what this is picking up, and I
need you to help. He drew his lips. Then, if
you think we can do this without management pulling the plug,
you're wrong. Management never lessens until it becomes a pr problem.
I said, we have to get ahead of it. Whatever
is happening, it's already gone further than ghosts and late
night rumors we worked for. I was labrat quiet, both
of us, haunted by Henry's notes and the memory of
voices not quite our own. Eventually Rain hammered the roof
so hard it sounded like footsteps, a barrage of muted fists.
I held the device in my palm eyes, following its
sch selected dial M f M shortwave. The selector had
been sharpened into a new notch, just off marker between bands.
I flecked there. The static that greeted us wasn't the
clean white hiss of an empty channel, but a broken
rhythmic pulse, like a heartbeat wrench for a blender. It
was Marcus who broke the silence. Try tuning it to
our back up frequency. I rotated the dial the static, slipped, snag,
then shuddered open, a slurry of overlapping new screts, calling greetings,
angry arguments, hundreds of fragments tumbling over each other, always
just a touch out of time. My own voice surface,
then ducked away, reciting bulletins from years passed, spliced jaggedly
into disaster announcements, all in the same urgent register. At
certain points, another voice strained croaked, carrying Henry's hitch, interjected
with corrections or warnings, never aired, not forgotten each word.
A witness, Marcus stared the Jesus. The station's clock flicked
two forty one p m. The ordinary world was still
moving out, their traffic shifting down boulevards, people buying groceries.
But in the booth, something else was singing a ghost quair,
cataloging every failure, every silence, every complicit edit. The vault
doors of w Roxaw's Ease Secret were busted. We were
just beginning to hear what had been locked inside. We
shut the transmitter off, but from every monitor speaker on
the wreck, a trailing ring of sound refused to resolve,
impossibly faint, as if the room itself insisted on humming
the station's secret. By five o'clock, the full shape of
the risk had sharpened. If what I had found was
even partly real, there were years of recorded, erased or
altered events still adrift from the frequency conversations. Nobody had
permission to record stories strangled at inception, name stitched and
stuck in the web of memory. And if Henry's device
could patch into our regular feed, it could just as
easily broadcast out an unwelcome, reckoning, one we couldn't control.
My phone buzzed in a known local number. I answered
voice brittle silence, then very softly, a gobbled modulata hiss,
and the shape of my own name stretched beyond recognition.
The line went dead. Even Marcus looked unsettled. It might
not even be any one at all, he muttered, failing
to convince himself. As darkness set in, I realized the
lines between paranoia and genuine that no longer existed. Whatever
force latch to the station now had my schedule, my Vosprin's,
my weakest diyre it would not willingly let go. Night
deepened before either of us moved, the sense of siege
deepening with the wind's racket outside the pane. Marcus offered
to stay, but I sent him home. Some one had
to play the role of outsider. Some unclean of things
went south. I rolled the device in an old scarf,
locked Henry's pages in the main archive, and said of
resistant manual control the only way out I thought was true.
Around midnight, the phone lines rang a feature as ring
on every extension, all at once. The switch howard glowed,
Strode saddled into static. A pulsive droid chased out any
remaining doubts. The station had become a note for whatever
haunted its wires, and to night it wanted an audience.
Lightning pried opened the sky, and for an instant a
tower of skeleton bone through the darkness like a question
marks sharp enough to wound. I closed my eyes, let
the boards cool under my finger tips, and brace for
the escalation that would come in the witching Iyro's next turn.
The disquiet built in ways that shifted from electrical to personal,
tiny infringements adding to the tension. The station used to
be anonymous, protected by the insulation of technical jargon and
the endless chain of workarounds I had built up over
the years, But from the moment Henry strands made across
the main feed. That shield corroded. Every system became suspect,
the phone lines, the rudder signal, the tape, Dick Safferay's
back ups. Every routine check felt like a trespass into
someone else's memory bank. I was thirty minutes into my
shift when the first concrete sign of the next wave
appeared in alert on the main console automation Schedule divergence
confirm imp its source. The interface blinked between normal and overridden,
as if two hands were competing for dominance. I ran
a quick The standard schedule was intact, but on channel
three and all barely used in but I hadn't touched
in months. A new playlist appeared, labeled only a witness shifts.
Inside were files labeled with old staff names. Some were public,
but others Donna, Sarah, Tony, names I'd matched in Henry's list,
names with rumors clinging to them like lies. The time
stamps didn't correspond to shifts, holidays, or events. They matched
the anniversaries of every reported or rumor had goun missing
the same pattern I'd seen before, but inescapable now hardwired
into the digital schedule with brutal logic. I turned the
imp of feet off. Seconds layer channel three re enabled itself.
The main lights flickered, crossed the internal office windows. A
ripple of static, tiny pimpric fine flakes of the electricity
ran through the glass. The sense of pressure of dread
mounting tied in my pulse. Desperate for a solution, stripped
away the superficial technical sequences, looking for manual of ride,
anything that could kill or fire all the rogue input.
But as quickly as I shut down one window, another surfaced.
It had a scading persistence, as if the schedule wasn't
being controlled from inside my studio at all. As the
storm outside intensified, the parking lot became a pain of
black lick with the no lights. For a moment, I
glimpsed the flare of distant blue as a police cruiser
rolled through the industrial lanes. I locked the studio, took
a gulp of tepid water, dialed on from my cell.
No answer, just for his mill Per absence snapped like
a thread inside me. She would have known how to
parry a crisis by now, even if with only a slap,
dush joke instead silence. I returned to the console and
found the inter channel's record like blazing red. Though I
issued no command, the signal routed externally upbound on frequencies
that didn't appear in a published ban list. Someone or
something was sending again in ahash the old transmitter id
and wrapped earlier a lad out ASoft tuning wine, then
an insistent click, like someone shifting between stations. My phone, buzz,
jettery and encounter are no number, no answer. I ran
to the break room for spare monitor, pulling extension cables
like a lifeline. I rewired a patchbey to give me
direct access to the outbound signal. Multiband static bled through.
Then within that swara a woman's low whisper, pained and
blurred with echo. Ye know what he chose to forget?
They remember, chills ripped my scalp. It was the missing
woman's voice, where a near perfect facsimile thread it into
my own. The cadences into locks, so neither quite disguised.
The other panicked a cold Marcus, it's live, I said,
as soon as he answered. I think it started feeding
out on both AM and short wave, not just digital
and the sources. It's using our dead channel and Henry's
transmitter both. Do ye know anyone who can jam or trace,
or at least confirm if someone is broadcasting his breath wavered.
I'll call Jacob. He still has the upland tools, since
they'll let him go. Don't try to confront it alone,
but alone I was the mainlights faded, leaving me by
the glove of the meter. I pressed both palms, flight
to the desktop, fighting the urged, and plug everything and flee,
knowing the only thing that Mike kelld this was transparency,
not flight. The signal grew bolder, living itself through every input,
a cold archived audio into the chatter, blended voice snippets
from a dozen lost nights. I saw you silence the
cold and only the dead air lessons at three thirteen,
A cacophony of pure chaos, but a very targeted blame.
When the studio clock jumped to three while from the
backup system shuddered on, I no longer fought the onset.
I stowed Mike laive and spoke towoever is on this
frequency to night, whoever is listening or speaking or hiding,
I hear you, I know the pattern. I am not
turning away. The statics urged for a breakfast interval. The
room grew colder, then, in a rise of feet back,
Henry's voice hollow cracked, but unmistakable rose through the interference.
But remember what is buried here. Static keeps the witness.
Repetition preserves your guilt. Do you let them disappear? I
stared into the glass, saw only my own shadows, stitched
in by the thunder outside. My pulse hammered at my throat.
If you want confession, I said, voice louder, firmer than
I felt. Then make it clear, make it public. At
three thirteen dead on the second, every board in the
booth re lit. The station's whole system switched to override
the output's stutter, then ran the ghost feed straight into
the open air. The city, for the first time in years,
became the accidental ear to our reckoning. The studio microphones
picked up more than my voice in the river. Dozens
of whispers layered in, each one carrying a counter, a
snippet of news, or a plea, all wound together and
feeding off the silence. The line between memory and broadcasts,
between history and myths, snapped. The irony was inescapable. Every
secret we had hit every story we killed for community
safety was now loose, jagged, and unedited, thrown into the
world by the very signal men to protect us from consequence.
The boards locked. The only control left was the analog
patch point. Henry's transmitter, plugged straight in the feedback belt,
growing raw and insistent, until I heard not only my
own voice, but every missing staff member, each haunting the
air with an unfinished sentence, a question they once raised,
an accusation I knew but never allowed to surface. It
was no longer a question of supernatural revenge. It was
dated a knock out too large to kill. Stitched into
every relay and back up. The ghosts were us, our denials,
our edits, our orasures, playing back in endless, damming cycles.
In a break between Gust's static, I caught the shape
of Donna's laugh, brittle echoing, and then her voice curled
through my earpiece. We all listened, Mara, some of us
did more than that. I pressed my hands to the concert,
unable to look away from the sweep of lights, the
inexorable c line of the output meter. As the confession
built to war climax, as the broadcasts billed out real
world consequences barreled into the station, abrupt and undeniable. My
phone buzzed again. This time the kola ID was flagged
private Devalt County government trunk. I hesitated before answering the signal,
roaring still in my background feed, Murrr, this is Officer Freling,
seventh District. I need you to step outside the booth
right now. We're receiving repeated distress calls routed from this point.
Are you alone? His voice at the clipped edge of
someone suppressing panic with protocol. I looked at the hallway
monit as read strobes flashing to police suv visible beyond
the right gate. Their pair of strobes rippling through the lobby.
Class protocols were no longer shield The city's official world
had found or shadowed one. I tried to answer, but
the board surged ladder inside the call overlapping the same
phrase again. I saw who you really were. My own
voice spliced forward from a year's old training tape, cut
through the officer chasing itself in loops. Officer Frelling is
just me in the booth. There is a techtical issue.
The stations been hijacked. Please, I heard the crackle of
a dispatcher of two distant to parts before he cut
back in, stay where you are, We're coming in. I
dropped the call and moved for the lock staff exit.
The main board buzzed, and the chime notes had never
program swept through the house speakers on every available surface.
The station's tagline now scralled wux z hearing what you bear.
Even the monitors in the supply room repeated it relentless.
My mind split. Part of me wanted to raise into
the lobby, hands above my head, surrendering. Another part, deeper
and older, stood firm. Hands on the analog dials were
refusing to break connection. The overalls protect the station shield.
The staff never let the board. Godette still live in
my nerves through the glass movement. Donna appeared then, not
in the half memory of broadcasts, but flesh and bun
hey bedraggle from Maine. She pounded once sharp on the
booth door before the lock mechanism faced. I yanked it open,
voice shows of panic, Donna. You shouldn't, eh, she cut
me off, voice both soft and thundering. You have to
stop the date, Mora and it, or it'll take more
than memory. Next POSTAIRA told me it wasn't just fear
or rumor. She had seen the pattern too. She pressed
her phone flat to the monitor. I caught just audible
between news loop and static. The missing woman's name looped
into a prison tense dispatch, as if the disappearance were
a live situation all over again. Outside speaker bout, police
instructions muddled by distance. The frequency fought against itself, system
logs stuttering, the automation board flashing witness mode over at Donna,
grab the transmitter from my hand. If this is what's
feeding it, If this is what Henry wrote, then finished
the message, don't let it decide the ending. Her eyes
bored into mine, wide with terror or conviction or both.
My hands shook as I twisted the transmitter's gain. Every
light in the studio dull, the hum rising into near
painful feedback. The monitors rolled through a dead channel, all
else blank. For a handful of heartbeats. We hovered at
the edge of silence. Then, as did the entire cities,
Hidden history slammed into clarity, the beat fold with the
course from the UCCA. Missing staff raised collars. Every amateur
story left and finished on tapeer, woven as if they'd
never left, demanding a listener. I looked from Dawna to
the board, to the rainsiak faces of police beyond the glass,
and realized the signals wall was relentless. It would not
cease until every confession was spoken, every secret aired or obliterated.
The station was no longer shelter. It was a reckoning,
and I was his final instrument. The only question left
was whether this time I could finish the story myself.
I stared in my hand atop the transmitter. Physical urgency
seized the air. I pressed the record at buddon engage
the annal up line, and flicked the patch to feed
every scrap into the live appart excepting that the city
and every haunted scrap of static would bear what came next.
Feedbuck shrieked. Nothing digital could produce sound that roofless and hungry.
As the final sequence ran, I spoke into the live
mike voice, rough but clear, This is Marra from w
x OZ. Here is the archive, Here is everything we
bear it. Here is the truth. The course on the line.
Henry's voice in its midst paused, not silence, but waiting.
For the first time, the signal did invite on every
speaker broadcast and twisted short with really silent, settled in full, massive, perfect.
Police battered at the front. Donna's hand squeezed my wrist high.
My ear sang with the pressure of decades of withheld sand.
Finally released the interface flash one final message, Archive equals true,
slast flush, witness equals all. Then the feet cut. The
lights returned, harsh and abrupt, the city's frequencies clear to
the common noise of rain and distant traffic. My shoulders
slumped and I felt smaller than I ever had behind
that board. My shoulders lumped, and I felt smaller than
I ever had behind that bore. Somewhere outside the booth,
the chaotic clanger of fists and voices pressed through the
sound proofing. It was all flashing blue and red out there,
wet sneakers smearing across our already stained carpet. As the
police made entry, Donna let go of my wrist when
she saw I was breathing again, exhaling like she'd been
holding her own breath for as long as I had.
My fingers were culled so tightly around Henry's transmitted that
the rich dial had bitten into my palm. Drawing pale crescents.
Rain was slamming sideways into the glass, the outside well,
trying to impose its order, angry and insistent. Now that
our frequency had glided with the cities an easy morning,
they broke the lock. Last shivert the wedded stripping poldiski,
the first uniformed officer, face beckled with sweat and rain
rounded the threshold. Cuned, drawn voice, a buck that for
a second didn't match the steady, turned calm of the airwaves.
Show your hands. Stepped back from the equipment, I put
the transmitter on the desk, pums up none with a
new kind of exposure, in a different moment, under different lights,
I might have protested, but my thoat fell rough, emptied
by the last confession. Dona's eyes darted everywhere but the board,
as if looking straight at it would force her back
into the cycle. A hand on my shoulder, too gentle
for the full rigid posture of the officer behind it,
steered me from the booth. As they ushered us out.
Other voices crowded the hallway. It was coming over our radios.
Someone said the station stuck on repeat. We had nine
calls claiming they heard their own voice. The cops moved
with force, but not cruelty. They were spuked, rattled out
of the script by something that didn't fit training. I
caught the brief blow of Marcus in the back corridor,
held back by another uniform. His gaze skidded over mine,
a question, an apology and relief, an entire history written
a glance alone. They sat up Son louchevs by reception.
What followed at a familiar taste, the low drone of bureaucracy,
anxious hands flipping through notebooks, the need to put every
event in sequence, even when no loger could bind it.
My mouth felt lined with metal. Dona sat rigid beside me,
collar dam I kept expecting the signal to surge back,
a blurring confession of the hollow mechanical loop of Henry's voice.
But all that filled the building was a humid hush
of day, the irregular tick of the front clock, as
if marking off the seconds of our culpability. Someone with
a shield pin to their sweater, or a detective or
maybe a supervisor, rose to his feet, poistrained into careful
con mess Rallo. We need to ask you both a
few questions. My name at least spoken by stranger, had
the ring of finality. The orderer was back, and for
a moment I wanted to warn him about the frequency
still breeding beneath the station. The store is still loose,
But I couldn't turn the signal into something they'd understand
over police band. Instead, we were separated, standard practice for
cross interviewing. As they led Donna off, she squeezed my shoulder.
The press of her hand told me she wanted to
force reassurance into muscle and bone, But the way she
let go quickly and lightly said she knew it couldn't hold.
The interview was brief, I answered precisely. Yes, I'd been
working when the signal interference began. Yes, I attempted to
trace and contain it. Yes, there had been oddities in
our system, locks and personnel issues stretching back longer than
I had cared to say on record. When they asked
about Henry, I gave only facts missing. Presumed Dad left
behind technical artifacts which did not begin to touch what
had really happened. The detective glance stopped from his note, Bud,
you were broadcasting at the time of the police calls.
Did you know what was being transmitted. I hesitated the
taste of static returning. I let everything play through. That
was the only way to stop the loop. He studied me,
trying to pass out whether that was an excuse, a confession,
or oversight. The question at the end was softer, at
the tone that of a neighbor, not a cop. Are
you all right? I didn't answer, because I had no
idea how to define that word. When they finished, they
took my statement and asked for the transmitter. I gave
it up without resistance. They examined it, turning it over
to see the ross order and added frequency notches. I
saw their faces fall confusion, irritation, the careful shuddering of
any insight that didn't fit the world outside. Would you
get this, the detective asked from the wall behind the
main booth. It belonged to an engineer who does a
page years ago. His notes are in the station locks,
and I don't know what else you'll find. They bagged
the device and made notations. I knew then that official
process being what it is, nothing clear would come of it.
Artifacts like that, with undocumented histories and analog schollows always
ended up lost or misplaced in some evidence locker they
go s, multiplying in silence. The rest my personal logs,
the folders of Henry Scold warnings were requested for review,
though before I left the interrogation room, I got the
station manager, Dalen, already on the phone with legal running
damage control. He nodded once court as I passed him
in the lobby, the muscle ticking in his jaw. Take
some leave, was all he said, ignoring Donna completely. His
eyes never quite met mine. When management emails, the language
edges indefinite and pending investigation were the only certainties. My
force leave wasn't a comfort In the lobby, Donna wasn't crying,
but she looked him moored, as if the foundation guns
off under her shoes. Marcus caught up as we drifted outside,
and he said, what none of us could joke away
the logs. They were already gone from the share drive
like someone white the mid process back upste They don't
want to remember. He offered to drive me home, but
I begged off. The sky had gone steely, streets washed clean,
as if rain could eraise what was etched in signal,
the impulse to keep moving, to not be inside another
signal's grasp kept me upright. The three of us let
the moments stretch out or cotally before scattering. I walked
out from the lot cross blocks mapped in Hemy's notes,
where every street light seemed to buzz extral out, and
I shivered even as the humidity closed around my neck.
For days, the new cycles fared off room or estatic.
Local broadcast hijacked sparks, renewed interest in cold case disappearances,
the headline said, But beneath the glib punditry, no one
was truly interested in the missing. The station's pirre blunted
everything faulty equipment, technical error, no admissions regarding the allegations,
until the signals fever dull from public view, But not
all traces vanished. An anonymous tip, details matching those spilled
over the three thirteen signal reached a paper. The police
reopened one file, filing it again his ongoing review. The
details match what the broadcast had revealed, names, locations, times
of vanishing. Even those who tried to keep secrets now
found themselves exposed. In the city's oldest wavelant. It didn't
matter if the rest was lost. The city had heard
what it shouldn't and now the frequency shimmered with the
after image of all that could not be unsaid. The
deadair was no longer safe, no longer silent. My apartment
press in always at the edge of electrical noise, the fridge,
the hum from the building transformer, the nearby towers. Faint
rob I lived between A M and F M, neither
truly home. Donna text died once. Yo Ke Tower feels
louder than ever lately, Marcus left foresmels I didn't unso long.
Scrambling stores about new diagnostics, interference on local scanners, the
rumor that an old staffer heard my confession on a
highway band forty miles up state. The only thing left
was the scratching, relentless curiosity was a finish or only
quiet for now. I wanted to believe we'd cut the
echo off at its route, but anything cut that deeply
does not die so easily. The last this message I
received before I shut down. Every notification was from an
unknown number. The body reading only dead air doesn't forget.
That was how I lived for those first blurred weeks,
not with fear. The edge wasn't fear, but something heavier
loaded and expectant as if in my merroid tuned to
the wrong channel, and any moment the city would start
speaking back again, the really continuing the work. Even then,
the urge to listen, in spite everything, to seek that
pulse in the dial, felt stronger than my will to
look away.