Speaker 1: The cardboard box has been wedged into the far corner
of my guest room closet for almost fifteen years, beneath
a wrinkle stack of forgotten sweaters and a half unraveled
Halloween scarf. The box sits with a distinct weight of
something deliberately left alone. One corner dended it's lid. Some
bleach from decades in daylight on station shelves then shadowed
his since of that night I hawl it into the gloaming,
does plumme out my knees, protesting the effort more than
they did back at WKDL. In the silence, every miner
sound is magnifat the low hum of my refrigerator down
the hall, my own soft breathing. My hands hesitate at
the box flaps. A part of me expected the tapes
to have dissolved over the years, or for time to
have shifted something from themental within, maybe shrank their voices
or erased the unease he sends that clings to them.
But the boxes, as I remember, stenciled a w kdlocka
of two thousand and nine blocky black shop have faded
to ghostgray. Inside the scent of old paper, a stale
cigarettes and magnetic tape rises up. There's a stack of cassettes,
mostly Maxell and t DKA have positively labeled Jamie Blues,
its lash twenty post midnight requests, a log term test signal,
and a torn envelope with a scattering of yellow fan mail.
To night sleep is a memory. The ghost of the
last week at the station, which I never speak of,
even to Lizzie when she used to check in has crone, heavier,
decades of humming circuits, the late nights, and seven cups
of burned coffee have left me with the kind of
permanent static in my bones. Others might call this nostalgia.
I know better. There's comfort in rituals. I retrieve my
ancient workmen from the box, its foam, heavr and stiff
one air bespandashed with electrical tape flick and fresh batteries,
and select the tape marks simply Jamie Final Blues. The
machines motor protests, spooling the tape forward with a thrudy
war headphones in place, I lower myself on to the
edge of the guest bed, squinting in the dinners as
the wheels turn. For a time, nothing but his blank air,
the soft shudder of magnetic particles, then weaving through static.
Jamie's voice murmurs to life, good evening, blue lights. This
is Jamie coming to you from w k D L
your home for late night solace to Night's first track
of his tambo, all honey and late chift, fatigue, unlock
something sharp in my chest. I haven't heard him in years.
Beneath his greeting a thread of long, slow beats and truths,
faint regular out of tempo, with the easy blues gutar
bleeding through. At first, I think it's just h taped
to a gradition, a natural artifact. But the beats persists,
space precisely, cutting through the soft minor chords. When Jamie
lets the track breathe, dead air fills with a deeper strangeness,
almost under the tit's noise floor. Another voice, just a mutter,
as if someone's hiding in the static itself. It's so
faint I have to close my eyes concentrate in the
lays music noise, another voice that seems to hover just
outside comprehension. My handshake only slightly. For now. It's a
familiar tremor. I remember Jamie's last night at the station,
the way he lingered by the break room, knuckles white
around his batter at thermos for refusing to meet my eye.
I remember Marty, the station manager, calling at dawn when
Jamie didn't clock out, the police lights dancing beyond the
transmitted tower, sweeping the parking lot, fronzes that would never come.
I rewind the tape, straining to catch the barest fragments
between the tracks, in the gaps behind the music, the
beeps repeater code. Surely, if someone cared to notice, there
is an impression of voices then blended into the end
of midnight at the cross roads, a phrase that might
be a name, my name, or Jamie's time plattens. I
set the head phones aside and run my hand through
the box until I find the fan letter is envelope,
torn but legible, purse, not barely a week before Jamie vanished,
the scold note inside. Here are the only ones who
know I hear more than you think they are listening
to below a string of numbers in the sentence, nearly illegible.
Play it backward. It's all there so many things I'd
let myself forget, at least until now the tape seemed
to hum with anticipation. There seekers pressing against one another,
as if complicit in their own concealment. I'm not young
any more, but to night the unfinished business is louder
than the years. I thread through the next tape, the
urge sharpening from a nast to something else. Whatever Jamie
tried to show me, it's still waiting somewhere between the
music and the static. I press play in return for
the first time in years, to w kitd L. Before
the mystery, there was only the routine memory brings me
back and spoiling in reverse to the deep country dust
that always enveloped the station. W k DL sawd alone,
square cinder block, its paint the color of spilled coffee
and broken promise on the sliver of forgotten highway. Car
had lights might pass out front, but mostly it was
the relentless dock feels gone to see, pressing clothes and
tend a spiking skyward like a warning. I pulled my
battert to Dan into the rutted lot at nine fifty six,
engine clicking as it cooled under the glow of the
one reliable security lamp. The air always smelled of summer
hay and nozone, as though the towers lol Hum had
its own weather system. If Jamie's krr was still there
that rosterabuke were three bumper stickers and a crack windsheld,
I knew I was on time. Inside the station was
a world depart The front office bristled with neglected filing cabinets,
an empty display for a Djay of the month metals
nunnawoarded since two thousand three, and a trophy case devoted
mostly to dead flies. The lawn linoleum hallway sloped toward
the control rooms. I always constant at the supply closet,
where Gerald's cart perched amid coils of cable and a
collection of creasy tools. Gerald himself, the night shift maintenance man,
was rarely seen, but often felt his critic. Notice in
shop had posted everywhere warning do not rewire booth three
or astro as gusterisk waves are not friendly. Asterrois gasterisk
in all caps. Lizzie the Intern would sometimes camp by
the coffee machine Herbert's in, peering into battered laptop as
if expecting government agents at any moment. Her laugh was contagious,
but her fixation on radio conspiracies made everyone elsewherey, especially
when she suggested our frequency could be a bachel for
more than music. Mardy, our station manager, was a relica
Warr's mustache man, allergic to change and stubborn about keeping
us on a m even his listenership plummeted. He shuffled
through after the apum news, checking logbooks and asking always
if the transmit a hump seemed hotter than normal. Tonight,
my shift began at ten Pums Shop, spelled by Jamie.
Our hand of us were brief, a lean in the doorway,
a half smirk from Jamie as he spun out of
his chair, sharing private jokes about the ghost in Boothouan
or the supposed midnight audience of truckers and insomniacts. Seamie
was a study and contradiction, wiry, with wild calls always
escaping his head, fond scars around his finger nails from
nervous speaking. His playlists were erratic old gospel, one night
turky sic fook the necks, always with hidden themed songs
about crossing over. He once winked his love for the oddum,
the forgotten, to find the light shift to nights for
those who can't sleep, he'd say, too softly for the mic.
Alone at the controls, the world seemed to flatten into routine.
I'd read the ad slowly, savoring the odd poetry in
Otto's feed, and see up and all night o'er the
fade and jingle for a king's pharmacy where the knight
never ends. I'd line up records vinyl mostly a CD
player only half functional, double chick transmit of meters, and
mark every action in the bat of green Lockbrook. The
station at night was lonelier than any church, a hiss
of live hair and crackle of vinyl. The only constant company.
Moss battered themselves, tobliving against the exteriors Judi or glass.
The silence outside felt absolute. Inside the station was its
own drifting island, afloat upon layered static. Every so often
Lizzie's sneakerd shuffle would pass outside the booth. Sometimes she'd
leave me a fresh cup of metallic over brewed coffee.
Once a shift, the phone would stutter to life. Ninety
percent of calls cross wires forks asking for a free
dog night on mis style Pete's orders. But there were
stranger messages left as voicemails, indistinct voices requesting songs that
barely existed, or muttering short clit sentences, sniffets of other
conversations half swallowed by static. Those always made me uneasy.
Marty waved it off as cross lines. Maybe somebody with
a shot with hammeringscrewing around. Jamie more than anyone, thrived
on the strangeness. He lived for it. In fact, after
midnight during his set, he'd sometimes had his own echoing
reverbor pitch songs down to make a collar shiver. He claimed,
our frequency hit a run note, but reality at once
it passed to him. He called this the slipshift. At
first I thought it was a joke. Then there were
the knights. He lingered, staring out into the unbroken blackness
past a parking lot, pausing mid sentence in his log enters,
did you hear that? He'd ask. By then the moment
had passed. Gerald when he surfaced, left gold notes in
the transmitter closet warning of voltage spikes, or would slip
into just cables while muttering, you keep the waves happy,
they keep you. Despite all this, our routine sustained us
nights stacked a top nights, songs blending into each other
at waking me at random intervals, with nothing in particular
out of place. I treasured the rhythm, flipped the record,
led to fader answered the phone once on a dare,
Jamie and I tried to see who could build the
stranger's playlist without losing the audience. He always won. There
is a specifical loneliness as for anticipation to such work
you present for everyone and no one. A storm crept
over the fields, the well trunk to the skip of
the stylus and the amber bulb of yon air sign
any unease, every odd crackle or line of garble speech
felt exaggerated by the iro. Sometimes that edge was comforting,
Sometimes it lapped at the corners of dread. I can
still name every weey complaint we fielded. The farmer who
claimed our station dropped in and out at the same
minute each night only when he set his radio a
top a particular window ledge, the woman who swore to whom
show played in reverse in her kitchen but not anywhere else.
Jamie laughed it off, as did I. Still in the
pitch black, I wondered whose voices invaded IROs and whether
we ever truly broadcasted alone. The first time I noticed
the pattern, it was deep in the present, sitting alone
with the headphones, pinching my scal reviewing Jamie's final blues
taper and stuttering midnight on. The beeps pulled at me, soft, regular,
almost soothing in their repetition, never overlapping with the schedule
that breaks the station id. I trot at the interval's
bell ringing regular, but each shee could subtly different, complex
enough not to be the result of cross talk or
failing relay. I loaded a second tape, Jamie's slip shift requests,
dated three nights prior, and the beep's surfaced again, further
down in the spectrum, barely oldible, beneath the notice Russello
drag number. Here they skipped in threes and fives, syncopating
in a deliberate fashion. Dizzy with focus, I spun through
the tape, rewinding to listen, pushing volume and trouble both.
During one quiet moment, a long before the station jingle,
a murmur or emerged, brushed across the ground in the
hess words if words could be under water, I shivered
my name or Jamie's by then it was hard to
tell an easy I went searching for an old cream
broadcast Love Eyed stash in the box routine enters everywhere
twelve son, the thrill is gone a twelve ten ins
or it ad copy k an entire nowhere, Not even
in the margins was there a note about the beeps
or coded transmissions. I checked the coal logger, just the
usual misconnections and the late night ramble of a lonely world.
Then buried in the back of Jamie's outbox. On an
old Windows backup disc labeled a WKDL Jamie drafts, I
found a half wretten email to me that had never
been sent. Saw it again tonight ways got rough you
ever hear numbers in the static. His phrasing jumps around,
but there is a frantic edge. Mardy says, ignore it,
but some of us hear more right. Some day I
think they'll want to speak. He never finished the message.
The end is just a string of random, out of
place numbers, and then nothing. Something in my chest tightened,
a memory resurfacing Jamie and the break crom near the end,
wild Eyed complaining about phantom signals. I told him kindly
as I could to get some rest that overnight radio
always frayed your mind with shadows, he'd half laughed. It's
not the loneliness, it's what comes through when you leanin
to listen. I didn't understand then, maybe deep down I
didn't want to. My pen hovered. I noted the first
significant time stamp, one forty four am, the same moment.
The beats appeared in both tapes. The time repeated across logs,
never shifting by more than a second over three nights.
That kind of precision doesn't happen by chance. Determined, I
set the tapes aside and began cross referencing. Jamie's locks
half scrolled in his jacket's kirked my own cleaner enters
right after, searching for any sign that these beaps and
voices might line up with real events. The more tapes
I played, the less I could dismiss it. Patten was deliberate,
waiting to be found. Most of the old cassettes sound
just as I remembered, the scratching static a velvet blues
guitar and Jamie's warm practice cadence. But for every late
night's show of his I review, never in the drive time,
never on daytime, playlist thus coadd beats through a true, unfailing, relentless.
I pile old station logs across my table, flecking through
each page with growing obsession. On the night of August twentieth,
two days before Jamie vanished, I find something beneath the
tightly ordered playlist. A rush pencil scribble runs along side
the meter readings power serge one forty four, two nine,
two forty seven. Ask Jerrel why my pulse quickens? I
remember Jerrel, rarely seen, but always present in traces, his
utility belt, the smell of burned sawder in the law.
Beneath Jamie's handwriting, Gerrel's and you. The hand has left
interference transmitter ran hot. Don't ness with ground ring. Elsewhere
in the tipok I have two old apece stand out
among the batter jacket, one mot with a culing sigil
that looks like broken radio waves, penn and fading silver ink,
the other with the jagged ex Tucked inside the first
is a slip of paper. Don't record, just listen. The
handwriting is nervous, press so hard it newly cuts the
thin paper. I recall Jamie making jokes about finding curse final,
but this is no joke. Did we ever play these
on air? I don't remember. I failed to supress a
creeping sense of unreality. As I continue, there's another uncent
draft from Jamie, save the two twenty five AM on
the night before his disappearance. He starts out referencing some
one in the parking lot saw him again, saying, black coat,
headlights off in the service lot, just watching. Lizzie says,
don't worry, but I see him most nights after two.
The message cuts off half way through a sentence about
courtive messages in the left channel between ats, turning now
to the station's digital visitor look kept for insurance reasons,
but rarely enforced. I scroll through the weeks before Jamie vanished.
Most knights no entries, but three times during his shifts
there was a wreckor back door open, slashed close too
while being ore service hall motion detected two forty five m.
No staff schedule, no explanation in official shift roster, and
always dismissed as probably jerreal, even when Jerrold's own sign
in is absent. I decide to reach out. I opened
my laptop and fire and email to Lizzie. I remind
her of a late night stat puzzles Jamie dropped about.
I ask, has she ever noticed the beeping pattern? Did
she know about the parking lot visitor? Her reply when
it comes as brief, heard something odd, thought it was
a busted Really only ever happened to Jamie show I
think got worse the last week before than stopped completely
two sentences. But inside that stopped completely is something un
set The tapes continue to unsettle. One night, desperate for clarity,
I queue up the infamous slips of tape, hoping for
some one dane technical floor or failing transformer, a colon hookser.
But at to ninim the static deepens, a rap calling
up from underneath a slow blues number. At the edge
of perception comes a voice so faint it might be
an odd a fact of sleep deprivation. Help me. I
rip the headphones off. Hard pounding sleep becomes impossible, and
caught between guilt and fascination, between a wish to let
him rest and the sense that Jimmie reached out, failed
and left me holding the thread. The moilis in the
more patterns creeping from the periphery. It's never once, never random,
always in the little eyres, always under his show, always
settling in the dead space, nobody listens to unless they're
desperate for company or warning. One night, as dew fogs
my window, when I sit hunched over the boxes, a
real as if started charting everything times, songs, code, transmitter jumps,
even atmospheric shifts. My home feels contaminated by the stations,
goes signals. Even now, I keep returning night after night,
determined I'll find something that spells out not just what happened,
but why. Thus, when the box gives out its final secret,
the tape that contains the last shift, my hand holds
Jamie's final broadcast, and in this moment, the act of
listening becomes an invocation, whether I wish for it or not.
It is on this final tape the one mark to
Jamie final blue slash eight in his twenty two and
ring with the nervous line impen that everything changes. I
wait until midnight, Headform's press two, tight to my ears,
A grow an ache in my jaw, and load the tape.
As Jamie's familiar sign unrolls up blue lights. Wherever you are,
You're never alone. At w kdel the sequence begins to unfold.
The beeps which I now expect to seem agitated, even insistent,
Arriving in a rigid, almost militant cadence for the first time,
I bewed up my old network, open a terminal, and
start typing out every lawn in short intervals. They occur
hand sweaty breath jacket. I'm no code breaker, but even
I recognize the pattern, a dash dotted language of halted urgency.
It takes me several passes cross referencing the lopsided rhythm
before certainty creeps in. The beeps Amore's coat. Jamie right
under the music, under the noses of any one who
cared to listen, was sending in so o s working
line by line, my pulse thrumming as if there were
still operating the booth. I had to code the message
Hans trembling so fiercely, and nearly missed the reveal. There
here not staff booth. Three shock sharpens my mind. My
chest grapes the four as I lutch to the box
and dig out the station security summaries from that week.
I zero in on the time stamps, each a door
open warning and brief flicker of the exterior parking lot
camera lines up exactly with the curded beeps, the grainy
print out shore only blurry stills, one possibly a figure
cat mid turn distorder just past the glass doors. Then
a blurt of white static rite as the time hits
two nigh and the screen's margins forced out in strange interference.
In the background of the tape, the music seems to receive,
as if retreating a pill through water. Suddenly, following the
code burst, a second, hurried burst of numbers repeats, not
a song cue, not a colophone in, but something relentless
and intentional, a string of digits, possibly coordinates, possibly an invitation.
The voice, almost certainly Jamie's, cracks and distorts, as if
it's fighting a tidal force. The pieces scay together, dread
blooming like a fever behind my rips. Jamie had noticed
what the rest of us chose to overlook. Every coded burst,
every irregularity in the transmitter lined up with documented power surges,
just where Gerald's hands gold notes won something round hot,
precisely when security glitches suggested unauthorized visitors. What if these
weren't random, What if the hot transmitter was never just
a maintenance issue, but a deliberate boost a moment that
allowed some frequency, something or somewhat to punch through burrows
that should have held. I stare at the scold messages,
the security images, the swirling lines occurred. My breath freezes.
Jamie wasn't just recording oddities or teasing out anomalies for
the fun of it. He was trying to send a warning,
routed beneath the music through the nighttime static, one last
call for help, buried inside to routine. Nobody checked on
the final lock, right before everything ends. He writes, if
anybody hears this Booth three is compromised, not staffed, I'm
not sure it's even listening any more. With a growing
certainty and a deep tremor of fear, I understand the
station are batter That island was never just playing music
for the lost. It was being used, maybe by someone
or something that I picked Jamie out as the only
one who noticed something that needed the music, the repetition,
the ritual of night and static, and signal to masket's
real purpose. Jamie's lost courted message of their here rings
in my head as I pulled the tape from the machine,
sow what slick across my palms? Whoever or whatever came
for him was never just a voice in the static.
I am left with only the tapes, my incomplete log sheets,
the whiff of ozon that now seems to permeate my
little house, and the certainty that I am listening to
the ruins of something deeper than just a vanish man.
And for the first time, I'm truly afraid to press
play again. I set the tape down, a thin sheen
of sweat holding to my opulep. Though the house is
chilled against a muggy august, The words and the cotesu
behind my eyes. Booth free, not staff. I drug in
a stading bread and worked steady my hands enough to
organize the spread before me. The yellowed logs found letters
tapes in their cases, each one marked with a date,
a song reference, or a nervous sounding and joke. The
clotter takes on new gravity, now, now a suggestion of
hidden signals pulsing beneath the ordinary. The house, outside my
little circle of lamp light falls away. I'm not in
my living room. I'm back in w kd L's control booth,
familiar dials and worn out faders under my finger tips.
The abroad been with that low, uneven humlet sometimes made
your teeth ache if you spend too long in a building.
I swear I can still smell the old, heavy crackle
of ozone and overheated dust, old molt sunk so deep
in the carpet that no chemical ever scrubbed it out.
I rub my eyes hard enough to see purple squares
behind my eyelids, and strap back into the work the
way I did back then, when the only option was
to keep spinning the wheel. I dig out Jamie's logs
from the last month. Each page reveals its own mood.
His handwriting grow and jagged the closer it gets to
the volgarst, as if his nerve stretched tighter across the days.
Some nights are blank, the log folled in SEB with
sketches looping radio waves or lines I can't parse. One
page abruptly ends in the middle of the playlist, with
only two forty seven. It's here then, a thick scrubble
blocking out what follows. My pulse stodters two forty seven.
It's the same time echoed in those doors. Alert's the
same ire that keeps cropping up in the beeps and
in Gerrel's warnings. I remember how during weeks of double shifts,
I blamed any oddity on exhaustion that humming and saw
me a contensity that shapes the world into something both
sharper and more dream like. But this, this is something calculated.
Shamie was following a system, noting the frequencies and marking
the times. My body aches as years of memory rise up,
and I remember how near the end he barely joked
any more. How sometimes after wrapping his show, he double
locked the booth door with handshaking and mutter never alone, right,
not really? That nervous energy seeps into me. Now I
turn from the papers and retrieve that X marked you'll
be from the stack at sleeve sticky with old recidue
label long since lost. I don't own a working turntable,
but I run my fingers over at tracing the jagged
marker strokes he left behind. They don't record, just listen.
The paper inside warns again. Was it just a private
joke or a desperate attempt to draw attention without stirring
Marty's suspicions? Behind my hesitation sits an instinct boorn not
of logic, but of long nights in the booth, these
odd objects on to try to stare warnings, bread combs,
calls for connection from some unburied in interference. I hunt
through my phone, scanning photographs of the old station for clues.
Never before did I notice the folding cher set just
outside Booth three in the group shots, always unoccupied, always
just out of sight. Pattens revealed themselves now that I'm
listening for them. Jamie wasn't imagining things, he was noticing.
Maybe it drove him out past the safe edges of reason,
but he was right to notice. Another thought claws at me.
The so called visited The figure in the long coat,
noted by Jamie, caught only in security sistants flickers. I
remember my owner knees. Atime, I stepped out for a
cigarette and the back steps and caught a glimpse of
movement past the tower, too far away to call out,
too quick to identify. Everyone brushed it off as a
service contractor a late arriving delivery, or sometimes just nerves.
Even Gerald's notes in Retrospects seem less like technical ramblings
and more like oblique warnings. Waves are not friendly. They
don't trust the meter At one forty four let the
frequency pass through. Do not return call. With growing dread,
I lay the fact Jamie hearing not in static security
alerts at odd Eyre's possible Morse code transmissions embedded in music.
A figure no one claims passing through the lot transmit
a running hot then cooling abruptly, all converging at two
forty seven, always just before his show ends for the night.
I glanced at the clock. It's only twelve thirty two.
My own home feels less certain by the minute. Every
wind gust of presents, every floor creak a consequence. My
laptop pings a response at last from Lizzie. She's brief
but direct. Looked up the logs. You asked me to
check your senses allogit. The doors shouldn't open those nights.
Also at the relay in Booth three kept tripping during
Jamie's last week. I always thought someone was inside beneath
her signature. She adds a link to an old w
kd L playlist dark I've one I've forgotten for years.
I clicked through and listened to samples Jamie uploaded degraded audio,
mostly the same patterns. Some tracks sound normal, others warp
when played at double speed, revealing behind them the faint
exhale of someone whispering a sibilant age. The mic shouldn't
have captured fuse bumps. I'm not sure my mind is
fabricating half of it, or if these are genuine artifacts,
shadows left in the circuitry by too many voices, too
many sleepless nights, and maybe something else too. I text Lizzie, impulsive, abrupt,
you ever see anyone strange at the booth? After ires
real answer, please, She doesn't reply right away. Instead, I
pour a second cup of coffee, the mug trembling faintly
in my hand. By now, our rhythm has set in.
Play a tape, listen for the beats, cross check with logs,
matched security records, scan for times, attempt to decode brown meat.
Snippets of fan latters, requests in complete playlists, and announwered
emails build a nest of obsession. Most normal, some I'm
truly odd, a child's handwriting. I hear the music in
the dark. One I'm not near my radio. Is that normal?
I read it again, not near my radio. I dig
into the bottom of the fan mail stack and pull
out Maddy's old members. Mostly policy some tight, some hastily
scribbled during overnight phone ends with corporate. I noticed one
I'd skinned before, now striking in its directness. No one
uses Booth three alone after to him tell Gerald news
full power, isolated and Baseline Rosette last summer, Wheely malfunctioned
during request, show fixed for next season and look after ires.
The memo is indeeded, but the handwriting match is Marty's
pre retirement skull from two thousand seven, the year before
Jamie started at w kd L. Everything circles Booth three.
Even now, The hair at the nape of my neck
prickles when I think of it. The one booth with
a second narrow window facing the lot, always a little
too coal, always just out of range of the main
security camera. The only place at the station you couldn't
hid the others if they called your name in the hallway.
Lizzie's reply comes through, startling me one line, only her
breathing outside Booth three once no one there but me
and Jamie. We both left early that night, Remember, I
do remember Jamie silent on the drive home, refusing to
pop under the station lights, checking constantly in the review.
I'd assumed he was just warmed in, But now I
see it differently. That night sit seem I got like
an unresolved cord. With the clock ticking forward. I line
up all the pieces before me, scanning for links I
might have missed. I pull up a public SEC database,
searching for anything out of place during those final weeks.
The station's engineering flags, transmit our licensing anomalies. Nothing that
fits until I stumble on a brief maintenance file scanned
into a government system years ago. W kdel of the
night transmit of voltage spikes, cause are known. No scheduled
maintenance for set logs at two fifty four m. Interference
suspected but source undetermined. The blocks say nothing else, No
official follow up, no troubleshooting report from Geral, whose handwritten
warnings stop appearing after that date. Did he quit? Was
he fired? Or did he sense? As Jamie hinted that
to ask too many questions as to risk getting lost
with the answers, something sharp and half remembered. Noase at me.
I rifle deeper for the original stations schematics thread boblue
prints marked up with Geral's blocky script BOO three is
an unusual notation. The grounding loop not shared with the
rest of the building, tied directly to a tower RelA
unique to w KDEL, a redundant system, according to Gerald,
installed for its special segments back when the station's reputation
for strange request shows began. I don't bridge it. His
note reads, circle twice, Let it float. Let whatever wants
out go out. I close my hands into Fie, then
force myself to breathe. It's the slow, methodical procedure that
helps her rill a cabot from running automation by hand.
When the fade is stuck and you had to slow
down or risk killing the signal. In my chest, something thrums.
Is it guilt or something older, something called up by
the act of listening itself again. I turned to the
fan mail addities cott in decads of cheap on the loops.
One card stands out a warbly, slantid block print to Jamie,
you play the songs that let the night in and
on the road outside your window, see you soon. There's
no return address. The postmark is smudged, stamped on a
day with heavy ray. Now remember, because the transmitted nearly
blue during a thunder storm that August. That night, Jamie
ran late covering for a sick coworker and didn't stop
by the office. The car's message sinks in among the
road outside your window. A memory comes, vivid and unbidden.
I'm in the booth, time blurred, near the end of
a shift. Jamie's show is winding down. There's a blues
truck drifting out across the static. The sword of song
that feels endless, but is only four minutes long. I'm
prepping out, copy dialed into whatever menial task keeps you
awake after thirty. Then through the glass, I see him
at the whole way in, pressing his face to the
second booth window, looking out through the night at something
I can't see. He isn't moving, barely breathing. When I
knock on the glass, he jumps and spins, as if
waking from a dream. Later I'll find an unsent email
in his drafts, dated the same night. Felt like someone
else was in the booth watching me watch them. Not
sure if it was reflection or something more. That is
the image I can't quite shake as I pour through
the debris of our former lives, seventeen years removed. Jimmy
call between the glass and the black not certain which
side he's on. No matter how much evidence I pile,
the question thickens in my mind. What precisely was using
w kd l's late shift to reach out? Was it
a person as by tapping the ionosphor edge, as Lizzie
once theorized, or was it something older, lest knowable that
required music and human repetition as part of its broadcast ritual.
I begin to catalog every anomaly, drawing lines between shift
logs found, male postmarks and send emails, and Jamie's beeping
morse code. When I lay it up by hand the
old fashioned way, the answer takes shape. Every spike, every
coated burst happens at times when the radio audience is lost,
the music most forgotten, the field round the station most silent.
There's a kind of invocation to it, a pattern of
inviting something to cross the gap. And Jamie, more than
any of us, stood too close to the open frequency.
As the IROs drag gun and condensation turns my water
glass lick in the outside, I find myself fighting a weary,
nervous agitation. There is a sense that if I listen
long enough, some new message will arrive, distinct from all
the others. Personal unmistakable that if I tune in just right,
the beeps will spell out my own name, and the
doors that flicker open and close, and the old security
log will be opening even now, just down the hall.
I set the decoder aside and sit quietly. Music off
a line, a hush to engulf me again. My heart
is loud in my ears. The isolation is nearly total.
I imagine for a moment, a presence outside my thin
kitchen window, just out of sight, waiting to be led
in the same presence Jamie feared, or found or began.
The titch remains scattered on my coffee table. There are
plastic shells catching lamp light. I fill myself, drifting back
into the memory of the last time Jamie and I
exchanged more than a handful of words, the penultimate shift.
Not long before he vanished, we sat in the crumped hallway,
sharing a waning thumbers of coffee, trading tired platitude about
the Johncad copy and the low hump from outside. Without preamble,
he asked, very quietly, you ever feel like someone's waiting
for you to finish your shift before they start theirs?
At the time, I just smiled and made a stupid joke.
Now reevaluating the question, I wonder if he meant something literal,
not a DJ, not Gerald or Lizzie, someone else who
took up position and began their own show only after
the human's clockter I show no one but the static attended.
The depth of Jenney's desolation is certainty that something was
whispering just for him haunts me. I know now that
paranoia can be a reasonable response to noticing Patten's others
choose to ignore. I recall that last night the final
entry in his log. If you're reading this, I'm still here.
Some are play it backward. It's all there be three.
A chill overtakes me the sense that some part of
Jamie remains embedded, not just in the tapes, but in
the patents, the repetitions, the things that never made sense
and so were deemed unimportant. He had built himself a
library of evidence, which, like a forgotten frequency, can only
be received at odd iris after the world's guard has dropped.
As Stolen threatens to gray the sky, I force myself
to rest, not from fatigue, but from the overwhelming presence
of something trying even now to push through the static
I stack the tapes and papers in neat piles, hands trembling,
resolve only sharpened. If Jamie's warning is real, then I
believe now that it is. Then the only way out
is further in. Before I sleep, I write a note
of my own and slip it into the box where
if I mail used to be. If you find this,
listen closely. Don't record, just listen. Some patterns are only
safe when you stop trying to capture them. Then I
sink into an unrest that feels like listening with my
ass closed, my mind attuned to the possibility that something,
someone might yet try to contact me from the other
side of the frequency. Above all, I understand, playing a
tip again is not just nostalgia, not idle curiosity, but
an act that completes the circuit Jamie started the night
he vanished fifteen years ago. Daylight comes thin in colors,
barely dilude in the taste of ozen that lingers on
my tongue. But I know when the next night comes,
I'll fead the tape again, and in a hush before
the music, I'll be waiting, ready to hear whatever Jamie
needed someone to finally receive. When daylight ekster my blinds.
It brings only the exhausted taste of failure and shreds
of silence. I don't remember falling asleep, only the jarring moment.
I wake, with my cheek against my kitchen table, the
old station lagitude into my skin. I can't say how
long I've dozed, but the tapes are still there, neat piles,
like tombstones, lined across the wood grain. A faint ache
blooms across my jaw as I sit up. My house
too quiet, swallows every movement, No birds, just the intermittent
tick of the fridge and the push of my own
pulse against my ears. I test my limbs, making sure
every joint is still under my command. When I rise,
I half expect old bones to rebel, but they move.
Gravity at least hasn't changed for a long moment, I
pretend nothing is different. I fill the kettle, study the
water as if it could tell my fortune said it
to Boyle. The urge to turn away, to show everything
as harmless. Nostalgia is almost overwhelming. I have errands, the
car needs all. A neighbor's dog is barking itself. Horse
too lots over. These are the mundane shaped my life
once took. I stare across my kitchen to the tapes
and the list of coated tines on the sheet of newsprint.
Even in daylight, it draws the eye. Nothing about last
night's revelation fields washed out. I approached the table, laid
deliberate palm atop the most heavily notiative Jimmy's last show,
though final blues. I sensed the edges of yesterday, culling
at my mind, sharper now stripped of sleeps, interfering gauze
my morning rituals, rinsing a mug, thumping grunds into the
French press. Mundane is dot. Don't calm me. My hands
only stopped shaking once I pressed the mug to my lips.
I drink, burn my tom and scan the log for
any hint that it could all be coincidence. It can't
be free More's code parwasurges, unexplained, door entries, a figure
in the nigh. Even the fan may are the suspect
for note from some one who heard more than you think.
There's a logic to the unease chick cut from the
negative space of every overlooked night. I try imagining what
Jimmy felt walking to his car after the shift, glancing
over his shoulder. There's more clarity now, he was documenting
fighting the urged surrender to whatever press from the other side.
He was alone and right both. The phone vibrates for
a heartbeat. I hope for Lizzie, but it's only a
spam call. After lingering with the dial for a moment,
a cave and call her anyway, letting the ring run
as I watched the sun ride up, burnishing the eastern horizon.
Voice mell as always, you've reached Lizzie. Radio silence is golden.
Leave it. After the beep, I hang up without a message.
The static feels thicker. I imagine thus Smote swirling in the
slants of weak light, fragments of sund trying to reach me.
Though the first time since the tapes enter my house,
I feel watched it, not by the pass but by
something else. The sense of pressure grows throughout the day,
settle at first, then underne bull. My skin prickles at random.
The back door rattles, though the sky is clear, and
any time I move past the closet where the tapes
once hit, I pause, almost waiting for a reply. I
keep the volume low on everything TV, radio, kettlesteam trying
not to miss whatever else is reaching. There is no
comfort in routine any more. Even the shape of my
home feels altered, slightly warped, as if I'm seeing it
from a slant I never noticed before. Afternoon brings the
urge to act, to finish what Jamie began, or at
least put a period to the endless lipses he left behind.
I gathered the logs a digital recorder, charged the wapman's batteries,
and start pulling up all contacts my fingers. However, over
the string of numbers Jamien coded. Is it a message
meant for some one else? Or a bread from my
meant to follow? I copied them down again, incoleading into
the grooves of my wood grain table. One number sticks
out an odd frequency, not w K d l's, followed
by time to forty seven m, the precise spike documented
by locks and fine complaints. The eye of the booth's
recorded voice always seemed to fracture into static. Is there
in the FCC maintenance flag in Gerald's warnings, I circle
it in red, Unable to help myself Jamie's attempts to
reach someone, me, anyone, were deliberate, built on layers of repetition.
His handwriting trails from certainty, interfere and then to a
final dense cluster, as if squeezing the last of his
nerve into the text. The closer I read, the more
it seems like he's beckoning me or someone past the
last safe boundary, as thus creeps through the windows. I
finally call another old contact, Bill Harper, to form a
regional tech who retired before w k d l's gear
was fully digital. His was the first friendly face I
I met in a business, a man who could quote
any blues lyric and had a soft spot for under
dog frequencies. I only half expect him to pick up
He answers on the third ring for s gravelly, but
amused you gone back to chasing ghosts, kid. I don't
answer him directly. Instead, I pitch him the question this
old habit, half casual, half confessional, Bill, you ever see
cooded beats running under music, midnight show, old tapes more
spuried in the carrier. There's a hitch in his breath,
long pause. Not by accident? You got a tape I stammer, Yes,
describe the situation with each detailed pressed exact only in
midnight hour's power surges, and the codes that never made
the load book. He grows sober fast. You digitize it,
he asks, you can get me a file. I might
know a thing or two. As we talk, I hear
shuffling and the scrape of a lighter. Listen. In the
Cold War, some folks sent number stations over commercial bends,
even paid for late slots to high short wave covert
traffic help. We used to run oddburse when the Feds
wanted no records, but that was always planned, and never
slept in the margins, never under the music. El's got
us on this. I keep things tight. Not many the
djaed outlogged. Most of it's gone, may be more. Don't
dig on your own, not at night, Bill Gruff's, but
I promise a copy, pushing the file over to his
email with tramping fingers as we hang up. His parting
words linger. Most ghosts on tape don't mind being played.
Sometimes they mind being found. Evening falls fast, the kitchen
grows chill, and each tick of the clock grows thick
is blood. The tape's weight full of pressure. It feels
as if the whole house is charged, humming with residual voltage,
holding its breath for the next movement. I cannot stop.
I set up my old portable receiver by the window,
tuning w k d l's frequency through the station's been
dead for years. The scanner crackles all static, no music,
just as I expect. But as I sit waiting, locking
the urge to listen, deeper returns. With my eyes closed,
A press play and allowed the wave of his to
spill out. At midnight, Bill calls back, his voice clipped
and nervous. I ran your file through my old analzi.
There is a carrier burst, all right. You got something
pickaback in your signal, not normal static, not blue leave
through from another station. And the morse that's not for ratings.
That's a signature, A handshakes, something that wants to say
it's here. Kid. You'll want to watch your back. I
try to laugh it off, his old superstition, but the
unease only coils tighter. What about the spikes, I ask, anything?
Thill sighs distant. Now, spikes like that with a low
power aim shouldn't reach half a mile. But you he
cuts off. Check your locks against solar conditions, tropospheric acting,
those aren't Rhandam that someone making an opening using your
station as a door? He hesitates. Don't replay the last
tape to night, he says, not unless you are ready
for whatever comes through. The line goes dead in a
way that feels final as a clock calls to two
Zeroam I realize I have a choice spelled of views
of habit and betrayal, to keep the tape coiled tight,
or to play it through and invite the rest of
whatever haunted Jamie into my home. The urge to know
it weighs any remnant of caution. I thread in the
last set, mute the lights, and set my recorder running.
If there is anything left to understand, it lies past
the line across the tables of ghosts in the radio band.
At midnight, I double check the locks in weight, no
stretched to breaking for the time to come round, half
hoping nothing will happen, half treading confirmation that Jamie's warning,
his final desperate reaching, was always meant for someone like me.
I two thirty, Fatigue and eagerness commingle until I'm unsure
if I'm awake. The house creeks, and a warm, slow
static fills my ears on awhim. I step out the
back and scan the street. Far off a pair of
headlights crawls pass without slowing, swallowed by tree lined dark.
I check every window. It's clear, yet the tapes on
my table look disturbed, shifted between the careful stacks, as
if some one's rifled them in my absence. I searched
the house for draft or intruder. Nothing but one envelope
fan nail unopened to lies on its side, facing up
with the same slantid block print as before. Are you
still listening? The urge to flee hit strong, chased by
the realization it's far too late for that. If I
run the signal, the story, the force that took Jamie,
whatever waits beyond the sound will follow. It's an old
logic and finis storas don't stay buried, and open doors
eventually invite entry, whether you intended them or not. As
the Minihan lands on two forty seven, my receiver shivers
and the static flexes deeper are rhythm pulsing under the hiss.
There is a tone, three notes, structured deliberate. I draw
in breath crossway arms over the table and press play.
The world narrows to the width of headphone drivers, and
the warble of a blues erfof dances just above the
threshold behind the music. The coated beeping returns harder, now insistent.
My pens getters as I turns, grab hands no longer steady.
I whisper the words scread by Jamie, willing myself to
hear without being hurt. But in the breath between the
second and third refrain, a thin voice walks out of
the ether. You hear us, Now they will too. The
tape garbles, My receiver shrieks, overloaded for an instant, the
living round dims. The bulb of her head buzzes, then fades.
The house stiffens, cutted by a pressure drop that makes
walls vibrate in the air tas metallic. The tape spoils faster.
They hiss, mutates more than hiss. Now the music is wrong,
a blue scale that never resolves. I look up hard,
juttering in the hallway. A shadow brushes the corner of
my vision. Something passes by my closed door as motion.
Un Kenny, no waight, just flicker. The fridge hums, then
cuts every appliance with the cloth flickers two forty seven.
It's as if the entire house ticks in synchrony with
a broadcast from somewhere unsecene. My phone lights up color
i'd blinking and none, then flatly cycling my own number,
I let it ring out. A message arrives, garbled audio,
a tune. I recognize cross Roads, the very one that
played before Jamie's last coded message. When I set the
phone side, it vibrates by itself, a rhythm that matches
the beeps on the tape. Its flat dampens my collar.
Something presses outside the window, now an impression of shape,
as though the blackness itself has thickened. Interested waiting, I
resist looking, focusing instead on the tape. The voice returns, layered,
almost in human. Play it back, listen, they're waiting. It
takes every reserve of wilter not eject the tape and
smash it. I want all at once to hear, not
to hear it, and do the last fifteen years in
surges in code. Instead, I hold the headphones tight as
the beeps stood out a new sequence, which I write down.
Hand shaking booth through door, open step inside. I stop breathing.
A crash in the hall way of photo frame, off
the wall or something heavier. I rise, legs and stable.
When I look around the corner, all is still no
open doors, and yet the impression lingers. Someone's just stepped through.
I think of the fading polari tucked in the evidence box,
depicting Jamie's stricken face, the night of his vanishing controls,
lit by the spectral green of the booth. I hurry back,
opening the box, expecting the photo to have shifted, o
the tapes to have rearranged. Nothing's utworthy changed she had
on the back of the polaroid, and news out of
digits has been pressed, indented with such force nearly tears
through two forty seven, not alone. As I hold the photo, shuddering,
the phone hums again a low wabble stat a cup
with my own recorded voice, simple from an old ud spot.
I listen. It is me saying the station's call sign,
but slurred out a phase. It ends with Jamie's force whispering.
Hear it. Yet every surface pulses with static, each tape
and peeper buzzing as if a low current is running
through the table top. I circle the kitchen knocking into
stewls and bracing myself against the wall. My home isn't
my own. There are presents that edges of pressure, not
physically felt, but inferred, like someone tugging at my thoughts
just beyond the visible. In desperation, had grabbed my recorder,
jam in a blank tape and set it to record
the room's silence and hum. The machine protests, but then
it takes wheels, turning, counting out the minutes. The air
grows cold, the window glass fogg despite summer thickness, and
at the moment the recorder's counter takes past to forty seven,
a rushaves weeps th rough a soundless wind that makes
every heat stand on end. The signal crests overwhelming music
and voice in all else. The beeping becomes rapid, urgent,
as if in answer to some question I cannot frame.
The next phrase emerges, recording isn't safe listen? Only listening
is opening. I scrabble for my phone, dialing belong instinct,
he answers, agitated, if you're broadcast, what the hell you're
transmitting from somewhere? The signal got a skip all the
way to my end, I'm hearing he breaks off. Not possible.
Did you wire into the old tower? My voice is hoarse.
I'm at home, only playing tapes. Bill curses, static fuzzing,
call ear carriers alive, getting bursts like nothing I've seen
since eighty nine. Does not local. Damn it, kid, stop
playing it. Cut it off before the line splits open
with white noise and all connection fails. My house is
a storm front, now shimmering at the edge of something imminent.
The old receiver wines feedback, screaming, then collapses into near silence,
just beyond the threshold of hearing. There is one last phrase,
beautifully clear, spoken over the tape by a voice that
part Jamie pots something else. Step outside and see who's waiting.
The ouse snaps to normal, The fridge resumes its rhythm.
The lights blink up to full power of digital clocks
stuttering to catch up, but nothing feels the same. My
body is ringing, alive, with the certainty that some boundary
has been crossed. A new envelope lies on my table,
not there a moment ago, its edge still warm as
if recently held. Hans trembling. I tear it open inside
a fan mail script, another set of numbers fifty one
point twenty three minus ninety eight point three to forty seven,
and a single poorer at this time, me sitting at
the table, I sunken, headphones on time, stump just now
Nausa punches through me, sweat forums icicles on my upper lip.
I stagger out to the window, scanning the street for
any sign of life, but it all appears still, save
for one car hiding two houses away, headlights off in
the driver's seat, a black coat silhouette, head lowered, unmoving.
The beeping resumes, this time from the tape still playing,
but also impossibly from the air itself, resonant as a
bone vibration. The house has become a lighthouse, and from
the static I realize I'm no longer the only one listening.
There is a call coming in, one sounding out through
the miles, another frequency, one I never wanted to answer.
The phone rings I pick up, unable to stop myself.
There is no voice, only the beep sequence now spelling
booth three. It's open, step in, then a click. I'm
not in control, my movements slow, inevitable. I gather the
logs and the tape, the wapman still running, my record
a humming. I slip on my shoes, as if pulled
by a leash of certainty. I pull the main tape,
the final blues from the player. At some level, I
know what I am about to do while split whatever
line I have walked for seventeen year, safe listener or
active participant, Jamie disappear because he kept the circuit unbroken.
Who is to say what you become if you finish
the loop? Outside the street smell strangely sweet like burnt
ozen and cut grass. With my keys in one hand
and all the evidence under my arm, I step into
the night. The chill is absolute. Moist in the air
is the taste of all vinyl and the scium metallic
head from the tower's shadow. My car's headlights flicker as
I approach the drive to w k D L even
now is measured by degrees of courage. As the station
rises from the fields, little more than a box of
cinder block in the night, I spot the battered sign,
half fallen w k D a hum of the late shift.
The windows are black no cause. The wind whips, but
not a leaf turns nearby. I park engine, chugging into silence,
and sit for a moment bargaining with myself. I do
not check my phone, I do not hesitate with tips
in hand. I walk to the station door. It's unlocked.
The door's wings open, as if weighted to obedience. Hinges
groaning inside. The rot has worsened, a plaster flaking most's orbit,
a dying bulb in the hallway. The air is ripe
with the staleness of forgarden electricity. I make my way
past the old trophy case. Shrove is gone. Only fly
husks remain down to Booth three. My footfalls line up
with remembered rhythms. No one greets me. The office is empty.
The break croom's clock long dead, stuck at two forty seven,
its hands frozen like a warning or a dare. Booth
three's door is ajar. I force it wide at the
same bat at chair Jamie always used its angle toward
the glass on the desk. The sticky note old and
bleeding through it reads, if you read this, it's already started.
Some songs never end. I slide into the chair, load
the tape and push play. The consol flickers and a
batted meet as surge, as if the old transmitter is
trying to come to life. My reflection splits some multiplies
in the window glass, showing only the hint of my
own shoulders, and a shadow just beside them that shouldn't
be there. I shudder. The lights above me flicker, casting
the room into pale, blued and brown. The tape plays
Jamie's was cleaves from the speakers, all honey and exhaustion,
mixing with fear beats from under the blues. The outside
world fails. Phone signal gone, no engine starting, no traffic
m There is only the broadcast, now looping, burrowing in
on the console. A note appears under my palm, as
if placed by ansteen. Hands do not speak, listen only.
I obey. The tip spowls, and as I strained through
the sand, Jamie's last encoded words become audible over the system. Hum.
If you play this, you'll see not staff don't answer. Suddenly,
a presence pushes into the rum are tightening, a cold
spot forming at my back. There is a scraping at
the male slot, and the fan mail box rattles. An
envelope tumbles to the floor. My breath goes shallow. I
reach for it with mechanical precision, tearing it open with
numb fingers inside. A new polaroid snapped from above me
at the boar time stamp now and the numbers spelled
out in ball point fifty one point twenty three mineus
ninety eight point three two forty seven. Behind me, the
glass whispers Jamie's voice. No, A thousand voices, all laid
fade right through the music. Are you listening? They need listeners?
Don't answer. The transmitter howls. The console glows white. The
air is full of coated beeps, now translating to one word,
but repeated in the voice in the head funds multiplies.
I see movement at the edge of the window, a
figure outline, wrong coat, flickering like bad tape, one hand
up as though waving a warning. The song peaks, warps,
and the studio drowns in a soundless wind. My chair
wrenches backward, weightless, then slams to stillness. All the machines
blink off, a power cut that leaves the room in
sudden tune, black silence. I fumble for my recorder, desperate
for contact, but it's dead. A feint vibration from underfoot.
I sense, more than see, another presence Jamie or something
in his absence, seated just beside me, breathing time and counterpoint.
I sit waiting every autem's training from the speaker, barely
a whisper now comes the final phrase, now you're the broadcast.
I make no sound, only listen. Tan staggers for stop.
I wake with the first glare of dawn, stabbing through
the booth's glass, head pinned to the console, stiff with
cold takes. Bulls have unspooled entirely across the boar. The
chair beside me is empty. My hands are covered in
graphite and ink, as if I've been writing all night,
and in the console, scribbled over and over, not alone,
not staff. A thin layer of misclings to the inside
of the window, obscure fingerprints arcing outward from where my
own hands never went. I fumble to my feet. The
fan mail envelope by grab last night is gone, But
in my shirt pocket is the poloid and an unlabeled
tipped brand new The outer holes are still desmote cutting
through sunlight. My phone, tucked deep in my pocket blinks
free Emerate two forty seven on no subject. Each is
an unplayable audiophile. I step outside the parking lot painted
with frost. My car sits where I left it, but
the black coat figure is gone. The tower above a
building is silent, an empty skeleton against the sky. Before
I leave, I locked the booth door behind me. Old habit,
pontous reflex. The keys feel heavier. As I drive home,
the road reconstitutes itself, fence by fence, mail books by
mail books, unremarkable except for the throm of something low
in the engine, a ghost note missing from the morning's
co In my front seat. Tucked amid the tapes, I
find one more noted fan mail script for the last DJA,
listening underneath another coat. I refuse to play it. The
urge is so enormous I almost cave. Instead, I walk
my evidence box into the garage, set it on a
battered stool, and lock the door behind me. I keep
the keys on my body. I'll never play, only listen,
just as the note said. The drive home leaves the
tapes and touched in the sea beside me. But as
the car takes in my driveway, I realize the quiet
has changed. The fridge's hummon entering is familiar and foreign
all at once. I flick on the radio out of
habit tuning absently through dead frequencies, and at two forty seven,
every dial and screen in the house gives a brief
static light and shadow, dropping the lights for a second
before resuming as if nothing happened. I put the polaroid
in the mantle upside down and sweep the remaining evidence
into a crate. Mark do not play. Only the encoded
slip sits in the table. The numbers swimming a lining
spell out the right time, over and over. I returned
to my place at the kitchen table, sitting amidst the
relics of fifteen years, in the living hush that now
feels charged with secret eltrich. The day outside is bright,
almost indifferent, but my attention hovers just at the edge
of every small, unexplains sound. I notice, without meaning to,
the urge to tune in, to try a frequency Jamie
ever name, to answer a message meant for anyone willing
to pay attention. Instead, I do nothing but listen as
the clock takes toward the next midnight, the last line
necking softly in my head. I am not alone in
the booth. I sit with at last thought, no longer
alone in the booth, circling refusing to settle every routine
sounds sharper, the fint drip from the sink, a telephone
pain that doesn't belong to any device. Iron shadows contract
and stretch along the baseboats. As the day passes, like
moving without warmth, there's no reprieve from vigilance. I monitor
the mundane, acutely, aware of a double layer in everything
surface normalcy and the current beneath. Alive and waiting that day,
I try to operate as if nothing has shifted. Dishes
this disdusting. Even an attempt at reading a book whose
plot now seems trivial, but all action happens in a
kind of fugue. My eyes fleck and voluntarily toward dark
spaces and doorways, my focus drawn back again and again
to the crate locked in the garage and the note
on the tea. I resist a pull, knowing already that
resistance is limited. It lives in the wiring, the floorboards,
the intervals between clock ticks, every time. It all has
grown lands just before I expect it. I feel as
if I'm hearing a pear range signal, and my hand
trembles over nothing. Sleep will not come. That night, I
find myself at the kitchen table. In the early IROs
head in my hands. They is ringing faintly. The odd
radio on the countermin inherited artifact from my first apartment,
crackles unexpectedly, as if testing its own range. The digital
displays stutters, slides back to two forty seven, then blinks forward.
I watch cot pulse accelerating, but it rights itself. Just
a power quirk, I tell myself, though I no longer
have the luxury to believe it. Just a power quirk,
I tell myself, though I no longer have the luxury
to believe it. After sitting there for some indeterminate stretch,
the faint hiss in my ears merges with outside quite
except now and then the scizzle spikes at intervals. The
house's infrastructure flickers, The fridge compressor cuts out, a lamps
clow throbs wants. The digital clock by my bed drops
three minutes, then corrects itself. Each shift coincides with a
slipping of stat across the radio band. Beneath these mechanical hiccups,
a steady drum of expectation bills each malfunction another signal.
I get up, Unable to remain a passive observer, I
fetch my note pad and begin tracing a timeline on
the kitchen table, writing out events in columns, power surges,
poldergeist flickers, coded messages, Jamie's last schiff, my own recent interventions.
The evidence feels linear, but it's all spirals, s drawing
back toward the moment of the booth T forty seven,
that unrelenting time. By mid morning, the exhaustion gives way
to single minded intent. I make calls again to authorities.
The FCC email systems oughto respond to Bounds's my query.
The police receptionist asks about my welfare, but says the
station's been condemned and no further investigations pending. She suggests
sometimes memories are worse than what actually happened. I hang
up before I say something regrettable. Even as bureaucratic dead
ends pile up, small intrusions keep coming. A neighbor's cat,
always worry, is now pointedly absent from its post on
my port trailing. The mail arrives later than usual, and
the mail books when I check it pulls no ordinary
lett is just an unsolicited envelope, thin mark with the
same blocky script from fan mail reply not required. I
sit on my front steps, envelope trembling in my hands,
and way whether to open it. The compulsion's familiar now
Jamie's old obsession taking route. The handwriting inside is neither
that nor confession, just a string of numbers and a phrase.
Two forty seven to night, blue set booth. Three last
requests don't answer. I pocket the note. Why now routine
to recognize instructions, not men, for any one in particular,
just the next puzzin, stubborn or foolish enough to keep
listening As afternoon dims with low stubborn cloud. I resolved
not to stay idle until the ire the booth calls,
whether from Leyton Guild or the inscapable tug of unfinished business.
I know my next step. I prepared by copying all
the tapes, one last digitized version stored on the USB drive.
I detail a handwritten note of my findings for Lizzie
order of a may some day want an explanation, and
tape it inside a kitchen drawer. There's no need for
a will, just this arc. I've burden, and I hope
the information lands safely elsewhere. A proper meal feels almost adversarial,
but I force myself to cook, refusing to concede. The
data shadows still as I eat, the house remains plainly aware,
so charged to expect the phone to ring with another
burst of codor for the lamps light to shiftly white
like transmitter serge. Any second, darkness inevitably comes. The Iro
approaches with pitilesstead in a snow crescendo, just a pervasive certainty.
I check my phone's battery. I pack instead of just
the tapes of flashlight, the USB paper map folded to
show the roads around WKDL and a wind up radio,
new batteries whichhed in the compartment. The old keys feel heavier,
more ominous. They press down in my pocket, as though
magnetized once more against my own better sense. I drive
out to the station, stripped to bravado, not expecting answers.
The corn fields lining the route of spectral, each passing
light standard mimicking the pulse of a transmittter. In the
mirrors behind the world is saturated night. In the windshield,
the ruin of WKDL sign emerges, metal bones edged against
the sparse bill of my head lights. The parking lot
is unchanged, but that itself is strange. De glazes the glass,
and the booth windows reflect only my own outline. I
cut the engine. The silence is vast, densely physical, the
sort only the edge of broadcast territory can host with
trip edition. I unlocked the side door and step inside.
My footfalls carry too loud, past a brutal welcome hat
and into the central hallway. Dust hangs in the air
for recent bulbs flicker awake with the guttural wine. The
break room is undisturbed. A mug with Jamie's initials still
in the dishracker. Trace of the ordinary smash into the extraordinary,
almost comical emplacement. Each motion feels formal, preparatory. I make
my way to Booth three. The door is shut tightly,
a rare occurrence, even in those last ten months hand trembling.
I pressed my pum against the panel, then push it open.
The room is as before, but sharper. Every detail illuminated
by the overhead glow is rendered with almost surgical clarity.
The old chair, the freight's schedule taped to the wall,
the broadcast console with its sun bleach dials on the desk,
A stack of sticky nut blank found as if riffled
by a nervous hand with intent. I fit the main tape,
the one never aired after Jamie vanished into the deck.
Static bursts out, reminiscent of the turbulent errors in my
living room, but more tightly wound. Before I can press play,
my phone buzzes new message, a number, no sender. I
check it, just a strain of beeps rising and falling.
The timestamp reads two forty six. I sit, bracing elbows
on the battered counter. Every part of me is waiting
for rupture. I thumb the play button, and the tape lurgies,
a patchwork of Jamie's sinon mixed with a low musical drone.
There are no words at first, just the heavy presence
of the house and the console's read led pulsing as
though alive. This is not a listening act, It's an invocation.
The blues riff and spools, pained and sweet than behind it,
the same canon's mysterious beaps morsel like. I decode them
as they come, not translating, but experiencing paroxysm of comprehension.
Somewhere beneath language, something shuffles in the periphery of my awareness,
A presence just outside the narrow booth window. The message
is insistent to booth open, listen only suddenly the lights gutter.
The sound from the speaker thickens, a surge coiling through
the air. I hear behind the track Jamie's voice, different news,
devoid of warmth, threaded with lonning and warning, end a show.
He says, welcome, whoever's left. The cock blisters to ward
two forty seven, and everything in the booth console Mike
phony rops with layer of sand, a multitude of Puss's
coded bursts blending to form language that is terrifyingly almost
comprehensible at the peak. A coldness lash is the nape
of my neck. Out of the corner of my eye.
A figure passes beyond a glass indeterminable bow line, but
the coat is black. The posture neither Jamies, nor Geralds,
nor any one I've ever known. I keep my gaze
fixed forward, refusing acknowledgment, holding on to some last deck
of Jamie's written plea don't answer. The fan mail slot rattles,
paper spill forth as if from a collapsed dark cavern,
mocked letters, each samped with the same nonsense numbers. A
Polari tumbles out face down, glossed with dew. I hesitate,
then retrieve it. The image. When I dare to look,
booth three seem from the ceiling's angle, with a figure
hunched over the board. It takes me too long to
recognize the photo of showing me here and now. A
pressure bills both inside the booth and within me, as
if the room's dimensions are shifting minatly, inching me toward inevitability.
The blue som scrapes to an unnatural end, reversing momentarily,
then writing like its correcting itself. There's too much signal,
now not enough signal. The receiver picks up a new frequency,
my own breath, hyper amplified, fused with an undo lying whisper.
Now you know it says, it's the listening that matters.
The door is sound. All sense of self orientation wanes.
The room feels like a capsule in orbit, sealed away
from both time and place. The darkness behind the glass
has teeth. I sense the shape of something enormous and
unhurried moving beneath the carrier wave. The console meter spin
out somewhere inside the static. Jamie murmurs, thanks for playing
the request. My skin erupted with goose flesh. A hush falls,
no tape, no music, just the fans, weak grind and
my own lungs rasping. The clock clicks to two forty seven,
its hands halting in silent compress. The buffer settles. All
is heavy now, with waiting, the last swarps of frost
at eye level, my breath hands. A final signal comes,
pulse code words. I write it unconsciously on the line
memmo belonging to Jamie, my handwriting overwriting his booth. Three
night open, next, guess please, I don't recall moving, but
the chair is empty. The soundproof glass fogs a fleeting
print suggesting a hen, then nothing. I'm in the corridor,
the tape resting in the deck, my own clothes misshapen,
damp with cold. I stagger forward. I'm sure if I'm
awake or reliving Jamie's lost passage out of this building.
I reach the exit. The air beyond is lighter, bows
and pricking. At dawn. My phone sits dead, battery dropped
to zero. All Polaroid's tapes and notebooks are worthy, belong
exactly as they were, but subtly re arranged against the
urge I checked the booth one last time. Nothing remains
save for a blank note waited perfectly in the center
of the desk. I leave it where it falls. I
unlock my car, start the engine, and dragged breath after
breath into lungs sore from holding, I back out, headlightes
slicing across the empty lot. For the first time in
all these weeks, there is nothing in my rear view.
I drive home, not startled, not a piece, simply emptied.
The tapes rattle on the passenger seat. My pockets hold
no new notes, no attempt at communication. Everything has ceased transmission,
at least for now. Back in my house, I set
the tapes and notes on the low shelf in the closet,
lay my keys on top, and closed the door. I
do not lock it that evening after, as twilight settles
over my street and the radio sits dead on the
kitchen counter, I allow the hush to settle. I do
not tune, I do not press play. I do not answer.
In the stillness the voice mind Jamie's someone Else's lingers
in the charged to air are you still listening? And
I realize finally that I am