#6: Things That Listen

By the time Cal returned to Harold’s Electronics, the afternoon had thinned to a glossy, worn light. He’d been telling himself Harold was just running late, maybe picking up parts, but it wasn’t like the old man to keep his shop closed.

Cal stepped out of his van, breath showing in the air, and tried the door. Locked. The OPEN sign was still dark. Inside, the radios in the display case sat still as fossils, each dial reflecting the gray daylight.

“Come on, Harold,” he muttered, tapping the door. Nothing. Just a faint hum from somewhere down the block, the kind you’d miss if you didn’t know to listen for it. “Harold?” he called, louder now, though the only answer was the overhead transformer’s nervous mosquito whine and the chatter of the coffee shop next door.

He walked back to his van around the corner and climbed in. The cab smelled like old vinyl and rosin core. He heard his receiver ping once, an interference spike, the same frequency that had flooded his broadcast the night before. He tuned the dial. The static was thick, but underneath it something pulsed, slow and patient, like breathing.

He was still listening when the bell from the school down the street rang out, and kids were already spilling onto the sidewalks when he cranked on his van and pulled out from the parking lot. Rounding the corner onto Main Street, a paper slapped flat against his windshield, and instead of roadway he stared at his own words from last night’s broadcast flapping back at him. The Bulletin Boys’ newsletter. Cal slowed, then stopped.

He popped out to swipe the bulletin and spotted three kids across the street. He recognized the taller one, the kid who’d stood outside the coffee shop that morning staring up at the wires. The boy stood there again now, as if he hadn’t moved from that spot all day.

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

They gave him nothing but blank looks.

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

The wires overhead began to hum louder, trying to run him out of town.

“What’s going on?” called the girl.

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

“Are you going out there?”

Cal paused, listening to the deafening crescendo above. “I need to check on him.”

Then he climbed back in and drove off, tires hissing over the salt grit as he pulled away. In the rearview mirror he saw them watching, bikes angled toward the road that led out of town.

The road to Harold’s ran past a stretch of soil that always looked damp, steaming faintly even in daylight. Telephone poles lined the shoulder like a procession of quiet sentinels, each one humming its own single note as they marched single file into the fields.

Ahead, Harold’s house crouched at the end of the road, porch light dead, windows somehow frosted white. When his van approached over the gravel, the radio woke itself. Cal hadn’t touched it. The speaker coughed and then pushed his own voice back at him, slowed a half-step until he sounded older and a little drunk. The hum changed pitch, first higher, then lower, as though something vast was breathing through the wires. The van’s dashboard lights flickered. The radio snapped on without being touched.

Keep your lights low…

His own voice. Slowed, reversed, laced with another tone beneath it. “Cute,” Cal said to no one. He shut the radio off. The sound kept going. It wasn’t in the radio. It was in the van, and when he cut the engine, it was outside the van, thin and patient and everywhere at once, alive in the air itself.

He gritted his teeth and climbed out.

The frost cracked under his boots like breaking glass as he stepped closer to the old house. It wasn’t cold enough for frost at midday.

“Harold?”

The hum deepened, not angry, just aware.

Harold’s place was a one-story house with a mast stuck behind it like an afterthought. He’d sunk the base in concrete himself years ago with a coffee can and determination. The porch had a mat with a cracked W. The kitchen window wore frost from the inside, feathered as neatly as handwriting. The fence gate sagged, held shut by a length of baling twine that had never once been tied in a proper knot.

“Harold?” Cal called into the wide empty. His shoes crushed the frost as he stepped.

A faint shape drifted at the edge of sight, like heat shimmering in cold air, taller than a man, threaded with pale light. From it, Harold emerged. He was barefoot, and wore pants but no shirt. The hair on his chest caught the light like wire.

“Jesus, Harold.” Relief came out like a swear. “You throwing me a heart attack for fun? You know the sign’s been dark all morning.”

“I heard her,” said Harold, apologetic and overjoyed at the same time. “Mary. She said it’s all right now. She said I shouldn’t be cold.”

“That’s…” Cal swallowed. The air tasted like pennies and wintergreen. “You’re not dressed, buddy. Let’s get you inside. Heat up something. Coffee, soup. Anything.”

Harold smiled. The smile made sense in the shape of his mouth but it didn’t move his face. “You shouldn’t be afraid,” he said quietly. “It’s better when you stop being one thing. It’s not so noisy.”

Cal took a step and the world pushed back, barely, like a rubber band trying to stay taut. He could feel the urge rising in him, not to walk away but to give in, to let whatever this was plug in. He smelled dust in the air, the same old electric warmth of an old workshop, like burnt wool and solder. He was eighteen again and standing in his father’s garage, holding the dead weight of a busted transceiver.

Dad?

“Come on,” Harold murmured, and he wasn’t alone when he said it. Something under him, or inside him, carried the other half of the word as if two mouths shared a throat. Harold extended a hand. His fingers fluttered as if light were a wind moving through him instead of air. “You’ll hear him. You will. He knows you tried.”

Cal heard shouting, but it was hollow and distant. All he had to do was take one more step. A hand on his arm, a voice shaking him free.

“What are you doing?” Cassie shouted.

Cal turned. The kids were there, bikes ditched crooked against the grass. No one had told them to be brave. They brought it anyway.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Cal, but he welcomed the steady hand grounding him against the dark signal. Harold watched them.

Then, Harold watched Eli.

Eli stepped forward. Not defiantly, but compelled. The entity did not use lures of grief for Eli, but of pattern. Galvanized harmonics. Elegant math. The air around him began to draw itself into invisible diagrams. The hum split into a harmonic stack of notes nested over each other until a person who listens for order could hear a sentence without words.

Eli’s head tipped. If Cal had handed him a cipher at that second, the kid would’ve solved it while blinking. Something behind his eyes settled, like a lock accepting the right key.

“You feel that?” he whispered. Not to Cal. To the frost.

“Eli,” said Cassie. Her voice blared with warning. He didn’t hear it.

The entity made a small sound like a camera shutter. A confirmation. Wholly yes. Then it did to Eli what it had done to Harold, and had attempted with Cal. We speak your language, it said without words. We are frequency. Come be in tune. It showed him how the town’s grid could be sung. It broke the lines into pieces and floated them and reassembled them into a shape that implied belonging. It used curiosity the way a hand uses a cup handle.

Eli stepped closer, palm up. He wasn’t reaching for Harold. He was inviting the diagram to redraw around him.

“Eli, stay back,” Cal barked, but it was too late for warnings. The frost lifted off the grass and stayed in the air like dust in a projector beam. The kid’s breath stuttered and came back deeper. The outline of him fuzzed at the edges as if someone rubbed a thumb along a charcoal sketch.

The entity took him politely. That was the worst part. No violence. If Cal’s invitation was hunger, Eli’s was welcome. The light climbed his forearms in lines as fine as filament. The blue-white glow traced to his elbows and pooled at the soft places near the veins. Under his skin, the light didn’t burn. It joined.

Cassie grabbed Eli’s jacket and the fabric shocked her. Noah stood three steps behind, as if doing the math of whether he was strong enough to haul Eli back alone and knowing he wasn’t.

“Eli, look at me.” Cassie put her face in front of his. “Hey. Hey, you.”

“It’s okay,” said Eli, and he meant it. “It knows us. It’s not… it’s not bad. It’s big.” His voice layered thin as tracing paper with another voice under it—higher, echoing, a chorus recorded in a dry room. We are. We are. We are.

Harold watched with tenderness, a father admiring a trick his boy finally learned. “See?” he asked Cal, and the entity behind Harold asked too and the asking made Cal want to weep and walk forward all in one motion.

The van saved him, or the metal in it did. He stumbled sideways and his palm smacked flat to the side panel. The steel skin answered with a deep, stupid clang that had no ghost in it. Sound without meaning. It shook the dark signal and a millisecond of silence fell across the yard.

Cal moved on instinct. He grabbed for the jump bag under the driver’s seat, fingers fumbling past a nest of fused ends and spare lugs. He came up with a length of braided grounding cable and a clamp. The plan wasn’t a plan. It was memory of shop class: give a surge somewhere better to go than the heart.

He lunged for Eli’s wrist and clamped the cable’s other end to the tight fabric of the boy’s sleeve, close enough to skin to make the point. The strap thrummed, and the the van’s skin crackled with discharge.

Eli jerked like someone waking out of a fall. The glow hesitated. Not retreat, but confusion, as if the room’s geometry had shifted.

“Cassie!” shouted Cal. “Pull!”

Cassie lunged forward and yanked Eli backward. Noah grabbed the back of Cal’s jacket and braced. For a second the yard was a tableau carved in glass: Harold statue-still, Eli mid-stumble, Cassie’s knuckles white, Cal off-balance with a strap singing between a kid and an old van.

The sound that tore free wasn’t a screech. It was quiet and clean, like ice splitting across a pond. The light in Eli’s arms shredded into threads too narrow to see, and those threads snapped away faster than vision could keep up, leaving thin frost-lines along his wrist. He collapsed into Cassie and choked once.

Harold flickered. He stuttered, as if someone were flipping the world’s slideshow too fast, frame-skip catching his shoulders and jaw. For a heartbeat his face cleared and his eyes were human, terrified, old. “Cal…”

The hum flared wide, not louder but broader, slipping into the cracks of everything. The ground carried it. The ditch water. The chain-link along the road. All the devices in Harold’s dark house woke at once. The radio in the kitchen muttered to itself. The porch light coughed. Somewhere, just out of sight, a streetlight turned on.

“Back to the van,” said Cal. “Now. Eli’s in the middle. Get the bikes in the back.“

Cassie and Noah did not argue. Eli let himself be steered, legs rubber, eyes curiously bright. In the cab, Cal set him on the bench seat and felt for a pulse. Fast, thin, present.

In the van, Cal turned the key. The engine tried to catch, thought about it, quit, and then changed its mind and came through on the third crank. The dash threw them a little show with needles bouncing up and down, lights a flicker, then steady. The tires chewed gravel and then found purchase. Cal kept his eyes on the road and did not look into the mirrors.

At the bend in the service road, the hum changed key. Not louder. Colder. As if the entity watched them go and, for the first time, felt something like recognition that the game had found opponents. A streetlight far back toward town flared on though the sun still had thirty good minutes left in it. Another answered it, and another, each one popping into a fragile dawn of its own. A sequence. A route.

“Cass,” Noah said quietly, “you seeing that?”

“Yeah, I see it.”

Eli sat upright, careful like an old man getting out of a bath. His skin was marbled pale, the frost-lines already fading. The glow beneath had mostly gone; a residue hung at the edges of him. He pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum like something ached deeper than bone. “It was showing me maps,” he whispered. The inside of his eyelids glowed faint lemon when he blinked. “The town. Every wire. Where they go. It wants… it wants routes. I think it wants paths through people.”

Cassie’s hand hovered near his shoulder but didn’t land. “You’re here,” she told him. At least they had that.

Eli nodded. “Mostly.”

They hit town as the lights all decided it was evening in different shades. A block of them glowed soft as sleeping televisions; another buzzed awake sharp and white; a third sat out the show entirely and left its corner strange. People would talk about a grid fault in the morning. They’d be wrong.

Cal parked a street over from Harold’s shop without meaning to, aim crooked, arm heavy on the wheel. The kids climbed out. Eli’s legs worked. Noah lingered with the van door in his hand like a shield.

“What do we do?” Cassie asked, which was the question grown-ups hate most when they’re tired and scared and have to act like an adult.

Cal ran his tongue along the back of his teeth, tasting metal and old breath. He looked down Main Street. In one direction, the coffee shop simmered with late-day business, and Harold’s shop beside it remained dark. In the other, to the far west, steam billowed from the plant beyond sight.

“We keep the lights low,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake. “We keep our hands off the lines. We tell people to do the same, even if they laugh.” He drew a breath like someone choosing to wake up. “And we get ready to make a lot of noise.”

*** End of Transmission ***