Speaker 1: Hullo. I welcomed stories all the time, Glad you are here,
Let's get into it. And by the time I forced
the key into the lock of the old w Alexorbuth,
my hands were shaking from more than the cold. It
was late May, and the last of the town spring
had stubbornly failed to warm the cinder block walls. As
I swung open the door, Augustus stale paper centered or
rushed out some combination of dust, decaying carpet, and a
note of something chemical sharp, nearly metallic. I flicked in
the single surviving lamp, spreading a one circle over the
battered audio console and reel stack like tombstones across a
battered folding table. Call at nostalgia a compulsion. But when
the museum called me about archaving the old station's assets,
I said, yes, some glimmer of the person I'd been
twenty years and a dozen lives ago raised his hand.
I packed up at dusk, closed the door of my
overheated apartment, and left a note on the kitchen table.
Back late to working the tapes, there were more reels
than I expected, hundreds each marked by the pragmatic hands
un labeling of midminute nineties radio red marker for advertisements,
green festation id, black grease pencil for shows. Some more
to wark to read. Others had been purposed so many
times that old titles bled through. I started easy. There's
a ritual to queuing up a reel. The tactile slip
of the tape threaded onto the playback spindle, the mild
resistance of splicing blocks and magnetic heads. The old air
just seemed to settle once the plasma hiss of analog
static filled the both my ears, recognizing three years of absence,
the faint, cozy jingle that prefaced every night voices broadcast
w lex R fourteen ten a m. This is night Voices,
to stay with us in Sogniac travelers, We've got another
iron in the dark. The tape wine at the end
of the line, wobbling slightly, but it was all there
at first, Jack voice, jack roll, and a settling into
its familiar hammock of gentle psardonic warmth. The year stripped away.
I remembered leaning against a console as a twenty two
year old, watching the switchboard blink with calls. But about
five minutes in the tape, he cut the music faded.
What should have been a sponsorship jingle slithered sideways, overtaken
by a pulsing burst of static. Not the friendly rounded
his of dead air, but something oily, pressing at distortion
in the bandwidth, as if the tape were being cheved midplay.
I paused and wounded back, fingers flinching as the static
prickled in my headphones. Back again. Jack's voice softer, now
almost slurred, drouted by a peculiar cadence I didn't remember.
There was an unnatural hitch to each word. He was
reading a listener's letter routine, but his syllable stretched appoints.
They stuttered and collapsed inwards, so that home became h
h h holme, cracking into gasp. For a moment, I
thought my memory was playing tricks on me. But then
Jack began to whisper in a turn, both breathy and
dead flat, sliding off into a register I'd never heard
from him. My skin drew tight across my arms. Something
knocked against the far wall, faint but rhythmic. I blinked
at the booth window, half expecting to see how light
sweep the gravel lot, but only the empty black miss
pressed in my fingers hovered over the playback volume on
the tape. The operator's board lights up. Frantic energy crossed
up from the open lines. A woman's breathless voice flooded through.
Or you getting this? Are you seeing them there? By?
Your car of the words tangled with another collar amanska reply,
there's someone out here, Jack, someone at the window of
the overlap drawn in a rising interference, a low, undulating
moan that pulls beneath the surface like a tidal on
a toe. Slow down, folks, Jack tried to say. The
word fooks pattered across several frequencies, decaying into reversed syllables,
mouffled and stretch. Then the outside sound. A new voice,
keening distant, as if picked up from the outside. Throwd
it through. It's not safe tonight, don't answer, don't The
line snapped. A ragged spike of static obliterated everything. A
third light flared on the board. Call our id immutable.
Jack breathed in and in the fuzzy silence, another voice
came through, the same tone as before, neither male nor female,
both flat and suggestive, echoing this is not for you.
I couldn't move. My eyes went to the reel, circling
and circling. The tip shuddered as if in protest, and
then cut out midward. For a few endless seconds, only
the watery his has remained. The boothsair grew icyy, condensation
filmed the glass. I realized had begun to tremble. In
that single instant, I knew I was not remembering the
night correctly. The room, the booth, all of me had
just tipped up into something that had never left. I
wound the tape back and ejected it upon slick but unsteady,
the label read only June fourteenth, nineteen ninety seven, final broadcast. Somehow,
though I was alone, I had the unmistakable sense that
something on the other side of the glass, some presents,
was still listening ash For the first years after the shutdown,
I lived in the shadows of a Uelix saw only
by accident. The station was the old part of my life,
the one I had set aside after they locked the
doors and shut down the tower. A decade of small
towns and smaller jobs followed. Box and groceries at Hawthorne's
inventory in the back of the hardware store, freelance copy
editing for the County paper. Nothing with irows after dusk.
W u elix Saw had been a harbor for local
oddballs and half chances, our little station that could. I'd
started as a fill in producing my last year of
college and then stayed mostly for the night shift camaraderie.
That's what I lost when everything fell apart, the feeling
that things made sense at three a m. With tie
voices f in from places you could barely believe existed.
The habit of being a nocturnal animal never left. Even now,
I can't sleep much before midnight, and the shape of
the world never feels quite right until the sky's gone
black and silent. I haven't had a TV in years.
What comfort I allow myself comes from the Persian shuffle
of old radio cycling to empty frequency bands. There's a
particular stripe of static to slippery to describe that sometimes
makes me think for just a second that night Voices
is about to return. My place these days is three
blocks down from Maine, above a now defunct bakery. While
pipper peels in the corners will a nullium bubbles in
the kitchenette. The raind is small, and the air always
faintly sweet. Vanilla burnt to sugar. I keep my windows
open most nights, throwing in the low drone of cars
headed for the highway that I live the rest of
the town. These are the aftershocks of a life lived
in some one else's echo. Main Street is more memory
than living now, a straight line past empty shops, their
signs sun bleached into unreadable ghosts. The old River Rooster
Diner boarded up a dry cleaner as I'd used twice enough,
estuned with yellow tape. No danger, just abandonment. The w
Wilok saw a sign, a battered slab of metal that,
once caught the early sun, sits prop behind a wall
of thorny needles and peeling paint. The thing they never
tell you about losing a job is that you lose
a language. The peculiar shorthand motor mouthed and jokes, the
way each of us could tell from a single lilt
what kind of night it would be. That's what the
booth was for, scribbling secrets to ourselves. The tower climbing
out of the river fog like a mast head. It
wasn't just a job, It was a town's pulse. One
summer nineteen ninety seven, every polese here seemed to skip
at once. People drifted, a friend's house went dark for
the last time. Some just stopped returning Coll's ghost who
left by walking into Sunday and never looking back. Even
the ones who stayed changed faces, got longer, the air thin.
The late shift at the safe right told stories about
names they saw in the mirror after midnight, and then
no one said them again. The museum gig wasn't part
of any plan. Joan, the new director, had put the
word of local history minimum wage. She wanted to digitize clippings,
evidence of life in a county before the New century
erased it. Sometimes that men scanning blurry photographs of nowray's homes.
Other weeks it was letters from the war, sun faded receipts,
or the smere minutes of failed town halls. W Reli
Saw's ark off box arrived the week after a two
day rain storm, accompanied by little more than a scold
note handle with care. Museum only wants the clean stuff.
I met the delivery driver in the hall. He unloaded
a bat of cardboard crate, double taped and stamped with
an inventory tag that curl from moisture inside reels wrapped
and crumbled schedules, broadcast logs, pockmart by, spilled coffee, a
handful of tape to win two tight. The box was heavy,
too heavy from the stalgia full of strange promises. I
left the box and opened just for an hour, enough
time to make tea and contemplate old patterns, Running out
to check if the boost lights still lit the parking lot,
listening for voices, whispering through the window, even when I
knew there was nothing there, catching the Barry's syllable of
the old night jingle in an otherwise anti frequency. Some
habits you never owed run the pass may stay locked
in a box for a time, but given the smallest
opportunity and kneels beside you, whispers something that never quite
makes sense. That afternoon, as I set up to SA,
I sought the tapes, a posed part of me, not
quite believing the old ghost would stay put. Still, the
boxwaded even in the hass new daylight felt heavier than
it had of rye to bee ash. Over the next
week I dipped in and out of the reels, chasing
a half remembered sense of home. What I crave, if untruthful,
was the restoration of some order, though night voices arcout
should have been comfort free to mass to give the
landscape of half cracked final tunes, late night animal rescue
requests and callers anxious about minor hands, lights or lonely hearts.
But as I transferred the early nineteen ninety seven broadcasts,
a web began to form, something bent beneath the surface,
never mentioned, but insistent in its repetition. At first, the
tapes played as I expected, Jack's signature opening languid conversations,
the reliable clockwork of AD's culture in hardware for all
your fencer post needs. But in the midnight er, a
cross multiple dates, discore creptain long droning tone snuck under
the music glitches in the usual AD schedule, the host
jokes landing off laughter smothered by silence is just a
shade too long. I jot down time stemps twelve seven,
background below blue valentious, can't tell if deliberate twelve eleven,
Jack's voice clapped, slurs, iy, I just tune. In the
twelve sixteen collar, anxious says, don't open it. Don't you answer?
On the May nineteen reel, the scheduled weather break vanish
replaced by a pulsing fron that reminded me of hearing
the tower hum through the floor boards as a kid.
The patterns sharpened over the sequence. In May's last week
five nights in a row, night voices lost its soft
rambing gait. Instead, the callers surged an urgency on tape
after tape, somewhat sometimes irregular, sometimes unreadable, and the distorted
call roster would plead we hear them again tonight. They
are at the back staircase. Who are they, please, Jack,
Just cut the feet just for once, please, just and
then nothing abrupt silences with needles of static jam between
static and some each please seemed to echo down a
corridor from which the others tried to escape but couldn't.
The archave loopbook, methodical in its before and after, went
blank at those points. May twenty three, only eleven forty
one p M recorded, then a long gap until sign off.
June two guests call logged, then acted by a black tape.
She n nine page torn one night, a regular voice trembling,
spent most of a minute whispering that she didn't want
to be here any more, not while the sounds are
outside Her sentence bubbled into a warbling that the playback
had strained to parse. When I checked her name against
later a locks, she never called again. One tape late
May ended, so suddenly it made my head front pop.
The tape snat dead just as the new caller's line connected.
There was never a formal goodbye from Jack, just a trailing,
desperate note in the air. Whatever script we thought we
followed in those days, something was someone had begun improvising
USh a certain point, nostalgic gives way to obsession. Each
evening I sat hunched over the walnut desk in the
little study alcove, scrolling out time lines and color coding notes.
I tried to bring process to what was essentially a
shape in the fog, to try us that refused. The
line up the airliest tapes from Spring nineteen ninety seven
eight tenths. Then the logs grew in coherent coal records contradictory,
and entire nights went and accounted for. I started by
cross referencing the on air logs with the Museums program schedules.
There were gaps, not just mistapes, but entire blocks, missing
nights listed as having pre recorded content when according to
what little documentation survived. Jack had been live in a booth.
The more I looked, the more the seems frayed. To
follow up, I called him Favors. The old faces of
w LEX are within. On the ground, moose had drifted,
found new stations, or simply moved away. But I started
with the engineer Hank. Last I'd heard him tending bar
at the Eagle's Lodge. The place was swollen with a
kind of quiet that feels like warning. But he agreed
to step outside with his lucky strikes and talk body alley.
You really want to dig into those nights, Aanks quinted,
his eyes tight with something more than cigarette smoke. We
all heard things, sure, but the tapes don't show half
of what was in the air. Sometimes you finished a
shift and there was just a tunk missing, like something
cut the night into snipped you right out. I lost
a whole friday once got home, didn't remember the drive.
He shrugged the memory off, but every new question found
him looking elsewhere. On the way back inside, he added,
if you find the tapes, just don't blame after midnight. Yeah.
Next came Ale, who had been the receptionist, half office manager,
half stationed inn mother. I caught her after lunch at
Betty's Cafe, working through her crossword, and more interested in
discussing the weather than anything to do with radio. When
I pressed, she protested she'd been out sick most of
that period. She assured me waves of flu. Her eyes
darted away each time I pressed on strange nights, avoiding
my gaze. All I remember is the calls people come
back changed different, like they were still hearing something I couldn't.
She stopped there abruptly, as if realizing she'd uncovered a nerve.
The next clue, though, found me an anonymous envelope slid
under the museum's door, just ahead of my first eight
A m shift. Inside was nothing but a faded security
by Jamie Caplan, the lost inton, hired before the summer
of nineteen ninety seven. The back was sticky, faintly stained
the color of old blood. There was a scribbled list
of first names, Hank, Jack, Amy, Eddy Kem. Each name
was crossed out in pencil except one mine. My hands
ran cold as I scanned the return address. None. The
envelope was of the kind tuct behind CHECKOK counters and
overlooked for days. My instincts set to coal Joan at
the museum, but something made me keep the badge and
slip the list in a pocket of my coat. The
following morning, had I come through the station maintenance logs,
something else snagged my attention. In late May of nineteen
ninety seven, some one had loved a service call emergency
repairs signal Box three a m accessed by non staff
per management, but the last entry from the maintenance man,
Pete maclure simply read terror still humming, locked in hold,
no signature, no follow up. Pete never returned to the station.
Soon after, I found stacks of official forms gathering mold
and the ark I've been withdrawn missing persons reports, all
filed in the weeks after the final broadcast. Amy Caplan's
was there, as well as Eddie's, a junior host who'd
gone out for smoke and hadn't come back for her
next segment. The Woodrow requests were signed, but in a
handwritting I didn't recognize shakey letters press too deep into
the page that after Iowa's visit, a log only deepened
the unease. Entry after entry marked between midnight and four
was scrawled easily faked signatures eddie jack, sometimes a dash,
sometimes just an initial. No witnesses, no camera on the lot.
Back Then that night, after a heavy dinner and free
failed attempts at sleep, I dreamed of the booth. In
a dream. It was always raining. I stood behind the glass,
static swirling outside, watching a figure outline in the far
edge of the lot. Every time the phone rang, a
voice I knew but couldn't name, whispered only stay with us.
It was cold in the dream. I wok equally called
veydroom window clothes. But the winds touched still in my bones.
Ash archevil work when you truly pursued, is not for
the nervous. Each box you and pack multiplies the question,
never the answer, but the truth. I was circling lay
just beneath the surface of the official story. W le
Exhauce shut down wasn't tidy, nor was it planned. On
an evening weighed more by dread than curiosity. I on
earth the battered on label tape from a crack plastic
sleeve deep in the bottom of a stack, marked surplus
to be destroyed. There was another note, faded pencil asterisks
stress do not archive astrisk ASTRSK the real isssel felt wrong,
the tape brittle, grain shedding to powder as I thredded
it in the deck. My nurse crackled. The museum had
given me leewe, but warned against salvaging lost causes. Still,
I couldn't help myself. It seemed as if the tape
had been waiting just for this moment. Getting the playback
was a struggle. I had to gently cook the heads
into alignment, pressing play, and holding my breath as the
opening pop snap through the monitor. Instead of the usual
station idea of the old familiar jingle, alow muttering filled
the headphones. At first it was Jack's voice, but the
weight was different, held like a string under tension. Good evening,
night travelers, he said. Though the words choked, skipping half
a syllable. The rhythm fell apart, sharp statics Byke slancing
across the sound like grazor wires. Then a second voice entered,
a calm, deliberate unheard. This was neither Jack nor any
known caller. Its turn was measured decade and clien. It
felt like listening to the first words of Afforms by
code for only a few to understand where through now
said the unknown were almost home, Jack stammering his speech,
bending his own voice slowly overwritten, and not our words
to night, not even my voice any more the tension
crew from behind them. A violent pounding shook the door
of the isolated sound of palm slapping heavy wood. I
recognize molusy'll ProVoice a mistakable twisting into harsh, desperate cry
stop for chow stop It an metallic scraping noise, and gulfed.
The next few seconds, the air sucked out of the
room and the tape warble dangerously. The unfamiliar voice pressed closer,
as if speaking directly into my ear. We always find
new hosts. Is at your turn? Now? On those words,
the tapes screeched, melting down into a maelstrom of static,
the edge's culling as escorched. I sat frozen, headphones clamped,
the after image of those words echoing in the booth's
haunted silence. Statics seemed to close in all around, as
tangible as the aching bones in my knees. I realized
with a clardy colt and unkind that someone, maybe more
than one, had been systematically cutting over, dubby or erasing
the crucial parts of the record. Each gap or botch
tape wasn't an accident, but an intention to keep a
truth insulated, to keep a message from escaping, And here
I was chasing it. For an instant, I stared at
the blinking console, wondering about the lines that had never disconnected,
the voices that still waited to be heard, and just
too or why was listening on the other side of
the static. I pushed away from the console, knee steff
the snap of my headphone cable smarting at my jar.
I needed a real air. Not the dusty, history clocked
atmosphere of the booth, but the station, even after all
these years, had a way of pressing back. I left
the light on behind me and crept down the central hallway,
past the crack display cases of forgotten Lissner contesse and
committee plaques, to the loading dock. The door steer latch
still stuck, complaining with the rusty squeal as I shoved
it open. Margie Knight met me for grapping the slow,
sluggish parking lot. No saws, just a sliver of sodium
vapor slice in the dark, painting oily walls on puddles
left by early rain. I leaned into the open air,
hart knocking and evenly in my chest, as if Towo
remembered an old were the more night Long tried to
erase night noises, drifted up, a lone dog barking two
blocks down, the metallic tick of someone's bicycle chain in
the alley. Out here, away from the booth. The world
should have felt ordinary, but I couldn't shake the sense
of being overheard. I popped a nicketine come square and
traced the edge of the security badge in my pocket.
The old inturn s name Amy raised in cracked plastic
under my thumb. When I first met her a bred
eye College gate, she shown up for her first shift
carrying a batted thermis in a philosophy text. She was twenty,
maybe so eager should volunteer for every night slot. Her
absence hadn't made sense, but I had done what people do.
I accepted the staff line that she'd gone home for
the summer may be transferred. In the months after w
Lexha's shuddering, I tried not to wonder about Amy, or
Eddy or all the others whose stores slipped away into
rumor and then silence. Back at the archive table, I
flipped open my notebook, a basset five star, the kind
we all used in the booth, Still washed faintly in
ink from prayer hands, I set about transcribing portions of
there do not okav tape, resisting the urge to skip
the fragments where the voices of a laped in that
broken off kidden style lines repeated we're home now. I
confess what you hear on A mad impulse allayed them
of a snippets from broadcast locks, reading aloud in a
low murmur, trying to trianulate whatever pattern there might have been,
but the sen shimid out of reach. Every time. Messages
like that wornful listeners. They were for those who'd sat
in the booth alone, with only the dull red glove
the aorn Ai a bulb for company. Soon, each time
I played an ark, I've reel any reeled background static
began spitting out subtle, shifting noises. Once it sounded like
fingers sliding slowly over glass. Another time a breath heavier
than the tape could carry. I checked the equipment, no faults,
no interference, no reason for the crawl of gosfluche I
felt every time I rewound and replayed those minutes of
mangled audio, sleep eluded me. There's nice. I thrushed beneath
scratched sheets, pressing my front flat to my ear, cycling
randomly through frequency bands fourteen ten A M gave back
nothing but silence, interrupted every so often by jettery. Water repulses,
almost like an underwater Morse code. If I concentrated, I
sometimes caught a word, just one, repeated until I feared
had slip out of reality. If I listened a moment longer,
I started keeping a running list in my notebook. Never
sign off, but let them inside. Voices don't end. A
host is in host. It was meant to ground me. Instead,
each new phrase tangled with the lass like a gnat,
pulling me back towards something I knew. Soho I shouldn't
try to name one. Afternoon, I returned to the museum
box in hand, intent on asking Joan if she'd heard
anything odd in her own rounds of tape digitization. The
lobby was emptiq except for the faint smell of lemon
polish and the hum of the ancient radiators in the
Oddfact's office. Joan kept her headphone slung loosely around her neck.
A gaze flicking between computer monitor and paper lock. She
barely looked up as I entered. Did someone drop off
the archive box personally or did it just show? I
tried for casual, but my voice came out too sharp.
Joan page backward through her calendar, delivery schedule, third party career,
No signature, no idea, she paused, frowning, nothing odd about
it unless he kept the box. Being thirty pounds of
mold and headaches. I hesitated it, stuck between wanting to
protect her from the ENnies pulsing from the tapes, and
needing to share my own doubts. If any tape seemed
damaged or strange, don't play them after dark, I finally said,
circling Hank's warning in my mind. If you do, make
a note of it for the records. That so, she smirked,
then seemed to notice my tension and relented. I suppose
you all had your share of storess Radio keeps its
own ghosts. Back in the storeroom as a rearranged reels
for scanning, I found my fingers drawn almost involuntarily, to
a folder of after Iyo's incident reports, worked behind anonymous
blueprints and forgotten from traising letters slit between pages a
quarter page memo written in the old manager's briskrid pen
Astoris Knight transmission must not be interrupted. Repeat All hosts
remain in booth between midnight and sign off. If interruption occurs,
follow the original script. Under no circumstances is the booth
door to be opened during power fluctuations astors. It was
dated me twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven. I tried recalling
that night, pinning the eye between what the official recroclaimed
and what my memory supplied. The script I remembered lived
in a lock drawer beneath the main console. We joked
about the apocalypse, copy cribbed and safe in case of
signal loss, just another part of old f CC compliance paranoia.
I'd never read the whole thing, finding it mostly gibberish,
with a worldly, repetitive refrain stay with us, speak only
as heard. The restlessness inside me hardened into something urgent.
Whatever happened those nights was more than a technical glitch
or a local radio station's demise. If there had been
any system, a ritual, even it was half lost, half
intentionally deleted. I needed to see the booth by daylight.
To rude out what clues it might surrender to some one,
insisting on in varying what no one else wanted to touch.
That next morning, I drove to w Relixor in sunshine
for the first time in years. The lot rotted by weeds,
the station windowless and hunched beneath drooping powle lines. The
glass door yielded to my key hinge, a reluctant as ever,
thus mote spun in fat columns over the clotted reception,
the soul catch still burying the print of the last
staff meeting years ago. I lingered in the operator's alco
of find the corkboordvault schedules, a holiday card and a
faded handwritten schedule for a night voices twelve two a
m with initials beside each night. Mine scrolled on a
handful of Tuesdays Hank's engineering cause it still reaked disorder
and burnt insulation. I picked my way through the tangle
of hardware to the main breaker, squinting at a yellow
logbook taped to the pipe above, page after page of
electricians handwriting, increasingly frinned. Close to that last summer feedback
monitor cycling external access deny on the final entry compromised.
Do not attempt to recite some unlikely Hank had written
over it. A day or two later at Gunham, Stay
out the air on the stairs with stuffiers still heat
dragging through the thick still morning from above. The afternoon
sun pierced through half shattered vent, displaying jagged light across
the control boospatter carpet. I traced the lines to the
consoles basin squaded, searching for the emergency script. It took
a few minutes of grouping and cursing that my hand
closed on a batted brick. Hold free. It yielded the
script folder, a manilla envelope, rubber banded. Freeing with age
and sweat, I sack cross legged under the desk and
wrapping the envelope. The first page was the opening an
event of transmission interruption. Read the following repeat from outpoint
until the signal stabilizes or official communication is restored. The
next sheets weren't much better blocks of text, Sometimes words
repeated three times over as if to anchor the speech.
It read more like a chant than a technical script.
The refrain stay with us, stay with us, speak only
as heard, Stay with us, repeat sections scratched with additions
in different hands. If something knocks at the booth, do
not open. If voices shift, do not just frequency, Do
not change the skirt. Speak only as heard. The practical
part of my brain rebelled. Scripts were for emergencies, a ceisy, regulation, daubery,
but the pattern was immistakable. This was language meant to
reinforce something circular, endless. Even as I sat there, legs tingling,
I caught myself whispering stay with us under my breath,
as though plugging into an ancient invisible loop. A shadow
moved on the wall, just a trick of birds outside,
or the sun shifting. I pushed myself up, folder in hand,
whiched it under my arm, and scan the room once more.
Out in the hallway, my phone bust unownumb flashing across
the crack display. When I answered, static filled the line.
The bursts of noise slicing high, resolved into a voice
stretched and warped. You were not alone in the booth.
I nearly dropped the phone. The breath behind those words
was unmistakably estroskyinastrous the building, as if spoken only a
few doors down. I held the phone out from my
ear checking the walls in the empty foy, no one,
just my own reflection wavering in the glass. When the
lion dropped, I let the silence settle, before gathering the
emergency script and returning to the booth. I sat trying
to make sense of what I had heard. The exhaustion
of days spent thriting through reels, pressing him for all sides. Still,
my old training kicked in search for connections, sequenced the unknowable.
I laid the script beside my notes, turning back and
forth for any overlap, and phrasing the repeated lines from
the tapes round with what was written in the margins,
lending a creeping coherence to patterns I'd only barely suspected.
The evidence was all laid out on nights when night
voices went wrong. The script had been read aloud, sometimes
by Jack, sometimes by others. Sometimes I suspected by Colo's
repeating rhythms, picked up from the broadcast itself, a feedback
loop of words and ritual, a signal engineered to hold something,
a beg or to invite something in I thumbed through
Collog's cross referencing voices. I recognize there was the old
regular misss Perry, who always famed to talk about the
weather and her cats. Her voice, by late May nineteen
ninety seven rose and pitch, repeating can't sleep, not safe
to stay with me? O, K stay on. It was
followed by minutes of silence, then what sounded like breeding
clothes to the microphone, as if she'd handed the phone
to someone else. She was never logged again. Other voices,
more distorted, seemed to stillip out a phase, losing names
and whole chunks of thought, then all at once breaking
back through with near identical intonations. It's not your voice,
and the words keep changing. Recordings that should have been comforting,
summing up decades of slow country nights instead bristle with
unaccountable tension. Each time I replied, they do not ockavit
tip against any reasonable judgment, I heard new echoes in
that unknown cadence at the end. In context, it sounded
now not just like a threat, but a calling card.
We always find new hosts. Is at your turn? Now?
Technically that line couldn't have been recorded live. The tape
would have needed to be running while I was in
the buth at that very moment. And yet every instinct
told me. It was deliberate, meant to crawl forward in time,
meant for me. Night came heavy over the river and
I took the akave with me, shoving the folder and
most recent reels into my batted satchel. The idea of
staying overnight at dou w Relixile was more than Night's handle,
but sleep at her home didn't seem likely. Ada in
the apartment, cutains drawn tight against anemic moon. I sat
on the bed, radio resting on my lap, nobook opened
to a fresh page. I started writing out the repeating freezes,
matching them line by line with what I remembered from
a script on what the unknown voice had said. Each time,
the compulsive urge to finish each patten grew stronger, a
strange sense of anticipation, as though aster as something asserusk
awaited the completed list. Half Way through, my phone buzzed again,
another known number, but this time when I answered, only
my own voice came through, feigned and breathless, Are you
ready to confess? It broke into static and the line
went dead. Startled, I left the apartment, walking the deserted
block past the shutter bakery, the street humming with the
echo of power lines overhead, the air outside seen fresher
with each step, the urge to return to the booth
nod deeper, doub Alexar sat at the end of my rout,
drowned in deep blue shadow, the sign of blur offiren
and mildy. I forced myself to circle at only once,
settling at last in the curb across from the dark entryway.
From here. In childhood, I'd watched the antenna blow from
my window, a signal sent not just to County, but
if you dream big enough to everyone, awaken all the
dark places of the world. I closed my eyes, breathing
in the metallic scent that always clung to the lot,
a hint of ozen hovering in the air from somewhere
up high. When I opened them, I saw a movement
behind the booth window, just a flicker, like someone shifting
from one microphone to another, a froze skin prickling. The
longer I watched, the more I was sure that what
happened in nineteen ninety seven was still happening, unresolved, paused
like a signal waiting for permission to continue. Each night,
the words must be spoken, the ark must be completed,
not a curse, not haunting, exactly, something else, an echo
with agency. I checked the time, half past midnight, crossed
the empty lot. The feeble overhead light seemed to blink,
as though someone had passed directly beneath it. No cars,
no wind, just a sense of terrible, watchful patience hovering
at the threshold, broadcast stirring into the glass. And sure
if my reflection was only my own, I mouthed the
words stay with us, speak only as heard. A shadow
flickered deep in the booth, then studded. The air changed
once more, without mercy, inviting beckoning in its disdain for endings.
In that moment, the unfinished story of w Elixor didn't
just belong to crumbling tape or vanished staff, but to
anyone readless enough to seek it out, anyone unable to
let the signal rest. And something I sensed was still listening,
content to wait for the next night, the next voice,
the next host, willing to join the transmission. A sleep
stuff sun was just beginning to lift above the skeletal
tree line when I snapped awake in my apartment, heart hammering,
this still clenched around the pad of crumpled notes, from
the night before. My dreams had turned violent. A thicket
of cable and microphone arms clutching at my limbs, A
biff door stuck shut as voices burrowed through the glass.
The old radio approached on my dresser boasts with a
tangle of soft static. Nothing discernible, yet certain snatches of
cadence roaded the hush syllables I half expected to hear
reflected back at me from my own mouth when I spoke.
I hauled myself into the kitchen, flipped on the overhead,
and watched the mercy light cut past peeling wall paper.
The exhaustion, as ever, was not just physical. Something had
splintered during those weeks strawling the tapes. My boundaries had blurred.
I was starting to flinch at the sound of my
own voice and recordings. I found myself lingering over the
phrase not our voice, letting it echo the worst of it.
I sought it to believe I was no longer alone
in my own head. There was a kind of shivering
clarity that comes with real fear, your mind jumping the
rails of reasonable debt. I was past rationalizing. Now there
were events in that booth, on those broadcast nights that
no ordinary process of memory or routine could explain. Chore coffee,
a run of paye likes fried in thick oil, eaten
standing up. I checked my phone, No voice mails, but
a single miscall time stamped at three two a M
no number, no message left in my in books. A
digital recording had appeared from the museum system. I hadn't
requested it. The file, labeled in I Caller's junior eleven
Taco was just under fifteen seconds long. I loaded it
on to my desktop and press play. A hiss, then
the unmistakable loath of the night voices theme rendered eerie
and distorted, as though funneled thrown to water glass. Then
an overlaid voice, mine but cracked and distant, whispering, We
just mirrored the words they're already inside, then louder, a
phrase I recognized from the emergency script. Transmission is incomplete.
Static closed it down like a door. My hand shook
as I closed a file. Who was sending them? Was
some one else trying to pass along a warning? Or
was the system itself infected with what we'd carried twenty
years ago? I called Joan at the museum, but the
line rang endlessly before being cut by a gobbled mechanical chirp.
I imagined her in the cramp record's office head Frond's
clamp tight lost in some loop of sounds she had
never asked to inherit. When the mail arrived, it brought
worse which between a pete's coupon and past two parabill
was a narrow envelope with no return address. Inside neatly
typed was mine own name at the top, underneath a
list of every night voices staffa prison in May in
June of nineteen ninety seven, Amy, Marla, Jack Hank, Eddy Cam,
each name with a knee black line cross d row.
Only mine remained and crossed below that a single line
Confess what you heard between the museums noted about Clean
Copper's ownly, the shadow coal loaks, and the scripting of
emergency lines across tape. In memory, it was clear that
what had invaded the booth had not left with the
station's closure, or even without withdrawal from the business of radio.
It was a pattern with its own life, demanding repetition
to anchor itself to find new mile's new hosts. I
told myself to wake, to rest to shore up what
little reserve I still had. Instead, I felt a compulsion
burning inside me like a fever. There was too much unspoken,
to many rules in the script that hinted at a system,
a rationale behind the madness. I needed physical evidence, something
that hadn't been corrupted, A snip a boxed up from
museum whitening that meant going deeper into the wreck. There
was one place left, the cause bay storage under the
old broadcasting tower, with a truly sensitive material emergency locks,
unaired accordings, manager correspondence had sometimes migrated when the pressure
of administration called for plausible deniability. I headed out just
as the morning market crowds were thinning, purposeful, hugging my
bat at Satchel and the emergency script folder. The walk
to w Alexaw felt different in this light, brider but sharper,
like the world was attempting to shook off the gloom
around the station, only to be rebuffed the door. Since
my first visit seemed heavier to open the creak of
the hinges, more resistant, sunlight barely crept through the smeared gas. Inside.
They smelled lass like dust and more like paper and
ozon an electric fenceding lingered on the tongue as if
the room's atmosphere was carrying a current. The crawl space
was touched behind a collapsed partition in what used to
be the Wreckers archive, done a sagging concrete step. I
wedged a flashlight between my teeth and pride at the
warped wooden panel, wrenching it aside. The blockmill beyond offered
a chill. I felt through overtendon cardboard boxes collapsed under
my gloves. I worked past spare receiver heads, tangled cores,
and a crate of w lex R fun drivemugs until
my hand snagged something hard of battered lock books, a
kind management favored for petty cash or on noble tapes.
The lock was feeble. My screwdriver did the trick inside
half a dozen pocket recorders, backuplowbooks with spines warped by damp,
four hard drives and zippered freezer bags, and a stack
of unlabeled cassettes, some regular, others were innately marked masking
tape torn and written over until the label disappeared to
noise the log books even before flipping through Whilbert reducted
blocks and jittery handwriting some interest reference to signal anomalies,
external transmission overriding pattern SWI which content or a host
un responsive to false grip read GIN fourteen's page where
a proper sign off should have been simply read. Connection
maintained until signal loss were set denied. My heart drummed
a rhythm I felt through my fingers as I lined
up the tapes. I didn't dare play them on the
station's equipment, in case the whole system had kept in
self erased. I stuffed the cassettes and lock books into
my bag, hauling aside enough old fliers to conceal the
gap i'd dug and climbed out into a corridor that
seemed even cold to them. When I descended behind me,
the door is shut, the lock clicking home by itself.
Back at my apartment, I stacked the cassettes and started
with one, labeled only with the ghost of a call
sign and a date no real identification. I digitized it,
built careful lossless files, and looped up my headphones. The
first few were fairly routined. Morning confessions psalms played and
replayed Management's voice, dripping through a tired list of community bulletins,
but in tape after tip marked between midnight and two
oddities thickened like a fog rolling up a valley. On
cassette four, long after midnight, a male voice, barely audible,
speed altered by degraded tip, spoke beneath the surface static
in a socato rhythm, rushing words that seen threaded through
the night. Voices theme song were already inside repeat the
phrase confess transmission and complete don't use your own voice.
Then a sudden splicio was missing, the jump, cutting back
to the show, as if nothing had happened. I lay
at these snatches and two separate digital slots, matching auditory
fingerprints from one tape to another. At first nothing emerged
except a heavy polarithm of tipes. But as I adjusted
for frequency drift and channel bleed, frequencies matched and superimposed
at the voices not overlain but orally after its mirroring asterisk,
each other, sinking up in a course neither explained nor
resolved on. The three knights of Patten's match staff present
were consistent Jack, Amy, Hank, occasionally Miless signature names already
crossed out in the nerve from that morning. Tracking the
log entries against town records. A realization had hard and immediate.
Every staffer assigned on the affected knights was now relocated,
with no known forwarding address or worse, lost scene at home,
presumed to have left intense specially partan easy to overlook,
most never seen again. After the last sprint tape, a
chill ran up my arms, the same as when I
first heard my own voice walked back at me, broadcast
as both warning and welcome across decades. The next morning,
I took the risk and reached out to Amy's parents.
They'd never left the county. She'd lived on Oak Lane,
a sleepy cul de sac with silent yards and the
sound of lawn sprinklers drifting through open windows. They met
me outside the porch Face's street with an enduring dinn
as I knew at onces, parents forever waiting or resigned
to waiting for a sound on the stairs that would
never come. Anything you can share about Amy's last summer
she was here, My voice trailed, Uncertain how much risk.
Her father shrugged, stepping aside to let me into Amy's room,
untouched except for dust in a slow decaying line. Her
mother lingered beside the door. Hand tied over a rosary.
She hardly slept that month, her mother said, almost dreamily.
He used to write things, bits of shows, lists of callers, numbers.
I catch her at the windows sometimes at night, talking
under her breath, saying they're coming through the wires. They
hear us. Her voice cracked. She started sleep walking, always
going to the living room, always to the radio. I
examined a desk, a battered spiral where Amy had scribbled
line after a line in a furious hand. There was
no narrative, just columns of time's names and repeatedly a
looping phrase let them and don't let them in beneath
her batt at radio or a weather desktop, travel along,
always tuned to fourteen ten am. Now a monument to dust.
I've found one more spiral. It's inside pocket, bulging stuck
inside Willis's radio show dates. Mike's checked out. Odd phrase
is repeated over and over, some crossed hat and described
in larger letters, as if to please someone watching. Hostes
and host to confess stay with us, few have to finish.
Our father spoke for the first time quietly as he
reshelved the faded photo. After Amy went missing, we had
police and tip on every box, but they always left
this room alone. Said it felt off. The radio never
did stop buzzing, not for weeks. I shuddered, thanked them,
and retreated as something of amy, trailing behind a presence
in the cracked wallpaper, waiting for a click, a syllable,
a new voice to finish what she could not. That afternoon,
the museum called Jones's voice was taught to feigning normalcy,
but shivering with dread at the edges. We're pulling the
plug on the archiving, she told me flatly, higher ups.
Funding doesn't matter, tits. Go to regionals doorage on Friday.
Anything weird, just put it back in the box and
bring to my office. Got it in the background through
the connection, I thought I heard the faintest form of static.
I could tape left and spoiled on a cold console.
As I stowed the cassettes, my phone vibrated, unknown collar,
no number. Against my better judgment, I answered, the line
was bared and static. But then a voice soft split, returning, stop,
don't open any more, don't trigger another event. The last
word hit with the same aid in headance of the
unknown voice. In the nineteen ninety seven tapes, intonation and inflection,
precisely matching syllables, landing half a second behind where they blonde.
Then a hiss, and the voice melted into a double decko,
my own blurb with static speaking words I did not
remember ever recording. You always come back, it whispered, But
you must not finish. My hands were shaking as I
hung up. In the silence, the radio in the hall
flared to life, a stammered blast of noise, then dead air.
I kicked the plug out of the wall in a panic.
Cold sweat prickling night brought only fresh violation. My answering machine,
ancient used only for museum coordinatation, blinked once a message waited.
I press play hullo, it's me or you, It's always us?
Did you hear the words? Let them through? Confess? The
message deteriorated into overlapping fragments my voice in Jackson that
are known terrifying second voice, each tripping over the last.
We're waiting. The lines are open. I jammed the or
receis slash O F F switch and pulled the cassette,
but the words remain hovering, indelible. The time had come
to submit to the compulsion to answer. At last, we
tever waited on the other end of the broadcast line.
If what the stranger voice on the tapes kept saying
was true we always find new hosts, then it was
better at least to see what it wanted directly. The
day before the broadcast, I left my apartment, stripped only
closed in the battered satchel. With as many tapes as
I could carry. I brought the emergency script, the last
log book Amy Spyrol. I needed evidence, or at least
someone to witness the transmission's final hour. If I could
speak with the thing at w Alexa, perhaps I could
lay the past to rest. The sky was bruised the
color of old copper. When I returned to the station,
A slow broiling storm building at the room of the horizon.
Wind battered the tower cables and stuttered through the broken eaves.
I circled a lot once, no cars, no sign of
vagrance or nosey teens, only the station, hunched and dark, waiting.
I slipped my key into the lock, carrying portable recorders,
a hand hell taped deck, and the old script in sight.
The glimpress so thick I felt it against my roops.
The static taste of the air was too sharp, as
if the building had built up a charge over years
of silence. The booth fell pretty naturally cold. A faint
whird from the break of box signaled the town's pow
still blood into the main console, though the on aiar
sign was dark. I pulled the chain, flooding the booth
with a sickly light. The control board flickered once, then steaded.
I ran through a routine checks, adjusting levels, aligning every
portable mic to twin recorders, shoulders hunch. I set my
watch for eleven fifty p m. Outside, wind battered the glass.
A crawling sound began, first only a hum, then unmistakably
growing the plural in discinct shuffle of something gathering outside,
rustling against the trash blown lot. At midnight, I forced
myself to sit hands on the battered host mike throw dry.
I had never hosted solo shown all my years, never
spoken to the listening dark, but I pressed record. The
old script opened in my lap. I greeted the air,
my voice quivering. The speech tilted as I read from
the familiar emergency words try to laugh it off instead.
The w alexir fourteen ten a m. This is this
is night, voices stay with us in sunny acts. We
were here for another hour in the dark. The moment
the words left my lips, air pressure shifted in the room,
A deep sullen heaven is clamp in the booth, I repeated, improvising,
invoking the rhythms from a hundred nights past. Lines are open,
call and confess. The rooms temperature dropped sharply, the gloss
of the inner studio filmed with condensation. The rest of
the station beyond lost in black weather from shadows or
something pressing tightly against the windows. My computer monitor flickered,
resolving then losing signal. Before VH scratched. Lines raced upward.
A warble swallowed me broadcast the subtle moment that had
haunted all those tapes. Suddenly, every switch and indicate her
light on the control board pulse in sequence, as if
a ghost hand were running diagnostics. The phone lines lit
up all at once, acquire of static mixed with voices unreadable, overlaying,
each sounding as if piped through miles of wire and water.
I tried to answer one and then another, fumbling with
the pahne, but there was no greeting, just an inrush
of breath in a sharp what phrase that repeated itself
on every channel. Not your voice mirror the word, let
us in. I press record. I tried to respond, if
you're there, if anyone's listening, if you can hear me,
But my own voice began to slip, loosening syllables, staggering,
breaking into the halting, fragmented kidince I had heard on
the donot ARKive tape. I felt my mouth moving ahead
of my mind, repeating a phrase I didn't remember learning
my voice on the tape. Now I going through the
station itself smewed out into the terrifying life. As for them,
houst isn't host. We're here for the confession. Stay with us.
Speak only is heard. A shape press against the glass
of the sound booth, A human outline lowered, spoiling out
a darkness so deep a blood color from the rest
of the control room. My scalp prickled, every hair alive.
I close my eyes, tried to snap out of the fugue.
The storm outside rattle the windows. Lightning exploded behind black cloths,
just enough to shadow a flock of figures standing scattered
along the lot arranged in a quiet arc. The Watchers
machinery sputtered in cough, then failed incrementally. A series of
percussive clacks from the auxiliary equipment worn by one level
meters dropped dead. The on aire light pulsed, feeble as
a heartbeat, edge and collapse on the phone lines. More
voices crowded in, some of them voices I recognized from
Earler tapes and reels, Al Collars, Jack hank Amy, even
Miles's familiar laugh, now pinched and metallic, circling itself. They
began to blend syllables, fusing then multiplying each line, picking
up the phrase that the previous ended on. In the mix.
My own voice joined, no longer under my control, thretting
through their words, making hollow music of the scroup. We
just mirror the words, mirror the words, mirror. Something caught
my attention, hands on my shoulders, a presence behind and
sat the old scent of foam and coffee and cologne
and something other, all mingled. The temperature dropped even lower.
Condensation dripping from the rim of the recording desk crossed
the room. The studio door shivered a heavy scraping sound.
On its far side, knocking, faint but insistent. Then a voice,
Jacks or not, Jack's older. Now you have to finish
the show. You have to finish. It's the only way out.
I tried to speak, but the only words that came
more from the script, as though com indeed by a
muscle memory. I didn't on't We're not alone in the boots.
Don't open the door, don't open the fingers cold, impossibly thin,
brust the back of my neck, as if punctuation to
the stammered phrase. Shadows used to cross the scene between
glass and wood, thickening, seeking a seam, seeking the microphone,
the compulsion to open the external line to broadcast straight
to whatever was waiting outside for rosenside me swelling. I
knew absolutely that if I did, something would fill the
breech and never leave. Frantically mouthing the in line of
the script to speak only as heard, Speak only as heard.
I wrenched free, scrubbled beneath the console and found the
main feed wire, the one emergency shut up and dated
its lost resort. Ran my hand across it for the switch,
finger shaking, another round of pounding. No longer polite, now urgent,
rattled the door, finish it. The spectral course pressed, each
voice tumbling through the ear, my own most insistent, I
braced and yanked the cord. Every light died at once,
the storm outside crash, blanketing the lot beyond in a
stroke of pale fire. The presence in the corner withdrew,
or maybe only grew still, a vacuum left in its aftermath.
I sat in the dark, longs heaving so loudly I
thought the booth mic would pick them up. The phone
lines all at once blinked off. The deep reel spun,
then halted silent. The arna our sign too went black.
I waited for whatever consequence would follow, but there was
nothing at all, just the slow resettling of air in
my own rasping breath. When the power returned in a
few seconds, it was the hum of an ordinary empty building.
No voices, no fountoms beyond what I had carried with me.
The only evidence the live recording, so rolling silently in
its deck, red light blinking, capturing only the shape of
the storm feeding to quiet. I took the tape, locked
the booth, and left out in the lot. The gathered watches,
scattered fog gestures, hunched, and electric spill to assolved to nothing.
As I approached just the wind, the smell of wet
weeds might kick in my boots. Back in my cold apartment,
I collapsed on to the mattress. The broadcast was done,
something closed in space, if not in time. Yet the
silence thus followed was a strained, uncertain thing. It did
not feel like victory, just intermission. Ash sleep eluded me
for nights. After the live broadcast, I lay on my side,
tracking the echo of thunder and that warbling hum from
the tapes, listening for the snap and jitter of phantom voices.
Sometimes I caught my own voice blintering, and the age
of consciousness finishing old sentences, sentences pinned to memory. Thatt
seene false staged by some unseen author. My radio even
unplugged his faintly. Each trip to the kitchen brought cold
interference on the old land line, scraps of phrases in
that Saint cadence, sometimes mine, sometimes Jack's, sometimes something in between.
On a morning, hung over from sleeplessness, I checked my voicemail.
A message waited Joan from the museum, her voice bertle
in Heston, asking about the tapes, wanting to know if
I'd finished sorting them, if there were any you didn't
want to go public. Her tone shifted mid message, sliding
up into a clip to bernstutter, we are waiting, work
must continue, holsters. She cut off. When I called back,
the number was disconnected. Two more calls followed that week, Hank,
whom I hadn't heard from since the engineer's aliwee warnings.
Now lucid bocleppt, his sentences full of apologies and desperate
for something. He didn't specify what next. Marla's number a
voicemail that at first seemed almost like her, but as
she tried to say my name, her vocal inflection completed
the phrase in the other worldly rhythm, voice slowing and repeating,
stay with us, speak only as heard. The effect left
me roar and uncertain. When I tried to sleep, my
jaw clenched, awoke with fingers, pressing patents into the bed sheet,
whispering lines from the script in the same broken cadence
I'd heard through the worst tapes. A few former staffers
reached up by email. They'd heard about strange interference or
felt oft as of laid I read replied slowly, one,
then two, then as well of similar notes. They said
their own voices no longer sound of right to them,
that sometimes radiostatics snatched syllables from their mouths. Some even
claimed they heard conversations over open phone lines that neither
party remembered. Afterward, I gave the clean tapes to the
museums that lacked any scrap of the ritual's curt any
back round hint of their visitors. I kept the live,
poorcast tape, and I do not ock over reels, locked
in a steel cash box, buried under this floorboard beneath
my bed. Within days, the town quietly erased the last
traces of w Alexar from its own record. The sign
came down, one down without notice. The lot fence, a
schedule for demolition posted with no vanfare. Friends I'd known
since childhood avoided the topic, changed the subject at the
mention of the old station, or switched to brighton brittle tones,
as if performing a collective forgetting. I grew more isolated, paranoid, tired,
stratch thin. Sometimes my speech fell into the transmitter cadence
without conscious effort, circular and repetitive, Sometimes late at night
I'd catch my own reflection in the oven door, lips moving,
forming phrases I didn't intend to say aloud. At the
edge of sleep, the static and the earth thickened. I'd
hear chorus, thin and plaintive, urging, speak only as her,
don't break the pattern, stay with us. I'd run my
hand over the pad of paper on my nights, and
always more word, always newlest always trying to finish something
that refused to be completed. Ash On the night before
demolition was scheduled at the station, I could not stay in.
I wanted the empty streets, the clouded stars hushed behind
a half moon, the world holding its breath between one
century's failures in the next. I told myself I had
no business going back. Yet before I knew, I decided.
My feet took me down the block, past the shell
of a bikery, to the silent shape of what had
been w Elisar. A loose plunk rattled in the breeze.
I pressed my pump to the crap boart, listening the
hump fainted, the non tape but still present waldep furtive warbling,
a living transmission. I pressed my ear to the cold glass,
turned my face toward the heart of the dark control booth.
The static was stronger there, Whispering in the background, voices
riffled through the frequencies, layered in old but distinct Jack, Marla, Amy, Hank,
my own, all pitched and tentacled into one, the repeated
lines that spark through the years. Confess what you hear,
transmission is incomplete, and mirror the words overlapping, looping, humming.
I shifted jaw slack to listen for whom might be
leading the chorus. Then muskin froze under the static, a
shadow and spoiled itself from the host. Jerry dim outline,
body shaped by the lightless, hunt forward, face, never turning.
The voices continued, joined by my own, pitched and echoed
into infinity. Stay with us, speak only as heard. Are
you ready to confess? The final phrase, repeated, twined around
itself ad infinitum, lay in my own familiar register and
the voices of all who had gone before. On an
impulse morning, our defense of something between. I pulled out
my phone and dialed the old station number dead for years,
recycled a dozen times, never answered why n Then a click,
my own voice across the years across the tape, across
the breach, answered clear as day, the phrase leaping inevitable?
Are you ready to confess? The shell in my hand
radiated up my arm. The phoneslick in trembling against my cheek,
pressed its plastic ridges into my skin, so foreign and
yet into a connection as old as any memory. Ahead
of the station, static poles crossed the line. I swallowed once,
felt the drawing a slide down my throat. My mouth opened,
and against instinct, I whispered, who are you? For a moment, nothing,
then faintly a hush beneath the signal. My own voice
puzzled up into a hundred a thousand tiny delays, shrouded
in a cadence that had haunted me through every tape. Aunceed,
we are the echo. We finished what's left and finished.
It didn't sound quite right, didn't sound like I ever
had one speaking aloud, but it wore my patterns and laughter,
the slip of an old accent returning briefly into vowels.
I felt the urge to speak again, to confess something
not yet confess, but my tongue caught on the words. Instead,
I let the silence hang and annette through the crack
window and the dip of the booth shadow. I saw
a movement of shape of the mic, leaning in the
line stayed open. The course began to braid its off
old hosts, lost collars, the sigh of the tower, guy
Amy's bright laughter, a child's uncertain hello, stay with us.
It was a benediction and a threat. My mind felt
like a tight loap of tape running out its last
few feet. I shut my eyes, gravel digging into my
knees as I knelt to the glass. Each syllable vibrated
through bone. I wanted to pull away, but I could not.
Inside the shadow at the board moved, tracing the ark
where the control surface once scleamed beneath Jack's stone finger tips.
It reached for the battered mic, the one we cheered
across years and stories, and leaned forward just a little.
The chorus behind it and swelled, sometimes a woman, sometimes
a dozen men, sometimes a weeping child, the greeting always
night voices, Are you with us? I tried, for a
desperate minute to focus on my own breathing, to draw
a boundary between my thoughts and the ripple of voices.
I dug my fingers into the cold cell. But soon
the poll became impossible to resist, a compulsion older than
the first confession. My voice, live on the dead line,
rose again through the phone. If I say the words
I managed, what happens to me? The answer came instantly,
all the voices blending soft, a matter of fact, and
somehow loving son are venomous. You become part of the story.
The transmission never ends. The words need hosts. The wind
snapped a loose sign from the building, flinging it across
the lettered lot. Rain began, fat drops bursting like static
against the glass, each one a drumbeat. Inside. The beef darkened,
but the shadow did not fade. Instead, it seemed to
gather itself, drawing from the room, grown sharper. Lightning shuddered
the world, and briefly I saw it shaped truly my own,
only not a reflection assembled from memory and take hunched
over the console in perpetual listening. A surge of dissiness
overtook me. Suddenly I was nowhere, I was everywhere, always
on both sides of the gas. I remembered that summer,
the pain of being awake too long, of holding a
hand over your mouth to keep from speaking aloud, whatever
wanted to emerge After midnight, I jerked the phone from
my ear, let it swing on the cord. Music or
memory of music crackled from the receiver. Three notes miner
and unresolved. The knife voices prelade fractured. My knees protested
as I struggled to my fetinum lidden. I walked the
length of the station's block, passing along the chainling fence.
The air quivered, and for an instant every hair on
my body stood stiff as wire. I passed under the
shadow of the tower, the ghostly impression of its bulk
against the stormy sky, and felt the whisper at once
signals in the bones. The cow passed, headlights slicing through rain.
I turned the driver, pale and blank, did not look
in my direction. The town was still tied its own
broadcast finished a home in the stillness, I entered the
kitchen and shed my silk jacket, peeling it from my shoulders.
I set the phone down on the crack countertop, trembling
across the room. Every appliance glimmered with iupulster spow cycling surely,
but my heart objected. I set up the batter tape deck,
slid the final live tape into the wheels, and press play.
Static laired with breathing somewhere in Americ. My own voice
greeted the others For half a minute. I listened, the
hair on my sculp tingled. The tape carried not just
my voice, but so many Jack's gentle caress of a phrase,
Aimy's novysalkism, Hanks eye in rough baritone. They told stories, meandering,
sometimes a reveling in mid sentence. On the second minute,
a break, a caller's voice low and feveredusss parry from
lon Ago, meaning for warmth. Then I don't remember how
I got here, she confess, and the line dissolved. There
was a space, a hush where words should have been.
A new voice emerged, unmistakably the stranger, the same one
from the do not Archive tape. Calm and hungry, confess
it commanded finish the story the right way. I sam
The tape stopped, chest heaving. For the first time in weeks,
I felt enough while a fury, not just a my
own helplesses, but at the end, this pattern, the predatory
persistence of unfinished broadcasts. My fist bold No, I whisper,
almost to myself, but it filled the room. You don't
get to have the last word, not this time. I
searched my drawers and found the padlock and key I
had kept from the station's mail cubby all those years before.
With deliberation, I wound the live tap and the do
not rcave a reel together, bundle tight with the last
piece of the script Amy had transcribed. I locked them
in the steel cash box, double checking the latch. Without ceremony,
I shoved the box deep under all his floorboard and
hammered the board snug. The act felt weighty, ceremonial. If
I could not rid myself of the story, I could
at least deny at new listeners, new hosts. Afterward, I
sat heavily on the kitchen floor, back pressed to the fridge,
alone except for the hum of the world and the
sawing static that never fully faded from my hearing. The
days have followed within him, bright, as if the world
had scrubbed itself too clean. I rarely left the apartment.
The radio stayed off, the tapes, untouched the phone and plugged.
Sometimes at night I thought I saw shapes in the
window glass. My own reflected, holding stands older than my body.
I did not answer when the phone rang, though it
rang often, always at three, two, at him, always from nowhere.
Warts bred that the station had finally gone. Demolition was
carried out, adorned with heavy equipment. The lot's grave raw,
vol but foundation and glass I watched from a distance
had drawn close. The stories dried up in town. People
moved on or pretended to the museums when on local
broadcasts shut down, files boxed away to regional apolite work
for buried Joan stopped calling Ianng's number, disconnected Marlus two.
In the diner, when somewhat spoke of the old days,
the whole room grew silent. The absence of w Alexa
became part of the landscape, another gap in the local memory,
another unspoken border. Sometimes, in sleepless hours, I found myself
for housing lines, stay with us, speak only as heard.
Sometimes I resisted. Sometimes the urge crept into my sentences,
even when ordering groceries were making idle conversation with strangers.
The patterns, once embedded, never left, merely waited for gats
and Wilpoe or moments of lapse. Spring came brought another
soft thaw, and with it the sounds of construction where
the old lot had been. Life pressed forward and small
in different ways. But when I passed the corner where
w leick Saw had stood, I still felt the tremor
beneath my feet, a vague interference, like two lives out
of phase, a transmission always threatening to break through. I
kept the box sealed. Papers and reels began to deteriorate,
as though time itself tried to consume them on rarer
nights and saw me deep and sharp. I'd paced the floor,
drawn to the patch of floorboards under which the box slept.
I never moved it. I learned to live with that small,
active resistance. My final sign off a denial of the
endless pattern. But the broadcast never truly ends, as Cadence
finds me in the hum of the refrigerator, in the
low cycling of the street lights outside my window, in
the echo at the edge of dream. Years may pass.
Eventually someone new will find a box, while not the
voices may choose another vector, another empty room, another confession.
My voice too is out there, layered with others, skipping
on the ghost lines, always reaching, And when ever saw
all my phone rings at that uncanny ire. I'll let
it play. Behind the static, my own voice hovers neither
invitation nor threat, just to promise, Halfulfelder, are you ready
to confess? And somewhere in the unspoiling dark, the show
goes ever on, and that is the end. Thank you
for listening, and I will see you in the next one.