by Cat Knight
Or it could be something else, a glitch somewhere in the wiring or mics or whatever the bloody hell! After a third play, she grabbed her phone and handed it to Ears. “Put it on this,” she said. “We have to determine if it’s the recording or your phone.”
Ears nodded and left with her phone. She watched him leave, and her mind raced. She told herself it was no good to speculate before she knew for sure where the problem was. She had to know where to begin, and panic was not the right place.
Julia tried to quiet the voice in her head that told her that she had made an awful mistake. She was an idiot. To think that she could convert an old house into a studio was folly. The fact was, it was cheap. That’s why they’d bought it.
Other people, more savvy than Julia, probably had known that there would be months and months of council work, digging up roads and whatever else they did, and that the owner wanted to unload it quickly before it all started.
The money that Alden had invested in her dream was slipping away. In fact, so was her dream. If word got around, and it would, her studio would fold like a tent and disappear down the rat hole of shattered dreams.
Julia felt sick. Disappointment ripped through her. She stood and walked to the break room. With shaking hands, she made more tea. It was the only thing she could think to do. For a moment, she wished she could pour herself a whiskey or smoke a joint, something to take the edge off her nervous energy. A hundred ‘what if’s’ whistled through her brain; none settled, none took root. ‘What if’ followed ‘what if’, until they circled inside her head like banshees, all heralding the demise of her enterprise. Why had she started this business in the first place? She zombie walked back to her office.
Ears rushed in and placed her phone on the desk. For a moment, she was afraid to move. She wasn’t sure she could handle the absolute truth of the recording. When she nodded, Ears repeated the series of touches.
The music played.
The noise marred.
She wanted to scream.
“I told you,” Ears said. “I told you.”
He sounded almost gleeful.
Julia listened to her phone ten times. Nothing changed. The sound was there each and every time. She was reminded of the old saw that said madness was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Madness wouldn’t help her. She couldn’t even use it as an excuse. The sound was there. If anything, it sounded like a voice. She grabbed the phone and started for the studio.
“Come on,” she growled at Ears.
They returned to the studio, and the first thing she did was tell Ears to play the master file. She didn’t bother with headphones. The speakers were good enough. Ears cued up the file and played. She listened.
The speakers didn’t utter a false sound.
“What the….?”
She handed her phone to Ears. “Erase the copy,” she said.
She watched as Ears deleted the file.
“Now yours,” she added.
Ears deleted the file on his phone.
“Now,” she said. “Copy the master to both phones.”
Ears obeyed, copying the file to both phones.
“Play them,” she ordered. Ears played her phone first, and for a moment, Julia had hope. No sound — until the noise came through loud and clear.
“Bloody Hell – sounds like a voice… Now yours,” she said to ears. Ears started his phone, and in moments, her worst fear was confirmed. His phone too had the noise, which was insane.
“How can this be?” Julia asked.
“I don’t know,” Ears answered. “The master sounds fine, but when you transfer it, that noise shows up.”
“It’s digital,” Julia said. “Ones and zeroes. Unless the ones and zeroes change in the copy, how can there be noise?”
“Maybe it’s in the wire. What if we send it via Internet? Upload the file to one place, and download it to a phone. If it’s clean, then, it’s a physical problem.”
“Do it,” she said. “Somehow, we have to isolate this.”
Ears proceeded to upload the file and then bring it back to her phone. When he played it, the noise, the voice, was there, the ghost was there.
“Bloody damn,” she said. “How did it get there? Your phone. Do it.” She watched as Ears repeated the download. His phone was no different than hers. The ghost was there, as loud as ever.
Running her fingers through her air, she paced behind Ears, trying to determine a way to pinpoint the problem.
“Run the master again.”
Ears ran the master, and there wasn’t a hint of the ghost.
“Copy to my phone.”
Ears repeated the transfer. The ghost was there, as if it had never left.
For a moment, she wondered if Ears was doing something during the transfer, somehow sending a phony file, a file he knew was marred.
Although she trusted him implicitly, she couldn’t help but wonder. How else could the ghost be explained?
Something’s not right here, you’re in trouble, the voice in her head told her. She sat down and asked Ears for the file name. He looked at her, and she could see the hurt in his eyes.
“I know it’s not you,” she said. “But I want to do this for myself. You understand?”
He nodded, but the angst didn’t leave his face. Careful not to make a mistake, Julia first used a physical connection to load one phone and the Internet to load the other.
She knew her instructions were correct, but she still hesitated before she performed the test.
“Go ahead,” Ears said. “I need to know.”
She tapped the screens, and they both listened.
The ghost mocked them, first on one phone and then on the other.
“That’s impossible,” Julia said. “These are digital files.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Ears added.
“We’ll try it again.”
After three more tries, Julia did feel insane. Nothing she tried worked. Nothing Ears suggested worked. Even though it seemed impossible, the ghost showed up on every copy even when it didn’t appear on the master.
Her frustration grew with every iteration until she threw up her hands and walked out of the control room.
She had the feeling that if she repeated the process one more time she would take off a shoe and pound the control board until it never worked again, not that her small boot would do much harm. Unable to control her anger, Julia grabbed her bag and marched out of the building hoping that the fresh air would help her think—if she could get far enough away from the noise.
Walking furiously along the old streets and stepping her way across construction rubble she continued several blocks. The smell of chips wafted from the pub ahead. Half of her felt hungry, but the other half was simply afraid to return and face the ghost.
She sipped a pint while she waited for her food, wondering if she should call Alden. She thought that maybe he would have a solution or a suggestion. But she shouldn’t reach out to Alden. It was her business, she needed to fashion the answer to her problems with it.
When the food came, Julia couldn’t eat it. Her appetite was gone. The only thing she could think of was the studio, the ghost. Drinking ale in the local pub wasn’t going to fix whatever was wrong. Tossing some quid on the table, quid she could hardly afford, she left the pub and hurried back. She had a ghost to vanquish.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
She found Ears at the mixing board. Earphones on, he didn’t turn when Julia entered the room. When she touched his shoulder, he jumped like a child with a hand in the biscuit jar.
He jerked off his headphones, and for a moment, Julia thought he would swing at her.
“It’s there,” Ears said. “It’s there.”
“What’s there?” Julia asked.
“The ghost, the ghost.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “There’s a ghost in the file.”
“Yes, yes, a ghost, a real ghost.”
“And you’ve fou
nd a way to excise it from the file?”
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not a ghost.”
“You just said it was a ghost.”
“It is, it is.”
“Well, Ears, it can’t be a ghost and a not ghost, so you’re going to have to talk a little more.”
Ears held up one finger. “Wait, wait, listen, listen.”
Ears’ hands flew over the board, hitting buttons, moving through the file. Then, he spun the volume dial and hit the play button. Out of the speakers came a woman’s voice, a very loud woman’s voice.
“GET OUT”
Chapter Five
“What? How?” Julia sputtered.
“I was fiddling around,” Ears began. “And I slowed it down. That was when it started to make sense. And when I heard it clearly”.
“Play it again,” Julia ordered.
Ears played the ominous warning five straight times, and each time was exactly the same. A woman—Julia was certain it was a woman — said exactly two words, and their meaning was unmistakable.
“That’s enough,” Julia said after the fifth repetition. “Where did it come from?”
“It didn’t happen during the session,” Ears said. “I would have noticed anything like that.”
“But it had to happen during the session. It’s right in the middle of the file.”
“I know where it is, but I have no idea how it got there.”
For a moment, Julia didn’t want to believe Ears.
But he was the mixer, so he had to know how those errant words invaded the song. It wasn’t as if someone had entered the studio, picked up a mic, and shouted out an unveiled warning. He had to know.
“Did you make a video of the recording?”
“Sure, but how will that help?”
“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but one of the people in the room somehow inserted that voice into our recording. If we go through the video, maybe we’ll see who it was.”
“They’re all professionals,” Ears said. “They wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“You would be surprised by what people will and won’t do. Send me the video. I want to watch it myself.”
“Sure thing.”
Julia left the room and marched to her office. Once inside, she closed the door and plopped into her chair.
She knew that the video was a long shot. After all, if one of the performers had pulled some stunt, it probably wouldn’t show up at all. And if they hadn’t… But Julia didn’t for an instant, believe in supernatural hokus pokus. Her phone rang, and it was Ears. The video file was in her mail box. For more than one moment, Julia wondered if she possessed the courage to watch it.
She did. She had the option to speed up the video and reduce the watching time. After a moment’s reflection, she decided that she might miss something in the fast-forward version.
If she was going to spend the time watching the video, then she was going to watch the video. Opening the message Julia started the video knowing she was in for hours of boredom. She wasn’t disappointed. She was halfway through the video when Ears knocked on her door and entered.
“Quitting time,” Ears said.
“Did you figure out anything?” Julia asked. He shook his head.
“Not yet. I swear it’s as if someone, like you said, walked up to a mic and talked so slowly that when speeded up, it sounded like that noise. It’s crazy.”
“See you tomorrow.”
The door closed, and Julia knew she wouldn’t be able to watch the entire video before she had to leave. Alden would be waiting for her at the pub. It was their usual night away from the flat, a chance to drink a pint, eat some rather bad pub food, and joke with a friend or two. If she begged off, citing the problem with the recording, he would wonder, and she didn’t want him to wonder. She didn’t want him to know anything until she had found the problem and fixed it. An oh-by-the-way comment would work far better than an I’m-tearing-my-hair-out plea for help. Grabbing her bag, she turned off the lights and started for the front door. That was when she heard it.
“GO AWAY!”
She spun on her heel, looking over her shoulder for the man who had spoken to her. Because it was a man. She knew that much. In the half-light of the hall, she saw no one. Was there a shimmer of something? She squinted.
No, it was a reflection of something. She stared and waited, and as she waited, her fingers twitched.
“Who’s there?” she managed to ask.
She received no answer, and she really didn’t expect one. That little two word phrase hung in her mind, but had anyone really said it? For sure, it wasn’t loud enough to come from another room. The man was right behind her, and he didn’t yell.
But there wasn’t any man behind her, although there had to be a man behind her, which was bonkers. She backed down the hall, half expecting some stranger to leap out of the ceiling or something and murder her. Of course, if she had thought about it, she would have known that murderers rarely warn their victims. She reached the front door, and still no one had appeared. Had she really heard someone? Or had the voice on the recording primed her brain for a kind of aural hallucination?
For the moment, she wasn’t going to pursue it. She slipped out, locked the door behind her, and started off. If something happened during the night, if equipment got stolen…well, she had insurance, didn’t she?
The further she walked, the calmer she became. Perhaps because the construction had ended for the day. The warning was some sort of voice inside her head, and while that would be enough to scare anyone, to Julia, it seemed far better than some real man stalking her. Yes, she was certain, she had imagined the voice, the words.
Her nerves were frayed, so imagining another warning was exactly what one would expect. She had read about people who heard voices, voices that weren’t really there.
Drugs could do that, or stress, or lack of sleep. She told herself not to worry. After all, it was a one-off thing.
Now, if she started to hear entire conversations, well, then it was time to seek professional help. She forced a little laugh. Julia, the stone, in need of a shrink. That sounded preposterous. Her hands had almost stopped trembling when she entered the pub. That was a good sign.
Alden was waiting in a booth, and he positively glowed. Julia was almost afraid to join him.
“You’ll never guess who I ran into today,” Alden said.
“Do you really want me to guess?” she said.
“Of course not, it’s rhetorical. Mark Haggit.”
“The Mark Haggit that went through second with you?”
“The very one, and guess what, he’s a video producer.” Alden beamed as if he had pulled a rabbit out of a hat. “Isn’t that great?”
To Julia, the ale was far greater than Mark Haggit’s job, but she didn’t want to spoil Alden’s mood.
“It is great,” she said. “Has he done anything we’ve seen?”
“Not that I remember, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that he does music videos. Get it? Music? He’s always looking for novel ways to present clients. When I told him you had a new studio, he blew up like a balloon.
He would love to feature you and your studio in a video. Great? Think of all the online publicity.”
Julia could see how Alden would think that putting the studio into a video would be icing on the cake.
Smiling, she tried to look impressed. It wouldn’t help to argue with him because he didn’t know about the ghost. When poor Mark found a woman screaming “GET OUT” in the middle of his video, he might not be so enthusiastic. Of course, Julia could frame the ghost as some sort of avant garde, artistic conundrum, and she half believed someone might buy it. No, she didn’t believe that. No one was that doltish.
“He wants to meet you right away,” Alden added.
“That’s great,” Julia agreed. “But can you hold him off for a day or two. I mea
n, I’m still putting the finishing touches on our project. I’d like to have a solid example to show him.”
“Sure, sure,” Alden said. “He was probably stroking me anyway. But I’m going to follow up, Jules. I really am. It’s too good a coincidence to let slide by.”
“I know it is.” She took his hand. “And I’m grateful. I really am.”
Alden grinned and squeezed her hand. “Be right back.”
She watched him go to the bar for more ale, and she knew she couldn’t share her ghost problem with him, not this night. He was too gleeful. Besides, it was too soon to toss him a problem he couldn’t possibly solve. And with any luck, the ghost would be gone by morning. After all, this was the first time anyone had mentioned voices in the house, the first time.
She frowned.
The first time?
What did that tell her?
Unless the ghost had put down roots because it loved rock music, the house should have a history of ghosts, of haunting. In all the time of the makeover and preparation, no one had mentioned a stray voice or two. No one had walked over with an ashen face and said cold fingers had brushed his cheek. So, if the ghost wasn’t there a month ago, then it wasn’t a ‘real’ ghost. It was someone manufacturing a ghost, manufacturing a spirit. But why? And Who? Who stood to gain if her studio suddenly became ‘haunted’?
No one.
Well, someone.
How was she going to discover who wanted her to abandon her dream? It had to be someone close. But who?
She trusted all of her colleagues. Which one of them was a delinquent plotting her demise? Before she could answer the question, Alden returned. He slid the mugs across the table and laughed.
“We’re going to be invited to all the awards shows. You and me.”
“Just think of the swag,” she added although she didn’t really feel like adding anything.
“Swag. Why the word all by itself makes one drool.”
They clicked mugs and sipped. Julia wondered how she was going to change the topic.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
