Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller
Read Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller Online
Authors: Ambrose Ibsen
Transmission
A Supernatural Thriller
By Ambrose Ibsen
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Copyright © 2016 by Ambrose Ibsen
All rights reserved.
ONE
No matter how long he listened, Kenji Ando couldn't seem to ignore the strange sound coming in over his headphones.
The dorm room was dim. He'd been hoping to get some sleep, the stress of the previous week's midterms still weighing him down. His roommate, Dylan, was out in the commons area, watching TV, so there weren't any distractions. Kenji should have been able to relax and sleep without incident, and had even queued up some music on his phone for the purpose of helping his relaxation along.
They were in their first days of a five-week winter break. Midterms were over and the campus had emptied out as students went home to visit with their families for the holidays. Kenji and Dylan, though, had decided to stay behind. There were only a couple of other students who'd done so in their entire building, making it eerily quiet at all hours. The campus, too, was a complete ghost town. Where usually packs of students roamed and raved there was only emptiness to be found.
Just an hour before, after scouring the usual illegal torrent sites, Kenji had zeroed in on a particularly rare album he'd sought for a long time. It was none other than a pirated copy of Jackal Priest's
Dreams in Black Static
, a little-known dark ambient masterpiece. Kenji often listened to dark ambient music when trying to focus or sleep; unless it was too outre, he usually found the soundscapes somehow relaxing.
This album, though, wasn't having the intended effect on him.
He straightened his headphones and sat up in bed, adjusting the volume. The first track, entitled “Cannibalism”, was a mere three minutes long, but already he'd listened to it more than four times. It was a gloomy soundscape, with a droning ambient din and the sound of discordant chimes breaking onto the scene at random intervals. Deep, electronic sounds not unlike growls punctuated the ambient background as well, ebbing and flowing like the waves of a black sea. All of this was well and good enough, and had the song stuck to these conventions it wouldn't have been any different from the dozens of other such albums he had on his hard drive.
This track, however, closed with something of an anomaly. He had to keep going back to it, listening to it with more closeness. Kenji was convinced there was something like a voice reaching out from beneath the undercurrent of noise, bursting out to the listener in even intervals.
The end of the song maintained the haunting, ambient din, however another element was introduced. First could be heard the barking of several dogs. Then, a moment later, came the murmurings of a crowd and what sounded like the gurgling of a fountain. This wasn't cause in and of itself for extra attention or concern; avant-garde musicians often experimented with street sounds or background noise of this kind in their songs. It was what mingled with the muffled voices in the crowd that continued to pry upon Kenji's ears even after the first track ended and the second began.
There was one voice that stood above the rest. It was very subtle, difficult to distinguish amid the mass of vague speech, but there all the same. As he lay in bed, listening, he heard this sound worm its way through his headphones and into his ear, where it warded off what little sleepiness he'd managed to nurture. He repeated the track once, twice, the curious anomaly returning to his ears each and every time he listened to the ending of the song.
Mixed in with the crowd noise was one voice that was somehow more discernible than the rest; and he felt that, if he listened hard enough, he could
almost
make out what was being said...
Kenji took off the headphones and sat up in bed, his form casting tall shadows against the lamplit walls. He rubbed at his arms, the fine black hairs standing upright and his flesh cold. Usually their room was unbearably warm, but tonight it had grown suddenly chill. Draping a blanket over his shoulders, he looked down at his phone quizzically and turned it over in his hands. He licked his lips, finding them parched, and then sucked in a lungful of the dry, sterile air.
As a student of Linguistics, the bulk of his midterms had been language-oriented. Of particular importance and difficulty had been his exam in Italian. The reading portion had been a breeze; Kenji prided himself on his ability to read and translate written Italian. It'd been the speech part of the test that he'd blown. Though he didn't think he'd failed it, he certainly hadn't passed with flying colors. His parents would expect to know how the exams had gone, would request to see his grades as soon as they were available. He tensed, trying to ease the tension from his shoulders with his thumb. That was the main reason he'd decided to stick around on campus over the winter break. Hanging out with his demanding parents, answering the ceaseless questions about his classes, had sounded miserable. They'd sent him some money the day before so that he could feed himself, and had reminded him over the phone that he should continue his studies every day, despite being on vacation. Sometimes he despised their strictness.
A shiver crept down his spine. His thoughts felt unfocused, were darting around in the petri dish of his brain like tiny, active protozoa.
Slumping against the wall, Kenji put on the headphones once more and queued up the first track, “Cannibalism”, yet again. Listening with closed eyes, he waited for the MP3 to hit the three-minute mark. The sounds of barking dogs met his ears, then the gurgling fountain and the mutterings of a crowd. It was exactly the kind of sound you might record by walking through a park on a warm summer day with a tape recorder in your pocket.
And then there it was.
The voice.
It wasn't like the others. It possessed more firmness, was seated upon the other layers of noise in such a way that it intruded upon them. He listened to the very end, then shut it off and tossed his headphones onto his desk.
Laying back onto his pillow, he threw an arm over his face and loosed a sigh. He wanted to sleep, but it took him only a few moments to realize that sleep wouldn't come.
The alarm clock on his desk read 10:01 PM in red, boxy letters. He stared at it a long while, his ears host to a constant ringing now, and his eyes never growing any heavier for it.
TWO
Kenji abandoned all hopes of an early sleep and crept out of the dorm room. Starting down the silent, carpeted hall in his socks, he passed door after door, all of them closed. Usually there were students chatting in this hall, hanging out of the doorways. Music could often be heard, along with yelling and sometimes less decent noises. Now there was nothing. It may as well have been a funeral home.
Rounding the corner and descending the stairwell, a new noise registered in Kenji's ears and eased the ringing that'd dwelt there ever since he'd taken off his headphones. It was the sound of a television program. Entering the commons room, he found his roommate, Dylan, propped up on one elbow on the ratty sofa in front of the television, eyes wide. Whatever he was watching, he was clearly riveted.
Dylan was an old friend of Kenji's. They'd gone to high school together and had decided to share a room when they were both accepted to the University of Wisconsin-- Madison. Dylan was tall and lanky, with sandy blonde hair that struck quite the contrast to Kenji's raven black. He wore glasses with white, square-shaped rims; the very portrait of hipster chic. Though he usually dressed pretty well, in button-downs and somewhat ironic, loudly-colored vests, with no one else hanging out around campus to see him peacocking he'd settled into comfier clothes for the duration of the break. He turned and presented a real Colgate smile as the program switched to a commercial break. “Oh, hey there.”
Kenji leaned against the back of the sofa, arms crossed. “What you up to?” he asked. The fatigue must've been evident in his voice. Stifling a yawn, he went on. “Anything interesting on tonight?”
“I'll say,” began Dylan, righting himself and patting the cushion next to his. “It's a show about monks-- real esoteric shit. Did you know that there are some crazy guys out there who go into caves to meditate and never come out? Like, they stay in there, in their lotus pose or whatever, until they literally
die
? That's... hardcore, no? Imagine the kind of mental strength it takes to do that! You meditate until you die, no food or water or anything, in pursuit of nirvana or enlightenment.”
Kenji arched a brow, blankly watching an ad for a new brand of vacuum cleaner. “Uh-huh, sounds like a real blast.”
“You're so uncultured,” replied Dylan with a smug grin. “You're Japanese. Doesn't that mean you're required to have, like, a couple Buddhist monks in your family line or something? You ever go into deep mountain caves to convene with the
other side
?” He waggled his eyebrows for extra, mystical emphasis.
At this, Kenji couldn't help but roll his eyes. “Dude, I was born in frigging Idaho. Give me a break here.” The show was coming back on and Dylan's attention had returned to the screen. Digging his phone from his pocket, Kenji tapped his roommate on the shoulder. “Hey, mute that for a second. There's something I want you to listen to.”
Dylan frowned, fishing around in the couch cushions for the remote. With it, he brought up a tangle of hair and a stale potato chip, and when he'd successfully muted the TV it was all he could do not to toss the remote away. Wiping his hands on the leg of his sweatpants, he shrugged. “Well, what is it?”
Kenji pulled up the first track on
Dreams in Black Static
, “Cannibalism”, and held the phone out to Dylan. “This song.”
Dylan groaned. “Come on, man. You know I hate this shit. I've never understood why you get off on this kind of music. I mean, it isn't even
really
music, is it? It's just a bunch of noise. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were some kind of goth kid, deep down.”
“Just shut up and listen-- to the end of it, specifically,” said Kenji, forcing the phone into his hands.
The track played over the phone's external speaker, the air of the commons room filled with the eerie, disjointed sounds of chimes. It was true that Dylan never listened to music of this kind; usually his tastes tended towards poppier stuff, like The Smiths or The Stone Roses. It was possible he wouldn't even know what to listen for, that he'd completely miss the voice that Kenji had caught at the end of the recording, rising subtly over the other noise. While watching Dylan recline on the sofa, listening with a bored look, Kenji tensed. Would Dylan hear the voice, too, or was it simply something that he had imagined?
Finally the ending of the song began, and the sounds of the crowd started drifting through the air. Kenji leaned in and pointed at the phone. “Here. Listen here. Do you hear, like... a woman's voice in there?” As best he could tell, the voice that had so bothered him had been a woman's. There'd been a certain breathy quality he'd been able to make out, despite the other sounds that served to muddy it. He gulped, working over his lower lip with his teeth in anticipation.
Dylan sat up, holding the phone so that the speaker was closer to his ear. He fidgeted a little, as if unimpressed. “I mean, they sampled crowd noise here. I'm sure there's a woman someplace in the mix.”
“No, that's not what I mean.” Kenji couldn't be sure just why he felt so worked up, but he wanted desperately to know whether Dylan could hear the voice. For reasons he couldn't articulate he'd become mightily invested in the existence of this strange voice over the course of the last half hour. It had its claws in him, and until someone else could attest to its presence he wouldn't be able to let it go.
Dylan perked up a little. “Oh, you mean
that
voice?” He held the phone a little closer, nodding. “It's a woman's voice or something, yeah? What's she saying?”
Kenji heard the breathy, muffled speech and quivered a little. While listening to it over headphones Kenji had felt it a very private affair, almost as if the woman in the recording were speaking directly to him. Listening to the recording of her voice in the dark commons room, however, which was lit only by the television, the whole thing felt somehow profane. Perhaps it wasn't a noise meant to be communicated in the open. Kenji felt, in a weird way, that it'd been intended for him and him alone, a private message, and that to play it out loud in this way was to discover in it a more ominous aspect. As the undulating speech repeated over the crowd noise, Kenji's eyes darted about the room. The way the track hung in the air, the way the sounds reverberated against the still walls, gave the impression that the space was somehow becoming defiled for it. This was tantamount to uttering blasphemous prayers in a sealed-off tomb.
