Lost Signals (42 page)

The perfume of the plants was thick in my nostrils as I moved through the blue light between towering bushes, stepping over a coil of hose before I found what I was looking for.

I pushed aside shovels and other long-handled tools to reveal a heavy steel door set into the sweating wall. Some kind of disabled security card reader was mounted beside it.

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY FORBIDDEN BEYOND THIS POINT was a faded stencil on metal.

I leaned a shoulder into the door and pushed because there was no way to pull. It was only by accident that I discovered the door was designed to slide to one side. After a moment of effort it did so and I jerked away from the rain of rust.

A plastic clatter caught my attention and I picked up another cassette and fed it into the Walkman, tossing the other tape into the basement jungle.

The audio whirred to life as I trotted back through the plants. Static. Sounds of movement. I stood over Don’s body, trying to figure out when a dead hand had slipped free from the blanket cocoon, struggling with the bizarre idea that I was acting in the present while listening to a voice recorded only a matter of hours earlier. Time was splitting.

His voice kicked in
 
: “Stop fucking around, man. Get my body through the door and down to the well, now
 
!”

A shout, panic in his voice. “Do you know that guy who picked you up at the bus station
 
? He called Salvatore to let him know you were on the way. Right now while I’m talking into a microphone you’re driving north to kill me. Far out.” A choking sound and I imagined tears.

“Look, man, I don’t blame you. I knew this would happen when I threatened to play the record. Maybe I wanted it to happen, I’m so damned lonely up here.” He laughed through his tears. “I mean, if I really wanted to end the world I would have just played the fucking record, right
 
?”

“What record
 
?” I asked the ghost.

“Enough messing around, get my body, man, do it. You really have to move.”

I grabbed the feet and walked backwards, dragging the corpse through the dark opening.

***

The next set of overheads flickered reluctantly to life and I let out a harsh breath. Goddamned lights always took an extra few seconds before the motion sensors triggered, so that for an eternal moment I was overcome with an onslaught of nyctophobia while David Bowie sang over the tinny sounding PA system. I thought the Alaskan night had taught me about darkness. What a child. True darkness was underground where the sun didn’t exist.

“Put on a stack of records and let ’em play through. Keep track of the records, of the time,” the DJ had instructed. Bowie meant that I still had plenty of time. I wondered if this is how I would sleep in days to come, dependent on a stack of records.

My laugh fell flat in the bizarre tunnel with its nonsensical letters and numbers beside doors I was told to ignore. The tunnel itself was ribbed and lined with tubes whose function I could only guess at. The whole thing designed by someone who thought
The Jetsons
meant the future.

“Knock it off,” I said and backed down the hall again with my grisly burden, footsteps muffled as we dragged a worm-trail through the dust. Stairs, he told me to look for stairs. Bowie sang about Andy Warhol and I tried to hum along.

“Keep going, Micky, keep walking through the fear,” my old friend on the radio was saying. “I know you’re freaking out, I sure as hell was. Like they built this place to give a guy the heebie jeebies, so deep with no air. And man, how the sound falls flat, right
 
?”

Was he fucking with me
 
?

“But you gotta get me down to that well, so find those stairs and ignore everything but my voice from this point on, no matter how weird things get.”

Mounted on the wall I saw fire extinguishers. Axes. Coiled hoses. Something marked a DECON STATION. Everything rusty. My broken fingers were throbbing and my nose ran from the clouds of dust I kicked up.

The body rasped along the floor as I pulled it into another inky spill of shadow and hesitated, awaiting the delicate touch of a bony hand on my shoulder . . .

The light overhead buzzed into radiance but never found its stride and flickered madly as I hurried beneath it. My ears filled with the sound of my own ragged breath and I wondered where my guide—

“I know you’re freaking out, hold it together.” I heard him inhaling deeply. “Let me tell you about this place, this damned place that was never used after millions of dollars and seven people—
seven
—died during construction.” I heard him blowing, imagined the cloud of smoke until he resumed with a crackle. “It was the Cold War, man, and the military wasn’t going to listen to anyone, especially not a bunch of fucking Eskimos with their fucking legends about a bad place. A hungry place.
Perlertok tonrar
.”

I stood up straight as a sound rolled down the corridor. Someone giggling.

“Hungry Devil is what they called this place, a place that makes men sick. But the military dug and dug and woke it up, gave it the tools to amplify its reach. Boost the devil’s signal, man, can you dig that
 
?”

I bent back to my burden when he screamed in my ears and I jumped. “THEY MADE IT STRONGER
 
! IT CAN REACH AROUND THE WORLD AND TWIST THINGS, TURN THINGS AND MAKE PEOPLE DIE.”

I pulled forward now with my uninjured hand while the sweat poured down my face in rivers and my hair became a salty swamp. A laugh bounced off the walls from somewhere behind me as one by one, the lights back there went dark.

“Hey Micky, Micky
 
?”

The voices were dopplering and I realized that Don wasn’t speaking to me through the headphones. I lifted a padded earpiece free and cocked an ear at the nearest PA speaker, but the voice wasn’t coming from there.

“Don’t throw me down the well, it’s so cold down there.”

Every muscle in my body went rigid as I stared at the blanket-shrouded body.

“Let’s go back up and smoke awhile,” the voice wheedled from beneath the blanket.

“Oh shit,” I said and if I hadn’t found the door marked STAIRS just then, I would have dropped the body and run. But there it was and I ripped it open. Dragged the corpse through until the heavy metal door swung closed on the head and we were stuck. I pulled viciously until it squeezed through with a wet crunch.

It was like stepping from a steam room into a meat locker and I fell against the door, shivering as a yellow lamp on the wall buzzed to life. The metal burned with cold and I pulled away, breath clouding. I felt an eerie constriction on my temples as short hairs froze.

Black veins of ice lined the walls and I slipped on a slick stair, jarring the breath from my lungs when I fell. The body tobogganed downward until it crashed at the landing and spilled free from the blankets. The impact was so great and the icy cement so slippery that the corpse rebounded around the corner and teetered on the edge of the next flight downward. “No . . .” I moaned before it was sucked down and out of sight.

Rubbing at my abused back, I stood and picked my way down the stairs, fingers growing numb on the metal railing while the voice in my ear spouted delusions and kept me company.

“ . . . part of the Distant Early Warning Line, get it
 
? Code named White Bear. Things went wrong before they put the system online, all those construction deaths, but once they cranked up those dishes everyone with a pair of headphones got sick.” I touched my own headphones involuntarily and looked down the next flight as the weak overhead lamps lit themselves. The blanket lay in a heap on the landing below me but the body had continued its careening slide and vanished around the right-angled turn for the next set of descending stairs.

“When the month-long night came, they went crazy. Started seeing Russian bombers every time the wind changed direction. Pushed us to Defcon Two half a dozen times before Washington figured out there was a problem with the site. Then the operators up here started killing each other and, well, can you imagine that meeting at the Pentagon
 
?” He wheezed in my ears and I realized he was laughing. “Sorry, General, looks like we should have listened to the natives. White Bear is haunted.”

I followed an organic smear down flight after flight beneath the inadequate lights until I was uncertain how deep beneath the earth’s surface I had traveled. I blocked out my companion’s voice, worry increasing as the precise, government stenciling on the walls grew looping and stick-like. At first the symbols were recognizable as letters and numbers but the shapes grew more distorted the further down I went, until I couldn’t identify them at all.

There, the body was piled bonelessly against the door to the next subbasement only one more flight below.

The PA system went silent as I reached the dead man and I waited, teeth chattering violently, listening anxiously to the whir and click of another record dropping into place over the PA system. A liquid clicking crackled from the speakers and then a horrible keening filled the air. It was a song sung by fleshless mouths, mandibles and teeth clicking together beneath a strange, warbling chant. The same as that sung by Inuit women while they circled a fire in which a man was cooked alive.

I cast about wildly as if the strangely marked walls would offer some explanation, tell me how those murderous hags had replaced the next album. Were they above me right now, waiting with guns and dogs
 
? Where they trying to frighten me onward to this lowest and final subbasement where an ancient well held a devil
 
?

“No way.”

I made it to the first step when a cold hand gripped my ankle.

***

I squeezed the sponge in both hands and pink, frothy water cascaded back into the bucket. A smoldering joint dangled from my lips and I blinked against the rising curl of smoke as I resumed scrubbing at the mess inside the door. My broken fingers barely hurt at all.

I heard a voice, not the radio, and I looked fearfully at the old brown door that opened on an unsteady flight of wooden stairs down to the basement.

“Shut up, you can’t talk any more.” I eyed the bloody fire axe leaning against the door. Three great whacks at the joint of neck and shoulder and Don’s head had bounced free, still gibbering. His blind body stumbled after me and I ran, trapping him in the subbasement. Sounded as if old Don had crawled up to the cellar.

Never did throw the body in the well.

Outside the wind howled and Don’s collection of homemade, shiny steel records rattled on the walls. As if in echo, the cellar door shook and I looked away, trying to block it out.

The phone rang and I wiped my soapy hands on my pants before turning down the volume on Sondheim’s
Pacific Overtures
. A blue spark jumped from my finger to the control panel and I hissed. The place was thrumming with a static charge.

I answered the phone. “KZXX request line.”

“Oh Mick, Mick
 
!” Vera said and it went the way Don told me it would. She cried and Sally threatened and I begged in spite of myself. I loved her, the real thing, promised Sally I’d do whatever he needed.

She sounded scared, you should have heard her.

He told me and I sat down in the chair, following the instructions Don had written out on lined notebook paper. The ground vibrated beneath my feet and I could hear the shriek of tortured metal outside as great concave dishes rotated. The devil reached out across the miles and I recorded a senator and his mistress exchanging sweet nothings.

Don’s record press looked complex but wasn’t hard to operate once I played around with it. His notes said something about magnetic fields from the special recordings wiping tapes after only a few minutes. Had to lay those tracks down on an album if I wanted the recording to last.

I used the press the way Don instructed, fed in a blank steel disc and listened to the scritch-scratch as the recording was transferred. In another life I would have thought it was pretty cool.

I thought about Sally’s words, about what happened to guys like me. About listening at keyholes. I felt sick in the pit of my stomach but I made some adjustments at the control panel and entered a phone number on the keypad.

“ . . . some place warm, Sally. It’s so cold this time of year, I need to feel the sun.”

Vera’s voice filled the studio and I pushed back in the chair. Held my Zippo to the joint and inhaled deeply, my heart and the tip smoldering in tandem while I listened to Vera planning a romantic getaway. Sally wanted to go to Italy because he was a fucking cliché. Vera wanted Aruba. The way she wheedled, I thought she’d get her way.

I disconnected and cried a little bit, smoked a bit and thought about how little Sally knew about guys like me. About what we’re capable of when you take everything away.

I started looking at all those homemade records Don hung on the walls.

The record that got Don killed was titled
Doomsday
and the track listing was filled out by hand. Ten tracks, most of them foreign names. World leader types I recognized from the news. I thought about what the devil would let Don record and I don’t think any of the guys back in Chicago would have recognized my smile.

I lit another joint and put the gleaming metal record on turntable number two. My vision shimmered as I played with the power knobs on the console, turned everything up to ten. The fillings in my back teeth buzzed painfully and static electricity lifted the short hairs on my forearms. I thought we’d reach Russia easily. Canada, the main body of the United States. Further.

I heard the devil laugh.

I grabbed the boom mic and leaned in. “To the folks at home and all the ships at sea, it’s Micky Shaw coming at you from the top of the world. I want to play something special, a last gasp from DJ Don.” I pushed off from the console and the chair rolled over to the turntables. I lifted the needle into place and rolled back to the mic. “This one’s dedicated to a real happening couple in the Windy City.”