#13: Open Circuit

Cal liked the quarry at night because the rock didn’t lie.

It held the day’s heat and gave it back slow, like a creature breathing in its sleep. Frost feathered the limestone edges where runoff had dried, white lace over a bone-pale face. Beyond the drop, the valley smoked with the beet factory’s steam, spools of it unwinding and snagging on the maple crowns.

Inside the van, the cab smelled like solder and coffee gone bitter, and the aluminum-clean cold that leaked in around the door seals. Cal worked by touch. His fingers knew which dented Altoids tin held the jumpers, which cracked plastic tub held the spare fuses, which notch on the tuner would slide him onto the frequency that people trusted him to hold.

He flicked the switch for the cabin bulb and it came up dim and yellow, the color of an old tooth. He tested the antenna coupler, tuned the tuner until the noise narrowed, then breathed on his knuckles and keyed the mic.

“This is the Wireman with your evening update.” He caught his reflection in the windshield, a stubbled jaw, hair under a knit cap, and flannel that folded in waves of checkered red and black. “If you’re new, a friend or neighbor likely told you to tune in. If you’re old, you know the drill. It’s been a rough week. I’ve got reports. You’ve got a town. Let’s keep each other honest.”

The open came with the usual constellation of clicks and hisses, the radio’s private weather. Behind it, something lower thrummed. He’d heard it before in the basement where the concrete floor had felt like a drumhead under his boots and a dozen whispering mouths had said we are awake. It lived deeper than static, deeper than grid hum. It lived like roots, and it was listening, too.

“Account one,” he said, reading from a composition book that had seen its own share of bad days. “East Walnut. Mrs. A. reports a draft coming from the electrical outlets. Not the windows. Outlets. Says the plastic faceplates felt cold as a coin and when she touched the screw with a knuckle, she heard… her word, ‘breathing.’ She turned off the breaker and it kept going. Advice for now: tape your unused plates. If you hear it talking, write down what it says. Don’t talk back.”

The quarry’s black water held a dull oval of stars. Cal turned the notebook’s page.

“Account two. Warehouse row, west of the rail spur. The night watch heard tapping from the masonry wall. A pattern. Long, long, short. If you hear something like that, don’t tap back. That’s the advice tonight: don’t reach for anything you don’t want reaching back for you.”

He gave it a beat. When he listened harder, the low thrumming opened, like standing over a manhole and hearing the whole street’s conversation.

“Account three, Garden Street. Some potted ivy that’s been trying to die since July has decided to stage a comeback. Over the last forty-eight hours it’s put on a dozen new runners across the porch and has crawled over the lawn and wrapped around a telephone pole. I recommend you give that particular patch a wide berth, and if your own house plant starts growing toward the electrical, go ahead and move it.”

He paused and slid his finger down the page. At the bottom he’d written: Breathe. Don’t make it a sermon.

He went off-air long enough to sip his coffee and wince at the bitter. He took a second, cup in his hand, then set it back down and keyed the mic again.

“If you have a basement, stay above it. If you have an attic, stay below. If you are standing in a doorway because a sound told you to stand in a doorway, maybe don’t do that. You can go out to your front steps and sit and breathe until the voices calm down. If the floor’s colder than the air, move away. I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to keep you safe.”

He took a long pause, longer than he should have. “That’s all I have for you tonight. Keep your sets warm, keep your lights low.”

Stillness followed. Cal realized he’d been holding his breath, waiting. Then a voice sighed through the receiver like someone speaking across the mouth of a jar, and the hair on Cal’s arms stood up. It said his name, lingering across the vowels. “Caleb.”

He shut his eyes. “You’re late,” he said, not into the mic but to the cold air around him. He forced himself to keep his breath even. He did not say her name, although begged to be spoken. Sharon. The receiver whined its thin whine, hungry.

“Caleb,” her voice said again, warmer now, like she had learned some new muscle as she spoke through the wires. “You said you’d help. You said you were coming for me.”

He opened his eyes to the windshield and the quarry’s black pan. A scrap of steam tore itself loose from the factory plume and drifted low like a ghost with a bad sense of direction.

On the board, the meter needles dipped and recovered, dipped again as if the sound leaking from the handset was trying to match their swing. He thought of the last time he’d seen her, her hair braided and frayed at the tail, her smile sitting wrong on her face, standing beneath the street light. He thought of her voice now, speaking to him at odd hours, and how, if you listened just right, you could hear rain in the background that wasn’t rain. And a voice beneath hers that said keep watering. We’re thirsty.

“What do you need?” he asked. He should have turned off the receiver and transmitter, killed the broadcast completely. He knew the rules. You don’t feed it. You don’t teach it what you care about. But he had known Sharon since he was a kid who came to the police station when he needed help with his jumper cables, because he’d never gotten his life sorted since his father died.

“You should come,” she said. The word came thin, stretched over a wire frame. A scrape. A slow breath. “I won’t be left at the edges anymore.”

The quarry seemed to lean closer. Cal leaned closer, too. “What does that mean?”

“It found a way,” she said. “I can join it completely.”

Cal realized his knuckles hurt from holding the handset too tight. He eased them open. He glanced at the board. He’d left the broadcast up. The town was hearing this, or hearing the shape of it, and maybe that was right. Maybe they should all have to hear what he’s been hearing.

“Sharon?” he said. ”Are you okay?”

It wasn’t a question for whatever lurked below them. He hoped, if ever there was a chance, that he might be able to reach her deep down.

A noise came like a hand running down the underside of corrugated metal. Then a whisper in a voice he almost recognized, smoked-deep and humid. “We’ll make a place for you.”

The receiver went dead.

Cal put the mic down like it might break. He swallowed. The quarry breathed. His own voice came back to him, small and somehow older.

“If anyone heard that,” he said, “I’m going to pretend you didn’t. But if you’re awake, and if you know Sharon Halder… if you’re on Cedar Street… keep your porch lights on.”

He clicked off the receiver and killed the transmitter, letting silence press into the van. It was the sort of quiet that made you count your teeth with your tongue.

When he turned the key, the van protested, then decided turn itself over. The heater blew air that smelled like old corn chips. He eased out of the quarry path with tires popping the frost.

On the two-lane he kept the speed honest, with no real place to hurry toward. Corn stubble made a gray comb under the moon, and the first skim of ice had formed on the standing water in the roadside ditches, appearing to ripple as it slipped by while he drove along.

At the town limit sign, the needle on the voltmeter jumped. He tapped the glass. It jumped again, then settled into a little dance, the kind of dance wires did when they were picking up a flavor of something more than voltage. He shut the radio down to reduce the meal. The meter kept dancing.

Cedar Street wore its late-fall clothes, covered in crisped brown and yellow, and sycamore bark sloughing off in ghostly scrolls. Porch steps were white with powdery frost. Cal parked two houses down from Sharon’s and let the engine tick as it cooled.

“Sharon,” he said into the emptiness. “I hope you’re alright.”

Something answered. Not a voice. Not yet. A sound like a small animal testing its teeth.

He clicked the broadcast back up and let himself sound like the kind of person who had a plan. “A final note,” he said into the mic, to the town, to the house that seemed to be watching him as he watched it, “for any who are still listening. If you’re hearing tapping, you’re not alone. If you hear breathing, It’s the same breath we all hear. If something asks to be let in, for the love of God, don’t let it.”

The low background thrumming rose and then settled like an animal arranging itself in a new bed. From the house, the TV flickered behind the shear curtains, going from blue to black to a pale gray that reminded him of frost on asphalt.

Off mic, so only the van and the earth could hear, Cal spoke.

“I’ll be back for you, Sharon.”

A voice came back to him. Not from the speaker, or his van’s radio. Not Sharon’s voice, or even his father’s. Something new trying out its throat. “Don’t be late.”

On Cedar Street, the porch lights held. The house Cal watched breathed in. From behind its front window, a white hand pulled apart the curtain and spread against the glass, long fingers splayed and palm pressed flat. Not a wave. Not a plea. A measuring.

*** End Transmission ***