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