Chapter 2: The Static Man

Chapter 2: The Static Man

Leo didn’t smash the mirror. He wasn’t that far gone. But he couldn’t ignore the raw, primal fear he’d seen in Cal’s eyes. It was a fear that clung to the air in the hallway like a bad smell, a contagion of terror that seeped under his bedroom door.

So he compromised.

After taking a long, shaky pull from his one-hitter, filling his lungs with the familiar, calming burn of cheap weed, he walked over to his closet. The mirror, a five-dollar piece of particleboard and silvered glass, reflected a distorted version of himself: a young man with weary, sleep-deprived eyes and a perpetual look of anxiety. He saw the frayed collar of his t-shirt, the slight tremor in his hand. He looked like a victim already.

“Gateways,” he muttered to himself, the sarcasm a thin shield. “Right.”

Still, he couldn't bring himself to look at his own reflection for more than a second. He snatched a damp towel from the floor, a casualty of his morning rush, and draped it over the mirror. The cloth hung crookedly, a pathetic, makeshift ward against an unseen evil. It was stupid. It was irrational. But as he crawled into his lumpy bed, the obscured mirror gave him a sliver of peace. He was just placating a crazy old man. That’s all.

He drifted into a shallow, restless sleep, the kind where every creak of the old house was amplified into a threat. But eventually, exhaustion won, pulling him down into a dreamless void.

He awoke to silence.

It wasn't a gentle, peaceful silence. It was a heavy, oppressive void of sound that pressed in on him, thick and suffocating. The first thing his sleep-fogged brain registered was what was missing: the static. For as long as he’d lived here, the house had a constant, low-level hum, the sound of Cal’s shortwave radio crackling away in the living room. It was the house’s heartbeat, a white noise machine of paranoia that Leo had, against all odds, grown used to.

Now, it was gone.

The digital clock on his nightstand glowed: 3:17 a.m.

A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach. He lay perfectly still, straining his ears, listening for anything—a cough, a footstep, the flush of a toilet. There was nothing but the frantic thumping of his own heart. The silence was a presence, an unnatural vacuum where sound was supposed to be.

This was wrong. This was more unsettling than all the tinfoil and hammered planks in the world.

Desire for sleep warred with a primal need to know. The need to know won. Slipping out of bed, his bare feet recoiling from the cold wooden floor, Leo crept to his door and eased it open. The hallway was a corridor of absolute blackness, the tinfoil on the living room window blocking any stray moonlight. He held his breath, taking a hesitant step forward.

As his eyes adjusted, a shape began to resolve itself in the gloom of the living room. A silhouette, tall and rigid, standing in the center of the room.

“Cal?” Leo whispered, his voice catching in his throat.

No reply. The figure remained motionless, a statue carved from shadow. Leo fumbled along the wall for the light switch, his fingers brushing against the cool, smooth paint. He found it and flicked it up.

Nothing happened. He flicked it down and up again. Still dark. The power was out. Or maybe just the lightbulb. Leo’s mind, desperate for a rational explanation, clung to the latter.

He took another tentative step into the living room, his phone in his hand, thumb hovering over the flashlight icon. The figure was Cal, he could see that now. The old man was standing with his back to him, facing the dead, black screen of the television. His posture was ramrod straight, his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He was unnervingly still.

“Cal, you okay, man?” Leo’s voice was louder now, but it sounded small and thin in the suffocating quiet. “You scared the hell out of me.”

Still no response. A tremor of real fear, cold and sharp, shot up Leo’s spine. He activated his phone’s flashlight, and a harsh beam of white light cut through the darkness, landing squarely on Cal’s back.

The old man didn’t flinch. He didn’t even seem to register the light. Leo moved around him, keeping a cautious distance, and shone the light on his face.

Cal’s eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the TV screen. They were glassy and unfocused, seeing nothing. His jaw was slack, his lips slightly parted. But it was the breathing that made Leo’s blood run cold.

It was a slow, deep, impossibly regular rhythm. A long, cavernous inhale that seemed to go on for seconds too long, followed by a pause of dead silence that stretched into an eternity. Then, a slow, rattling exhale, like the sound of gravel being poured down a chute. It wasn't the breathing of a living man. It was the sound of a machine. A bellows. A pump, cycling air in and out of a hollow vessel.

“Cal!” Leo shouted, his voice cracking. He reached out and grabbed Cal’s shoulder. It was like touching a side of beef left in a freezer. The flesh was cold, the muscles beneath it hard as rock. He shook him, first gently, then with all his strength.

“Cal, wake up! What’s wrong with you?”

The body remained rigid, unresponsive, locked in its strange, silent vigil. The mechanical breathing continued, a terrifying, metronomic rhythm in the dead quiet of the house. Panic began to claw at Leo’s throat. He was alone in a dark house with a man who was… what? Catatonic? Having a stroke?

He let go, stumbling backward, his mind racing. He had to call someone. 911. An ambulance. But what would he say? ‘My roommate is standing in the dark, breathing weird’? They’d think he was high. They wouldn’t believe him.

Just as he was about to turn and run back to his room to find his keys, to get the hell out of there, the breathing stopped.

The sudden, absolute silence was a physical blow. Leo froze, his phone’s light fixed on Cal’s face. In the stillness, a new sound emerged.

It was a whisper.

It didn't come from Cal’s lips, which remained slack and unmoving. It seemed to emanate from deep within his chest, a dry, rasping sound layered with the faint, ethereal crackle of phantom static. It was Cal’s voice, yet it wasn’t. It was stretched, hollowed out, distorted, like a recording played at the wrong speed.

The whisper formed a single, chilling word that scraped its way through the air and into Leo’s soul.

“…Tuning…”

The word hung in the blackness, pregnant with a meaning Leo couldn't begin to comprehend but felt in his very bones. It was a statement of process. An announcement of arrival.

Leo didn't scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a knot of pure, undiluted terror. He scrambled backward, tripping over an unseen rug and crashing to the floor. He crab-walked away, his phone still clutched in his hand, the beam of light dancing wildly across the tinfoil-covered walls, making the room flash and strobe like a broken camera.

He didn't stop until his back hit his own bedroom door. He fumbled behind him for the knob, threw himself inside, and slammed it shut, twisting the flimsy lock until his knuckles were white. He pressed his ear to the wood, listening.

The silence had returned. And then, after a moment, the sound of the breathing started up again.

Inhale… pause… exhale.

Leo backed away from the door, his gaze landing on the closet. On the towel-draped mirror. The pathetic piece of cloth no longer seemed like an overreaction. It seemed like the most rational thing he had ever done. The whisper echoed in his head, a signal cutting through the static of his fear. Cal wasn't just losing his mind. He had become an antenna. And something on the other end was trying to find the right frequency.