Lost Signals (27 page)

The clothes he thought would be the easiest to pack, but the vastly-too-small Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that still hung on a silver hanger against the closet wall sent Matt into a spiral of sobbing that left him drained, slumped over outstretched legs that refused to stand.
He needs you to be strong
, he reminded himself.
But for what
 
? Strong for who
 
?

The radio sat on the makeshift desk, a wooden monstrosity that took up most of the surface. Matt stood, walked to the desk with a mechanical motion, sat down in the chair, and flipped the power switch. The assaulting noise he’d heard before erupted from the speaker, and he pressed his fists against his ears to drown out the throbbing vibrations. He kicked out with his foot to rip the power cord from the wall, but the noise stopped abruptly. It was replaced by a soft static and the hesitant murmurings of a new sound, unsteady and wavering
 
; an uncertain recitation of single-digit numbers in the voice of a boy, a child still, with a vocal range that once promised to lower in pitch in a few short years.

It was Andrew’s voice.

Matt sat, mouth open, eyes wide. It couldn’t be his son. It couldn’t be Andrew. Whatever Sheila had managed to do before her death, Andrew certainly couldn’t have. The old radio she’d given him couldn’t record anything. It could only play what someone else was broadcasting.

His son, the ten-year-old love of Matt’s life, continued to read a series of numbers. There was a pause, and Matt’s breath caught in his throat. His son’s voice, his son, reading numbers on a spy station. It was crazy. He was delusional from grief. There hadn’t been any numbers. The radio wasn’t even plugged in, was it
 
?

Matt leaned down to see a black plug in the socket trailing a black cord up to the desk. Plugged in, powered on, playing. The speaker was silent, except for the cold crackle of static. There was no voice.

But there it was again, the same voice that had evolved Matt’s name from “Da-Da” to “Daddy” to “Dad,” in ever-increasing levels of frustration and impatience. The voice that had squealed in delight when Matt tickled his ribs, and shouted “swing me, swing me higher,” even as Matt threatened to loop the swing around the crossbar.

It
was
Andrew’s voice.

Matt grabbed a stub of pencil and began to copy down the numbers.

6, 7-6-4, 6, 4-1-4-4-7, 7-3-5-1-1-5.

Clearly a code of some kind. He scribbled furiously as the voice continued in its flat but halting monotone.

2-5-3-5-9-4-5, 4-1-4-4-7, 6, 7-6-4, 6, 7-3-5-1-1-5.

Repeats. A name, maybe
 
? A location
 
?

2-5-3-5-9-4-5, 2-5-3-5-9-4-5.

More repeats. Then another pause while Matt waited without breathing. One second, two, three . . .

And then the sequence began again. He copied it again to make sure, comparing the two. They were identical, down to the pause at the end. The message began again, the now-familiar numbers becoming a kind of prose poem lulling Matt into relaxation. He listened to his son’s voice calmly reciting the numeric “message,” and it didn’t matter where it was coming from, or how it was coming. It just was.

The transmission concluded as abruptly as it had begun, with the whine and vibration, and then it was over. The yellow light on the radio’s front blinked once and then faded. Matt flipped the power switch off and back on again several times, but whatever had been keeping the antique thing running had failed. Matt slid the radio off the table into a large box of trash.
It’s not worth keeping. Be strong.

He hesitated before clearing off the desk. Dozens of papers, all with long lists of numbers, littered the surface, many of the columns starred and highlighted. Hours of work lay there, lines of unbreakable “spy code,” transcribed in the night. Matt picked up a half-sheet, horizontally oriented with the numbers from one to nine written at the top and the letters of the alphabet stacked in three rows underneath. At the bottom, in quickly scribbled pencil, was the phrase, “55 5595 59657 735115—WE WERE WRONG PLEASE” with a circled question mark beside it.

There was an echo in his memory, an excited pronouncement
 
:
“I’ve almost got the code broke
 
!”

Cipher
, he thought, then stopped, closing his eyes against the swell of emotion rising in his gut.
I can’t do this to myself. It’s the grief. It’s causing me to see patterns that aren’t there.

He picked up the half-sheet and started to crumple it, but stopped when he noticed that both the letters “a” and “s” were lined up under the “1” column. His eye quickly scanned sideways to the 7, which lay over “p” and back left again to the 3 for “l.”

P-L-E-A-S-E. 7-3-5-1-1-5.

“I’ve almost got the code broke
 
!”

Matt tore through the pages on the desk, scattering them in his frenzy. It had to be there. He’d just had it. Where the hell—

“Found it
 
!” He slammed the page down on the desk. With the half-sheet in front of him, he went back and forth between the “key” and the sequence he’d written down earlier.

His pencil stub scrambling over the page, Matt experimented with letter combinations. An interior “1” would most likely be “a” or maybe an “s,” and the double “4” could be either “dd” or “mm.” He already had “please,” and with the doubling, the “7” had to be a “y.” The “6” had to be “o” which meant “764” was “pod” or . . .

6, 764

o god

He worked furiously and the final letters fell into place on the page. Matt stood up, a terrible cold spreading up from the base of his spine to the back of his neck as he read the translated message—a message that could have only come from one source, an inexpert speller
 
:

o god o daddy please

beleive daddy o god o please

beleive beleive

There were a
few days each semester in which Albert Gardner’s soul was crushed by the certainty that he wasn’t getting paid enough to put up with the shit students threw his way. Luckily, there were also days in which he sat back and did nothing. Those days, albeit rare, were glorious. They made him feel like his adjunct position was not an absolute waste of time and a blatant insult to his curriculum vitae. On these throwaway days, he could sit back and enjoy one of his favorite movies and get paid for it. While that was awesome, his favorites were presentation days. On these days, he could quietly enjoy each second of his students’ shaky voices and fidgeting hands as they struggled to address the same bunch of idiots they interacted with in class two times per week and then for six hours straight during the Friday labs.

This particular Tuesday was presentation day, and that meant each group of students had to introduce their audio project, play it for the class, then stand there awkwardly as Albert offered scathing critiques. The group that had just sat down, a collection of misfits who had banded together because no one else had asked them to join their group, had done a horrible job. They’d gone to Eeyore’s Birthday, yet another ridiculous Austin celebration in which folks dressed up, smoked weed, and listened to live music while clogging downtown streets like thirty years of bacon grease on a fat man’s arteries. Besides the excessive screaming, they had done a shoddy job with their MOS reporting and had forgotten to run their audio through a noise reduction filter to at least try to get the wind noise down to tolerable levels. Albert had almost felt bad about calling their piece an aural nightmare.

The next group looked sharper. Brionne and Tristan were somewhat decent students, and they were clearly the leaders of their four-student group. Ben and Tanya were not as intelligent or academically inclined, but being in a group with the coolest folks in the classroom had hopefully made them give it their all. They were standing in front of the classroom and looked as comfortable as a germophobe getting a hug from a hobo. Brionne cleared her throat and addressed the class. Ben turned and started working on the computer they were using for the presentations.

“Hello, my name is Brionne Larsen and these are my fellow group members, Tanya Robinson, Ben Martinez, and Tristan Fox.” She moved her hand toward each of them like a rookie TV show model. Albert noticed the manicured fingers were shaking a bit. “For our third radio project we decided to do a short documentary on the massacre of the
Lady Rose
.”

Brionne looked good in her short black skirt and business jacket. These young college girls could go from looking like teenagers to resembling top-notch smut magazine models with a bit of makeup and different clothes. Nothing hid a woman’s charms as well as those stupid oversized sorority t-shirts. A collection of pornographic images flashed through Albert’s mind and made his pants a bit tighter in the crotch. The thoughts would surely cost him the gig if they became public. He adjusted his body on the seat and watched Brionne step away and gesture toward Tristan with her hand once again.

Tristan stuck his hands in his pockets and quickly pulled them back out and rubbed them together. He looked at Albert as if waiting for a cue to begin. Albert didn’t give him one. Finally, he started talking.

“We . . . we had a hard time with this project. We were lucky enough to have the original audio on hand because my grandfather was involved in the original investigation and . . . you know. Well, we had to, like, clean it up, but we had to do it by chunks because weird sh . . . stuff kept happening—right, Tanya
 
? Like, whenever we played more than a minute of it, something would happen. I’m not even kidding.”

“What exactly are you talking about, Tristan
 
?” Albert didn’t like interrupting because it made the students even more nervous, and that meant they stammered more, which invariably led to longer, far more tedious presentations. The fact that college students would get so anxious at being called out made Albert lose all hope of a future for the third time that day.

Tristan made some monosyllabic attempts at a coherent response and succeeded only in looking more like a dumbass. As if to save his cohort from a total breakdown, Tanya stepped up.

“Tristan’s grandfather was an audio engineer back in the day. He worked for the FBI doing surveillance for many years and in 1981 was pulled into a special project. He helped clean the audio that came from the
Lady Rose
. I know Tristan’s always making silly jokes about everything, but he’s not joking about weird stuff happening to us. Ben and I did most of the heavy editing work on this while Brionne and Tristan did the VO. Putting it together was hard because of all the equipment malfunctions and whatnot. My brother is a ghost freak and he says that the audio we used is possessed by something, that it carried something, some energy, from when it happened. I think my brother’s an idiot, but there’s certainly something going on here.”

Tanya’s delivery was superb. Everyone in the studio was looking at them instead of at their laptops or phones. Albert didn’t like his classroom turning into a circus, but he was curious where this was going.

“Are you guys talking about something like those EVPs they play on
Ghost Hunters
 
?” The question came from Eric, a chubby Mexican kid with an acne problem who Albert always thought smelled of pizza.

“No,” said Ben. “This is something different. This is . . . I think we should just play it.”

“Yes, that’s enough of an intro,” said Albert. “Let your work do the talking.”

Brionne nodded, moved toward the computer, and clicked play on the Audition file already up on the screen. After a second of white noise and a click from the recorder that they’d forgotten to cut or had been too close to start of the VO, the sound of waves gently lapping against the hull of a boat faded in and took over. The speakers were top-notch and the studio was soundproof, so the sound of the lapping waves really took the class and placed them in the ocean. They only thing that was missing was a bit of movement. Then Tristan’s voice came on. He was trying too hard to make it sound deeper.

“Very late on the night of August 2nd, 1981, the
Lady Rose
, a freighter out of New York, was slowly making his way across the relatively rough waters of the Bay of Bengal. It was a trip the boat and its captain had done countless times before. Unfortunately for the crew, something went wrong on this particular night and the
Lady Rose
ran aground on a submerged coral reef.”

The sound of splashing waves was overpowered by the screech of metal scraping against rock. Albert wondered where they had found the sound effect and made a note to give Tanya and Ben some props for their seamless transitions. Brionne’s clear voice came on. She had recorded too close to the microphone, but at least they’d remembered to use the fox tail so the distortion was minimal and her Ps didn’t pop as violently as they had in other projects.

“The
Lady Rose
wasn’t going anywhere that night, but it wasn’t sinking and they had no problem radioing in and communicating their situation. After hearing back from headquarters in New York, the crew, tired from a long day at sea, went to bed. The next morning, knowing that rescue was on its way but that it would take at least a day and half for it to reach them, the captain, Charles Willeford, and crew decided to turn their little accident into a vacation and have lunch under the sun. They brought up a few tables from their kitchen and Willeford graciously shared his personal stash of booze.”