#10: Interference Pattern

Cal Redding stood on Sharon Halder’s porch and watched his breath collect on the door’s chipped paint. Frost webbed the lawns and gutters, but warm air leaked from her doorway, humid enough to unfurl a steamy fog from its cracks.

He hadn’t planned to come here. Not until last night, when he’d been sitting in the van with the receivers running low and lazy while he poured over old city maps, tracing the dark signal’s underground path from the beet factory toward the residential blocks. He was half-asleep when he heard her words crackle through the speaker.

“Hello?” 

Cal recognized Sharon’s voice immediately, but never over his radio.

“Who is this?” she’d said. And then, more delicately, “Mark, please… Is this you?”

When the words finally stopped, a stillness filled the van that pressed against Cal’s breath. He looked down at his hand, pale and rimed with shadow in the dim orange cabin light, and he saw the map beneath his fingers. The beet factory, the flow of storm water, the routes and channels flooding past Harold’s home and beyond through downtown, and Sharon’s house on the other side. An invisible path, hollow and spreading and everywhere at once, leading to this spot.

Cal hadn’t slept after that. He packed his gear at sunrise and spent the entire morning driving through town, checking his maps and validating landmarks. Now, in the stale daylight of late afternoon, he pressed two fingers on Sharon’s unlatched front door. It swung inward without resistance.

“Sharon?” he called.

No answer. Just the thick, wet exhale of a house that felt far too alive.

He stepped inside.

***

The first breath of air that washed over him was moist and warm, touched with fertilizer and copper. A greenhouse breath. It fogged his glasses. The living room dripped with condensation. Moisture beaded on the ceiling and on the paint, drawing slow, dark tears down the walls. The pothos above the mantel had swollen into ropes that looped picture frames and crawled toward the nearest outlet like vines seeking sun. In the dining room, ivy had wrapped tightly around chair legs.

The carpets squished underfoot. “Sharon?” he repeated, although he already knew she wasn’t here. His own voice came back to him like a whisper that had taken a wrong turn. Cal set his field pack on the table and the same effect came again, this time a muted memory of the sound his pack had made against the wood, as if the room swallowed sound and returned it with a faint, low tremble.

Cal laid out his instruments: digital recorder, seismograph case, loop receivers, oscilloscope, contact mics, flashlight, and his analog ground resistance tester because there was nothing he trusted more than a sweeping needle. He laid the gear out in a precise line, then turned his attention to the floor.

The hum under the boards came in pulses. Three long, two short. That was his first observation. He crouched, unspooled gaffer tape, and fixed a contact mic to the floor where the carpet seam kissed the vinyl of the hallway. Then the seismograph module centered on the braided rug as if it were a specimen. He clipped one of his ground tester leads to the radiator feed, because old houses had honest steel, and he ran the other to an outlet faceplate whose screws were already green with bloom. He loosened a screw, slid the copper under, tightened it down gently until the bloom crackled. The ivy shifted as if resenting the intrusion.

He booted the receivers, then looped a flexible antenna around the room’s perimeter, hitching it with tape every two feet. He didn’t expect RF up here. He expected nothing. But he listened anyway.

On the digital recorder he spoke: “Sharon Halder’s residence. 7:18 a.m. December 14th.”

He took a breath, then another, then began to work.

***

“Sharon Halder missing.” He peered down the hallway, unsure if his nerves were ready to unfold those depths just yet. “At least, missing from the living room.” He lifted his boot and pressed it back down as if to measure the swampiness around him. “Carpet and floorboards spongy underfoot. Audible vibration. House interior humid, damp. Vegetation overgrowth noted.“

The seismograph returned a lazy sawtooth on its little needles: up, up, up, down. It wasn’t ground traffic. Not that rhythm. Not that depth. He tapped the floor with his boot, splattering bits of water. The needles flicked, then settled back into their own timing, like a big animal telling a fly to mind itself.

Cal unrolled an old zoning map, the one he’d been scribbling on for weeks, and spread it across the table between a philodendron leaf and a sweating water glass. The beet factory sat like a tumor on the south edge, with the service road running along its fence. The utility easement, drawn as a thin gray stripe, cut a path from the factory discharge to the mainline pits downtown: water, sewer, electrical. Decades ago, the expansion had shoved Sand Cut Creek into a box culvert so the factory could sit where the creek had braided itself for a hundred years. The creek had never wanted to live in a box. Neither did anything else.

He traced the easement’s gray line on the map again with his grease pencil, bolding it in an effort to make his nerves behave. Factory. Drainage lines. Downtown. The grids. The schools. The trench under this block. With a little extrapolation and suspension of disbelief, his pencil found itself at a spot beneath Sharon’s house. Beneath this floor. Beneath his hand. The blue of a creek that had lived here before, which the town had asked to take a new shape. The ground was remembering what it had been. He put the pencil down very gently so his hands would stop shaking.

“If anything was going to talk,” he murmured, “it’d be here.”

The seismograph readings climbed and held. On the receiver loop, the fog hung thicker around a frequency he couldn’t quite tune, as if the knob had a dead zone, a place you could turn through but not stop.

“Hello?” he called, sounding foolish. Was he talking to the air? The plants? He talked like he had a broadcast mic in his hand. “Anyone there?”

The house gave him a moment of patience, the long inhale before a word. A pulse came. Three long, two short, three long, four short, like an arhythmic heartbeat, then a low drag that sounded like a held note or a held breath.

The oscilloscope blipped. A deep swell sharpened into something leaflike, growing, and the display fractalized in a way oscilloscopes weren’t supposed to behave. The pulse surged, brushing the loop receiver with the weight of a wave hitting shore.

Cal leaned closer. “If you’re trying to communicate, I need it clear.”

The floor rippled. Then the meaning hit, not quite sound, not quite language, but somehow both. The words came from everywhere.

“We are growing.”

Cal exhaled shakily. He tried to speak, tried to press something reassuring from his lips, but his mouth had gone impossibly dry amidst the swamp around him. “Copy,” he choked. “Subject indicates self-expansion.”

The pulse returned. Stronger now, more confident, reacting to his words and emboldened by his staggered breathing.

“We are spreading.”

Something under the house shifted. The floor, which had been a single drumhead, became a membrane with a shadow hand pressed up from below. It rose a fraction, a long slow bulge that traveled from the basement door toward the dining table. The water glass slid a quarter inch and left a clear trail. A tiny loop of ivy lifted as though listening.

Cal tightened his grip on the recorder, as if it might anchor him to something sturdy. “Propagation… noted.”

But the pulse didn’t fade. It refocused. Downward. Toward the basement door. A thin line of golden-green light leaked through the seam, pulsing like something breathing beneath the threshold. He grabbed his flashlight from the table, trembling now but trying to stay steady, and approached the door.

The moss on the walls shivered as he passed.

The doorknob was warm. He pressed his palm to the wood. Something inside pulsed once against his skin, like a deliberate, answering knock. He opened the door.

Heat rolled up the stairs like an exhale from deep earth. The basement glowed faintly green, the air thick and moving, almost… eager.

Cal took the steps slowly, one at a time. Each board sagged under his weight, softened by moisture and threaded with thin roots. His flashlight beam jittered on the railing. Halfway down, the glow brightened.

At the bottom, the basement opened into a chamber far larger than any blueprints allowed. It was sunken, hollowed, eroded by something patient and voracious.

His light swept across the impossible: a subterranean cavity where old creek sediment gleamed wetly, electrical conduits pulsed with green light, and utility pipes bulged like arteries filling with sap. In the center of the cavity grew a mass. Not plant. Not machine. Not fully biological. Something fused from root tissue, copper filaments, glistening cables, and mineral sheen. A living knot where the town’s infrastructure met the land’s memory. The whole structure expanded and contracted, slow and tidal.

Embedded within the growth was something shaped like a man. Cal’s stomach dropped. His knees nearly buckled.

“Harold?”

The growth shivered.

Every instrument upstairs screamed through the stairwell at once. The seismograph shaking, loop receiver howling, oscilloscope whining some high frequency, before it all collapsed into silence.

Heat swelled. Pressure mounted. The air thrummed like the moment before a dam shatters.

Cal backed up a step. “Okay… okay, easy…”

The entire chamber inhaled. Then Harold’s voice, woven through many voices, rose and filled the space with a unity far older than human language.

“We are awake.”

The glow detonated upward with a white-green blast that slammed into Cal’s chest and hurled him backward up the stairs. He hit the floor of the first story hard enough to rattle his teeth. All the lights in the house died.

The house’s walls trembled, satisfied with itself, and relaxed.

Then silence.

*** End transmission ***