Chapter 2: The Four Knocks

Chapter 2: The Four Knocks

The first time Liam heard the scratching, he’d slammed his palm down on the red button so hard the plastic cover cracked. His heart had thrashed against his ribs like a trapped bird. The static in his headphones cut out for a single, jarring second, replaced by a deep, resonant thump that seemed to shake the very air in the room. Then, the familiar hiss returned, pristine and empty. Nothing else happened. No alarms, no calls from Grant, nothing. The scratching was gone.

He’d spent the rest of that first week on a razor’s edge, his hand hovering over the switch, ready to strike at the slightest deviation in the noise. But none came. The feed remained a placid, roaring river of static.

Weeks bled into one another, each eight-hour shift identical to the last. The sterile corridor, the heavy click of the mag-lock, the solitary chair, the hypnotic dance of snow on the green screen. The strangeness of the job began to erode under the relentless pressure of monotony. Liam’s fear, once a sharp and tangible thing, dulled into a low-grade anxiety, and then, eventually, into a weary sort of acceptance.

The job became a simple, if bizarre, equation. Eight hours of sensory deprivation in exchange for a number in his bank account that was slowly, blessedly, chipping away at the mountain of debt. He stopped thinking about what he was listening to and started thinking about what the money could buy: groceries, rent, a measure of peace. The initial terror was a memory, and Grant, with his haunted eyes and scarred thumb, seemed less like a grim warden and more like a man who’d simply spent too long in the quiet.

Liam developed a routine. He’d spend the first few hours meticulously cataloging the nuances of the static, a holdover from his sound engineering days. He could discern the low-end rumble from the high-frequency fizz, the almost imperceptible sine wave that hummed beneath it all. It became an academic exercise, a way to keep his mind from dissolving into the noise. He was no longer a guard on a lonely post; he was a scientist studying a peculiar phenomenon. The job wasn't dangerous; it was just boring. Easy money.

He was deep into the sixth week, slumped in the chair, eyes half-closed, mentally calculating how many more shifts it would take to clear his mother’s final ambulance bill. The static was a familiar blanket, a comforting wall of sound that insulated him from the world.

Then it came.

It wasn't a scratching sound, buried in the hiss. This was different. This was clean, sharp, and utterly impossible.

Knock.

The sound was so clear, so perfectly rendered, it bypassed the headphones entirely and seemed to manifest directly inside his brain. It wasn't a sound he heard, but a sound he felt. He sat bolt upright, his entire body rigid. The air in the room felt suddenly cold and thin.

Knock.

It came again. Slow. Deliberate. A patient, measured beat. There was a resonant quality to it, like knuckles striking old, heavy wood. But there was no wood here. Only concrete, steel, and circuitry.

Knock.

Liam’s hand shot out, his fingers trembling as they fumbled with the cracked plastic cover over the red button. Grant's voice screamed in his memory: No hesitation. Not for a second. He was fumbling, wasting precious time. His heart hammered a frantic, terrified rhythm against the slow, steady beat in his ears.

He finally flipped the cover open. His finger hovered over the smooth, cool surface of the button. He just had to press it. That was the job. That was the only rule.

But his finger wouldn’t move.

Curiosity, that fatal, human flaw, had sunk its hooks deep into him. What was this? It was so different from the scratching. That had sounded animalistic, mindless. This was intelligent. This was a signal. A pattern.

Knock.

The fourth and final knock. The silence that followed was a physical presence in the room, a vacuum that sucked the air from his lungs. The static roared on, unchanged, but its emptiness was now profound. It was the silence of a held breath, of a question asked and an answer awaited.

Liam stared at the button, his finger still hovering, a monument to his indecision. The moment was gone. He hadn’t acted. He had waited, he had listened, he had tried to understand. He had failed.

He sat there for what felt like an hour, his muscles locked, every nerve screaming. He expected alarms. He expected the door to burst open and for Grant to drag him out. He expected the static to tear apart and reveal something monstrous.

Nothing happened. The feed remained stable. The monotonous hum of the facility continued its low thrum beneath the floor.

Slowly, painfully, he lowered his hand. He pulled off the headphones, but the sound was still there, seared into his memory. Four slow, perfectly spaced knocks. A call from the void. A question posed from the heart of the noise.

A profound and icy dread began to creep into him, far colder and deeper than the simple fear he’d felt on his first night. The scratching had been a mystery, a strange bit of interference. This was different. This felt like a communication. An introduction. He hadn't followed the only rule, the one simple task he was paid so handsomely to perform. And by hesitating, by letting the four knocks play out, he felt a terrifying certainty settle in his gut: he had, in his silence, answered back.