#7: Residual Signal

The quarry ridge held a heavy kind of silence.

Cal cut the van’s engine and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel. Far below, the quarry bowl glowed faintly from frost and old limestone dust. A wind dragged over the bluff in long, cold breaths to rake through the gravel, and an abandoned conveyor skeleton loomed nearby, clinging to memories of a forgotten industry.

Cal reached to the dash and flipped on the receiver, waking the meter needles to green. He loved that part, the modest theater of it. He checked the levels, dipped his head close to the mic, and let The Wireman step forward through his own mouth.

“If you haven’t been following the last couple weeks,” he said, voice low and even, “here’s what we know.”

The van gave back a thermoplastic creak and the sigh of heater coils cooling. The quarry added the barest hush, a hand over a mouth, a voice almost speaking. It did not interrupt.

“The interference started near the processing plant,” Cal went on. “It came as a hum running through the lines. We’ve seen televisions lighting on dead circuits. Baby monitors whispering names at three in the morning. Water heaters singing. Even after you cut the power.”

He turned a page of his composition book, thumb catching the penciled edge. “As some of you know, we lost track of Harold Wicks two weeks ago. The county doesn’t want you to use the word ‘missing.’ They don’t believe his absence is related.“

Cal caught himself here, lingering over the lie in those words he even told himself. Harold wasn’t missing. Or absent. He was always present, whispering. Beckoning… from somewhere in between.

“Three more outages this week along Park and Miner,” he said, pushing past it like a rough patch of gravel. “Livestock were spooked by something they couldn’t see near the drainage field. And the low sound, the hum folks are hearing, is still with us. As for me, I’m on the move, collecting readings, measuring signals. I’m tracking it down. And I’m close.” He glanced at the windshield, where frost was advancing from the edges in a lace whose symmetry made him uneasy. “I’ll share what I find once I find it. Stay off the lines if you can. And, if possible, keep your plants away from the outlets. It sounds ridiculous, but things are getting weird.”

He hesitated, then gave himself one more beat of breath. “No matter what you see or hear, you’re not alone. I’m The Wireman, and I’m out here, listening. Keep your sets warm, keep your lights low.”

He clicked the transmitter off, and the van filled with quiet. He waited in that well of stillness, eyes on his receiver, ears listening to everywhere, wondering if something dark might echo back. Tonight, it did not.

Cal unspooled the last of his warmth and stepped out. The night hit him full-on, like cold iron to the lungs and tasting almost sweet. He liked that first bite. It sharpened the world. He walked around to the back doors and opened them to his field kit: plastic cases lined like caskets, the guts of a personal science he’d been making up since he was twelve. Seismograph. Old microphone recorder. Earth ground tester with cracked casing. A notebook fat with lived-in paper. A hand auger for the soil. One grounding rod.

Wind sang in the conveyor skeleton above, a wire-tremor that set his molars humming from this towering thing that loomed over him as a haunt mourning its past life, before the richer coastal deposits were discovered up north and left these operations still. Beyond it, the sky was a tight lid of low cloud, no stars. The southern edge glowed a steady orange from the sugar beet plant’s lights, the final holdout of industry’s grip in an ocean of farmland.

Cal set to work with a soothing, repetitive rhythm. Auger the hole. Bury the grounding rod. Connect the ground tester’s leads. Make sketches in the notebook with shorthand arrows and little numbers that would make no sense to anyone else. Measure the pulse of the earth.

The meter’s needle swelled and settled like a sleep-breath. He slowed his breathing without thinking, then let the breath out. The meter wavered. Cal’s tongue picked up the faintest taste: crushed stone, damp earth, a little salt. The taste of the air in Harold’s den the first time he’d visited.

“Caleb,” said a voice.

The single word came up through the stone like a bubble rising from a throat. It had Harold’s shape but with a slow, bedrock-deep timbre, like vowels rounded by pressure. The meter fluttered again, then fell still.

It was more than just a sound. Cal could feel the gentle pressure behind the eyes, the nubs of hair on his arm lifting as if to listen. He crouched beside the hole he’d augered and brushed loose soil from the rod. His glove found something else there, half-buried and resistant to his fingers. He scraped more clay aside and saw copper wire running under the rod like a vein, marbled with ancient green-black corrosion. Something resembling root had grown through and around it, brown and fibrous, wrapped and gripping. The copper and the root had fused so cleanly there was no seam between them.

The root twitched under his touch. Just once, like an eyelid spasm, and then still. He recoiled wordlessly, then made himself reach again, steadier, touching the copper where it entered the root, the root where it met the stone. It was warmer than the ground, and it pulsed very slightly slower than his own heart.

He stood, shaking the tremble from his arms. “All right,” he said aloud to the empty ridge. “All right. I’ve got you now.”

He followed the root with his eyes. It ran toward the conveyor frame and then down, disappearing into a fissure in the limestone where weeds had managed a life. The fissure breathed mist you wouldn’t see unless you looked for it, a faint wool of vapor that made shapes when it met the colder air above ground.

Cal went back to the van and retrieved the small seismograph, a lunchbox-sized hand-me-down piece that ticked a paper drum under ink needles. With this, he could watch the earth draw itself like a cardiograph, its breathing made visible. He set the case on the gravel near the fissure and waited.

Ink and paper whispered against each other. The line made a microscopic wave. Not random. Not machine. It looked like something sleeping, shifting its weight in slow time.

“Caleb…”

He put his microphone recorder on the ground, the head of it pressed to the stone. “Location: Quarry Ridge,” he spoke into the soil as if into a grave with the lid already closed. “I hear you.”

A wind rose up from the bowl of the quarry then, carrying wet smells from ancient places: silt, limestone seep, leaf-rot from a long-ago forest. Mist followed, shaped the way breath has shape when a body speaks in a cold room. It pulsed once, twice, like a mouth forming a sound.

“Caleb,” the voice said again, as if the mist itself carried a mouth.

The voice pulled at him, one step and then another, drawing his feet to the quarry’s edge. Drawing him to the answers it offered, to the closure it promised in whispers only he could hear. He nearly stepped out. The aching parts of his soul craved it. He caught himself in that moment, not asleep but also not quite awake, staring at the precipice of the dark pit below. One step, and he would have been complete.

Cal stepped back. “Screw you, Harold.”

The wind went still. In its place came a hush that had weight. He heard a distant sound from the low woods, a single crack like ice flexing. He smelled something sweet and faintly rotted, like apples forgotten in a cellar.

“This is how it moves,” he told the recorder. “Soil and water first. Wires last. We were at the wrong end. We need the roots. The literal roots.”

Cal thought of the kids. Cassie’s practical eyes, the way she fixed them and would not deviate. Noah with his too-loud laugh that broke the quiet when sound was needed. Eli pale as frost, the day Cal had pulled the boy back from something that wanted to consume. If the earth could take a person the way it took Harold, and nearly Eli, what else could it keep?

The quarry’s breath continued, mist exhaling in slow beats he could just barely match without a clock. The seismograph’s motor whirred, the paper drum turned, and the ink tips scribbled like a foreign hand learning to write the alphabet. He wished he had someone to show it to. He wished he could hand it to Cassie with her serious brow and say, see, you were right to listen with your teeth. He wished he could call up Harold and say, you would love this, old man.

Cal caught himself at the thought. He could call Harold. He knew exactly where to find him.

“I’m always here, Cal.”

Cal stayed there a long time. Long enough for his knees to register their complaint, for the back of his neck to gather the night’s dew. He stood, slow, and his legs argued. He carried the cases to the van in two trips, shut the back doors, and slid into the front seat to let its cold vinyl soak through his clothes.

He leaned back, closed his eyes, and listened without instruments. The ridgeline wind had gone down. The hum held. Far beneath it, or within it, something the size of a town took one slow breath and let it go. Cal opened his eyes to the dark windshield and the first clean thought he’d had in a while: Tomorrow, bring a longer rod. Bring the old maps. Stop treating the wires like cause. Start treating them like hair. Like the dead extension of a growing body.

He put the van in gear. Gravel popped under the tires like knuckles, and Cal spoke softly as he put the ridge behind him. The words were not for himself, but for the ditch and the cold and the frost-laced sumac and whatever was out there listening from the earth. The words were for the memory of Harold, the smell of dust and solder in his shop, and for the dark signal that took him. For the heartbeat he had cornered in the earth. The thing that had tried to kill him, because it knew he was close.

“I’ve got you now.”

*** End of Transmission ***