Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (2 page)

Kenji was overjoyed when the track finally came to a close.

“Where'd you get it?” was the first question out of Dylan's mouth as he handed back the phone. Judging by the look on his face he wasn't even remotely impressed. The voice in the recording hadn't spooked him in the least.

“Well, I pulled it up on a torrent tonight. The album's kind of rare. I've looked for it before, but never managed to turn up anything.” Kenji stared at the phone in his hands, the screen dark.

“See,” replied Dylan, standing up, “that's your problem. You poke around on those underground torrent sites and then complain when you don't get awesome quality? I'll bet you it's just some shitty rip. Should've
bought
the album somewhere instead, if you wanted a good copy.”

Kenji paced towards the door. “I didn't come here for a lecture on that. I'm just wondering what you thought of that voice. It kind of... freaked me out.”

“Why?”

Kenji paused. It wasn't something that could easily be put into words. He hadn't even heard what the person was saying. Rationally, there shouldn't have been anything disturbing about it in the least. And yet, here he was, losing sleep over the thing, unable to think of anything else. “It just doesn't seem like it belongs. It feels like someone is reaching out to the listener, like...” His words fell short and he was silent.

Dylan, still unmoved, stretched. “This doesn't make any sense. Industrial goth types put all kinds of weird crap into their music. You should know that. So they added in some little recording of a woman speaking at the end there? It's... it's like the most commonplace thing in the world, if you ask me.” He grinned. “Why is it so weird to you? You listen to this kind of junk all the time.”

Kenji knew that his roommate wasn't far off of the mark. Strange, unplaceable sound effects and eerie voices were par for the course in dark ambient music. He should have been used to such things by now, not at all bothered. And yet for whatever reason, this snippet of voice, indecipherable, had upset him. He felt like an idiot for being so disturbed, but the snippet of speech had left him shaken all the same.

Sighing, Dylan shut off the TV and ambled towards the door. With the warm glow of the television gone, the commons room was plunged into total blackness, with only the dull glow of the hall illuminating the roughest outlines of the furniture within. “Well, the night is young and this is obviously bothering the shit out of you, so what say we have a closer look at that song?” Dylan led the way back to their room, hiking up the stairs with a grunt. His long legs took the steps two at a time, and he was marching down the second-story hallway before Kenji had even climbed the second flight.

“What do you mean?”

Dylan approached their door and shoved it open, stepping into the room. From inside, came his quiet reply. “We'll clean up the audio.”

Kenji cocked his head to the side, rushing into the room and closing the door behind him. “What do you mean? How can we clean up the sound?”

Already Dylan had slipped into the chair at Kenji's desk, and was firing up Kenji's laptop. Pulling up the web browser, he began to type furiously. “Dude, we're living in the twenty-first century here. You can illegally pirate music in a flash these days; what makes you think you can't find a solid audio editor online, too? It's pretty simple, actually. I know this program, totally free, that lets you play around with sound files. You can isolate certain noises, amplify others. You know, mess with it till you've got it just right. If you think there's something to this weird voice at the end, maybe we can clear up the sound and listen to it more clearly.”

Kenji sat at the edge of his bed, watching Dylan work. It hadn't occurred to him to clean up the track and isolate the woman's voice at the end. Even if it had, he wouldn't have known how to go about it. Already Dylan was downloading the necessary program, was zeroing in on the mp3 file on his computer.

“What file is it?” asked Dylan. “Cannibalism?”

“That's the one.”

Dylan scoffed. “Super spooky. These track titles are a goth kid's wet dream. '
Cannibalism
', '
Profane Apotheosis
'... gimme a break. Why do you download this crap, man? It's so lame.”

Kenji wasn't listening, however. As the download for the audio editing software finished, a strong dread washed over him. Something told him that cleaning up the sound and listening to the woman's voice without the obscuring background noise may not be the wisest idea; that it may reveal to them something better left hidden.

“When we're done with this and we find it's just some basic, occult bullshit, I wanna grab some wings. You game?” Dylan turned and cracked a grin. “Oh, I forgot, your folks just sent you a bunch of money, didn't they? I guess that means it'll be your treat, since I'm being a swell guy and helping you with this, eh?”

Kenji held his breath for a bit, giving a little shake of the head. “Sure, whatever.”

Turning back to the computer, Dylan started into his work.

Gripping his comforter, Kenji watched as the MP3 file was loaded into the audio editing software. It was displayed as a single bar alight in wavelengths of different heights.

This was his last chance to turn back, to call off the whole thing. The dread washed over him again, stirred his senses to life. A knot of fear in his stomach rose up his throat as though it were an elevator and settled there. His hands trembled a bit as he sat upright and watched the screen.

But he said nothing. He didn't ask Dylan to stop. He observed, wide-eyed, as Dylan began tinkering with the file.

Something, though he couldn't say just what, was about to be set in motion.

He felt certain.

THREE

Dylan busied himself at the laptop for more than a half hour, dragging, cutting and pasting till he had something workable. All the while, he explained his process with a hint of pride, as though he were a professor giving a lecture. Dylan was a Chemistry major, and loved to get into the more analytical aspects of the things he took an interest in. In this case, discussing the finer details of the audio editing software was endlessly entertaining to him.

Dylan continued. “So, as you can see, it's pretty easy to do. They make the software damn intuitive these days. In the past, you'd have had to have access to an entire studio, but now a laptop and an internet connection will do.” He turned a bit in the chair so that he was facing Kenji. “First we boot up the audio editor. Then we upload the mp3 in question. All of these different wavelengths look like a complicated mess, but we have an option here, see, to sample certain sounds. We find the part we want to clear up and merely sample the specific sounds we want to minimize. In this case, we want to minimize anything that
isn't
that woman's voice, right? So, the barking dogs, the fountain noises, the crowd-- all of that gets sampled and then we lower its volume as far as it'll go, stripping the file down to just the woman's voice. It still won't be a hundred percent clear, but it should be worlds better than what we started off with.” Looking at the screen, Dylan clicked around a short while and then pulled up a new, shorter snippet of sound. “All right. It's all set. I've isolated the woman's voice, lowered the volume of everything else and the resulting recording is right here. Ready?”

Kenji would have been lying if he'd said he was ready to listen to the woman's voice without any interference. While watching Dylan work over the past half hour, he'd grappled with continuous unease. Now that the job was done and he had a finished product he could listen to with the stroke of a single key, he felt his apprehensions mount a thousandfold. Still, he issued a slow nod and Dylan hit the space bar, playing the edited audio.

The sample, of nearly thirty seconds' duration, indeed featured a woman speaking. The voice was undoubtedly feminine, though it was marred by a slight echo, and various sound artifacts came in around the edges, muddying it further. Nevertheless, it was clear enough to understand now, and as the woman spoke, the air in the dorm room became awfully stifling for Kenji. He wished he could open a window, let in some of the fresh, winter air, but there was no window to be found in their little room. He leaned forward, eyes focused on the carpet, and listened while the woman spoke. She repeated the same thing a total of three times, with only a brief pause between each instance.

The meaning of the woman's message was something of a mystery, a jumble of seemingly random letters and numbers that went so:

EN17DA43TU85

There was then a pause. Then the sequence was repeated a second time, followed by another pause. After the third and final repetition of the cryptic message, there was silence.

Dylan frowned. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Talk about a let-down.” He laughed, smacking Kenji's arm. “Don't look so disappointed. What did you think it was going to be? '
Now that you've listened to this, you will die in seven days
'? I told you, man, these underground musicians put weird crap in their songs all the time, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

Though Dylan had misinterpreted it as such, it was not a look of disappointment that left Kenji's face a blank slate. It was intense curiosity. He'd heard a mysterious, muddled message in a song that evening. Now, with the audio cleaned up and the message made clear, he was met with an even greater riddle. He'd heard the message, could have no doubt about what had been said, but what in the world did it mean? He puzzled over it a time, then asked Dylan to play it again.

Dylan complied, and the woman's breathy message drifted through the air afresh. As she spoke, Kenji suddenly stood up and took a notebook from his backpack. Listening closely, he jotted down the string of letters and numbers as neatly as he could despite the shaking of his hands. He muttered them under his breath as he wrote. “
EN17DA43TU85
”.

Dylan scratched at his ear, looking up at Kenji quizzically. “Does this jumble mean something to you?”

Kenji stared at the notebook in his hands, read the letters and numbers one at a time, and tried to parse some meaning from them. None presented itself. Chewing on the eraser of his pencil, he set the notebook on his bed and took to pacing around the room like a prisoner in a cramped cell.

“Kenji?” interrupted Dylan. “Earth to Kenji? What's going on in that head of yours?”

Kenji removed the pencil from his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “I... I don't know what it means, but I also don't think it's bullshit. Why include something like that in a song if it's meaningless?”

Dylan leaned back in the chair, sighing. “I dunno, dude. And I don't know why you give a damn, either. For all we know it's some Illuminati shit and we need to stay away.” His grin faded when he found no amusement in Kenji's narrow gaze. “Look, let's just drop it, yeah? It's probably nothing. I'd bet on it. People include all kinds of weird nonsense in songs because they want to give the illusion of deeper meaning. Who cares, man?” He motioned to the clock on the desk. “It's still early enough to get some wings, and I seem to remember someone in this room promising me a free meal.”

Kenji stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Yeah, all right. Let's get out of here, then.” The two of them found their shoes and put on their jackets, leaving the room and stopping only to lock the door. The march down to the exit was silent; Kenji was far too deep into his thoughts to make small-talk with Dylan as was usually his wont.

Escaping into the deserted campus, which was dressed in thick shadow and revealed to them only by the orangish overhead lights, the pair made their way to the sidewalk that would lead them between the towering, adjacent faculty buildings and to the main drag. Their destination was The Wing Stop, a little restaurant that specialized in wings and burgers. Situated on the corner of the campus, it was usually crawling with customers from the minute it opened to the minute it closed, and it kept long hours, taking orders till four in the morning on the weekends. As the two of them left the shadow of the campus and started across the street towards the restaurant however, they saw not a soul. The shop's signs glowed in eerie hues of green and red, but there was no one else around to see them. Kenji buried his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket and tried not to focus on the utter desertion that surrounded them.

The wind was ice cold, and while Dylan bitched about it relentlessly with every gust, Kenji found it a welcome change from the stuffy air he'd been breathing in the dormitory all day. His cheeks were flush and his hands almost numb by the time they reached the door.

The bored-looking cashier took their order, looking as though he hadn't done a thing all night, and brought out their food shortly thereafter. He stayed at their table a bit, thankful for the distraction of customers, and even offered them a free dessert. The restaurant was very small; done up in a strange aerial theme, with pictures of old aviators and the propellor of an old plane hanging on the wall towards the back, there were only about ten small tables to be found. Every other table was empty, a stark contrast to the heaps of people who often occupied every single one on any other night.

Dylan chatted with the cashier for a bit and then dug into his food with gusto. Taking advantage of his friend's windfall, he'd ordered a large platter of wings and fries, along with a large soda. Kenji, though, had ordered very conservatively and didn't much bother with his food, too lost in thought to eat.

“What's the matter with your food?” asked Dylan, motioning to him with one of his freshly-cleaned wing bones. The corners of his mouth were covered in a thin layer of barbecue sauce.

Kenji shook his head and took a disinterested bite. The food was fine, but he wasn't hungry. His mind was elsewhere, the sound of that woman's voice still pulsing in his ears. A Prince song came on overhead, and in its chorus he fancied he heard the recitation of those cryptic numbers and letters by the woman in the recording. He stifled a shudder and nibbled on one of his fries.

“It's so dead around here,” offered Dylan, taking a swig of his soda. “Usually we have to wait to get a table, and there's a constant stream of people heading in and out. Campus, too. I haven't seen another person in, like, days. Wild, man. Just wild.” He took another pull from his soda and then crunched on an ice cube. “Have you ever seen campus this way?”