Chapter 6: Echoes in the Wires

Chapter 6: Echoes in the Wires

The conversation haunted him. It was a tape loop of terror playing endlessly in his mind, the two voices—one pleading and human, the other a monstrous rasp of static—defining the new, horrific architecture of his world. The boy is irrelevant… only a conduit. A future receiver. It wasn't just a threat; it was a technical assessment. Leo was no longer a bystander to Cal's madness. He was the designated successor.

Passivity was a death sentence. The passive victim waits for 3:17 a.m. to arrive. The active investigator goes looking for it. A cold, unfamiliar resolve settled in Leo’s gut, pushing aside the constant tremor of fear. He had to know what he was up against. He had to understand the source of the signal Cal had been chasing his whole life, the signal that was now chasing him. His desire for answers had become a primal need, as essential as air.

The obstacle was Cal himself. The old man had become an unpredictable variable, a walking prison for the entity. Leo couldn't risk confronting him, not when he didn't know which voice would answer. He needed Cal gone. He watched him for two days, tracking his movements, learning his routine. Every Tuesday and Friday, like clockwork, Cal would put on a worn-out army surplus jacket, grab a canvas bag, and take the bus into town. To the VFW hall, Leo guessed, or the library. It was the only time he ever left the house for more than an hour.

On Friday, when Leo heard the front door click shut and watched through a slit in his blinds as Cal’s stooped figure shuffled down the street, his heart began to pound a frantic, heavy rhythm. The action he was about to take felt like a profound violation, a trespass against a man who was already being trespassed against in the most horrific way imaginable. But his own survival was on the line.

He gave Cal a ten-minute head start before slipping out of his room. The hallway was silent. Cal's bedroom door was slightly ajar. Pushing it open felt like breaking a seal on a tomb.

The room was a reflection of Cal’s fractured mind. The window was covered in foil, casting the space in the same sterile, silver gloom as the rest of the house. A single, neatly made cot was pushed against one wall, a testament to his military past. But the rest of the room was chaos. Stacks of books on radio technology and government conspiracies teetered precariously. The walls were covered in hand-drawn maps of Vietnam, marked with frantic circles and annotations. And everywhere, on scraps of paper, on the book covers, even lightly etched into the wooden windowsill, was the three-pronged symbol. The Interface Mark.

Leo moved with a desperate urgency, his breath held tight in his chest. He checked under the cot—dust and a pair of old boots. He rifled through the small closet, finding only worn flannel shirts and fatigues that smelled of mothballs. He was starting to feel a rising tide of panic. Cal would be back in an hour, maybe less.

His eyes scanned the room again, looking for anything out of place. His gaze fell on the floorboards near the closet. One of them looked slightly different. The wood was a shade lighter, the nails in it newer than the rusted ones surrounding it. Hope, sharp and painful, lanced through him. He knelt, his fingers finding a small notch along the edge of the plank. He pulled. It came up with a soft groan of protesting wood.

Beneath it was a small, dark cavity. And nestled inside was an old, olive-drab military footlocker.

His hands trembled as he reached into the space and pulled it out. It was heavy, solid. The latches were stiff, but they opened with two loud, metallic clacks that seemed to echo through the silent house. He lifted the lid. The smell of old canvas, machine oil, and ozone washed over him.

Inside was a treasure trove of paranoia. There were three thick, spiral-bound notebooks, their covers filled with that same, obsessive symbol. Beneath them, nestled in yellowing foam padding, was a piece of military equipment. It looked like a shortwave radio, but it had been heavily modified. Extra wires snaked from its chassis, connecting to a strange, hand-soldered circuit board. Dials were marked with cryptic labels in Cal’s spidery handwriting: ‘Sub-vocal Frequencies,’ ‘Harmonic Filter,’ ‘Null Field.’

This was it. This was the source. This was the altar where Cal had worshipped his phantom signals.

Leo grabbed the notebooks first, his hands shaking. He flipped open the first one. The pages were a mix of precise, military-style logs and frantic, barely legible scrawls. The early entries were dated from 1969.

May 17. LZ Gator. Monitoring enemy transmissions. Picked up something on the empty band. Not Viet Cong. Not NVA. A pattern. A voice made of static.

Leo’s blood ran cold. It was almost a direct quote of the forum post. He flipped further. The handwriting grew more erratic. The pages were filled with diagrams of the radio, schematics for the modifications, and endless, maddening repetitions of the Interface Mark.

June 4. Heard it again. Clearer this time. It doesn't use words. It uses the spaces between them. It showed me the shape. The key. I have to draw it. Have to remember the shape.

The last notebook was the most recent, the ink still dark on the pages. The entries were disjointed, desperate.

It’s stronger now. The old radio isn't enough. It found me without it. It says the house is a good antenna. Says the mirrors are weak points in the field. Says it needs a better receiver. My body is failing. Too much noise. The brand helps, but it’s a temporary fix.

A wave of nausea washed over Leo. This wasn't just a journal; it was a record of a man’s soul being systematically overwritten for fifty years. From an anomalous signal in the jungles of Vietnam to a brand of reception burned into his chest.

His gaze fell back to the radio in the box. He knew he shouldn't. Every rational part of his brain screamed at him to put it back, close the locker, and get out. But the conversation he’d overheard whispered back. A future receiver. If this thing was coming for him, he had to know what it sounded like at its source.

With a sense of grim finality, he lifted the heavy radio from the box and set it on the floor. It wasn’t connected to a power source, but he saw a thick cable leading to a heavy, brick-like battery pack. He found the switch and flipped it. Nothing. He scanned the device, his eyes landing on a large, red button labeled ‘ENGAGE.’

He pressed it.

The radio hummed to life. A single, green light flickered on the panel, and a low crackle erupted from the speaker—the familiar, comforting sound of empty airwaves. It was just static. A profound sense of relief washed over him, followed immediately by disappointment.

He reached for the main tuning dial, his fingers closing around the cold, ridged plastic. He began to turn it slowly. The pitch of the static changed, rising and falling as he swept through the frequencies. He passed snippets of foreign-language broadcasts, bursts of Morse code, the ghostly strains of a forgotten song. It was just a radio. A powerful, strange radio, but a radio nonetheless.

He kept turning, moving the dial into the ranges Cal had marked with a red pen. The static grew thicker, heavier. And then he heard it.

It was faint, buried deep beneath the hiss and crackle, like a voice at the far end of a transoceanic phone call. It wasn't human. It was a dry, rasping whisper, the sound of autumn leaves skittering across pavement. It had no words, no discernable language, but it had a cadence. A rhythm. It was the texture of the voice he’d heard coming from Cal’s chest, the voice he’d heard from behind the door.

Leo froze, his hand clamped on the dial. The whispering continued, a constant, sibilant stream of malice from the empty spaces between worlds. He leaned closer, straining to make out any detail, any word.

And as he did, the whispering stopped. The static hissed for a moment in the sudden silence. Then, a new sound came through the speaker. It was a single, clear, impossibly close sound, as if the speaker were right beside his ear.

It was the sound of a slow, deep, cavernous inhale.

Leo scrambled back, his heart seizing in his chest. The thing on the other end wasn't just broadcasting. It was listening. And it knew he was there.