#3: Bulletin Boys

The den wasn’t supposed to be warm, but it was. It was the kind of warmth that came from an old house doing its best. The baseboard heater ticked and sighed beneath the window, fighting the cold that pressed through the glass. Shelves of a bookcase sagged with mismatched paperbacks and a half-dead plant sat on top, and a lamp in the corner leaned a little, its shade stained the color of tobacco. The only real glow came from the dial of the radio sitting on the desk, a thin stripe of red Eli had painted across the tuner with a model-kit brush. That was their frequency marker. It was a little off, so you had to tilt your head.

Eli crouched nearest the radio, one hand resting near the tuning knob. Noah lay on his belly, chin in his hands, feet kicking slow arcs in the air, with a sketchbook resting under his elbows. Cassie had her knees tucked under her, hair pulled into a crooked ponytail and a pencil pressed to the spiral notebook they’d been using since August. BULLETIN BOYS was lettered in black marker at its top, a name she’d given up arguing over.

They heard static. Then, a throat being cleared across distance.

“Testing…”

The man’s voice cracked over the waves.

“This is… uh… This is The Wireman. Broadcasting from somewhere outside town, and you’re tuned to a frequency they don’t want you to find…”

They leaned toward the speaker as if the radio were a well sunken into the floor. Eli mouthed the phrases he knew by heart. Cassie’s pencil hovered, waiting for the numbers, things like street names, times, and sequences that made a bulletin more than a story. Noah’s eyes slid up to the bulb in the shabby floor lamp, which blinked occasionally and buzzed when the heater kicked on. Tonight, the buzz wasn’t just a buzz. It carried a low hum you felt through your teeth, rising and falling with The Wireman’s pauses, like the room was breathing in rhythm with his broadcast.

“…I’ve been tracking them all week. Same time, same direction. Every night, it crawls closer.”

“I told you,” Cassie whispered. “The hum’s not in our heads.”

“Shh,” said Eli, but he wasn’t shushing the point, only the timing. Every word from The Wireman’s beat required attention.

Cassie scribbled as the reports drummed on: Route 9 lights dropping, like a thing moving under the lines; Dan Keller, county garage, watched it happen, air got heavy; Nora Cates and the breathing power in her walls; truckers on 19 hearing themselves talk back; starlings smashing into the silos at the sugar factory, the ground littered with soft bodies, Animal Control calling it cold shock; phones on the north side ringing after midnight and no record of any calls.

“Like current crawling through sheet metal,” The Wireman said, and Cassie wrote it down word for word.

When he signed off, his trademark words hollowed out the room. “Keep your sets warm. Keep your lights low.” The den felt bigger. The hum took a second to fade.

They sat with the static.

Eli was the first to breathe. “Okay. Same as last night, but worse. We’ve got to move the birds to the top and-“

“Start with the ringing phones,” said Cassie. “It’s real, tangible. First-hand accounts. Not a lot of people are driving out to the sugar silos to check for birds.”

“Birds are dramatic,” said Eli. “Noah can draw birds.”

“I can draw a phone,” said Noah, but his tone admitted birds were better.

Eli grinned despite himself. “We can do both. Bird first. Phone second. The breathing wires third.”

“We should call it humming, not breathing,” said Cassie. “Breathing sounds like we’re being dramatic on purpose.”

“Breathing is exactly what he said.”

“He said it hums like breathing. It’s not the same.”

“Guys,” said Noah. He tapped his sketchbook with his pencil, as if his haphazard bird sketches implied urgency. “Time to print.”

They doused the shabby lamp’s bulb and eased through the dark house, avoiding the floorboards that would protest the most. Eli and Noah’s mom worked the laundry day shift at the hospice, and was a light sleeper when dad wasn’t home, which was often. Like tonight.

The basement kept its cold even in the warm months. Now, in late fall, it felt like a forgotten pocket of the outdoors where the concrete clung to its memory of snow. Their “print room” had started as a corner on a card table and had expanded as they took their pledge more seriously: rubber stamps, old rulers, an empty coffee tin for thumbtacks and another for rolls of tape, a milk crate of past issues stacked by month, and a crooked lightning-bolt stamp that made everything look official.

The mimeograph sat proud at the center like a small animal that would bite if you didn’t stroke its spine right. Eli cranked the drum once, testing. A fleshy squeal answered. He loved that sound like other kids loved a bat connecting to a ball.

“Heat first.” Cassie plugged in the space heater, angling it so the air breathed diagonally across the table. They’d learned the hard way you don’t aim heat at drying pages unless you want curls like potato chips.

“What’s the final order?” said Eli. He rolled a new stencil sheet into the ribbon-less typewriter, ready to punch out their master copy. “Changes are hard.”

“Bird up top, phone next, then the humming.” Cassie tapped her notebook. “And ‘breathing’ gets one mention only in quotes.”

Eli typed the scribbles from Cassie’s notebook: DATE, then LEADS: BIRDS AT THE SILOS; PHONES RING ON NORTH SIDE; BREATHING WIRES (LOW HUM); ROUTE 9 LIGHTS DROP N TO S; TRUCKER HEARS HIMSELF— and beneath, a section marked WHAT TO DO: stay indoors at night, keep radios warm, keep lights low, don’t answer after midnight, get reports to The Wireman by spreading the word.

“Keep your sets warm’ is silly for a rule,” said Cassie.

“It’s what he says,” said Eli. “It’s a real thing. If they keep their radios warm, tubes don’t crack, battery lasts longer.“

“Cold makes things break,” said Noah. “Dad says so.” He had finished a sloppy job of removing the ink pad cover from the drum, and was now scraping the stuff out from under his nails; the purple lived there permanent now.

Eli placed the typed template and rolled the first copy. The drum stuck. He leaned into it, shoulder against cold steel, felt the mechanism give grudgingly, heard the seal, smelled the chemical bloom that meant ink was waking. He cranked. The machine chattered and wheezed. The master kissed the drum and the drum kissed the paper. Cassie slid the first sheet away, palms flat so she didn’t smudge, and laid it on the floor among the chalk outlines she’d drawn in summer so every piece had a place.

They fell into rhythm.

Crank. Chatter. Peel. Lay.

Eli worked the handle like he was churning butter. Cassie moved in sweeps, bare feet biting at the concrete, picking up sheets and setting them down, leaning over them to fuss over smudges. She frowned whenever she read “like breathing.” ‘Hums’ still sounded better.

“Drawings?” said Eli when they’d made a dozen.

“Birds.” Noah had already starting working in the top left margin, sketching starlings in a tight flock, their bodies like thumb smudges. He added a tiny grain elevator to anchor them. He worked quickly, his pen stroking the art on each page like the mimeograph turning copies. Cassie handed him the stamp pad and the lightning bolt, which he stamped between HEADS UP and STAY INDOORS. It bled a little where the pad had gotten too wet.

The basement light buzzed as they worked, with a low, steady hum that felt closer, more present, than a normal buzz. The drum squealed. Their heater puffed lukewarm air. The papers drank inky words.

“Count?” Eli asked.

“Twenty-two good,” said Cassie. “Two smeared. We’ll use them for school boards or the grocery corkboard. People forgive smears if there’s pushpins.”

“We’ll do the route in the morning,” said Eli, “before school. Same as usual.”

They cleaned the machine in silence, Cassie wiping the drum with a cut-up T-shirt while Eli oiled the crank and smoothed the master with his fingers so it wouldn’t dry with a wrinkle. Noah capped the stamp pad and arranged their tools, lining up the thumbtacks like bullets. The ink on the floor pages took on a skin, shifting from gloss to matte as warm air sighed over them. Cassie killed the heater.

The basement light hummed steadier now, like it had practiced, like it had learned something since their time in the den. Eli wondered, if he turned the radio on down here, what would he hear in the static?

“Okay,” said Cassie. “Tape and tack in the morning. Split the route like usual: Noah and me, east side; Eli, west. We meet at the coffee shop window and decide if we have time to hit the school before first bell.”

They turned off the basement light. Cold filled in the spaces where their bodies had been. The house’s bones creaked, itself never sleeping, and the three of them climbed the stairs slow, being sure to hold the rail where it creaked less.

In the kitchen, the dark felt thick enough to leave ink blots on your fingers. The clock on the stove showed a green 12:47, its digits hovering anxiously, and Eli blinked. He held his breath. He could feel the gravity swell. In the thick and the dark, something crept in.

The phone rang once.

Not a trill, not a song, but a single hard bell that chopped through room.

They froze. Noah’s hand found Cassie’s sleeve. Cassie’s fingers found Eli’s forearm. The stove clock popped to 12:48 like it had been kicked.

Eli picked up the receiver because he always did the thing you weren’t supposed to do. The curl of the cord was cold against his wrist.

“Hello?”

He didn’t say the word, except in his head. In the air, his mouth shaped it. No sound came out.

The line hissed back. Under the hiss, something moved like breath pushed through a long pipe. He thought of their den lamp bulb leaning into the Wireman’s voice. He thought of the gray shape of the sugar factory at dawn and the ground around it speckled with birds.

He put the receiver back carefully, not letting it tap the cradle. Someone exhaled. Maybe it was the house.

“Tomorrow,” said Cassie, breaking the silent chains, restoring normalcy. “Before school. Same route.”

Eli nodded. Noah nodded because Eli did.

Parting in the hallway felt unnaturally permanent. Cassie slipped through the back door, and Eli held his breath until he heard the clunk of a door thirty yards away to an identical ranch beside their own, built the same year except for the siding that was dull blue instead of white. Noah padded toward his bedroom, and Eli stood a moment longer in the place where the phone’s ring still echoed. He went back to the basement. He told himself he was checking the window latch, or maybe the heater. He flicked the pull chain and the basement light erupted in a buzz as if to remind him it hadn’t ever left.

The heater was cold and quiet. The window was latched. The pages on the floor were a field of pale squares which he walked between. The words had dried into themselves.

KEEP YOUR SETS WARM

KEEP YOUR LIGHTS LOW

DON’T ANSWER AFTER MIDNIGHT

The letters looked ominous in parts where ink stretched further than it ought. Eli stepped toward the mimeograph, which sat silently, possessing a gravity of its own that pulled at him, and Eli saw a forgotten sheet resting in its tray. He picked it up. The sheet ruffled the way paper does when drawn through the air.

He held it under the light. It was a mostly blank page, simply a sheet that hadn’t rolled under the drum like the rest, explainable enough except for the words inked at the bottom.

Keep your lights low.

He held the page, and the basement hummed. Somewhere under the floor, a pipe ticked as it cooled, the sound running the length of the house and out into the ground, where it connected to other pipes and other houses like a dark conduit.

“Talk to me,” Eli whispered.

The house breathed. Not louder. Not softer. Just there.

He laid the page with the others, aside but together. He unplugged the heater, just to be safe, and wrapped the cord careful around the handle. He clicked off the light.

Eli climbed back to the hallway and stood for a second with his fingers on the kitchen doorframe, feeling the grain and wondering if the house might answer through the wood. If the wires hummed like they’re breathing, maybe they’re listening, too. He went to bed and imagined the pages below him breathing the basement’s cool air, and the earth and the pipes which connected to everything, listening to his thoughts, and the hum which lingered the way frost waits over all the lawns across town, ready to vanish when the sun hits, ready to come again by the next cold night. Always listening.

*** End of Transmission ***