By the ninth night, I could no longer tell where the radio ended and the house began.The closet door had remained ajar ever since the previous night, moving on its own as though breathing. Every floorboard groan, every whisper of wind outside my window felt like a signal, a pulse from something alive inside the walls. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. The anticipation was suffocating.
At 2:14 a.m., the red glow of the radio flared to life, and the static surged with a ferocity I hadn’t heard before. But this time, it wasn’t just noise. It carried shapes, voices, and intent. The Caller spoke immediately, calm, almost tender:
“Brian. Listen carefully. Tonight, you will understand.”
The static shifted, compressing into words so clear it felt like they were spoken inside my head. It wasn’t a recording, wasn’t a radio signal as I knew it. It was… something else. Something alive.
“You think this is a machine,” the Caller said, “but the radio is merely a window. The signal isn’t here. Not in this house. Not even in this world.”
My stomach turned. “Where—where is it then?” I whispered, voice trembling.
The room seemed to close in around me. Shadows pulsed with the red glow. The static warped, bending, twisting. And then, through the hiss, I heard the faintest of sounds—a door creaking, footsteps pacing, a low hum of voices like a crowd in the distance.
“Far away,” the Caller said. “Somewhere beyond the frequencies you know. Somewhere between stations. That is where we are. That is where Samuel went. And now, that is where you will go.”
The static rose higher, voices overlapping in a chaotic symphony. I could hear screaming again—shouts of anger, despair, pleading—but layered beneath them was a pattern, a rhythm. A language I didn’t understand but instinctively felt: an instruction. A calling.
I fell to my knees, shaking. “I don’t want this. I won’t—”
“You already answered,” the voice interrupted. “Every night, every whisper, every breath you’ve taken while listening has bound you to us. You can resist, but the signal will not be denied.”
The closet door shivered again, and for the first time, I realized the voices weren’t confined to the radio. They weren’t confined to the house. They were everywhere, streaming through the air, vibrating the walls, curling into my bones.
Then the Caller spoke in a whisper, closer than before, right inside my mind:
“Look at the radio.”
I glanced at it, still lying in pieces on the floor. Its cracked casing no longer seemed ordinary. Inside, the wires writhed faintly, glowing with tiny sparks, as though alive. I felt my body pulled toward it. My hands stretched out despite my own will, trembling, reaching.
“You will join us,” the Caller said. “And when the connection is complete, you will see everything. The voices, the signal, the place beyond the stations. It’s waiting for you.”
The static shifted once more, coalescing into a single high-pitched tone that vibrated through my skull. My vision blurred, the room folding in on itself. Shadows stretched from the corners, converging at the radio.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to pull away. But my hands touched the wires, and a shock of white-hot energy shot through me.
Then, silence.
I opened my eyes.
The room was the same, but… different. The red glow lingered in the air like a fog, and faint whispers pulsed from every wall, every corner, every shadow. I understood then: the signal wasn’t here, but it was me.
I could feel the frequencies moving through me, intertwining with my thoughts, my breath, my heartbeat. The radio wasn’t a transmitter. I was.
And somewhere, far beyond the boundaries of the world I knew, the voices waited. Patient. Eternal.
And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that I couldn’t stop them anymore.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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