Chapter 8: The Frequency of Fear

Chapter 8: The Frequency of Fear

The reply from Dr_Aris came less than a minute after Leo sent his desperate message. It was stripped of all previous arrogance, replaced by an electric, almost frantic intensity.

Delete the photo. Wipe the drive. Now. I am sending you a location. It is a dead drop. There will be a burner phone in a magnetic case under the designated mailbox. My number will be the only one in its contacts. You have two hours to get there. Come alone. Tell no one. We are no longer having a theoretical discussion.

The message was a bucket of ice water to Leo’s panicked mind. He followed the instructions with numb, robotic precision, the fear of the Watchers momentarily eclipsed by the stark authority in Thorne’s commands. An hour later, he was driving his rattling car through the winding, unlit backroads of the neighboring county, the burner phone a cold, heavy weight on the passenger seat.

The address led him to a rusted gate hanging crookedly from a single hinge, guarding a dirt track that disappeared into a thick copse of pine trees. The place felt utterly isolated, a pocket of the world that had been forgotten. At the end of the track was a sprawling, single-story building that looked like a cross between a mechanic’s garage and a Cold War-era bunker. Light, a warm, flickering yellow, spilled from a single grimy window.

The man who opened the heavy metal door was not what Leo expected. Dr. Aris Thorne was maybe fifty, with a gaunt, hawkish face, a wild mane of silver-streaked hair, and eyes that burned with a ferocious, sleep-deprived intelligence. He wore a grease-stained lab coat over a faded band t-shirt. He didn't offer a handshake; he simply stared at Leo, his gaze flicking from his face to the empty woods behind him.

“You weren’t followed,” he stated, not asked.

“I don’t think so,” Leo said, his voice hoarse.

“Thinking isn’t good enough,” Thorne grunted, stepping aside to let him in. “They don’t follow like we do. They change the pressure. They bend the light at the edges. You feel it more than you see it.”

Leo felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air. Thorne knew. He knew.

The inside of the workshop was a cathedral of organized chaos. Scaffolding lined the high walls, laden with salvaged electronics, esoteric-looking machinery, and tangles of thick copper cable. Oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers blinked with silent, green light on workbenches littered with soldering irons, circuit boards, and dog-eared physics textbooks. It was a place of scientific heresy, a laboratory built from the scraps of a brilliant, disgraced mind. In the center of the room, on a heavy steel table, was a partially assembled device of strange and menacing geometry.

“Your girlfriend has a remarkable mind,” Thorne said, walking over to a large monitor. The photo Leo had sent was displayed on the screen. Thorne hadn’t deleted his copy. “To be able to encode this, under those conditions… remarkable.”

“Encode what? What are the numbers?” Leo asked, his voice tight with desperation.

“They’re not a code. Not in the traditional sense.” Thorne pointed a long, nicotine-stained finger at the screen. “819.434. I’ve seen numbers like this before, in resonance data from pulsars, in the background static of deep space telemetry I was never supposed to see. The world is saturated with signals, Vance. Radio, television, microwaves. Our reality hums with them. But there are other… hums. Other frequencies that don’t belong to our slice of spacetime.”

He turned, his eyes locking onto Leo’s. “That number isn’t a location. It’s a tuning fork. It’s the carrier frequency for the dimension they inhabit, or at least the one they’re using to anchor themselves to ours. It’s the sound their machine makes.”

The words from Emilia’s poem echoed in Leo’s head. Listen… Not to the words. Listen to the… the machine.

“What they’re doing to her,” Thorne continued, his voice dropping, “the ‘smoothing,’ the ‘unraveling’… it’s a process of attunement. They’re trying to make her consciousness resonate at the same frequency as their own. ‘Symmetrical minds.’ It’s the most elegant and horrifying description of forced quantum entanglement I’ve ever heard. They’re not just erasing her personality. They’re rewriting her soul to match their physics.”

The clinical explanation was a hundred times more terrifying than any monster story. Leo felt sick. “Can you… can you use it? The frequency?”

“Use it?” Thorne let out a short, harsh laugh. “Oh, we can do more than that. We can shout back.” He gestured to the half-built machine in the center of the room. “We can build a broadcaster. A transmitter. We can aim it at the location your star map points to—the weak point in the veil where they took her—and we can blast 819.434 megahertz right into their living room.”

Hope, fierce and desperate, surged through Leo. “Will it let us find her?”

“It will provoke a response,” Thorne corrected, his expression turning grim. “Think of it this way, Vance. Our universe is a quiet house in the middle of a dark, silent forest. We’ve spent a century whispering into the night, hoping someone nice is out there. What you’re proposing is to take a megaphone, stick it out the window, and scream the home address of the boogeyman.”

The warning was clear. This was their gamble. Knock on the devil’s door and pray it wasn’t the devil who answered.

“What do you need?” Leo asked, his jaw set. There was no other path.

For the next ten hours, they worked. It was a frantic, desperate collaboration. Thorne was the architect, barking out orders and equations, his hands a blur of motion as he soldered components with surgical precision. Leo was his instrument, stripping cables, calibrating power supplies, and hauling heavy magnetic coils into place. He worked through the haze of exhaustion, fueled by black coffee and the image of Emilia’s unraveling mind.

The device grew, a monstrous hybrid of science and scrap. A powerful microwave emitter salvaged from an old radar station formed the core. Thorne wrapped it in a nest of copper coils, connecting it to a series of mismatched capacitors that hummed with stored energy. The focusing dish was a repurposed satellite dish, its surface now covered in a strange, hand-drawn fractal antenna pattern. It was a brutal, ugly, terrifyingly powerful machine. A weapon built from junk.

As the sun began to cast weak, gray light through the grimy window, they finished. The device sat on the table, silent, wires snaking from it to a bank of car batteries and a control console that was little more than a keyboard and a flickering monitor. A single, large, red button was housed in a flip-up safety cover.

“It’s done,” Thorne said, wiping sweat and grease from his brow with the back of his hand. He looked older now, the manic energy replaced by a deep, weary apprehension.

“We’re broadcasting a signal into the void,” he said, his voice quiet. “We have no idea what it will do to the local area. We have no idea what it will attract, or how quickly. Once we push that button, the clock starts ticking. The Watchers, the Gardeners, whatever they are… they will know precisely where we are. They will know that we can hear them. And they will not be happy about it.”

Leo stared at the machine. It pulsed with a latent, violent power. It was the frequency of fear, his only hope, and a potential beacon for his own destruction. He thought of Emilia, of her handwriting fracturing, of her memory of his face fading for one whole, terrifying second.

He looked at Thorne, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. “Do it.”