#4: Paper Ghosts

They left in the inky dark of pre-dawn.

Eli had the stack of papers under his arm and a band of painter’s tape looped around his wrist like a bracelet. Noah balanced on his bike with newspaper boy seriousness, one foot on the curb, one foot ghosting the pedal so the front wheel twitched. Cassie wore her long coat over a sweater and jeans, the tape tin in her pocket knocking her thigh every second step. Their breath made soft clouds. The town lie still.

“Route,” said Eli, as if they didn’t cut the same path each time. “East side for you two. I’ll take the west. Meet at the coffee shop window. We’ll see if we can hit the school before first bell.”

“We know,” said Noah, already rolling.

“Lights low,” said Cassie. She wasn’t sure if she meant house lights or their voices. The phrase worked for both.

The streets appeared as cutouts of themselves, all edges and frost, everything quiet enough to hear the seams straining to hold the stillness together. The phone poles along Main held a skin of ice that glittered under the yellow lamps, and the wires went away in perfect lines to prop up the paper-thin town.

They started with familiar places, like the notice board outside the hardware store, where Noah smoothed his first bulletin with both palms and pressed tape at the corners. Cassie helped with a cross of tape because the notice board was splintering and liked to kick things off. Mr. Landry was already in the gas station next door. He watched them through the glass door while he counted change into the register. When Eli opened the door, a bell rang, somehow making the place feel more quiet.

“You kids are out early,” said Mr. Landry. He wore a cardigan the color of dust. He looked at their paper and pursed his mouth like he was sucking on a number he didn’t like.

“Sharing the news,” said Cassie.

“Sugar plant was steaming all night,” Mr. Landry said, not for the first time in his life. “Frost near the drains don’t melt till noon. Seen it twenty years. Ground there’s sour. That’s your news.”

Cassie nodded, adding “drains near factory” to her mental route of places to investigate later. Noah looked toward the west, where the fat stacks of the factory were already breathing white into the morning.

“Is it poison?” he asked.

“Poison, curse, pick your word,” Mr. Landry said. He smiled, but you could tell he didn’t mean it to comfort. “Some things don’t forget.”

They left him his coffee and paper in the quiet.

A block away, the street dipped toward a run-off drain at the edge of the curb, its metal grate rimmed with a strange lace of frost that hadn’t melted though the morning had begun to gray. Noah slowed his bike, coasting close, Mr. Landry’s words still close in his ear. The frost around the grate looked alive, with tiny curls of vapor breathing out between the bars and a faint whisper threading up from within its throat. It wasn’t words, not exactly. It was the sound of something thinking.

He leaned closer, trying to catch it, the front tire nudging the gutter. For a second, it felt like the whisper knew his name. The air there was colder than the rest of the street. A chill gripped him that hummed in his teeth.

“Noah!” Cassie’s voice cracked the spell. She was halfway up the block, one hand raised. “Route!”

He blinked hard, swore under his breath, and tore a bulletin from his stack. The page fluttered like it didn’t want to go near the place, but he slapped it onto a light post anyway, the tape squealing against the cold metal. Then he pushed off quick, riding to catch up, the frost’s breath fading behind him.

The town went still again, pretending nothing had happened.

At the laundromat, Cassie taped next to the quarter machine where people stood, often just staring and waiting. At the hair salon, she slid one beneath the door so it would be the first thing they saw when they swept in the morning. Noah put one on the pay phone even though the phone had been broke for a year. People look to landmarks for comfort in dark times.

Eli’s route ran them parallel. They could see the lamp heads flickering one by one as he moved, a mildly unsettling effect, and they spied the shape of his bike against the shadows as he curved across streets. Here and there, he would buzz past and lift a hand like a flag without stopping. He was good at a moving tape job: a slap, a pat, gone.

They reached the coffee shop together just as the first real people arrived, the men in their town jackets and a nurse with her scrubs under a puffy coat. A kid behind the counter mumbled greetings while he filled cups and pressed plastic lids.

“Window?” Eli asked. Tradition pulled at him. They always put one in the window. It always got taken down. But Eli didn’t get a chance to post his paper. A van idled at the street curb, rust around its wheel wells and a CB antenna listing a little like it had slept wrong. The man leaning against it appeared as if he’d washed his face with cold water and then forgotten to dry around his eyes, and he wore a jacket that looked exactly warm enough for someone who thought about the weather after he was already in it.

The man lifted a hand. “Hey,” he said, a warning and a question and a hello.

“Hi.” Eli arranged his face into the version of friendly that made adults stop asking where your parents were. “You need a bulletin?”

“I need three dozen,” the man said, a worn-out smile trying to exist on his tired face. “You’re the kids with the lightning bolt.”

Eli nodded, proud. Cassie kept her hands on her handlebars. Noah balanced a foot on his pedal, ready to take off if this turned into the kind of conversation kids are warned about.

The man’s eyes flicked past them to the window, where last week’s bulletin had been scraped off with a razor. The scrape line still made a rectangle.

“You kids are doing good work. Keeps people’s heads up.” He looked like he wanted to say more but didn’t know what shape to put it in.

“Are you…?” Eli began, but he didn’t know how to finish it. Are you one of us? Are you listening? Are you the kind of person who hears the hum?

“I’m a listener,” said the man, saving him the embarrassment. He nodded at Eli’s stack. “Just… be careful, alright? Some folks don’t like words that don’t come from the county.”

The coffee shop door swung just then, and Officer Halder came out with a paper cup pinched in both hands. She was still wearing last night’s tired uniform. She blinked slow in the morning light the way night-shift people do when they forget how brightness works.

“Hey, Cal,” she said, like she’d been expecting him. Her voice had the normal in it that makes other things seem strange. “What are you doing out here?”

The man straightened like she’d put a hand on his spine, like she was the last person he’d expected to see come out of that shop. “Hey… Sharon. Just, uh… Waiting for Harold to open up.” The electronics store one door down remained quiet with its OPEN sign dark.

Cassie saw confusion moving across his face, and she gave Eli a bump with her elbow to say are you tracking this?

“You look like hell,” said Sharon, easy like a friend. “You working nights again?”

The man’s words seemed slow to start. “Something like that.” He left room at the end for more, an unspoken question that lingered, unanswerable. The sound of it lifted hair along Cassie’s arms. Sharon squeezed Cal’s arm, a gesture between friends, and he stiffened. With a smile and a wave, she walked to her car, and then she was gone, leaving them swimming in the red of her patrol car’s tail lights.

Cassie looked at the man named Cal, then back at the space where the car had been. “You know her?”

Cal watched the empty spot as if the ghost of something still remained. He swallowed. “Everyone knows everyone around here.” The words were hollow. He raised a hand again. “You kids be careful.”

He climbed into his van and turned it over, the engine stuttering like it didn’t love its job. He drove away with both hands on the wheel and both eyes wide, fixed straight ahead.

They stood there for a second, collecting whatever that had been. Eli pasted the bulletin on the coffee shop window, though he pressed the tape a little softer, as if the glass might bruise.

“Let’s list local theories,” said Cassie, shaking herself free, because their lists kept them moving. “Gas station said frost at the drains doesn’t melt.”

“Poison,” said Noah, “from the factory.”

“Old swamp,” said Eli. “Our grandma says you can pour a town over a swamp and it still remembers being wet.”

Noah pressed his palm to the street lamp pole. “It’s humming,” he said. “An electricity monster.”

Eli pressed his hand to the metal. Cassie followed. Her bones vibrated faintly, like a cat purring in a different room. “Yeah. I’ll add it.”

On their way back through the neighborhood near the school, they did the quiet work of shoving bulletins through any front door mail slots they passed. A woman on a stoop in a plaid housecoat watched them, cigarette burning flat between two fingers. She wore a long braid wild with frizz.

“You’re the lightning ones,” she said as they crossed her plot of sidewalk.

“Good morning,” said Eli, hoping politeness would lay a coat over whatever intrusion they were causing.

“My brother worked the sugar,” the woman said, ignoring his greeting. “Said the drains talk in winter. Hear them at night when he goes to piss. Not real talk. Talk like a jar you blow across. Old swamp air moving funny. He says that, I say shut up. He says he knows what he hears.”

“Thank you,” said Eli, because what else do you say to that. “That’s very helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” the woman said, surprised to be part of something.

At the school, the bulletin board inside the main hall had rules about where you could put things. They ignored the rules and taped one right where first period’s crowd would crash and stop. Eli pasted another inside the glass of the trophy case so the big team photos had to share the light. Cassie could feel the building’s hum different than the street light’s hum, a higher pitch but still present, like fluorescent thinking. Maybe it had come here to learn something, too.

By lunch, the town had found its noise again. By after school, people had layered notices over their bulletins, or simply torn them down. The Bulletin Boys three looped back toward the coffee shop to count how many were left, and that’s when they saw it: their page on the window had sucked in the damp and puckered. The ink had bled along the fibers so the letters read like veins under skin. The hum from the lamp above the window had slid lower, almost a bass note you had to feel at your molars, the kind of note that empties the quiet.

“Sounds like the lamp is reading,” said Eli, just to say something.

Cassie didn’t laugh. She watched the paper flap as the wind gusted up. She saw the rusted van from that morning turn the corner up the block, driving nervously if that’s a way a person could drive. For a second, the wind kissed their window page off the glass and carried it tumbling. The sheet smacked the van’s windshield, stuck as if it had been waiting to do that all day, flapping wildly but not letting go.

The van slowed, then braked. The door swung open with a squeak that sounded colder than the air. The man who stepped out wore the same flannel jacket they’d seen that morning. He still looked wired and sleepless, eyes scanning the storefronts like the buildings might answer back.

“You kids,” he called, and they froze. “You seen Harold?“

Blank looks.

“Harold Wicks. The, uh… The electronics guy.” Cal waved at the dark shop beside them. “Shop’s been dark all day.”

They shook their heads. Cassie noticed he was already glancing at the wires overhead, then back toward his van like the street itself was ticking down to something. “What’s going on?”

“Go home,” he said. “Lock up. Stay indoors.”

“Are you going out there?”

“I need to check on him.” Cal hesitated, listening to a sound only he could hear. Then he climbed back in and drove off, the van’s taillights redder than they should’ve been in daylight.

The three of them stood there, unsure what to say or do with this. The air felt charged, like after a lightning strike that missed its cue.

“He’s going to Harold’s,” Eli said quietly. “You heard him.” After a long pause, he added: “We’ve got a few hours before dinner.”

“That’s a long ride,” said Cassie, in a tone that wasn’t entirely a protest. She was already turning her bike by the handlebars.

Noah sighed like he’d been volunteered for a bad idea.

The van disappeared around the next corner, and the hum under the street seemed to follow it. They pushed off after it, tires crunching through the grit. The paper Cal had tossed from his windshield flapped in their wake, whispering as it flitted with the wind.

The town breathed, and the wires settled in their poles, waiting.

*** End of Transmission ***