#5: Dead Air

Harold Wicks kept the same hours as the streetlights.

By six o’clock, he’d closed the blinds of Harold’s Electronics, counted the till, and driven his old Chevy square-body pickup a quarter-mile down the service road to a lonely home hiding from the road. He used to walk the old stretch, back when his knees could carry him that far. The frost was thick today, and early, or maybe had never thawed from the morning, and his boots pushed through with a satisfying crunch. It looked pale as ash stretched across his lawn.

The house sat back from the road, half-swallowed by maples. He’d built the radio mast himself, years ago, before his wife got sick. Now it leaned a little, and the guy wires sang when the wind hit right. He used to tell Mary it was like the place hummed to itself when it was lonely. She used to answer, “Then it must be very loud when I’m gone.”

He hadn’t played the old receiver much since. Not until The Wireman’s broadcasts started.

Tonight, he switched it on absently. It was late by now and he’d be up by dawn to open the store, but he didn’t sleep well these days anyway. The tubes warmed, casting a dull orange behind the wire mesh, and words came through a few seconds later, steady and low, loud and clear Cal Redding’s voice even if half the town pretended it wasn’t. Probably the only true conspiracy out here, even if a harmless one.

“They’ve been saying the power surges are just the cold,” came Cal’s voice. The Wireman. “Transformers freezing overnight. But I’ve been tracking them all week. Same time, same direction. Every night, it crawls closer.”

Harold leaned back, mug in hand. Instant coffee, cold by now.

He liked the kid’s broadcasts, even if half of it sounded like nonsense. It breathed new life into a town gone stale, adding rhythm without disrupting routine. Harold reached for his pencil, wrote down the frequency, and marked a line in the margin of his logbook:

12:03 AM. Stable signal, clear voice. Slight harmonic echo.

Then something shifted in the static. Not louder, but closer. A slow inhale through cloth. For a moment, he thought he’d brushed the microphone input, but the breath came again.

“Harold.”

He froze. The word wasn’t shaped by Cal’s mouth.

He leaned forward, heart thudding, and adjusted the fine-tune dial.

“Harold, you left the kitchen light on.”

The pencil rolled off his notebook.

He turned toward the doorway. The kitchen bulb was still burning, pooling light over the linoleum. He hadn’t noticed. He could almost hear her voice in the words, soft and practical, the way she used to say it before bed.

He turned back to the receiver.

“Mary?” He felt stupid as soon as the name left his mouth.

The radio exhaled. Not static, but a breath. Then the softest click, like someone setting a plate on the counter.

He stood and killed the kitchen light. The house went still. Outside, the wires whispered, carrying with the wind toward town.

He sat again, notebook open, and wrote:

12:04 AM. Unknown voice. Possible feedback.

He underlined unknown twice.

The signal rose in pitch and Cal’s transmission warped, stretching thin.

“Come outside, Harold.”

He swallowed. “No.”

The word came out smaller than he intended.

“Please. It’s cold.”

He reached to power off the radio, but the switch wouldn’t click. The knob held firm beneath his fingers, vibrating slightly. A blue arc winked between the contacts and vanished. The hum moved to the window, into the glass. Outside, the telephone lines trembled, singing a low metallic chord.

He set his mug down and stood. His knees cracked. He pulled on his coat, stepped onto the porch. The frost on the steps was thick as sugar.

“Mary?”

A shimmer moved in the dark, not quite a light, not quite a shadow, growing brighter toward the old radio mast. The hum bent around him as he walked. He felt it in his teeth.

He thought of Cal’s voice saying, keep your lights low.

He thought of Mary humming while she swept sawdust from the shop floor, years ago.

The hum thickened, not a sound now but a deep vibration as if his bones were tuning forks. Something in the ground came up through the soles of his boots and made his ankles feel young.

He reached for the radio mast, its surface wrapped in a frosty skin, and its chill bit his palm.

“Harold.”

The voice was so close he could have leaned and breathed it in. For a heartbeat the hum became a chord of every sound he’d ever missed: her laugh, the static of their first television, the thump of her foot on the stairs when she called his name. It was like putting your ear to a seashell that had remembered the ocean correctly.

“Mary,” he said again.

A pressure slid along his wrist and stitched itself into his pulse, curious and busy. It didn’t feel like a hand. It felt like being read.

“Come on,” she said, no longer a voice in air but now the shape of something inside him. “It’s warmer than you think.”

He could have stepped back. He could have. Somewhere behind him the house held a chair with his shape in it. The kitchen held the coffee he’d keep warming until it didn’t taste like anything. Not far away, his shop’s dark window held the ghost of a neon sign that would try to be OPEN again in the morning.

He put his other hand on the mast.

The world narrowed and then did not. He felt the map of town the way you feel your tongue without touching it: the substation, spur, the sag in the older wire by the post office where summer heat made it lazy, the transformer by his shop that stuttered in rain. He felt the ash trees along Main get it wrong in the wind and hit the wires with their last leaves. He felt the sugar beet plant’s huge motors yawn. He felt Cal’s van like a forgotten coin in a pocket.

“It’s not the power,” she said, and she was not only Mary now but a chorus of familiar and unfamiliar voices baked into copper. “It’s us.”

He laughed. The sound came small. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Most things don’t.”

From the house came a noise that didn’t belong to the house. The refrigerator kicked, then held, then clicked in triplicate like a telegraph. In the living room the receiver’s dial swept and returned, swept and returned, as if checking and rechecking. The kitchen bulb, though off, sighed once and gave a half-second of light.

He let his forehead touch the mast. It smelled like old rain.

The guy wire thrummed. He felt the hum measuring him like a tailor: height, reach, the lay of his shoulders when he was tired and pretending not to be.

“Mary,” he said. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“You won’t be.”

He should have known how dangerous it is when an answer arrives too fast.

He pulled one hand back. The air between his hand and the mast lifted, stuck to his hand and stretching with it like sugar thread. A thin hair of frost bridged the inch and then snapped without sound.

He could, even now, step back and go inside, to sleep wrong and wake up mean and go to the shop in the morning and turn on the OPEN sign. He could write 12:11 AM. Hallucination in the logbook and leave it at that. He could remain trivial.

He put his palm flat again against the mast.

The lights didn’t flash. The sky didn’t crack. The old receiver didn’t explode. The loudness of that would not make sense. What happened instead was administrative: the line took his name the way a clerk takes a form, stamped it somewhere neat, and filed him under CURRENT. He felt Mary standing on the other side of whatever this was, her weight the exact weight of a memory with breath.

“Come along,” she said in her kitchen-supper voice. “Before your coffee gets colder.”

The last thing he registered was the smell: ozone and warm dust, like the scent of his shop when he left a soldering iron on too long. It came forward and everything else stepped back to make room.

Then light swallowed everything.

*** End of Transmission ***