Chapter 6: It's Not a Ghost

Chapter 6: It's Not a Ghost

Chloe’s paranoia had curdled into a brittle, sleepless terror. She’d stopped going out, stopped answering calls from anyone but Leo. Her world had shrunk to the four walls of her bedroom, but the walls offered no protection. The thing from the park was already inside. It lived in the circuitry of her phone.

When Leo arrived, he found her sitting on her bedroom floor, her back against the door as if to barricade it. The room was dark except for the glow of her laptop. Her phone lay on the carpet in front of her, face up, a black mirror of obsidian dread. She looked up at him, her eyes wide and haunted.

“It’s changed, Leo,” she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “It’s not just whispering anymore.”

The guilt was a physical weight on Leo’s chest. He knelt beside her, his mind flashing with the image of the small, muddy handprint he’d seen on her backpack. He was the one who had researched the park, who had pushed for the trip. He had led them to the gate, and this thing had followed Chloe through it. He was the only one who knew she’d been marked.

“What does it sound like now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Like tapping,” she said, hugging her knees to her chest. “When a call drops, or when the Wi-Fi cuts out. For just a second. It’s faint, but it’s… rhythmic. It’s not random static. It’s a pattern.”

A pattern. The word sent a jolt through Leo. The barefoot prints had a pattern—calm, deliberate, methodical. This wasn’t the chaotic lashing out of a mindless spook. This was something else.

“Let me hear it,” he said.

With a trembling hand, Chloe picked up her phone. She navigated to a recent call that had failed to connect. “It’s in the dead air, right after the error tone.” She hit play, and a tinny, electronic beep sounded from the phone’s speaker, followed by a familiar wall of hissing static.

Leo leaned in close, his ear almost touching the device. At first, it was just noise, the sound of an empty channel. But then, buried deep beneath the hiss, he heard it. It was incredibly faint, a series of clicks and pops, like a needle scratching on a dusty record. Click-click. Clack. Click. Click-click-clack.

It was exactly as she’d described. A rhythm. A distinct, repeating pattern hidden in the noise.

“I’m not crazy,” she whispered, tears tracking silently down her pale cheeks.

“You’re not crazy,” Leo confirmed, his mind racing. The memory of his research surfaced—the covered-up tunnel collapse, the men buried alive. The ones who never clocked out. They were miners, diggers, people who worked with tools, who communicated in the dark with signals. “I have an idea. It’s a long shot, but… I need to record this. On my laptop.”

For the next hour, they worked with the focused intensity of bomb disposal experts. Leo plugged a small auxiliary cable from Chloe’s phone into his laptop’s microphone jack. He opened the simple audio editing software he used to clean up static from old song rips. They played the sound clip over and over, recording it, amplifying it. On the screen, it appeared as a thick, messy block of sound—the waveform of pure static.

“Okay,” Leo muttered, his fingers flying across the trackpad. “Let’s see if we can clean this up.”

He applied a noise reduction filter first. The thick block of the waveform thinned out, the ambient hiss diminishing. Then, he used an equalizer, dragging the sliders to cut out the high-frequency static and the low-frequency hum. He was peeling back layers of electronic noise, performing a digital archeology on the sound.

Chloe watched, holding her breath, as the waveform on the screen changed. With each filter Leo applied, the messy block shrank, and something else began to emerge from within it. A series of sharp, distinct peaks rose from the flattened line of the static. They were no longer just random noise. They were clear, defined spikes of sound.

Tap. Tap. Taaap. Tap.

“There,” Leo breathed, pointing at the screen. The sound he played back was cleaner now, the pattern unmistakable. A series of short clicks and slightly longer ones. “It’s a signal.”

His heart was pounding. This was impossible, and yet it was happening right in front of him. He stared at the rhythmic peaks, the pattern of short and long pulses. Dots and dashes.

“Wait a second,” he said, a wild, terrifying thought blooming in his mind. “Oh my god. Chloe… it’s Morse code.”

He scrambled to open a web browser, his hands clumsy on the keyboard. He typed “Morse code translator” and pulled up a chart. A=•-, B=-•••, C=-•-•. It was a language he barely knew, but the logic was simple. Short pulse, dot. Long pulse, dash.

He dragged the audio file into a new track and slowed it down, isolating the first part of the repeating pattern. He listened intently, marking it down on a notepad.

Dash. Dot. Dot. That was a B.

Dot. That was an E.

Dash. Dot. Dash. Dash. That was a L.

Dash. Dash. Dash. That was an O.

Dash. Dot. Dot. Dash. That was a W.

He stared at the letters he had scrawled on the page. B-E-L-O-W. His blood ran cold. He played the next sequence. It was the same. And the next. The same again.

“What is it?” Chloe asked, her voice tight with a mixture of hope and terror. “What does it say?”

Leo turned the laptop to face her, his own face pale. He pointed to the notepad where the five letters were written. “It’s one word,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Over and over again.”

She read it aloud, the single word falling into the silent room with the weight of a shovelful of earth on a coffin lid.

“Below.”

The full implication of the message crashed down on them. This wasn’t a curse. It wasn’t a mindless, residual haunting. They weren’t being haunted by a ghost; they were being contacted by a prisoner.

Something intelligent was down there, trapped in the dark earth beneath Ashworth Park. The thing that had followed them, the thing that had marked Chloe, hadn’t done so out of malice. It had reached out, desperately, in the only way it could. It had latched onto her, using the electronic pathways of her phone as a conduit, tapping out a message from its subterranean tomb.

It wasn't trying to scare them away.

It wasn't trying to hurt them.

It was telling them where to find it. It wanted them to come back.

Chloe looked at Leo, the wild fear in her eyes being replaced by a new, focused dread that was somehow even worse. The whispers had been a torment. This was an invitation. A command from the grave.

“It wants us to go back, doesn’t it?” she whispered, the horrifying truth dawning on her. “It wants us to go back… below.”