Lost Signals

by Josh Malerman

  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.”

  The sound of shuffling feet and clicking silverware replaced Brionne’s voice. The effects were obviously meant to place the listener in a restaurant, but Albert decided not to be too hard on them because experience had taught him that finding free sound effects for something as specific as a bunch of seamen having lunch on a boat was really hard. Still, he made a note : mention that, when an effect is not readily available, they can always go the extra mile and create it themselves.

  After a few more seconds of eating and talking sounds, Tristan’s voice returned.

  “The Lady Rose was full of merry for a while. To the surprise of the captain, who could’ve sworn the previous night that they were far from land, he and his 26-men crew were about 800 yards from an island. The tiny speck of land to their right was something they hadn’t expected to see, and they ignored they were looking at North Sentinel island. The crewmembers looked out at the beach and talked about exploring it after lunch. As they ate, someone looked out at the beach and spotted a few men coming out of the dense jungle that sprouted just beyond the shore. The men, all very dark-skinned, wore loincloths and carried spears and bows and arrows. At first, these men stuck to the tree-line and moved from shadow to shadow like fish moving from puddle to puddle.”

  The writing was a little cheesy, but far better than Albert had expected. The students had managed to create an atmospheric piece of radio, and that was something no previous group had accomplished. A very loud voice said, “Look at that !” It was obviously Ben. Albert made a note to also mention that, when you create your own sound effects, you need to worry about them fitting in with the rest of your audio in terms of clarity and volume. Brionne’s voice returned, loud enough to be heard over the sounds of men talking indistinctly.

  “The mysterious men on the beach looked out at the crew and vice versa. Captain Willeford told his men to finish their meal. They would get a few boats in the water after lunch. By the time the crew was done eating, there were nearly 50 men standing on the sand, and they had brought out some canoes.”

  Radio was a strange beast. An audio piece had a few seconds to hook a listener. Once that happened, it could only go two ways : listeners either got bored of your crap really quickly or they became entranced by what you were telling them. This was clearly a case of the latter, and despite the few small problems with this piece, the group had pulled it off. As much as he hated to do so, Albert contemplated the possibility of having to congratulate these four students in front of everyone.

  Brionne went on.

  “This is where the story gets weird and where the official reports offer inaccurate versions of what went down. The only thing that really happened after that and was reported truthfully is the words uttered in Willeford’s second call. That morning, the captain made an early morning call just to check that everything was in order and that rescue was still on the way. After lunch, he made a second radio call, a distress call. The audio is not very crisp on the official recording, but you can tell that there’s urgency in his voice.”

  Ben and Tanya had tried to fade the new clip in, but the age difference, not to mention the digitalization process, made it rough and grainy, like an old movie for the ears. Still, the quality of the audio was not as awful as it could’ve been. It had probably been cleared by an expert before these kids got hold of it.

  “Wild men ! Wild men are coming ! I estimate more than 50. They are carrying various rudimentary weapons.” There was a pause. Willeford’s heavy breathing could still be heard. “They are dragging five rustic wooden boats onto the water. I’m worried that they will try to board us. If they do, we will proceed with caution, but will use deadly force if necessary.”

  All sounds faded. Tristan’s voice came on and delivered a single line on top of that silence : “The captain never made another call.” After two seconds, he spoke again. “At least that’s the official version. According to the report, the natives came, the crew fought them off, and the so-called wild men retreated. That night, everyone on board was rescued by a Japanese freighter and taken to safety before being flown back to New York because the Lady Rose’s hull had sustained too much damage. The truth, however, is very different. According to one Indian report and some rumors, the third distress call was never made public. The rescue crew was told to hurry. When they arrived, they found the crew slaughtered. Some limbs had been taken and most torsos had been opened from sternum to groin and everything but the intestines was missing. Not all bodies were accounted for. The government covered the whole thing, but Jessica Dahlby, a New York Times reporter who also did work for National Geographic on that area of the world, wrote a piece about a year later. In it, she explained how she’d been unable to find any crew member in the US despite having information about them and even previous addresses. What she did uncover was a copy of the last call. That is what you’re about to hear.”

  Albert hated that last bit, but everything that preceded it had been great. It’d been a bit too gory for his taste, but it made for a truly compelling radio piece. The rough audio returned. Tanya and Ben had completely faded out the sound of the waves in order to allow Willeford’s voice to be heard as clearly as possible. They deserved props for that. The man’s voice was tinged with panic.

  “Mayday ! Mayday ! The natives are on deck ! We tried to keep them down, but they’re chanting something and my men are dropping like flies.”

  The sound of screaming and chanting could be heard under Willeford’s voice. The chant was strong, but the words were strange, spoken in a language Albert had never heard. He leaned forward and tilted his head toward the speaker a few feet above his desk. The door to the lab
slammed closed. Everyone jumped. The massive metal door was part of the soundproofing system and weighed a ton. Slamming it shut was something Albert never would’ve imagined. Brionne and company were taking this joke too far.

  “I think that’s enough. Please stop the audio for a second.”

  Ben was frantically hitting the spacebar key, but the Audition file kept playing.

  “The natives are surrounding my men. Only Sebastian Castellano and I were able to made it to the bridge. We . . . we are looking at the situation down at the bow deck. It’s . . . hard to describe. The natives have surrounded my . . . oh, God ! Did you see that ?”

  Willeford went quiet. The sound of the chanting grew. Despite the poor quality of the audio, it sounded guttural and brutal.

  “Ehe . . . javasas-ggot . . . ”

  Tommy’s scream made Albert jump again. He looked at the wimpy kid. He always sat at the back of the lab and tried unsuccessfully to hide his earbuds under his hoodie. Now he was standing up, his hands wrapped around his neck as if choking. Albert got up. Could he perform the Heimlich maneuver ? He knew the theory, but had never done it to anyone. He was about to run to Tommy when the kid’s feet left the ground. Every eye in the classroom nailed itself to Tommy.

  “The . . . chanting keeps getting louder,” Willeford’s ghost screamed from every speaker in the room.

  “Stop that thing !” yelled Albert.

  “I’m trying ! This is exactly what we were talking about, Mr. Gardner !” said Ben.

  Tommy’s body flew into the wall behind him and the impact of his head reverberated even over the cacophony of chanting and screaming.

  “Ehe maytubi javasas-ggot igomoro . . . Ehe maytubi javasas-ggot igomoro . . . ”

  The sounds coming from the speakers had lost their grainy quality. The chanting was now loud and clear, and Albert could make out every word even if he failed to recognize their meaning. Whatever it was, it sounded ominous. That those words were somehow responsible for what was happening in the room was something he instinctively knew and didn’t question.