Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (7 page)

Kenji, too, took the hint and glanced back at the Honda, wondering if they hadn't just trespassed onto this man's private property. “Sorry,” he uttered.

The man in the doorway didn't budge, however. Looking down at the two of them, he repeated, “What are you doing here?” Then, he continued. “How did you kids find this place?”

Kenji and Dylan looked to one another, exchanging nervous glances, and realized there was no telling this guy the truth without sounding utterly insane. What were they supposed to say in such an instance? That they'd stumbled upon a secret message in some obscure song and followed a set of coordinates all the way here on a whim? When he thought about everything that'd preceded their arrival, even Kenji had trouble believing it all.

“Well...” began Dylan, “we were just, uh...”

The man stepped out, cocking his head to the side. There was a shift in his expression; a bit of ferocity ebbed away and curiosity came to replace it. His dark lips were pursed for a time as he appraised the students before him. Then, he actually cracked a slight grin. “Don't... don't tell me you two got the coordinates, too.”

Kenji's heart very nearly stopped. “W-what?” he gasped, staggering forward. “You know about the coordinates?”

The man began to laugh, holding onto the inside of the doorway to support himself. “This... this shit is getting out of hand. Insane, just completely insane!” he proclaimed, his voice echoing through the night.

Dylan sidled up to Kenji and leaned in for a whisper. “Y-you mean we aren't the only ones who followed the message in the song?” Looking to the older man before them, he shook his head. “This guy doesn't look like he listens to dark ambient music, though.”

Relaxing a great deal, the man waved them over and returned to the shack. “I'm sorry about that,” he said. “I've been a little on edge since I arrived. Things have been... strange for me recently. Ever since I got into this mess, I haven't been feeling right.”

Kenji slowly entered the tiny building and Dylan followed. He could certainly relate to the man. Ever since hearing the woman's voice in that song, Kenji hadn't been able to shake a nebulous dread. The fact that someone else had been drawn out to this remote location should have been a comfort to him, however as he entered the small shack and had a look around, comfort proved fleeting.

The shack was possessed of a single room. One window opened out onto the field, giving them a near-limitless view of the vast plains beyond. There were two metal folding chairs to be found within, both of them pushed up behind a wooden desk. Sitting on this desk was a television, VCR and radio. There was nothing else to be seen. Every surface was coated in a dense, mostly undisturbed-layer of dust, except where this man had very recently tread. The light fixture above their heads was a very simple one, a pair of exposed sockets bearing two light bulbs. It appeared that no one had been in this place for a long time. Perhaps several years.

“The name's Reggie. Reggie Cash,” said the man, extending a large hand and shaking theirs with gusto. His grip was formidable for a man of his years. “And you two are?”

Dylan introduced them both as Kenji's gaze scoured the tiny room. “My name's Dylan Hudson. This is my friend, Kenji Ando. We're students at UW--Madison.”

“Students, eh?” replied Reggie. “So, I take it the two of you caught the documentary on TV and followed the coordinates all the way here?”

Kenji was yanked from his trance. “Documentary?” He paused, working over the word on his lips as though it were alien to him. “No, we heard a woman speaking in a song... What's this about a documentary?”

“A song?” Reggie's eyes grew wide and he glanced at the two of them in apparent disbelief. He pulled out one of the dusty folding chairs and slumped down into it, a cloud of hazy dirt rising off of it in his wake. “You mean to tell me you heard that woman speaking in a
song
?
That's
where you got the coordinates?”

Kenji nodded, fishing his phone from his pocket. “That's right. You can hear it for yourself if you want.” He found the song in question, entitled “Cannibalism”, and skipped ahead to the part where he and Dylan had heard the woman speaking. When he hit play, the crowd noise started. There was the barking of a dog. The sounds filled the little room and seemed amplified a thousand times, burdening the rarified air with extra weight.

And then the woman began to speak. It was muffled, of course, but Reggie understood at once what was being said.

“We cleaned up the audio. That's how we got ahold of the coordinates,” explained Dylan. “It was too hard to hear in the original track, but once we isolated her voice, it was easy to make the message out.”

Reggie understood exactly, and rose from his seat, picking up a leather bag from the floor. He pulled a videotape from it and walked over to the VCR on the desk. Palming away a thick layer of dust, he cleared the television screen and switched on both machines. They buzzed to life and glowed sluggishly, their components grinding and clicking for the years of apparent disuse. When the VCR had warmed up, Reggie slipped the tape in and hit the Play button, pointing to the screen. “Watch this. I recorded it off of TV a few nights back. It's from a documentary on World War Two, but this woman caught my eye.”

It was a short clip, obviously edited for the muted nature of all the other noises. A large slab of stone, perhaps a war memorial, entered into view. Just behind it, hovering in frame unsteadily, was a pale woman with long, black hair. The dress she wore was the same shade of deep black, and her lips were moving. The breathy voice of this woman was the same as that which they'd found on the MP3 file. The message, too, was exactly the same. She repeated the coordinates,
EN17DA43TU85
, three times, before she suddenly vanished from the screen. One minute she was there. Then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone, as if plucked away by an invisible hand.

Kenji stared at the television a long while, unable to shake the intense stare of the woman in the video. He'd listened to her voice countless times over the past day, had reviewed the contents of her message until he'd memorized them, but this was the first time he'd
seen
the speaker.

It didn't feel like the first time, though.

Perhaps he was just being fanciful, however something of the woman's intensity and appearance had been transmitted into his mind previously, despite his only having heard her voice. Though it had been only a vague, unformed notion up to that moment when he'd first laid eyes upon her on the dusty television screen, he'd already glimpsed some aspect of her haunting presence, of her intense stare before. Perhaps it'd been in his dreams. More likely, he'd studied the audio recording so closely that a kernel of dread had been planted in his mind, and the figure of this woman had been fleshed out in full before he even knew it. There wasn't any good way for him to describe it, except to say that she looked precisely the way he'd expected.

Reggie shut off the television and then drooped back into his chair, staring at the floor. His leather shoes gleamed in the dull light, and he buried the tip of one into the floor, making little circles in the dust. “You two heard her in a song. I saw her in a video.” He pawed at his cleanly-shaven cheek. “I wonder where else she might turn up.”

It was a terrifying proposition, that this woman may be present in other media. Not that Kenji himself hadn't considered it. It was entirely possible that this mysterious woman's voice or image would not be limited solely to these two pieces of media. “But why?” asked Kenji aloud, more for his own benefit than anyone else's. “It doesn't make sense. Why was this woman pictured in the documentary. I mean, she obviously doesn't belong there. The camera guy didn't focus on her. And then she disappears at the end of the clip. It's like she was a particle of dust in the lens that blew away in the next instant. Same thing with the song. Her voice just kind of passed through at the end there, masked by other stuff. Like it was interference of some kind.”

Dylan was pacing around the room, looking up at the unfinished ceiling. The mess of wooden rafters was overgrown with dust and featured intricate clusters of cobwebs. “Never saw this coming,” he said. “Thought for sure we'd get some answers coming all this way. Instead, the plot thickens.”

Reggie sighed. “One thing for sure; this ain't all just a coincidence. We can agree on that much, right? All of us followed this little message out here to the-middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota. That's gotta mean something.”

“Yeah, but what?” asked Dylan.

Kenji grit his teeth. Every atom in his body seemed to be shouting the same thing at once.
Run. Run far from here. You've walked into a trap.

“If we had any sense,” continued Reggie, “we wouldn't stick around to find out. We'd take off. Get the hell outta here before something happens. Because something about this entire thing just don't sit right. Know what I mean?”

Kenji agreed. There was something ominous about this entire thing. Certainly they hadn't been brought here for anything good. All of the evidence, scant and cryptic though it was, pointed to something uncertain but sinister. Nevertheless, they'd driven more than seven hours to this spot. They'd decided to follow the clues, to knock on this door. They'd had their fair share of chances to turn their backs on this, but they'd insisted on coming this far nevertheless. The time for running away was over, and Kenji knew it. They'd blown any chance they'd ever had of leaving this behind them. They were all-in. “I think we should hang out for a bit. You know, try and talk through this. Maybe we can figure out what this is all about.”

ELEVEN

They could all agree on one thing: No one had been in the shack for years. The utter filth of the spot was sufficient to confirm that. The building was in good repair. There were no leaks to be found, and the structure was sturdily built. It couldn't have been more than a decade old, by Reggie's estimation, but it seemed as though it'd sat vacant at least that long. Someone had built this little shack in the middle of nowhere and placed a couple of items inside. And then they'd never returned, by the looks of it.

Reggie discussed his arrival at the spot. His Buick LeSabre was parked on the other side of the shack, just out of view of the dirt driveway. He'd arrived nearly an hour before the two of them and had been unable to switch on the lights at first. It turned out there was a generator outside, and with a little doing he'd managed to restore power to the shack just a few minutes before the two of them had knocked. He'd had a look around the grounds, too. There was little to be found except for grass. The lawn immediately surrounding the shack was comprised of two types, one short, the other tall, and the nearest tree seemed to be half a mile away. There were no other buildings around that he'd been able to see, and both Kenji and Dylan agreed that they hadn't seen any for quite some distance. They were united in an extremely out-of-the-way place.

“You know,” began Reggie, stretching out in the chair, “ever since I got here I've felt like someone's watching me. Before that, too, but
especially
once I drove up to this spot. It never stops. It's like someone's looking down at me from above.”

Kenji knew this feeling all too well. The same sensation had haunted him since the first time he'd heard the woman's voice on the recording, back in his dorm room.

Dylan chuckled, trying to keep the mood light. He pointed through the window. “Well, at least you know it's all in your head. Nothing out there but grass. No place for a prowler to hide, you know? Everything's clear, in plain view.”

Kenji knew this was the case, but the feeling persisted nevertheless. He couldn't put his finger on its fountainhead, wasn't sure why it kept on despite the marked lack of a visible threat. But it did. While the three of them milled about in the shack, Kenji felt somehow convinced that there was an invisible fourth occupant among them. Of course, he didn't dare voice this feeling. Any acknowledgment, he feared, would only give the presence more power.

Dylan broke the contemplative silence once again, leaning against the wall and tapping the buttons on the radio at random. “So, who is this woman? I think that's where we should start.”

“That's a good question,” replied Reggie. “Think this is her place?”

Kenji shrugged. They could stand around theorizing till the sun came up and they'd never draw any closer to an answer to their questions, at this rate. They needed to look beyond that;
why
had this woman, whoever she was, been captured in two disparate pieces of media in this way? What had been her intent in disseminating these coordinates? He cleared his throat. “OK, you saw this woman in that documentary. What was it called? Maybe, if we look it up, we'll find some sort of hint. Could she have worked in the cast and crew?” He was spitballing, but at that point any progress would have been welcome.

Reggie thought about it a moment. “It was called
Segregation In The Second World War: A Visual History
, I'm pretty sure.”

Kenji wrote down the title in his notebook. Then, toying with his phone, he searched for a reception.

There was no signal to be found.

“I already tried, dude,” said Dylan. “It's a dead zone out here.”

“Awesome.” Kenji was about to stuff the phone into his pocket when the slightest impression of a signal flashed across the status bar. “Wait a minute, I've got a real weak signal coming in here.” He held the phone over his head, hoping that the signal might hold, and when it did, he opened the browser.

Carefully, as though typing too quickly would scare the signal away, Kenji did a search for the documentary,
Segregation In The Second World War: A Visual History
. The results loaded very sluggishly, and for a while there, as the three of them huddled around Kenji's phone, they feared that they wouldn't load at all. Finally, however, after a wait of some minutes, the results populated the screen and some basic information about the documentary was made available to them.

Of particular interest was the date of its production, which was among the first facts to come up in the search. It'd been released on May 10
th
, 2006. That made it over ten years old.