Speaker 1: Welcome listeners to Tales, a podcast that brings your short
stories to life. Do narrations, sound effects, and more. These
stories will be brought to you by different authors with
different writing styles, but with the same spooky vibes. So
lock your doors, check your closets, make certain there's nothing
lurking under your bed.
Speaker 2: And enjoy.
Speaker 1: I was six when I first heard it. Not a whisper,
not a voice in my head. It was a recording
playing from an unplugged cassette deck in my foster home,
gestatic at first, and then patience.
Speaker 2: Mercer subjects one four demn one, memory suppression active.
Speaker 1: I glanced around the room to see if anyone else
had heard it, but no one even looked up. No
one reacted, No one heard what I was hearing from
this old recorder. I remember going to my foster mom
trying to explain, telling her something had said my name,
that the sound came from the tape deck even though
it wasn't plugged in. She just smiled and nodded, like
I was any other kid with an overactive imagination. But
I remember the date May twenty eighth, the first time
it spoke to me, because it was my birthday. I
didn't tell anyone after my first encounter with the recordings.
Who would believe me. Foster homes weren't the kind of
place where kids had secrets. Your business was public property
the moment it came out of your mouth, and mine
already sounded strange. But the recordings didn't stop. Sometimes it
was a radio flickering on at three am in white noise,
than someone calling my name. Sometimes it was TVs showing
footage that didn't belong on any channel. Old flickering black
and white clips of long hallways, empty gurneys. Room would
peeling numbers. One door showed a thirteen. The screen went
black before it opened. By eight, I'd stop talking to
the other kids. I spent most of my time staring
at all electronics, radios, tape decks, even unplugged televisions, watching them,
listening wading devices no one else cared about. Once everyone
believed were broken or dead. At first, the other kids
were kind, curious, maybe, but that faded fast soon. I
was just the weird one, the kid who heard voices
in static, the one who whispered back to machines. I
didn't blame them either, I was imagining it all or
they just weren't special enough to hear what I did.
At that age, I thought maybe it was a superpower.
Cartoons were full of kids like me, misunderstood, isolated until
they saved the day. All I had to do was
wait for my moment. But the day never came. By nine,
I started drawing the same symbol over and over, three lines,
one broken in the middle. I'd wake up with it,
scratch into my notebook, margins carved faintly into my desk,
even drawn on my skin in pen I didn't remember using.
At ten, I had my first incident. They found me
standing in the middle of the group's home common room,
eyes wide open, nose bleeding. A portable radio pressed tight
against my ear, the volume cranked to the max, blare
in nothing but static. When my foster dad tried to
take it away from me, I lost it, screamed, clawed
at his arms, his face. I wouldn't let go. That
radio was mine. The only voices that ever spoke to
me like I mattered came from that recording. The only
connection I craved, the only friends I thought I had
lived in that endless broken hiss. That's when I was
sent to ritual psychiatric hospital. They called it a psyche
valve temporary whole observation only, but I stayed for three years.
I remember the hospital, damp walls, buzz and lights that
sound in the air like you will always standing near
a speaker playing a frequency just outside your hearing range.
I remember the staff. Everyone wore white except for one.
She had a coat too, but hers was in medical.
No stethoscope, no clipboard. She never wrote anything down. She
just asked questions. Do you hear them in order? Do
the recordings change dependent on the room you're in? Do
they speak before something happened? She said her name was Danny.
I didn't know what she was. She wasn't like the
doctors or nurses I'd already met. She didn't carry a
chartway a badge. But somehow she was allowed to talk
to us, really talk to us about the things we
were hearing. I didn't understand what a psychiatric hospital was
back then, not really, but I knew one thing. I
wasn't the only one. There were others like me, others
who heard things, Others who were different, others who were special.
Danny also had a key to the wing they kept
locked after dark. The one with no name sometimes I'd
see her walking through the halls after midnight, all cassette
recorder in her hand, whispering into it like she was
documenting something no one else believed. She asked me once,
if the recordings know your name, Eli, what else do
they know? I answered gleefully. Someone finally believed me, believed us.
By then, the voices in the static were clearer than ever.
Back at the Force of Home, they always sounded distant,
like trying to hear someone through a tunnel or a
radio with bad reception. But here, at a richual, psychiatric
they were sharp, crisp, like they were right in the room.
At the time, I didn't understand what they were trying
to tell us, what they were trying to warn us about,
But when Danny asked her question, I didn't hesitate. I
was eager, because for once someone was listening. She always
spoke softly. In that room, it wasn't like the others.
No bright lights, no cameras on the wall, just an
old tape recorder on the table between us hers, the
same kind I'd seen flicker into life in the middle
of the night. Danny leaned forward, elbows on the table
and ask again, what are the voices saying Eli. I
looked out on my hands. They were ink marks on
my fingers again, three vertical lines. I didn't remember drawing them.
They're scared, I said quietly. She blinked the voices. I nodded.
They used to just talk, like, tell me their names,
ask questions, but now they're warning me. They said something's coming.
Her expression didn't change, but her hand moved slightly closer
to her recording. What did they say exactly? I squinted,
trying to remember. The words never stuck around long, but
the last few nights they started repeating. They said the
door opened soon, that something got through, that it's awake now,
and it remembers the sound of everyone. It touched, bread
caught so small, I almost missed it. Did they tell
you what it is? I shook my head. They don't
haul it anything, just it and they said it's not human,
not anymore. I leaned closer, lowering my voice. They said
you were close ones, that you almost found it, and
if you try again, it'll remember you. For a moment,
the room felt colder, not like a draft, but like
the ear had thickened. The tape recorder between us clicked.
Danny hadn't even touched it. Then it rewind itself, slowly
and loudly. Danny stated at it, her lips part and slightly.
That's that's not possible, She murmured, it's not even one.
The tape stopped, and then it played. But it wasn't
a wa kamvas station. It was her voice distorted out
of sync, words overlapping with themselves, like they were coming
from two timelines at once. This is Subject seventy one
communicating every door. It didn't mean like wrong, it would here.
She reached for the device, and the lights in the
room topped. The bulb above us burst with a crack,
showering faint sparks. The recording shut off. Neither of us
moved for a few seconds. My ears were ringing. Danny
stood up, her hands shaking uncontrollably. She turned off the
overhead power and quietly told me the session was over,
but I could still hear it under her breath as
she backed towards the door. They said wouldn't reach us.
After Danny left the room, I sat there for a while,
chest in silence. That's when it dawned on me that
it was silent ever since I started hearing the noise
silence really found me. I turned and realized that Danny
had forgotten to completely close the door. I waited. I
waited for what seemed like twenty minutes, but no one came.
I wandered the hallways, drawn by something. Not a voice
this time, but a sound, a low, repeated tone, like
a siren, buried in the walls. It led me to
the east wing. We weren't supposed to go there. No
one was half. The doors didn't have numbers. The wallpaper
peeled like old skin, and the light pictures hummed even
when they were off. But the door at the end
was open. Inside was a room I'd never seen before.
Equipment lined the walls, old computers, real to reel recorders,
broadcast and monitors. Very screens showed static except one. It
was playing a footage footage of me younger in a
hospital bed, screaming. Danny was at my side, whispering something
I couldn't hear. Another monitor showed her alone, sitting in
front of a microphone. This is Danny Faga Log entry thirteen.
We may have made contact Patient one four seven one
appears to be a carrier. Audio traces in his magnetic
field suggest foss dimensional imprinted. This shouldn't be possible. The
footage glitched, her voice doubled over itself, words distorted. It's
using her to transmit, excusing me knows. Then everything went black.
The sirens kicked in real, this time loud physical. The
lights shut off, emergency floodlands flickered, and then I heard
them screaming, not just the staff, not just patients, but everyone.
I remember running. I don't know how far. I don't
know what floor I was on, but I ended up
back at the interview room. Except it wasn't the same.
There were more kids in there now I knew some
of them. They were talking nonsense, tearing at their own skin.
The mark our mark was burned into their risk, like
it had been branded. I saw Danny in the hallway,
staring at something none of us could see. She turned,
reached out like she recognized me. Then the alarm hit
a new frequency, a pulse I remembered clutching my head,
blood from my nose, high pitched tone that borrowed straight
into the base of my skull. Danny dropped to the floor, convulsed,
and then she stopped moving. They called it an electrical failure.
A system wide malfunction that overloaded the East Way generators
and triggered a building wide evacuation. There were no fatalities reported,
no incident reports, no press. It never happened. I was
discharged two days later. No one talked about what happened,
not the staff, not the kids. They didn't even take
me back to the group where I came from, just
handed me a paperbag with my clothes, a new notebook,
and a packet labeled follow up service declined. I was thirteen,
and nothing made sense anymore. After that. I bounced around
foster homes, juvenile centers, a halfway house that smelled like
bleach and regret. I never stayed anywhere long. The jobs
didn't last. I'd flinch every time a radio turned on.
I couldn't stand elevators or hospitals, couldn't hear static without
the heir on my arms rising, and the voices gone
gone for years until one day they weren't. It was rare.
In the first time I saw her again, I was
outside the County office building, half hidden beneath the overhang,
talking to myself and humming, trying to stay quiet enough
that the street cameras wouldn't ping on, and then she
walked out, Danny, older, distant, polished, almost but something inside
me knew. I stepped forward, and she looked right through me.
But then something happened, so so that it took the
air right out of me. The noise, the static, the
voices were back. They were screaming like they had been
trying to reach me for years, and now, out of desperation,
they knew only one volume, the hum and the street
lamps above me, the pitch in the ear that bent sideways,
the sound of a tape recorded clicking on inside my head.
I didn't sleep that night. The noise was too loud,
and somewhere in that noise the message returned, the warnings
of something waking up again. I went to the woods
the next morning, to the place where Ridgewell Psychiatric Hospital
had once stood. No bag, no plans, just to close
up war and the sound of my name echo wins
from the trees. Whatever had started back then, whatever they
covered up, well, it isn't over, not for me, not
for Danny, and not for ridguell See. And Danny may
have triggered something she didn't know. Me, didn't remember Ridgeal
Psychiatric Hospital, didn't remember what we had almost found. Didn't
remember what she had become a part of, but the
recordings do, and they're playing again