It’s a long one (13 parts-recommending cos I’m seeing a lot of people wanting longer stories) or any of u/Polterkites stories really. All nosleep originals (iirc he got a nosleep award for one of them?). His We used to live here series was also was made into a book.
“Down in the Devil’s Hole,
Ne’er go alone,
The rock and the current don’t care for none,
Down in the Devil’s Hole,
He’ll come gnashing on yer’ bones.”
Passed mouth to mouth the way old warnings pass through schoolyards and pub stools and the back seats of utes on dirt roads. Kids grow up with it in this part of the outback, singing the jaunty tune. The Hole itself sits roughly forty minutes east of town, at the far end of a vast Australian creek system that feeds into the main river through a series of low gorges and one giant waterfall. The scrub grows low and sparse, twisted into shapes by years of wind coming off the plateau, and the rock underfoot is the colour of dried blood-a deep, oxidised red that bleeds into the creek water after rain and turns it the colour of rust.
The chute is where the cliff face drops. Roughly two metres across, parallel to the waterfall's ledge, it is set into the sandstone at a steep, unforgiving angle, dropping approximately fifteen metres before it spits whatever goes through it. Water, debris, and occasionally something else-into the river pool below.
The locals know the rule.
Down in the Devil’s Hole,
Ne’er go alone,
The rock and the current don’t care for none,
Down in the Devil’s Hole,
He’ll come gnashing on yer’ bones.
Don’t go at night, and don’t ever, ever go through the chute without a mate to spot you. God forbid, you get stuck.
Every few years, some kid dares another to go through alone. Sometimes it’s a city cousin brought to the country for a summer, sometimes it’s a local dumb enough to think the stories are only stories. Most of the time they come back fine, scraped and shaken, yelling about how it was nothing, that the river at the bottom wasn’t even that cold. But once in a while, they don’t come back at all. Or worse, they come back with a lost toe, or a look in their eyes that doesn’t fade even when the school year starts up again. The locals say you leave something of yourself down there, and the Devil keeps it.
The Devil. Not a horned thing in a suit, not the cartoon red bastard from an American TV show. This Devil is half dingo, half man, all teeth.
Today, it waits for Lily.
The ceiling fan in Lily’s kitchen ticks with each revolution, a subtle, off-balance knock. Danner’s hands are on her shoulders, thumbs digging in just above the collarbone, pinning her to the bench. His face is too close, eyes bloodshot, a fine blotchiness spreading up his neck.
“You always do this.” The words come out slowly, like he’s choosing them one by one. “You’re not going anywhere, Lily.”
She can feel the blood climbing up her ears. Her breath is short and sharp. The benchtop behind her digs into her back, hard enough she wonders if it’ll leave a bruise.
“You’re hurting me,” she says.
He keeps his grip. “I’m trying to talk to you.”
She tries to push off, but his weight is forward. She hates him for it, the way he never raises his voice but just holds on until you break or give in.
“I said, get your hands off me.”
He doesn’t, not at first. He leans in, bringing his forehead almost to hers. “Don’t walk out on me again. Not after last night.”
She thinks about the plates still in the rack, the two mugs left out with lazy spirals of wine dried at the bottom. Danner would never break a cup; he’s not that type. But she can picture it, just for a second, the mug flying across the room and hitting the wall, white crockery exploding.
“I need to go,” she says.
He laughs, low and mean. “That’s what you always say. Like I’m the problem.”
She jerks her shoulder, but he matches the movement, hands clamped hard now. “Let go or I’ll scream.”
The instant she says it, he lets go, steps back, rubs both hands through his hair. She moves past him, going for the front door. The hallway is narrow, lined with faded posters and sun-bleached Polaroids. She grabs her backpack from the hook-faded olive, side clip busted since Year Ten-and shoves her phone into the front pocket.
“Where are you going?”
She shrugs on the pack, adjusts the straps. “Out.”
He steps forward. “With who?”
She snorts.
“Don’t go up to the falls, Lily.”
She looks at him. Really looks. He’s wearing the same tee as yesterday. There’s a nick on his chin, probably from her nails. He’s scared, she realises, but not for her. For himself, for being left alone, for losing the argument.
Outside, the heat punches her in the face. The air tastes like eucalyptus, with the humidity dialled to ten. She cuts across the side yard, past the shell of her old bike and the stack of empty plant pots. Her runners kick up little spurts of grit with every step. She runs fast, faster than she needs to, trying to burn out the sting of his hands on her shoulders.
The track behind her street is rutted and loose, winding through a tangle of saltbush and dead wattles, the kind of scrub that shreds your shins if you don’t watch your step. Her feet are pounding now. She keeps her head down, eyes locked on the next patch of shade, the next gnarled outcrop to hurdle. She’s faster than she was in high school, and back then she was fast enough to leave every other girl eating her dust. But today, she’s not running to win anything; she’s just trying to outrun what’s behind her. Danner’s words spool out in her head, on repeat.
She mutters it aloud between breaths. “Fuck you.” “Not yours,” she says, spitting it out.
The sun is vicious, even in the shade. Sweat beads on her forehead, rolls down her back, gathering at the base of her shirt. By the time she hits the halfway marker-the old cow fence, long since fallen down-her calves are burning. She doesn’t slow. Instead, she pushes harder.
The track bends and widens, and then she hears it. It’s louder than she remembers. She slows, finally, knees wobbling, and lets her feet crunch to a stop at the edge of the clearing. She bends over, hands on her thighs, sweat dripping off her nose and hitting the ground in dark dots. The banks are studded with river gums, the roots clawing through the rock. She knows every inch of this place-the place where the ledge juts out, the tree that fell last winter, the pocket of still water where she once saw a red-bellied black snake sun itself on a flat stone.
She shrugs off her backpack, drops it in the grass, and yanks her shirt over her head. It sticks to her skin. She peels it away, then steps out of her shorts, not caring if anyone sees her. Not that anyone’s around. She stands in her faded black one-piece, the elastic gone at the legs, and feels the sun burn down on her bare shoulders. There’s a moment where she could still turn around. She could pull on her shorts, pick up her bag, and head home to wait for Danner to cool off. Instead, she takes a step forward.
The water is cold, shocking, a full-body slap. She wades in to her knees, feeling the current tug, not hard yet.
She glances once over her shoulder. The sky is blue, washed out to almost nothing at the horizon. There’s nobody there. Not Danner, not anybody. She wades here for a good long while, before heading up the grass and rocks.
Lily leans forward, plants her feet, and stares into the mouth of the Devil’s Hole. She can see the black moss slicking the sides, the way the light cuts off at the edge and turns to shadow. It’s not a mouth, not really, but she imagines it opening wider as she gets closer, waiting to bite down. She mutters a curse under her breath, one last fuck you to Danner, and then she jumps in.
The water pulls her. She’s in the chute now, sliding down, scraping her side on the mossy rock, water pounding her eyes and nose. Lily’s feet catch the current and she’s ripped forward, knees and elbows flailing. The air in her lungs blows out in a scream, but the sound is lost in the roar of water. Her foot smacks a shelf, the shock of it numbing and then lightning hot, and suddenly her ankle is twisting beneath her, bone rolling in its socket like a marble in a cup. She slams her shoulder against the wall, then the next wall, then her face is submerged, eyes wide but seeing nothing but blur and froth. She claws up for air, but the tunnel bends and pitches her down and sideways again, an undercurrent yanking her deeper and slamming her head against the stone. One millisecond: pain, sound, white. Then nothing.
When she comes back, it’s to the taste of mud packed in her gums, and a thickness in her head. She’s face-down on the grass, half out of the river, lungs working like a fish on sand. She coughs, drags herself up on her elbows, and spits. She rolls onto her back and stares straight up into a night sky. Black from horizon to horizon, with a smear of stars like some bastard salt-shaker went off above her. For a few seconds, all she can do is breathe. Her ankle throbs, sending out hot, sick pulses. The back of her head feels split. She pokes at it, comes away with fingers sticky and slick.
Lily tries to sit up. It takes more effort than she wants to admit, the muscles in her arms barely answering. She props herself with her hands behind her and takes inventory:
One foot: fucked.
Head: bleeding, probably concussed.
Shoulders: both bruised, left one numb.
Swimsuit: riding up her crack.
Dignity: zero.
She blinks, turns, and expects to see her pile of things-bag, shorts, shirt-right where she left them. Instead, all she sees is more grass and the shadow of the tree, its branches shifting in the wind. She sits up straighter, blinking hard.
She gets to her feet. The bad one almost folds beneath her, but she stands. The moon’s not fully shining, but she can see well enough: there’s a perfect impression in the dirt where her bag was, and beside it, smaller depressions where her shorts and shirt had been. Gone.
For a second, she wonders if she’s just lost it. Maybe the hit to the head knocked a few wires loose, and she staggered out, hid her things, and then forgot. Maybe she never brought the bag at all.
She hears Danner’s voice, the last thing he said. “Don’t go up to the falls, Lily.”
The memory curdles. Her skin prickles up all at once. She spits again, not to get rid of the muck but to spit out the word that forms:
“Prick.”
It’s silent, weirdly silent. No frogs, no insects, just the distant shush of water over stone. She looks at her foot. Even in the faint starlight, it’s already puffing up, the swelling a tight bulge above the arch. She wants to cry, but the anger burns the tears right out of her.
No bag, no phone, no shoes. She’s got a wet, half-ripped swimsuit and nothing else. The longer she waits to get home, the more she’s going to seize up. It’s a shit choice, but it’s her only one.
She scoops a handful of river water and sips it, lets it dribble down her throat, then wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. Her legs are shaking.
She staggers up the bank and into the edge of the scrub, bracing herself against the cold and the pain.
“Fuck you, Danner,” she says to the empty bush.
The scrub at night is a different country. In the day, the tracks are hard-packed, obvious, the line from the falls to the town scored deep by years of feet and dirt bikes. But in the dark, every stick is a would-be snake.
Lily lurches onto the dirt path and starts moving as fast as her foot will let her. She keeps her eyes down, scanning for loose stones, for broken bottle-glass from the last round of bored kids. The ground is biting up through the sole of her good foot and into the raw meat of her bad one. She mutters as she moves, a string of curses half spat, half breathed out. “Fucking idiot. Dickhead. Piece of shit.” Sometimes it’s Danner she’s talking about, sometimes herself.
Behind her, the sound of the river fades. Ahead, the bush thickens, the acacia so dense that she can smell the pollen and the dry rot of dead leaves underfoot. She ducks under a low branch and keeps moving, using her arms to swat away spiderwebs and the thin, grasping arms of the wattle. At some point, she loses all sense of time. It could be ten minutes, could be an hour, but when she finally pops out of the trees and onto the weedy edge of her old street, the sky is full dark.
It hits her like a slap: every house on the street is blacked out. Not a single porch light. No television blue behind a window. No streetlamp buzzing with moths. She limps up the verge, half expecting to see someone sitting out on their front steps, beer in hand, ready with a joke about her midnight swim. Nothing. Just the dark.
She stares at her own house, and the only thing she can see is the faint glint off the metal mesh of the screen door. There’s no sign of Danner’s old Corolla in the driveway.
It’s unlocked, as always. She pushes it open with her shoulder, expecting the usual creak, but it’s silent.
“Danner?” Her voice is weak, so she tries again, louder. “Danner! You in here?”
Nothing.
She fumbles for the light switch, runs her hand up and down the wall until she finds it. Flicks it. No dice.
She steps inside, drags the door shut with a click. She lets her hand slide along the wall, using the cheap acrylic paint to guide her, and hobbles toward the kitchen. Her feet leave wet, rust-brown prints on the vinyl. She looks down at them, a staggered line of smears from the door to where she stands.
“Danner!” she yells, and the echo bounces up the hall. Even in the dark, the shape of everything is familiar: the battered fridge, the cluttered counter, the stubby knife block with two knives missing. She wants a drink. Anything-water, juice, beer, even the bottle of cheap bourbon Danner keeps behind the spices.
She fumbles to the fridge, yanks the handle. Inside, it’s dark, the cold a little less than it should be. She grabs a can, cracks it, and drinks half in three gulps. She pads down the hall to the bedrooms, calling out again. “Oi! Danner! This isn’t funny.”
She pushes open the door to the spare room-empty. The next door is their bedroom. She stands in the doorway, waiting for her eyes to adjust, expecting to see a lump in the bed, the dark tangle of Danner’s hair on the pillow. But the bed is empty.
She steps in, stubs her toe on the edge of the bed frame, and almost goes down. “Fuck,” she says, softly this time.
She stands there, letting the pain in her foot and the throb in her head crowd out the fear. The thought flickers up, ugly and raw: Danner’s not here.
She goes back to the kitchen, trailing fresh blood. She stands at the window, looking out into the yard, then up and down the street.
It’s worse than before. The dark is absolute. She can’t see the other houses, can’t see the sky. It’s like someone’s turned off the world outside the window. There’s a sound, finally-a creak, or a snap, from out back. She spins, nearly falls, and then limps to the back door. She stares through the mesh, waiting for a shape, any movement. She closes her eyes and breathes, tries to force her heart to slow down.
She screams. Just opens her mouth and lets it out, a sound so big it shakes her insides and bounces off the walls. Her scream dies in the pit of the house. The quiet stretches, thin and tight as dental floss, until she can’t stand it anymore. Her right foot is screaming at her with every pulse of her heart, but she ignores it. Instead, she stares at the wall and tries to remember if she ever got on with the neighbours. The answer is no, but she can’t think of anywhere else to go.
The outside air is cooler than she expects, which should be a relief, but instead it makes her skin crawl. Her neighbour’s house is only twenty metres away, but it might as well be on the far side of the moon. The space between is scrubby grass and dry dirt, a few survivor plants clinging to the idea of a garden, and a busted section of cyclone fencing with a shopping trolley tangled in it. Each step-left, right, left-crunches louder. She clenches her teeth and tries to land light, but there’s no way. Her body is running on adrenaline now, every nerve firing. With her next breath, she catches the scent of smoke on the air-bushfire, probably far off.
At the neighbour’s front gate, she hesitates. The house is dark. Not just the kind of dark where someone’s left the porch light off, but the kind where every curtain is pulled, every blind dropped. She lifts her hand to knock, but her knuckles are shaking, so she balls her fist and hammers instead. Three loud bangs. She waits, then does it again, harder. The sound reverberates through her forearm and into her shoulder. With each hit, pain flares in her scalp, then recedes.
“It’s Lily! You there?” Her voice is hoarse, barely more than a smoker’s bark. “Open up! Hello?”
She tries again, this time with the heel of her palm. The hollow thunk of the door is somehow even less comforting. “Come on, you lazy pricks. Someone’s got to be in.”
She’s desperate enough to try the knob. It’s locked, of course. She shifts her weight and looks down the driveway, half-expecting to see a ute parked in its usual spot, but the drive is empty. She pounds the door again, then steps back off the porch, defeat rising up in her throat. She spits a curse at the doormat and turns to scan the street. She listens, straining for the sound of a dog barking, a baby crying, a TV running in some half-awake living room. Nothing.
Lily stands in the yard, both feet planted, head still leaking down her neck, and tries to make sense of it. The power’s out, she tells herself. Just a blackout. She’s been through plenty. You light a candle, eat the ice cream before it melts, and ride it out. She doesn’t want to go back to her house, but standing here in the open is worse.
The wind’s come up a little. The porch steps are harder going up than coming down, and when she makes it to her own front door, she has to catch her breath before pushing inside.
“Fuck,” she says, to the dark. “Just fuck it all.”
She closes the door behind her, slow and deliberate, and leans against it for a second, trying to steady herself. She’s so tired she thinks about just sitting right here, on the lino, and letting the night do what it wants. She pushes off the door, staggers into the kitchen, and reaches for the tap. She drinks straight from the tap, lets it run down her chin, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She grabs a dish towel and ties it around her scalp, cinching it tight until her eyes water. She finds a half-pack of smokes on top of the fridge, lights one, and draws so deep her lungs ache.
Then she hears it: a song, faint and mean, drifting in. The words crawl up the back of her neck:
“Down in the Devil’s Hole,
Ne’er go alone,
The rock and the current don’t care for none,
Down in the Devil’s Hole,
He’ll come gnashing on yer’ bones.”
Her hand is shaking so bad she almost drops the smoke. She stares into the black rectangle of the hallway. She should move. She should hide. But she sits, transfixed, as the singing drifts closer, getting clearer and uglier by the second. She sucks in another lungful of smoke, then stubs out the cig on the tabletop, grinding it so hard the filter splits. The song stops.
A shape, hunched and huge, appears at the kitchen table. Lily freezes with one hand gripping the benchtop, her legs half-bent, ready to run or fight but unable to choose. The shape leans forward, and a face slides into the faint grey spill from the window. A dog’s face, long and ugly, with big brown eyes set wide and too far apart. Its ears are cocked back. The teeth are bared, the kind a kid makes when they’ve just thought up the next cruel thing they’re going to do. Its head is dingo, but the rest-fuck, the rest is wrong. The arms are dog-legs up to the elbow, but then human from the forearm down, with hands that look like they’ve been boiled and peeled. The torso is thick with matted fur.
It’s singing the rhyme, slow and soft. The voice is wet, dog-thick. It’s English, slurred but clear.
The thing turns its head, assessing her, and then shifts its weight so the chair legs scrape loud across the vinyl. Its shoulders bunch up, and she can see them ripple under the fur. The thing is huge. It says, “You brought a real pretty stink with you.”
Its hands, or paws, rest on the table, and the table looks suddenly too small and fragile for the weight pressing down on it. She tries to think, but there’s nothing in her head except a high, panicked shriek. Her hands grab for anything-knife block, can of beans, a rolling pin-but everything is out of reach except the old wooden chair tucked at the end of the table.
The thing stands up, and for a second she sees the rest: below the waist, it’s human, pale and naked, legs corded with sinew, feet planted flat on the linoleum. There’s a half-stiff cock lolling between its legs, and her stomach flips with revulsion. She swings the chair up in both hands and brings it down on the thing’s face. The impact is a splintering crack, splintering into hunks. The Devil grunts, head rocked sideways, but it barely moves. A long string of drool swings off its lip.
It lunges for her, jaws open wide, and she sees straight into the back of its throat. She dodges left, but not fast enough-the thing’s hand catches her by the upper arm. She screams and drives her knee up, aiming for the soft underbelly. It connects, hard. It drags her in, teeth snapping inches from her face. The stench is rank. She goes for the throat, but it’s faster-its other hand catches her wrist, twists it up behind her back. She slams her head backward, skull to snout. There’s a crunch, and her vision goes white, but the thing howls and reels back, letting go just enough. She bites down on the pain and throws herself for the back door, but the thing is on her before she can reach the knob. It tackles her to the ground. Its weight crushes the air from her chest.
It leans in, jaws dripping. She gets her good leg up and drives it into his groin. It yelps, surprised, and shifts its weight off her just enough that she can wriggle loose. She grabs the first thing she can-a heavy whiskey glass-and smashes it into the Devil’s face, sending shards into its muzzle. Blood, black in the half-light, oozes from the punctures. The thing howls, more pissed off than hurt. She tries for the front door, but the thing’s hand catches her again, this time by the hair. It yanks her backwards, and she feels a chunk of scalp tear loose. She twists, elbowing back with all her force. The elbow catches the thing in the side of the ribs, jarring her entire arm. It lets go, just for a second, and she sprints down the hall, out onto the street.
She’s outside, asphalt under her feet, and running. She hears the thing tear through the door after her, splintering the jamb. She doesn’t look back. She just runs, as fast as her shredded foot will let her. It’s behind her, low and fast, and singing as it chases.
Her lungs are burning, head bleeding, but none of it matters. All that matters is staying ahead, even by one step. She hits the end of the yard, vaults the fence, and is gone into the scrub. The night blurs around her, but she knows this track, knows every root and dip, knows exactly how far it is from her street to the falls if you don’t slow down and don’t let yourself trip. She keeps her head low, arms pumping.
It’s not chasing like a person would-no stumbling, no panting, no thrash of panic. It’s closer to the ground, running the way a wild dog does. She pushes faster, ignoring the way her right foot keeps threatening to fold, ignoring the blood trickling down her arm, ignoring the warm wetness between her legs where she’s pissed herself without noticing. She risks a glance back; there’s nothing. She tells herself it’s gone, lost interest. Lily makes another hundred metres before she hears the yip, clipped and sharp, the way a wild dog calls to another. It’s close.
The land slopes down, and she knows she’s almost there. She can smell the water now. The track goes from dirt to red rock, slippery in places where algae blooms. She slows just enough to stay upright, then skids down the last incline. The waterfall is louder than ever, a white roar in the night. She sees the pool below, the flat stone shelf jutting out, and the black mouth of the Devil’s Hole. The thing is there, just at the tree line. Its eyes are wide, tongue lolling, teeth slick with blood. The Devil pads forward.
She backs up, heels almost at the drop. She tries to calculate: could she jump? Would she survive the fall? Or does she risk the chute?
It gives her no time. With a leap, it’s on her, slamming her down. The impact drives the air from her lungs, and for a second she’s blind with pain. She claws at its face. It pins her down, weight crushing her ribs, and snaps its jaws at her. She twists, gets an arm up, and the thing bites down.
The teeth sink in just below her wrist, and she hears the bone break, a high pop. Blood pours out, hot and fast, splattering both their chests. She screams. The thing shakes its head, her arm like a chew toy, and with a wet, tearing sound, it rips her hand clean off, chunks of skin and muscle hanging in its teeth. Blood sprays.
Lily almost descends into shock. With her left hand, she grabs the thing’s face, jams her thumb into the socket of its left eye, and pushes. The eye pops with a sensation like a stick into a grape. Black fetor spills over. The thing rears back and howls, opening its jaws.
She uses the moment. She rolls, and staggers for the chute. She can barely see, the world reduced to spinning black and white dots, and throws herself in.
The current catches her instantly. She’s tumbled in head first, the slick walls scraping skin off her shoulder blades and thighs. She tries to scream, but there’s only water and blood in her mouth. The chute narrows, and for a split second she’s wedged. Then it widens again, and she’s free-falling. She bursts out the bottom, spat into the river pool. She surfaces, coughing and sucking air, and manages to paddle to the bank. She crawls out, dragging herself up onto the mud.
She lies there, shaking. The sun is high, and the whole world is painted in red and orange and white. Lily blinks, looks around, and sees her bag on the grass, exactly where she left it. Her shorts and shirt are folded neatly beside it. She wants to laugh, but what comes out is a wet, gurgling noise. All the way through the chute, Lily kept telling herself she’ll wake up in her own bed, that none of this can possibly be real. She claws toward her things on hands and knees. Except it’s not hands; it’s a hand, singular.
The other is a raw, dripping stump, and the sight of it knocks the breath right out of her. She tries to look away but her eyes won’t obey. The end of her arm is a ruin: white-bone centre, shredded meat, a dark arterial pulse that squirts blood in time with her racing heart. Her vision goes blurry.
She’s still hoping for a miracle, some cosmic reset. She presses the stump to her chest. She mouths her brother’s name, her mum, Danner, anyone, but there’s only the birds and the waterfall and the sticky stink of her own ruin. She retches, bile burning up her throat, and then presses her forehead into the ground and whimpers. It’s only when she sees her own shadow, stub-armed and hunched, that she finally lets herself give in. The blackness is a mercy, and she lets it take her, with the thought that she’s alone:
Ne’er go alone… the rock and current don’t care for none.
PART 1 -
My memory is a sieve. I am not the first physician to notice this, though in my case the diagnosis is not a punchline or a coping mechanism but a pathologically true fact. For most of my adult life I have trusted in my recall the way a man trusts his skeleton: implicitly, to the point of forgetting it exists. Now I keep discovering new structural failures, hairline cracks, long stretches of bone gone to sand. I write these sentences at a desk which I must, every evening, reacquaint myself with; I am forced to relearn the patterns in the wood grain, the exact drag of the left drawer, the taste of my own coffee, which has always been bitter. I am trying to be honest. In medical school they teach you that writing is not for remembering but for defending against forgetting, if you want to preserve the truth you must carve it in the hardest substance at hand, the way a trauma surgeon learns to stitch through cartilage, not just flesh. The following is my best attempt at such a record.
It will read, I suspect, as both confession and eulogy. If I have structured it well, it will serve as a sufficient account for those who survive me, even if I am not here to answer questions.
The year was 1983. The place was Stanic Island, off the Maine coast, population 812, not counting the dead. I was fifteen, a scholarship child, spending my third summer as a ward of the local program designed to keep us bright, unathletic children from drowning in the gene pool. The isolation suited me. My only complaints were the ones any person would have had: the insect load, the air so wet you could taste every decomposing leaf in it, and the persistent, metronomic blinking of the radio tower, visible from almost every square foot of the southern peninsula. I have to remind myself, as I write this, how normal it all seemed at the time.
The recollection proper begins here.
The five of us walked in loose, uneven formation along the gravel service path. Behind us, the settlement: nineteen double-wides, a general store, two churches so nearly identical that the locals told them apart by the species of dog tied outside, and a derelict community hall whose roof was kept from collapse only by the collective will of the people who insisted on holding events inside it. Ahead of us, the spruce line cut off direct view of the radio tower, but its shadow crawled over us whenever the breeze was strong enough to part the trees. The path was slick with rain from the night before, each step dislodging cold spray from the ferns and knee-high grass that bracketed the tire ruts.
Geoff, who claimed not to be cold, had the bluest lips of the bunch. He spat into the ditch every six or seven paces, watching the trajectory as if expecting it to arc differently each time. Tony and Tommy flanked him, engaged in a running debate over which girl from the program would have the best chance of smuggling contraband onto the ferry at week’s end. They were not careful about the volume of their discussion. Tony’s voice was lower, but what it lacked in decibels it made up for in percussive emphasis; every syllable landed like a shovel in packed dirt. Tommy was all bounce and echo, repeating phrases and laughing before anyone else did, as if racing to the punchline. Mara and I walked in the lead, not so much together as simply ahead of the noise.
She made no pretense of matching my stride, but somehow I never found myself more than a meter ahead of her. The rest of them would lose ground, fall behind, catch up, pass us, and then slow again, obeying an erratic logic that I could never map. I liked Mara’s gait: economical, precise, unshowy. She walked the way she did everything else, as if each movement was a bet she had already calculated and was sure to win. She said little unless directly asked, which made the rest of us either nervous or desperate to fill the silence.
The forest on either side was wet with an overripe, almost solvent odor of decomposing needles and resin, an undercurrent of salt. There was a small swamp to the left, its mirror-surface broken by the castoff heads of cattails and the occasional drift of scum-green duckweed. Gnat clouds bloomed and receded, replaced every few meters by a differently unpleasant insect presence. Every time I brushed a branch or reed I half-expected to come away marked, stung, or god knows what. My father would have described it as “unspoiled,” a term I had always found suspect, as though beauty was measured only by how untouched it could remain by human hands.
The radio tower itself had no opinions. Its uppermost light blinked with the steady, indifferent pace of a heart on an EKG, one second on, one second off, a rhythm that became audible in your skull the longer you stared at it. The generator at its base was a more direct phenomenon: even from a hundred meters out you could feel its bass throb through the ground, a low, unbroken sound like the ocean held just outside your field of vision. When we rounded the final bend and the clearing opened up, the air seemed to thin, the ambient temperature dropping a full degree as we stepped onto the soaked, trampled grass at the base of the tower.
“God, look at that,” said Geoff. “It’s like a fucking spaceship landed here.”
He was not wrong. The clearing was a deliberate space in the forest, an almost perfect oval scraped down to mineral dirt. The tower itself was newer than anything else on the island, a steel latticework, painted hazard-red, its topmost section clearly taller than the tree line by a factor of two or three. I had been out here twice before and found it equally impressive both times. The generator shed, a low concrete box with a slanted tin roof, was sunk several feet into the ground at the western edge of the clearing. From this angle, you could see both the guy wires that anchored the tower and the chain-link fence that circumscribed the base, topped with a single line of slack barbed wire.
The thing that caught the eye, though, was the splash of color at the foot of the tower’s eastern leg. The human figure was not immediately apparent, at first I thought someone had dumped a tarp or heavy coat, the color so wrong for the landscape that my brain failed to process it as a person. It was Tony who stopped first.
“Wait,” he said. “Is that-?”
We all halted. The rest of the group closed the gap between themselves and Mara and me, the energy of the walk dissipating in an awkward, silent shuffle.
“Henrik,” said Mara. Not a question.
He was face-down in the moss and spruce needles, one boot half-on, the heel of the other foot canted skyward in a way that seemed both unnatural and inevitable. His tool belt was twisted up under his torso, one leather pouch ruptured and spilling a handful of hex keys and washers into the dirt. The left arm was extended, palm up, and a coil of heavy radio cable was looped three times around the wrist and forearm, terminating in a ragged, frayed end two feet from the body. His right hand was curled in a loose fist next to his head, which rested in a shallow depression worn into the moss. There was a thin, dark wash of blood at the temple, not the arterial spurt I would later read about but a slow, soaking leak, the kind that suggested a loss of consciousness rather than instant death.
For a long moment, nobody said anything.
I crouched next to the body, balancing on my toes to avoid soaking my shoes. The first thing I did was check the neck for pulse. This was not medical training (my father had forbidden me to touch his patients) but I had watched him enough times to know where the carotid ran, how to press just hard enough to flatten the vessel without crushing it. There was nothing. I looked at the color of the skin, the slackness of the jaw. I had never seen a dead person, but I had seen photos. This was not like the photos. This was smaller, somehow.
“Is he-” Tommy began.
I straightened, wiping my hands on my jeans before I realized how pointless that was. The blood had already dried on my fingers.
“He’s dead,” I said.
Geoff tried to make a joke, a reflex born of discomfort, but the words failed him. Instead he let out a single, high-pitched laugh and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Tony took a slow step backward. Mara knelt beside me and examined the cable, tracing its length from the forearm to the ragged end, then back to the base of the tower. Her face was careful, a precision instrument set to record without judgment. I admired her for that.
“Was it an accident?” Tommy asked, as if the logic of it might redeem the scene. “Did he fall?”
I looked up at the tower, at the regular intervals of the crossbars, the clean lines of the guy wires. The base of the tower was dry, the only disturbance in the clearing, the patch where Henrik lay.
“Maybe,” I pondered. “But I don’t think so.”
The generator continued, indifferent to the drama at its threshold.
We stood there, five teenagers and a dead man, surrounded by the unbroken forest, the generator’s low throb and the tower’s blinking red, the only witnesses.
“I think we should go back,” Mara said. Her voice was even, but she kept her hand close to her face as she stood.
Nobody disagreed. We left Henrik as we had found him, the tableau arranged for whatever adult would next wander through. I did not look back until we had entered the tree line, and even then I was not certain what I was hoping to see.
I remember this with such clarity it sometimes feels like an implanted memory, a film I have watched too many times and now confuse with my own history. But I was there, and so were the others, and what happened next is simply the remainder of the story but would irrevocably change all of our lives.
The walk back through the forest is not a walk. We move in a kind of single-file disorder, speed fluctuating between a forced march and something not quite a jog. Nobody wants to be the first to call it running, and nobody lags so far behind that the group splits, but there is a current underfoot and we are all carried by it. I lead, not because I am particularly brave or even especially sure of where I am going, but because I have the highest forward velocity and the others are content to draft behind it.
Mara is two steps behind, her breathing measured and regular. She has not once looked over her shoulder since we left the clearing. I keep glancing sideways, expecting to see her eyes scanning between the trees, but she is fixed entirely on the route ahead. If she is afraid, she is storing it for later.
The forest is denser now. Every sound is crisp to the point of violence: the collapse of a dead branch underfoot, the wet slide of boot on stone, the rasp of Tommy’s jacket as he tries to keep up while avoiding the brambles. Behind us, the tower’s red pulse is still visible at intervals, a metronome counting down to nothing in particular.
After five minutes the terrain flattens and the path widens. The houses of the settlement appear suddenly, as if extruded from the earth while we were gone. I can see the dock, the strip of gravel that passes for Main Street, and the general store’s makeshift banner advertising some brand of potato chips I have never seen outside New England. The ferry is at anchor, a pale hulk looming at the far end of the cove, and the smell of diesel competes with the usual brine.
The adults are arranged in their standard morning configurations: four men at the far dock, each with a crab trap in a different state of disrepair; Mrs. Tierney and her assistant at the store’s outdoor freezer, restocking bags of ice; a cluster of seniors on the sunward side of the community hall porch, playing some variant of cards that seems more about argument than points.
We cross the open ground, ignoring the usual markers, no detours to the convenience store for gum or to the picnic benches for a drink of water. The others let me keep the lead as we approach the first adult.
Roy Collins is the one I choose to speak to. I have always liked him, which is rare for me; he has the hands of a man who could break you in two but the voice of a patient, slightly amused uncle. He sees us coming and raises an eyebrow, but does not set down the crab trap he is re-lining.
“Something up?” he asks. There is a strong undertow of expectation in the question, as if he has already predicted a handful of possible answers and is preloading his responses.
“There’s a body at the base of the radio tower,” I say, “and it’s Henrik.”
I deliver this in the same tone my father used when listing patient symptoms over the phone, careful not to dramatize, letting the words do the work.
Collins blinks once, slowly. For a split second he is a blank page, the words arranging themselves in a sequence I can almost see behind his eyes. Then he nods, twice, a slow deliberate motion that does not travel above his shoulders.
“Henrik, huh. Where exactly?”
“At the base,” I repeat, “near the east support. He’s face down. There’s blood at his temple.”
Collins processes this with a small pursing of the lips. He does not look at the other men, who are now openly watching us.
“Well,” he smacks his lips together, “we’ll have a look, then.”
He turns back to the crab trap, his hands resuming their task as if I had told him nothing more consequential than discovering a pothole. I stand there, waiting for the acknowledgment to deepen or evolve, but he offers only a vague nod in the direction of the forest.
Mara tugs gently at my sleeve. It is the first time she has initiated contact all morning.
“Let’s try the store,” she says, barely above a whisper.
I nod and we walk away. Behind us, the only sign of change in Collins’s behavior is that he takes a second, longer pause before threading the next section of rope through the trap. I look back at him once and see him staring at the water, mouth slightly open.
At the store, Mrs. Tierney is supervising her assistant, a teenage girl I do not know by name, as they restock a wire rack with SunChips and soda. She is old enough that her hair no longer looks “gray” but has begun to approximate the color of the steel door behind her. I admire her ability to monitor multiple things at once; her eyes flick from the truck to the assistant’s hands to us to the register and back again in an endless, efficient cycle.
“We found Henrik at the radio tower,” I say, again opting for directness over pleasantry. “He’s dead. I think someone might have hurt him.”
Mrs. Tierney’s gaze stops cycling for the duration of one breath, then resumes at its usual clip. “These things have a way of working themselves out,” she slurs, and I note the phrase because it is not one I have ever heard from her before. She always favored specifics: ‘Let me call Donny, he’ll know what to do,’ or ‘We should get some ice on that, dear.’ I wait for her to break character, but she simply nods, accepts a stack of flattened chip bags from her assistant, and moves on to the next chore.
Tony is scowling now, his arms folded across his chest, the posture of someone who has spent a childhood being underestimated and resents every minute of it. He opens his mouth to say something to Mrs. Tierney, then thinks better of it and mutters under his breath, “Nobody gives a shit.”
“We can try the ferry,” Mara offers, as if she is mapping out a diagnostic algorithm and we are only at step two.
On the way down to the dock, Geoff stops me with a light tap on the shoulder.
“This is weird, right?” he asks, and for once his tone is completely stripped of irony. “Like, this isn’t just me?”
“It’s not just you,” I reply.
He nods, relieved. Tommy is walking ten feet ahead, his head on a swivel, as though expecting someone to leap out from behind a barrel and offer a plausible explanation for everything. I am struck by how young he looks in this light, the normal bravado of his posture erased by the gravity of what we have seen.
Aldous Peck is the ferry operator, and in my life to that point I have never seen him do anything that is not directly related to the ferry. He is always in motion: loading, unloading, checking manifests, refueling, making complicated notes on a clipboard. Today he is standing by the edge of the water, staring at a yellow float that bobs twenty yards out. His uniform is a green t-shirt with the name of the ferry stenciled across the chest, the letters faded almost to invisibility.
“We found a body up at the tower,” I repeat, again, as soon as we are within earshot. “Henrik’s dead.”
Peck nods, but does not turn away from the float.
“I’ve only got two round-trip slots open this week,” he states, as if the dead man’s presence might constitute a reservation. “Can you wait till Thursday?”
I am so startled by the non sequitur that I say nothing for a full five seconds. Mara recovers first.
“We just thought you’d want to know?” she says accusingly.
Peck shrugs. “Probably the generator again. Just kept going out, no warning.”
There is a brief silence, the kind that only happens when a conversation is already over but the participants have not yet agreed to walk away.
“Thanks,” Mara doesn’t quite know how to end the conversation, and we walk back up the dock.
On the way, we pass Collins again. He is alone now, the other men gone, and he is threading rope through his hands with the same absent motion as before. If not for the slight change in lighting, I would swear he had not moved.
The five of us gather near the dock entrance, not sure what to do next. Tony is vibrating with anger, fists clenched at his sides.
“We should drag someone up there,” he mutters. “Make them look at it.”
“Nobody’s going to do anything,” barks Geoff. He has sat down on the lip of the seawall, staring at the horizon with the blankness of a person on day three of a fever. “They already know. They just don’t care.”
Tommy is still watching the community hall, as if expecting an adult to emerge and set things right. His face is blank but his hands are shaking slightly.
Mara looks at me. She does not ask a question, but I feel compelled to answer anyway.
“I think something’s wrong with them,” I say. “Not just… I mean, not just today. It’s like they’re…” I search for the word, but all the ones I can find are medical, and none fit.
“Broken,” says Mara.
I nod. “Yeah. Broken.”
I take out my notebook. My father always carried a field notes log in his pocket, and it had always seemed a dignified habit, so I adopted it, even though I rarely had occasion to record anything outside of school assignments or interesting animal sightings. I turn to a clean page and, with a borrowed pencil stub, write: “Something on this island is wrong.”
There is a long, shared silence. The others stand in a rough circle, not looking at each other, not looking at me. Above us, the radio tower’s warning light is visible through the gap in the trees, still blinking at its perfect, inhuman interval.
The community hall seems less a building than an assertion of collective memory. It exists at the edge of the settlement, shingled with a local tradition that says if you hold enough birthday parties and bake sales under a given roof, the structure will be immune to both time and weather. This is not true, but the lie is serviceable. The place smells of a history that has soaked into its fibers. The double doors stutter on their hinges as we file in.
There are three phones in the hall, which is exactly two more than any other building on the island. One is an ancient black wall mount, the kind with a cord so coiled it looks like a fossilized intestine. The second is a squat, gray tabletop model with a rotary dial scarred by the fingernails of every person who ever tried to call in a weather warning before the storm cut power. The third is new, a pushbutton unit with plastic so white it repels fingerprints.
Mara goes first, as always. She crosses the wood planks in a line so straight I can feel the effort in each step. She lifts the wall phone and presses the receiver to her ear, then holds it there, unmoving, her jaw set in a line so controlled I want to reach over and prod her just to see if she would react.
“Well?” says Geoff, after a time.
Mara keeps the receiver to her ear but turns to look at him, the angle of her head asking if he expects anything different than the obvious.
“Static,” she states. “Nothing else.”
She does not hang up. She covers the mouthpiece with one hand and closes her eyes, as if some hidden frequency will emerge if she simply outlasts the silence. After ten full seconds, she puts the receiver back, the cradle accepting it with a soft click.
I prefer verification. I move to the gray tabletop phone, spin the rotary through a test number, and count the audible gaps as the dial resets. The plastic is cold and slightly greasy against my skin. I do not expect a dial tone, but I check for one anyway, because the gesture is ritual. When the absence repeats, I place the receiver on the table and mentally catalog the likely failure points: circuit box, trunk line, tower base, operator’s switchboard.
Tommy kneels beside me. He is careful to avoid making eye contact, instead focusing on the phone as if by proximity he can force the machinery to life.
“Maybe the lines are just overloaded,” he suggests. “That happens. Storms do it all the time.”
“There wasn’t a storm last night,” I remind him, but gently.
“Then somebody cut them,” says Tony. His voice is flat, factual, the way a person might point out a missing limb. He offers the statement, leaving it to float in the astringent air.
Geoff grunts and moves to the third phone. He stabs at the keypad, his thumb heavy on the plastic, dialing nothing at all.
“What’s the plan now?” he asks. “I mean, if we can’t call out. Are there walkies? Does anybody have CB?”
Mara shrugs. “Henrik was the only one who ran the board. If he’s gone…”
“He is gone,” I say, unable to stop myself.
“-then the relay’s down for good.”
Tony kicks at the floor, his boot scraping a bright new scar into the wood. “We could try the VHF direct,” he says, not to anyone in particular.
Tommy laughs, but the sound is damp and wavering. “What are you going to do, Tony? Build a radio from junk in the kitchen?”
“If you have a line-of-sight and enough wattage-” Tony begins, but Mara cuts him off.
“You heard what the ferry guy said. Nobody’s coming until Thursday, at best.”
“That’s five days,” says Geoff. He sits on the edge of a folding table, the metal groaning under his weight. “You know what can happen in five days?”
“Everything,” I say, and the word tastes sour.
A draft moves through the hall. It snakes in via the cracks around the windowpanes, winding its way around our ankles. The windows here are so thin they magnify the blinking red of the radio tower outside, each pulse staining the floor with a faint, blood-colored afterimage. If you stare at it long enough, the rhythm sets your heart rate.
I open the circuit box near the storage closet, check the fuses, flip the main. Nothing changes.
Mara paces the room in a deliberate square, each lap methodical, as though she is counting perimeter for an eventual escape. Geoff watches her, his eyes following the route, but his mind is already elsewhere.
“We could try the Jensen house,” says Tommy, “they have a Ham radio setup. The old guy, Mr. Jensen, he used to patch through to the mainland during lobster season.”
“They’re probably home,” hopes Tony, but it doesn’t sound like hope.
Mara stops pacing. “Let’s just say it out loud,” she says. “We’re cut off. We’re stuck here until the next scheduled boat or until somebody fixes the relay at the tower.”
“Or until somebody else dies,” says Geoff, and his voice comes out thin, like he is already practicing the retelling.
Tommy slides down to the floor, his back against the wall, and stares up at the ceiling. “You think they’ll send somebody, when they notice?”
“If the lines are dead, how would they notice?” shouts Mara. “Henrik handled the logs, the only way anyone would even know is if there’s no check-in. And even then, you think anybody on the mainland is waiting to hear from us?”
Tony shrugs again, this time more ambiguous.
The room feels smaller now. The humidity of breath and adolescent sweat, the sense of being watched by the inventory of unclaimed trophies and warped portrait photos that line the walls.
I drift to the window and peer out. There is no visible movement of anyone. The village looks suddenly uninhabited, a model or a diorama abandoned by the child who built it.
“Okay,” I say, “Let’s review what we know.”
Four faces turn to me, waiting.
“One, Henrik is dead, possibly murdered, though nobody is calling it that. Two, the adults are-” I struggle for the word, then settle for “nonresponsive.” “Three, the phones are out, and the tower is functioning maybe but unmanned. Four, we have no way to get ourselves off the island to the mainland for help.”
Mara holds up a hand, ticking off points as if checking them for fault.
“We’re missing something,” says Geoff, “some piece. Because this doesn’t make sense, not in any real-world way.”
“Sometimes things don’t make sense,” says Tommy.
I look at each of them in turn.
“We need a plan,” I say, and this time it is not a suggestion.
Mara nods, the motion small but decisive.
I have always hated my father’s living room. The entire design is an argument against comfort: no throws or pillows, all the furniture arranged to maximize airflow rather than human use, and a persistent odor of ozone from the ancient humidifier he insisted on running year-round. My father was a man who believed in the prophylactic effect of minor suffering. He applied this philosophy to medicine, child-rearing, and the choice of his sofa. The couch cushions are undisturbed, untouched by any human since the last time he rose from them. I have to remind myself that he is not about to walk in from the kitchen, mug of black coffee in one hand and a question about my performance in school poised on his tongue.
The group clusters at the threshold, uncertain if they are allowed to cross the boundary into my domestic history. I wave them in. Mara is first, as usual, scanning the room with a kind of predatory caution. Tommy and Tony follow in a pair, their steps landing out of sync, then converging as they stake out separate corners. Geoff lingers at the threshold until I gesture again, then closes the door behind him with an audible click.
The house is silent except for the periodic tick of the kitchen clock and the low, ultrasonic whine of the fridge cycling on and off. On the end table is a medical journal, open to an article on the epidemiology of emerging viral encephalopathies. I slide it to the center of the table with a practiced flick. The article is heavy on electron micrographs and short on answers, a perfect encapsulation of my father’s view of the world.
“Ssssoooooo,” drawls Geoff, “what’s the next move?”
“We compare notes,” I reply, “and we see what fits.”
Tony grunts, but otherwise says nothing.
I begin with Mrs. Harper, the morning of the day before. I recount her standing at the dock, muttering to herself. The locals avoided her with theatrical nonchalance, the way you might step around a fresh oil stain in the driveway, each detour a little wider than the last.
Mara nods along, unsmiling. She has already heard this, but she lets me re-tell it for the sake of the others.
Then Mr. Jensen: up at dawn, drilling a neat row of holes into the hull of his own lobster boat. When I asked why, he looked straight at me and said, “To let the air out.” Then he returned to work, as if my question had never been asked.
“Maybe he finally cracked,” laughs Tommy. “The guy’s been losing it for years.”
“Possibly,” I say. “But it doesn’t explain the rest.”
I pause, waiting to see if anyone else will contribute. Mara picks up the thread.
“Mrs. Tierney,” she adds. “I watched her take inventory at the store. She recited the numbers backwards, every item, then locked the freezer and put the keys in the slot for outgoing mail. When I asked if she was okay, she just said, ‘I’m keeping score.’”
Tony shrugs, his default gesture for all information.
Geoff offers a data point: “Collins at the dock. I saw him open the same crab trap, five times in a row, each time acting surprised by what was inside. I asked if he needed help and he told me to fuck off, which I guess is normal, but the rest isn’t.”
The evidence accrues, each anecdote more inexplicable than the last. None of the adults seem capable of acknowledging a deviation in anyone’s behavior, least of all their own.
I rise and move to the bookshelf. The spines are a uniform brown, the dust jacket color leeched out by sunlight over years. I pull down my father’s favorite text “Neurovirology, third edition” and open it to the flagged section on viral-induced cognitive dysfunction. Chapter Twelve: Encephalopathies, Progressive and Acute.
I set the book on my knees and trace the diagram with my index finger: virus enters host, crosses blood-brain barrier, interrupts normal neural transmission, leads to abnormal behaviors (and eventually) systemic collapse. The annotations in my father’s handwriting are precise and joyless.
Tommy leans over my shoulder. “You think it’s contagious?” His breath is loaded with the acetone tang of sweat and whatever snack food he has hoarded in his pockets.
“Everything is contagious,” I say, but only Mara hears it, and she looks at me like I have confirmed her worst suspicion.
The cold kettle on the stove is an artifact of the morning, a relic left untouched as the rest of the house drifted toward entropy. I want to boil water for everyone, as if tea could stave off the thing that is crawling through the community’s collective nervous system, but I don’t know if that would help or just further the illusion that normalcy is achievable.
“What about us?” asks Tommy, and this time his voice is almost childlike. “How do we know we’re not?”
He does not finish the sentence, and nobody tries to supply the words for him.
Tony is staring at the bookshelf. Geoff sits on the arm of the couch, fidgeting with the buttons on the remote, each click another layer of static added to the background.
Mara moves closer. She studies the diagram, then flips back several pages, scanning each one with a finger that moves at a pace both deliberate and slightly impatient.
“We need a hypothesis,” she says, “not just anecdotes.”
“I agree,” I say, and this time my voice is steadier.
I open my notebook, the one I had used at the dock, and draw a table with two columns: Affected and Unaffected. The first column fills quickly: Henrik (dead), Mrs. Harper, Mr. Jensen, Collins, Mrs. Tierney, all exhibiting aberrant behavior. In the Unaffected column, the only names are the five of us and, perhaps, the store clerk girl whose name I still do not know.
Tony finally speaks. “Maybe it’s the water.”
I consider this. The island’s water table is shallow, and after heavy rain the wells often overflow.
“Or the air,” says Geoff, “like spores or a mold.”
“Nobody’s coughing,” I point out, but he is not wrong to suggest inhalation as a vector.
“It started with the boats,” says Mara, not as a question.
“Or when it rained the other night,” says Tommy.
“Or it’s the soil,” I say, “and something just triggered the acute phase.”
We stare at each other for a full minute, the silence as dense as the humidity after a storm.
“Let’s assume it’s a communicable agent,” says Mara, “and let’s assume we’re exposed. What do we do?”
“Quarantine,” I say, but my mouth is dry and the word sounds insincere.
Tommy laughs, but stops halfway through.
“Seriously?” says Geoff. “You want us to hole up in your house and wait for it to pass?”
“If we’re already infected,” I say, “then it doesn’t matter. If not, then isolation is our only defense.”
“Unless it’s not a virus,” says Tony. “Unless it’s something else.”
Mara looks at him, and for the first time, I see her uncertainty.
“What else would it be?” she asks.
Tony shrugs, but his mouth is a straight line.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “If the adults are compromised, it’s up to us.”
Mara folds her arms. “We need to observe. Monitor symptoms. Document everything.”
I nod, and begin to copy the structure of the table onto a clean sheet. I note the date, the names, the baseline behaviors. I will record every anomaly, every deviation, because if there is a pattern, it will be here, somewhere in the accumulation of data.
The ticking clock in the kitchen marks out seconds with the precision of a metronome. The kettle does not boil. The house is sealed up tight, but the air feels electrified, a charge building without discharge.
Then, from the direction of the porch, a heavy, deliberate thump against the front door.
All of us freeze. The room has no cover, no exits except the way we came.
There is a second thump, softer this time, as if the visitor is not certain they want to be let in.
Geoff makes to stand, but Mara holds up a hand, palm down, and he sits again, his body tensed like a trap ready to spring.
The third knock is the same as the first: measured, precise, inhumanly patient.
“We’re not answering that,” I say, and nobody argues.
The thumping stops. For a minute, there is nothing but the whine of the fridge and the tick of the clock.
Then, from the window, the red pulse of the tower intensifies, painting the walls of the room with a deepening blood hue, as if the house itself is signaling some internal alarm.
Outside, the door remains closed, but I sense the pressure building. Inside, we are a closed system, five vectors of potential catastrophe, waiting for the next symptom to present.
I resume taking notes, my handwriting steadier now, each letter a defense against forgetting.
The kettle remains cold.
The red light pulses on.
The next phase has already begun.
PART 1 -
My memory is a sieve. I am not the first physician to notice this, though in my case the diagnosis is not a punchline or a coping mechanism but a pathologically true fact. For most of my adult life I have trusted in my recall the way a man trusts his skeleton: implicitly, to the point of forgetting it exists. Now I keep discovering new structural failures, hairline cracks, long stretches of bone gone to sand. I write these sentences at a desk which I must, every evening, reacquaint myself with; I am forced to relearn the patterns in the wood grain, the exact drag of the left drawer, the taste of my own coffee, which has always been bitter. I am trying to be honest. In medical school they teach you that writing is not for remembering but for defending against forgetting, if you want to preserve the truth you must carve it in the hardest substance at hand, the way a trauma surgeon learns to stitch through cartilage, not just flesh. The following is my best attempt at such a record.
It will read, I suspect, as both confession and eulogy. If I have structured it well, it will serve as a sufficient account for those who survive me, even if I am not here to answer questions.
The year was 1983. The place was Stanic Island, off the Maine coast, population 812, not counting the dead. I was fifteen, a scholarship child, spending my third summer as a ward of the local program designed to keep us bright, unathletic children from drowning in the gene pool. The isolation suited me. My only complaints were the ones any person would have had: the insect load, the air so wet you could taste every decomposing leaf in it, and the persistent, metronomic blinking of the radio tower, visible from almost every square foot of the southern peninsula. I have to remind myself, as I write this, how normal it all seemed at the time.
The recollection proper begins here.
The five of us walked in loose, uneven formation along the gravel service path. Behind us, the settlement: nineteen double-wides, a general store, two churches so nearly identical that the locals told them apart by the species of dog tied outside, and a derelict community hall whose roof was kept from collapse only by the collective will of the people who insisted on holding events inside it. Ahead of us, the spruce line cut off direct view of the radio tower, but its shadow crawled over us whenever the breeze was strong enough to part the trees. The path was slick with rain from the night before, each step dislodging cold spray from the ferns and knee-high grass that bracketed the tire ruts.
Geoff, who claimed not to be cold, had the bluest lips of the bunch. He spat into the ditch every six or seven paces, watching the trajectory as if expecting it to arc differently each time. Tony and Tommy flanked him, engaged in a running debate over which girl from the program would have the best chance of smuggling contraband onto the ferry at week’s end. They were not careful about the volume of their discussion. Tony’s voice was lower, but what it lacked in decibels it made up for in percussive emphasis; every syllable landed like a shovel in packed dirt. Tommy was all bounce and echo, repeating phrases and laughing before anyone else did, as if racing to the punchline. Mara and I walked in the lead, not so much together as simply ahead of the noise.
She made no pretense of matching my stride, but somehow I never found myself more than a meter ahead of her. The rest of them would lose ground, fall behind, catch up, pass us, and then slow again, obeying an erratic logic that I could never map. I liked Mara’s gait: economical, precise, unshowy. She walked the way she did everything else, as if each movement was a bet she had already calculated and was sure to win. She said little unless directly asked, which made the rest of us either nervous or desperate to fill the silence.
The forest on either side was wet with an overripe, almost solvent odor of decomposing needles and resin, an undercurrent of salt. There was a small swamp to the left, its mirror-surface broken by the castoff heads of cattails and the occasional drift of scum-green duckweed. Gnat clouds bloomed and receded, replaced every few meters by a differently unpleasant insect presence. Every time I brushed a branch or reed I half-expected to come away marked, stung, or god knows what. My father would have described it as “unspoiled,” a term I had always found suspect, as though beauty was measured only by how untouched it could remain by human hands.
The radio tower itself had no opinions. Its uppermost light blinked with the steady, indifferent pace of a heart on an EKG, one second on, one second off, a rhythm that became audible in your skull the longer you stared at it. The generator at its base was a more direct phenomenon: even from a hundred meters out you could feel its bass throb through the ground, a low, unbroken sound like the ocean held just outside your field of vision. When we rounded the final bend and the clearing opened up, the air seemed to thin, the ambient temperature dropping a full degree as we stepped onto the soaked, trampled grass at the base of the tower.
“God, look at that,” said Geoff. “It’s like a fucking spaceship landed here.”
He was not wrong. The clearing was a deliberate space in the forest, an almost perfect oval scraped down to mineral dirt. The tower itself was newer than anything else on the island, a steel latticework, painted hazard-red, its topmost section clearly taller than the tree line by a factor of two or three. I had been out here twice before and found it equally impressive both times. The generator shed, a low concrete box with a slanted tin roof, was sunk several feet into the ground at the western edge of the clearing. From this angle, you could see both the guy wires that anchored the tower and the chain-link fence that circumscribed the base, topped with a single line of slack barbed wire.
The thing that caught the eye, though, was the splash of color at the foot of the tower’s eastern leg. The human figure was not immediately apparent, at first I thought someone had dumped a tarp or heavy coat, the color so wrong for the landscape that my brain failed to process it as a person. It was Tony who stopped first.
“Wait,” he said. “Is that-?”
We all halted. The rest of the group closed the gap between themselves and Mara and me, the energy of the walk dissipating in an awkward, silent shuffle.
“Henrik,” said Mara. Not a question.
He was face-down in the moss and spruce needles, one boot half-on, the heel of the other foot canted skyward in a way that seemed both unnatural and inevitable. His tool belt was twisted up under his torso, one leather pouch ruptured and spilling a handful of hex keys and washers into the dirt. The left arm was extended, palm up, and a coil of heavy radio cable was looped three times around the wrist and forearm, terminating in a ragged, frayed end two feet from the body. His right hand was curled in a loose fist next to his head, which rested in a shallow depression worn into the moss. There was a thin, dark wash of blood at the temple, not the arterial spurt I would later read about but a slow, soaking leak, the kind that suggested a loss of consciousness rather than instant death.
For a long moment, nobody said anything.
I crouched next to the body, balancing on my toes to avoid soaking my shoes. The first thing I did was check the neck for pulse. This was not medical training (my father had forbidden me to touch his patients) but I had watched him enough times to know where the carotid ran, how to press just hard enough to flatten the vessel without crushing it. There was nothing. I looked at the color of the skin, the slackness of the jaw. I had never seen a dead person, but I had seen photos. This was not like the photos. This was smaller, somehow.
“Is he-” Tommy began.
I straightened, wiping my hands on my jeans before I realized how pointless that was. The blood had already dried on my fingers.
“He’s dead,” I said.
Geoff tried to make a joke, a reflex born of discomfort, but the words failed him. Instead he let out a single, high-pitched laugh and then clapped a hand over his mouth. Tony took a slow step backward. Mara knelt beside me and examined the cable, tracing its length from the forearm to the ragged end, then back to the base of the tower. Her face was careful, a precision instrument set to record without judgment. I admired her for that.
“Was it an accident?” Tommy asked, as if the logic of it might redeem the scene. “Did he fall?”
I looked up at the tower, at the regular intervals of the crossbars, the clean lines of the guy wires. The base of the tower was dry, the only disturbance in the clearing, the patch where Henrik lay.
“Maybe,” I pondered. “But I don’t think so.”
The generator continued, indifferent to the drama at its threshold.
We stood there, five teenagers and a dead man, surrounded by the unbroken forest, the generator’s low throb and the tower’s blinking red, the only witnesses.
“I think we should go back,” Mara said. Her voice was even, but she kept her hand close to her face as she stood.
Nobody disagreed. We left Henrik as we had found him, the tableau arranged for whatever adult would next wander through. I did not look back until we had entered the tree line, and even then I was not certain what I was hoping to see.
I remember this with such clarity it sometimes feels like an implanted memory, a film I have watched too many times and now confuse with my own history. But I was there, and so were the others, and what happened next is simply the remainder of the story but would irrevocably change all of our lives.
The walk back through the forest is not a walk. We move in a kind of single-file disorder, speed fluctuating between a forced march and something not quite a jog. Nobody wants to be the first to call it running, and nobody lags so far behind that the group splits, but there is a current underfoot and we are all carried by it. I lead, not because I am particularly brave or even especially sure of where I am going, but because I have the highest forward velocity and the others are content to draft behind it.
Mara is two steps behind, her breathing measured and regular. She has not once looked over her shoulder since we left the clearing. I keep glancing sideways, expecting to see her eyes scanning between the trees, but she is fixed entirely on the route ahead. If she is afraid, she is storing it for later.
The forest is denser now. Every sound is crisp to the point of violence: the collapse of a dead branch underfoot, the wet slide of boot on stone, the rasp of Tommy’s jacket as he tries to keep up while avoiding the brambles. Behind us, the tower’s red pulse is still visible at intervals, a metronome counting down to nothing in particular.
After five minutes the terrain flattens and the path widens. The houses of the settlement appear suddenly, as if extruded from the earth while we were gone. I can see the dock, the strip of gravel that passes for Main Street, and the general store’s makeshift banner advertising some brand of potato chips I have never seen outside New England. The ferry is at anchor, a pale hulk looming at the far end of the cove, and the smell of diesel competes with the usual brine.
The adults are arranged in their standard morning configurations: four men at the far dock, each with a crab trap in a different state of disrepair; Mrs. Tierney and her assistant at the store’s outdoor freezer, restocking bags of ice; a cluster of seniors on the sunward side of the community hall porch, playing some variant of cards that seems more about argument than points.
We cross the open ground, ignoring the usual markers, no detours to the convenience store for gum or to the picnic benches for a drink of water. The others let me keep the lead as we approach the first adult.
Roy Collins is the one I choose to speak to. I have always liked him, which is rare for me; he has the hands of a man who could break you in two but the voice of a patient, slightly amused uncle. He sees us coming and raises an eyebrow, but does not set down the crab trap he is re-lining.
“Something up?” he asks. There is a strong undertow of expectation in the question, as if he has already predicted a handful of possible answers and is preloading his responses.
“There’s a body at the base of the radio tower,” I say, “and it’s Henrik.”
I deliver this in the same tone my father used when listing patient symptoms over the phone, careful not to dramatize, letting the words do the work.
Collins blinks once, slowly. For a split second he is a blank page, the words arranging themselves in a sequence I can almost see behind his eyes. Then he nods, twice, a slow deliberate motion that does not travel above his shoulders.
“Henrik, huh. Where exactly?”
“At the base,” I repeat, “near the east support. He’s face down. There’s blood at his temple.”
Collins processes this with a small pursing of the lips. He does not look at the other men, who are now openly watching us.
“Well,” he smacks his lips together, “we’ll have a look, then.”
He turns back to the crab trap, his hands resuming their task as if I had told him nothing more consequential than discovering a pothole. I stand there, waiting for the acknowledgment to deepen or evolve, but he offers only a vague nod in the direction of the forest.
Mara tugs gently at my sleeve. It is the first time she has initiated contact all morning.
“Let’s try the store,” she says, barely above a whisper.
I nod and we walk away. Behind us, the only sign of change in Collins’s behavior is that he takes a second, longer pause before threading the next section of rope through the trap. I look back at him once and see him staring at the water, mouth slightly open.
At the store, Mrs. Tierney is supervising her assistant, a teenage girl I do not know by name, as they restock a wire rack with SunChips and soda. She is old enough that her hair no longer looks “gray” but has begun to approximate the color of the steel door behind her. I admire her ability to monitor multiple things at once; her eyes flick from the truck to the assistant’s hands to us to the register and back again in an endless, efficient cycle.
“We found Henrik at the radio tower,” I say, again opting for directness over pleasantry. “He’s dead. I think someone might have hurt him.”
Mrs. Tierney’s gaze stops cycling for the duration of one breath, then resumes at its usual clip. “These things have a way of working themselves out,” she slurs, and I note the phrase because it is not one I have ever heard from her before. She always favored specifics: ‘Let me call Donny, he’ll know what to do,’ or ‘We should get some ice on that, dear.’ I wait for her to break character, but she simply nods, accepts a stack of flattened chip bags from her assistant, and moves on to the next chore.
Tony is scowling now, his arms folded across his chest, the posture of someone who has spent a childhood being underestimated and resents every minute of it. He opens his mouth to say something to Mrs. Tierney, then thinks better of it and mutters under his breath, “Nobody gives a shit.”
“We can try the ferry,” Mara offers, as if she is mapping out a diagnostic algorithm and we are only at step two.
On the way down to the dock, Geoff stops me with a light tap on the shoulder.
“This is weird, right?” he asks, and for once his tone is completely stripped of irony. “Like, this isn’t just me?”
“It’s not just you,” I reply.
He nods, relieved. Tommy is walking ten feet ahead, his head on a swivel, as though expecting someone to leap out from behind a barrel and offer a plausible explanation for everything. I am struck by how young he looks in this light, the normal bravado of his posture erased by the gravity of what we have seen.
Aldous Peck is the ferry operator, and in my life to that point I have never seen him do anything that is not directly related to the ferry. He is always in motion: loading, unloading, checking manifests, refueling, making complicated notes on a clipboard. Today he is standing by the edge of the water, staring at a yellow float that bobs twenty yards out. His uniform is a green t-shirt with the name of the ferry stenciled across the chest, the letters faded almost to invisibility.
“We found a body up at the tower,” I repeat, again, as soon as we are within earshot. “Henrik’s dead.”
Peck nods, but does not turn away from the float.
“I’ve only got two round-trip slots open this week,” he states, as if the dead man’s presence might constitute a reservation. “Can you wait till Thursday?”
I am so startled by the non sequitur that I say nothing for a full five seconds. Mara recovers first.
“We just thought you’d want to know?” she says accusingly.
Peck shrugs. “Probably the generator again. Just kept going out, no warning.”
There is a brief silence, the kind that only happens when a conversation is already over but the participants have not yet agreed to walk away.
“Thanks,” Mara doesn’t quite know how to end the conversation, and we walk back up the dock.
On the way, we pass Collins again. He is alone now, the other men gone, and he is threading rope through his hands with the same absent motion as before. If not for the slight change in lighting, I would swear he had not moved.
The five of us gather near the dock entrance, not sure what to do next. Tony is vibrating with anger, fists clenched at his sides.
“We should drag someone up there,” he mutters. “Make them look at it.”
“Nobody’s going to do anything,” barks Geoff. He has sat down on the lip of the seawall, staring at the horizon with the blankness of a person on day three of a fever. “They already know. They just don’t care.”
Tommy is still watching the community hall, as if expecting an adult to emerge and set things right. His face is blank but his hands are shaking slightly.
Mara looks at me. She does not ask a question, but I feel compelled to answer anyway.
“I think something’s wrong with them,” I say. “Not just… I mean, not just today. It’s like they’re…” I search for the word, but all the ones I can find are medical, and none fit.
“Broken,” says Mara.
I nod. “Yeah. Broken.”
I take out my notebook. My father always carried a field notes log in his pocket, and it had always seemed a dignified habit, so I adopted it, even though I rarely had occasion to record anything outside of school assignments or interesting animal sightings. I turn to a clean page and, with a borrowed pencil stub, write: “Something on this island is wrong.”
There is a long, shared silence. The others stand in a rough circle, not looking at each other, not looking at me. Above us, the radio tower’s warning light is visible through the gap in the trees, still blinking at its perfect, inhuman interval.
The community hall seems less a building than an assertion of collective memory. It exists at the edge of the settlement, shingled with a local tradition that says if you hold enough birthday parties and bake sales under a given roof, the structure will be immune to both time and weather. This is not true, but the lie is serviceable. The place smells of a history that has soaked into its fibers. The double doors stutter on their hinges as we file in.
There are three phones in the hall, which is exactly two more than any other building on the island. One is an ancient black wall mount, the kind with a cord so coiled it looks like a fossilized intestine. The second is a squat, gray tabletop model with a rotary dial scarred by the fingernails of every person who ever tried to call in a weather warning before the storm cut power. The third is new, a pushbutton unit with plastic so white it repels fingerprints.
Mara goes first, as always. She crosses the wood planks in a line so straight I can feel the effort in each step. She lifts the wall phone and presses the receiver to her ear, then holds it there, unmoving, her jaw set in a line so controlled I want to reach over and prod her just to see if she would react.
“Well?” says Geoff, after a time.
Mara keeps the receiver to her ear but turns to look at him, the angle of her head asking if he expects anything different than the obvious.
“Static,” she states. “Nothing else.”
She does not hang up. She covers the mouthpiece with one hand and closes her eyes, as if some hidden frequency will emerge if she simply outlasts the silence. After ten full seconds, she puts the receiver back, the cradle accepting it with a soft click.
I prefer verification. I move to the gray tabletop phone, spin the rotary through a test number, and count the audible gaps as the dial resets. The plastic is cold and slightly greasy against my skin. I do not expect a dial tone, but I check for one anyway, because the gesture is ritual. When the absence repeats, I place the receiver on the table and mentally catalog the likely failure points: circuit box, trunk line, tower base, operator’s switchboard.
Tommy kneels beside me. He is careful to avoid making eye contact, instead focusing on the phone as if by proximity he can force the machinery to life.
“Maybe the lines are just overloaded,” he suggests. “That happens. Storms do it all the time.”
“There wasn’t a storm last night,” I remind him, but gently.
“Then somebody cut them,” says Tony. His voice is flat, factual, the way a person might point out a missing limb. He offers the statement, leaving it to float in the astringent air.
Geoff grunts and moves to the third phone. He stabs at the keypad, his thumb heavy on the plastic, dialing nothing at all.
“What’s the plan now?” he asks. “I mean, if we can’t call out. Are there walkies? Does anybody have CB?”
Mara shrugs. “Henrik was the only one who ran the board. If he’s gone…”
“He is gone,” I say, unable to stop myself.
“-then the relay’s down for good.”
Tony kicks at the floor, his boot scraping a bright new scar into the wood. “We could try the VHF direct,” he says, not to anyone in particular.
Tommy laughs, but the sound is damp and wavering. “What are you going to do, Tony? Build a radio from junk in the kitchen?”
“If you have a line-of-sight and enough wattage-” Tony begins, but Mara cuts him off.
“You heard what the ferry guy said. Nobody’s coming until Thursday, at best.”
“That’s five days,” says Geoff. He sits on the edge of a folding table, the metal groaning under his weight. “You know what can happen in five days?”
“Everything,” I say, and the word tastes sour.
A draft moves through the hall. It snakes in via the cracks around the windowpanes, winding its way around our ankles. The windows here are so thin they magnify the blinking red of the radio tower outside, each pulse staining the floor with a faint, blood-colored afterimage. If you stare at it long enough, the rhythm sets your heart rate.
I open the circuit box near the storage closet, check the fuses, flip the main. Nothing changes.
Mara paces the room in a deliberate square, each lap methodical, as though she is counting perimeter for an eventual escape. Geoff watches her, his eyes following the route, but his mind is already elsewhere.
“We could try the Jensen house,” says Tommy, “they have a Ham radio setup. The old guy, Mr. Jensen, he used to patch through to the mainland during lobster season.”
“They’re probably home,” hopes Tony, but it doesn’t sound like hope.
Mara stops pacing. “Let’s just say it out loud,” she says. “We’re cut off. We’re stuck here until the next scheduled boat or until somebody fixes the relay at the tower.”
“Or until somebody else dies,” says Geoff, and his voice comes out thin, like he is already practicing the retelling.
Tommy slides down to the floor, his back against the wall, and stares up at the ceiling. “You think they’ll send somebody, when they notice?”
“If the lines are dead, how would they notice?” shouts Mara. “Henrik handled the logs, the only way anyone would even know is if there’s no check-in. And even then, you think anybody on the mainland is waiting to hear from us?”
Tony shrugs again, this time more ambiguous.
The room feels smaller now. The humidity of breath and adolescent sweat, the sense of being watched by the inventory of unclaimed trophies and warped portrait photos that line the walls.
I drift to the window and peer out. There is no visible movement of anyone. The village looks suddenly uninhabited, a model or a diorama abandoned by the child who built it.
“Okay,” I say, “Let’s review what we know.”
Four faces turn to me, waiting.
“One, Henrik is dead, possibly murdered, though nobody is calling it that. Two, the adults are-” I struggle for the word, then settle for “nonresponsive.” “Three, the phones are out, and the tower is functioning maybe but unmanned. Four, we have no way to get ourselves off the island to the mainland for help.”
Mara holds up a hand, ticking off points as if checking them for fault.
“We’re missing something,” says Geoff, “some piece. Because this doesn’t make sense, not in any real-world way.”
“Sometimes things don’t make sense,” says Tommy.
I look at each of them in turn.
“We need a plan,” I say, and this time it is not a suggestion.
Mara nods, the motion small but decisive.
I have always hated my father’s living room. The entire design is an argument against comfort: no throws or pillows, all the furniture arranged to maximize airflow rather than human use, and a persistent odor of ozone from the ancient humidifier he insisted on running year-round. My father was a man who believed in the prophylactic effect of minor suffering. He applied this philosophy to medicine, child-rearing, and the choice of his sofa. The couch cushions are undisturbed, untouched by any human since the last time he rose from them. I have to remind myself that he is not about to walk in from the kitchen, mug of black coffee in one hand and a question about my performance in school poised on his tongue.
The group clusters at the threshold, uncertain if they are allowed to cross the boundary into my domestic history. I wave them in. Mara is first, as usual, scanning the room with a kind of predatory caution. Tommy and Tony follow in a pair, their steps landing out of sync, then converging as they stake out separate corners. Geoff lingers at the threshold until I gesture again, then closes the door behind him with an audible click.
The house is silent except for the periodic tick of the kitchen clock and the low, ultrasonic whine of the fridge cycling on and off. On the end table is a medical journal, open to an article on the epidemiology of emerging viral encephalopathies. I slide it to the center of the table with a practiced flick. The article is heavy on electron micrographs and short on answers, a perfect encapsulation of my father’s view of the world.
“Ssssoooooo,” drawls Geoff, “what’s the next move?”
“We compare notes,” I reply, “and we see what fits.”
Tony grunts, but otherwise says nothing.
I begin with Mrs. Harper, the morning of the day before. I recount her standing at the dock, muttering to herself. The locals avoided her with theatrical nonchalance, the way you might step around a fresh oil stain in the driveway, each detour a little wider than the last.
Mara nods along, unsmiling. She has already heard this, but she lets me re-tell it for the sake of the others.
Then Mr. Jensen: up at dawn, drilling a neat row of holes into the hull of his own lobster boat. When I asked why, he looked straight at me and said, “To let the air out.” Then he returned to work, as if my question had never been asked.
“Maybe he finally cracked,” laughs Tommy. “The guy’s been losing it for years.”
“Possibly,” I say. “But it doesn’t explain the rest.”
I pause, waiting to see if anyone else will contribute. Mara picks up the thread.
“Mrs. Tierney,” she adds. “I watched her take inventory at the store. She recited the numbers backwards, every item, then locked the freezer and put the keys in the slot for outgoing mail. When I asked if she was okay, she just said, ‘I’m keeping score.’”
Tony shrugs, his default gesture for all information.
Geoff offers a data point: “Collins at the dock. I saw him open the same crab trap, five times in a row, each time acting surprised by what was inside. I asked if he needed help and he told me to fuck off, which I guess is normal, but the rest isn’t.”
The evidence accrues, each anecdote more inexplicable than the last. None of the adults seem capable of acknowledging a deviation in anyone’s behavior, least of all their own.
I rise and move to the bookshelf. The spines are a uniform brown, the dust jacket color leeched out by sunlight over years. I pull down my father’s favorite text “Neurovirology, third edition” and open it to the flagged section on viral-induced cognitive dysfunction. Chapter Twelve: Encephalopathies, Progressive and Acute.
I set the book on my knees and trace the diagram with my index finger: virus enters host, crosses blood-brain barrier, interrupts normal neural transmission, leads to abnormal behaviors (and eventually) systemic collapse. The annotations in my father’s handwriting are precise and joyless.
Tommy leans over my shoulder. “You think it’s contagious?” His breath is loaded with the acetone tang of sweat and whatever snack food he has hoarded in his pockets.
“Everything is contagious,” I say, but only Mara hears it, and she looks at me like I have confirmed her worst suspicion.
The cold kettle on the stove is an artifact of the morning, a relic left untouched as the rest of the house drifted toward entropy. I want to boil water for everyone, as if tea could stave off the thing that is crawling through the community’s collective nervous system, but I don’t know if that would help or just further the illusion that normalcy is achievable.
“What about us?” asks Tommy, and this time his voice is almost childlike. “How do we know we’re not?”
He does not finish the sentence, and nobody tries to supply the words for him.
Tony is staring at the bookshelf. Geoff sits on the arm of the couch, fidgeting with the buttons on the remote, each click another layer of static added to the background.
Mara moves closer. She studies the diagram, then flips back several pages, scanning each one with a finger that moves at a pace both deliberate and slightly impatient.
“We need a hypothesis,” she says, “not just anecdotes.”
“I agree,” I say, and this time my voice is steadier.
I open my notebook, the one I had used at the dock, and draw a table with two columns: Affected and Unaffected. The first column fills quickly: Henrik (dead), Mrs. Harper, Mr. Jensen, Collins, Mrs. Tierney, all exhibiting aberrant behavior. In the Unaffected column, the only names are the five of us and, perhaps, the store clerk girl whose name I still do not know.
Tony finally speaks. “Maybe it’s the water.”
I consider this. The island’s water table is shallow, and after heavy rain the wells often overflow.
“Or the air,” says Geoff, “like spores or a mold.”
“Nobody’s coughing,” I point out, but he is not wrong to suggest inhalation as a vector.
“It started with the boats,” says Mara, not as a question.
“Or when it rained the other night,” says Tommy.
“Or it’s the soil,” I say, “and something just triggered the acute phase.”
We stare at each other for a full minute, the silence as dense as the humidity after a storm.
“Let’s assume it’s a communicable agent,” says Mara, “and let’s assume we’re exposed. What do we do?”
“Quarantine,” I say, but my mouth is dry and the word sounds insincere.
Tommy laughs, but stops halfway through.
“Seriously?” says Geoff. “You want us to hole up in your house and wait for it to pass?”
“If we’re already infected,” I say, “then it doesn’t matter. If not, then isolation is our only defense.”
“Unless it’s not a virus,” says Tony. “Unless it’s something else.”
Mara looks at him, and for the first time, I see her uncertainty.
“What else would it be?” she asks.
Tony shrugs, but his mouth is a straight line.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “If the adults are compromised, it’s up to us.”
Mara folds her arms. “We need to observe. Monitor symptoms. Document everything.”
I nod, and begin to copy the structure of the table onto a clean sheet. I note the date, the names, the baseline behaviors. I will record every anomaly, every deviation, because if there is a pattern, it will be here, somewhere in the accumulation of data.
The ticking clock in the kitchen marks out seconds with the precision of a metronome. The kettle does not boil. The house is sealed up tight, but the air feels electrified, a charge building without discharge.
Then, from the direction of the porch, a heavy, deliberate thump against the front door.
All of us freeze. The room has no cover, no exits except the way we came.
There is a second thump, softer this time, as if the visitor is not certain they want to be let in.
Geoff makes to stand, but Mara holds up a hand, palm down, and he sits again, his body tensed like a trap ready to spring.
The third knock is the same as the first: measured, precise, inhumanly patient.
“We’re not answering that,” I say, and nobody argues.
The thumping stops. For a minute, there is nothing but the whine of the fridge and the tick of the clock.
Then, from the window, the red pulse of the tower intensifies, painting the walls of the room with a deepening blood hue, as if the house itself is signaling some internal alarm.
Outside, the door remains closed, but I sense the pressure building. Inside, we are a closed system, five vectors of potential catastrophe, waiting for the next symptom to present.
I resume taking notes, my handwriting steadier now, each letter a defense against forgetting.
The kettle remains cold.
The red light pulses on.
The next phase has already begun.
Natalie’s thumb moves on its own. The blue light catches the ceiling, and somewhere in her head a Stanford guy is saying something about dopamine, but she’s already past him. The App Store feed refreshes. A puzzle game with a grinning cartoon safe. A pink-haired girl mouthing something at the camera, the caption: “SCARE LEVEL OVER 9000!!” A lo-fi horror platformer whose screenshots look like they were drawn in MS Paint on a dare. She taps one. Reads two sentences of the description. Backs out. Picks at her hangnail. Scrolls.
Tonight, Natalie’s thumb lands on something called ‘Hide’. No promo art. No developer name. The icon is a brown, shapeless blur that might be a tree or just a smudge. The description page is blank except for the price: $0.99, crossed out and replaced with a red “$0.00.” Free until midnight, supposedly.
She hesitates, then snorts. As if she’s a mark for this kind of thing.
Natalie taps Download anyway.
The load screen is black. No music, no jingle, no little spinning icon to soften the wait. Just black, and then…
A room.
Natalie’s thumb goes still.
It’s top-down, the perspective of a smoke detector or a god, rendered in that flat, slightly washed-out palette of older mobile games. A bed in the corner. Clothes on the floor in roughly the shape she’d left them. And on the bed: a figure. Small. Prone. Phone-light pooling blue-white across its face.
Her mouth opens and nothing happens. Her brain offers several reasonable explanations; location data, phone camera, some AR gimmick that scraped her photos, and she listens to none of them, because the carpet in the game is the exact ugly rust-red of her actual carpet, and she had never photographed it, had never thought it worth photographing, had never thought of it at all until now.
Then the screen goes blank.
White text. No font flourish, no design sensibility.
Just letters.
YOU HAVE SIXTY SECONDS TO HIDE.
Then, from the window. A sound.
Not loud. That’s the thing about it. It would have been easier if it were loud, easier to dismiss as a branch or a drunk or the ordinary violence of the city at night. But it’s quiet. Deliberate.
The hallway swallows her. She hits the bathroom door with her shoulder, gets inside, gets the lock turned. As if a quarter-inch of brass has ever kept anything out. She puts her back to the door. Breathes through her nose the way she’d read somewhere you’re supposed to.
Then it comes again.
The bathroom window this time. Same sound. Closer now, just above the toilet tank, the frosted glass trembling with a vibration she feels more than hears. Her legs fold before she decides to move and she’s in the bathtub, knees to chest, the cold porcelain cupping her like a mouth.
She looks at her phone.
The game is still open. She presses the X. Nothing. She holds it. Nothing. She swipes, force-closes, tries every muscle memory of the thing and the screen stays exactly as it is.
Thirty seconds. Counting.
She tries the side buttons next. Volume down, power, the combination that should bring up emergency services, the one her mother had made her memorize. She presses them together. Holds them.
Nothing happens.
Her heart is doing something wrong.
Not fast, she’d expected fast, could have managed fast, but uneven. A heavy thud, then a skip, then two beats crowding each other like they’ve forgotten the order. She knows, distantly, the difference between a panic attack and something structural, had read about it once in the specific hypochondriac spiral of a sleepless night. Left arm. Jaw. The chest pressure that doesn’t feel like pressure so much as the sense that something inside is being slowly wrung.
She presses her palm flat against her sternum as if she could hold it steady from the outside. Her jaw aches. Her left arm feels faraway and strange.
The window rattles.
She flinches so hard her elbow catches the faucet. The sound stops. Starts again. Louder now, the glass shaking in its frame like something on the other side has lost patience, like whatever was testing has finished testing. Her heart responds before her mind does, throwing itself against her ribs in that wrong, arrhythmic way, the heavy thud and skip, thud and skip, her jaw throbbing with it.
She presses her back into the curve of the tub.
The rattling gets worse. Continuous now, the whole frame shaking, a low percussive clatter that fills the small bathroom and bounces off the tiles and comes at her from every direction.
Her chest tightens. Squeezes. Something hot and enormous pressing outward from the inside.
The window bows.
She can see it, the glass flexing, the seal straining.
The glass breaks.
Her heart stops.
The countdown reaches zero and then a pop up appears, “Are you enjoying this game? Rate us on the App Store! For comments or concerns, reach tech support. Sorry, no refunds!”.
They sat in the dirt behind the house, seven small bodies arranged in a rough circle around the single wooden car. The toy had been handed down through cousins, its wheels held in place by nails that flashed silver beneath flaking yellow paint. Monday pushed it first, leaving a neat pair of tracks across the dry soil. Tuesday took it after him. Each child claimed their turn with the blunt certainty toddlers have, their movements clumsy, their breath loud with excitement. Wednesday watched from the far edge, hands idle on her knees. A mild grit clung to her palms where the dirt had started to cake, the texture dry enough to sting.
When it became clear no one would offer her a turn, out of boredom, or sadness, or both, she picked up a thin stick and studied it. The point was ragged, splintered from whatever branch it had once been. She pressed it against her ear, nudged it inward, and felt the membrane resist before giving way. The sound inside her skull was soft and wet, followed by a pressure shift that made the world tilt. Pain arrived seconds later, a clean and hot throb. Blood crept down her neck in a warm thread.
Thursday noticed first and scrambled to his feet, stumbling as he ran to get help. Sunday stayed where he was, leaning closer so his shadow fell across her shoulder. He clicked his tongue the way adults do when pretending disappointment, his voice pitched with an older child’s smugness. He told her it was her own fault. That she should have waited. That crying wouldn’t fix anything. She did not cry. She sat very still, the stick resting in the dust.
The children had larger bodies now. The seven of them stood at the lip of the old battlement, a slab of concrete mottled with lichen and the shallow pits left by long-forgotten explosives. The drop beneath was steep enough that the air carried a faint mineral cold, the smell of wet stone rising from the shaded ground below. Sunday tested the edge with the tip of his shoe, then leapt without hesitation. His landing sent up a dull puff of dust and he straightened with a triumphant grin. Monday and Tuesday followed, their bodies thin and quick, arms slicing the air as they hurled themselves below. The thuds of their landings travelled upward.
Wednesday stood back from the ridge. The height made her frightened. She felt the faint vibration of Tuesday’s whoop echoing upward. Thursday lingered beside her. His voice dropped to a soft register. He told her she was the only girl and no one expected her to jump. She could stay where she was. She could watch. She didn’t have to follow them.
Sunday overheard. He climbed back up the slope with a flush of irritation across his cheeks. He called her pathetic in a tone meant to wound, loud enough that the others turned to look. He asked if she wanted to be the weak one forever. Wednesday felt the pressure behind her ribs again, that familiar internal drop. She stepped forward, toes touching the crumbled lip of the battlement.
The fall was shorter than she imagined, yet the moment of impact bloomed through her arm with a hot, wet crack. She lay curled on one side. The broken bone sent pulses of bright pain along her elbow and shoulder, each one rising like a wave and breaking before she could brace. Thursday reached her first. He knelt and pulled her to his chest, his hands careful as he steadied her head. Friday sprinted up the bank toward the path, shouting for anyone who might hear. Wednesday pressed her face into the fabric of Thursday’s shirt, hiding her tears.
Their bodies grew larger still. The chapel was at the farthest edge of the property, It doubled as the schoolhouse. A bell rope frayed where countless hands had pulled it. After chores, Thursday asked Wednesday to meet him behind the chapel. She found him near the rear wall where the grass grew taller. His posture was restless, shoulders tight, fingers pulling at the hem of his shirt.
He spoke in a rush. He said he wanted to run away. He said Friday and Saturday would come with them. He said they could go anywhere else and never touch another chore on this land again. The words tumbled from him, warm with hope and desperation. She opened her mouth to answer but he stepped closer, close enough that she could feel the heat of his breath. His lips pressed against hers, unsure and clumsy, the contact soft at first before he adjusted awkwardly. Her heart thudded once, then again. The kiss held no grace, only two inexperienced mouths learning shape and pressure.
A twig snapped. The sound cut through the quiet like a small fracture. She turned and saw them at the corner of the chapel. Sunday in front. Monday and Tuesday crowding behind him. Their expressions were wide with amusement, eyes sharp with interest. Sunday mimicked the shape of the kiss, exaggerated and cruel. Monday elbowed Tuesday. Laughter rose.
Wednesday tried to step back but Sunday moved quickly. He shoved her chest with both hands. The ground was soft from last night’s rain and she slid into the mud, her palms sinking deep into the cold sludge. Thursday shouted her name and swung at Sunday with a wild, unpractised punch. He barely made contact before Monday and Tuesday seized his arms. They pinned him with an ease that made Wednesday’s stomach turn.
Sunday struck him once, the punch landing square against his stomach. He struck him again. The rhythm built, dull impacts carrying through the air like someone knocking on a hollow wall. Thursday’s legs buckled but Monday and Tuesday held him upright. Sunday told Wednesday to watch. His voice was calm, almost bored, as if this were another chore to complete. She tried to rise but the mud held her hands, thick and cold between her fingers. The chapel wall cast a long shadow over them, the building silent as Thursday’s breath grew laboured beneath the repetition of Sunday’s fists.
Their bodies fully grown now as Wednesday pushed Thursday along the narrow path. The wheelchair rattled over stones that had worked themselves free from the earth, each vibration passing through the frame. He asked again whether she was sure. She told him yes. She told him today was the day. Across the field the chapel stood dressed in white bunting. Sunday was to be ordained, the culmination of years spent shaping himself into something righteous. Wednesday had watched him do it, had watched how quickly righteousness became a weapon.
Friday had not lived long enough to see this morning. Sunday had poured drink for all of them in those earlier years, a cruel sort of hazing. Friday’s body had failed before dawn and none of them spoke of it now. Saturday had run soon after, vanishing down the road with nothing but a small canvas bag. Wednesday remembered watching his figure shrink against the horizon, knowing she’d never see him again.
She helped Thursday into the passenger seat of the work truck, lifting his weight with a careful grip beneath his arms. He settled into place and watched her load the chair and a small bag of clothes into the back. He spoke of marriage then. He had imagined vows spoken under a sky that was theirs alone. She squeezed his hand.
She returned to her room for the last of her things, knowing Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday would be occupied at the chapel, busy readying the day’s ceremony. When she turned to leave, Sunday filled the doorway. His shadow swallowed the narrow space. His tone was calm as he explained his plan. She would be his wife before sundown. She would carry children for the good of the community. Her life was already decided.
He stepped forward and gripped her face with one broad hand, squeezing her jaw until her teeth tapped together. She felt the warmth of his palm, the press of his thumb against her cheekbone. She did not flinch. She reached instead for the pear knife tucked deep within her apron pocket. She angled her wrist and drove it into the soft place beneath his ribs. The sound he made was sharp, a broken inhale. She pulled free and ran.
The gasoline canister sat in the corner of the truck bed. She snatched it up, splashed its contents along the dry boards of the house, and struck a match. The flames caught fast, hungry as they climbed the old wood. Smoke curled into the skies. She climbed into the truck beside Thursday without a word. In the rear-view mirror, Monday and Tuesday raced toward the inferno, their figures frantic. Sunday’s screams chased the wind.
Sunday’s child grew harsh with pride,
Monday’s child stood at his side.
Tuesday’s child learned cruelty’s game,
Wednesday’s child bore all their blame.
Thursday’s child held love so small,
Friday’s child took one last fall.
Saturday’s child ran far from sight,
And none of them were raised in light.
Have you ever been afraid that you are mentally ill? Not the passing kind of fear, the kind you get after reading something unsettling online and spending twenty minutes convinced you have it... I mean the real kind. The kind where you start auditing your own behaviour, replaying conversations, checking your responses against some internal rubric of what a normal person would have said, would have felt.
I have spent most of my adult life certain that I am, on some fundamental level, fine. Ordinary. Unremarkable in the specific way that means nothing is wrong. And then something happens that only you can hear, or only you can see, and the whole architecture of that certainty develops a crack, and you know what cracks do given enough time and pressure. The worst part is the silence you are forced into. You can’t tell anyone. Not because there is no one to tell, but because telling someone is the moment it becomes real. The moment a face shifts across the table from you, softens in that particular way, and you watch them choose their next words very carefully. So you say nothing. You develop small rituals for managing it. You start sleeping with the television on.
The word earworm entered English sometime in the 1980s, a translation of the German “Ohrwurm”, which had been in common use for over a century prior. The German compound is literal and plainly anatomical, a worm of the ear, something that enters through a small passage and moves inward. James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, became one of the first researchers to study the phenomenon systematically in the early 2000s, and his findings suggested that nearly ninety-eight percent of people experience involuntary musical imagery with some regularity. He called sufferers earworm victims, which always struck me as a strange choice of language for something so apparently universal and benign. The clinical term is involuntary musical imagery, abbreviated to INMI in the literature, and the research is largely reassuring. Songs get lodged. The brain, having no off switch for pattern recognition, chews on an unresolved melodic loop the way a tongue finds a loose tooth. Most of the time, the song is recent, familiar, structurally simple. A hook. A chorus. Something with a gap the brain keeps trying to fill. Most of the time, it fades. Most of the time, you are not lying on the floor at 4 in the morning with your hands pressed flat against the cold tile, listening to a voice singing about flowers, and wondering whether the sound is coming from inside your head or from somewhere just outside the window.
I work the graveyard shift at a radio station, four hours a night, 2am-6am, and I have done so for the last six years. The job title is night producer, which sounds more involved than it is. What it actually means is that I sit in a room full of computers and make sure they do not stop doing what they were already doing. Internet radio and streaming killed most of the craft out of it years ago. The playlist runs itself. The ads fire on a schedule. The signal pushes out locally and online through software that, on a good night, requires nothing from me at all beyond my physical presence in the building.
Occasionally, a request comes through the station app around 3 in the morning, someone driving long distance or working a warehouse shift or simply unable to sleep, and I queue it up, and that is the most human contact the job tends to involve. I come in just before 2, take handover from the late evening producer, who is usually already halfway out the door and smelling of whatever they had for dinner, and I sit down and I read, or I tidy the desk, or I run through whatever game I have installed on my laptop that week. Just before 6am, I hand over to the morning news and then I go home and I sleep until the afternoon. It’s a cruisy job. It was, at least, until the earworm started.
They’re usually something catchy in the straightforward sense of the word. Something with a hook that repeats at the right interval and lodges in the pattern-recognition part of your brain. In twenty years of living inside music in one capacity or another, I have never once had a death metal earworm. It’s always pop. When I was a child, it was Britney Spears, “Baby One More Time”, and I remember it being collective, humming it in the corridors at school.
Being at a top 40 station means the music that surrounds me night after night tends toward the recent and the familiar, which is probably why requests for older material are rare enough that they catch me off guard. Which is probably why, when the message came through at 2:04 am on a Tuesday, I stopped what I was doing and read it twice.
Tiny Tim. Tiptoe Through the Tulips. 1968.
I had never heard it. I pulled it up before I queued it, just to check the runtime and make sure it was clean for air. The recording quality is of its era, thin and slightly warped, like sound pressed through wax paper. And then the voice came in and I sat back in my chair without deciding to. A falsetto, extraordinarily high, wavering at the edges in a way that made me feel physically unsettled. The lyrics present themselves as innocent. Flowers. Gardens. Moonlight. But then there is the line, “and if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight, will you pardon me?”, and something in the phrasing bothered me. It reminded me of that particular mode of old cinema where a man corners a woman against something solid and the camera treats it as romance, the no that gets talked over, the permission that gets assumed. Maybe I was reading into it. The song is over fifty years old and I was tired.
You can hear something once, a single unremarkable pass, and somewhere below conscious thought the brain files it, indexes it, and tucks it behind everything else you know. A week can go by. A month. And then one bar, four notes, half a lyric sung in the wrong key, and the whole thing surfaces intact.
It was about a week after I had played the request. I was in the bathroom adjacent to the studio, the one with the loose tap fitting that the building manager had been meaning to fix since sometime the previous year. I was washing my hands. The vent above the mirror pulls air from somewhere in the building’s ducting, and sometimes you catch fragments through it, a door closing on another floor, the lift mechanism, etc. And I swear I heard, thin and reedy and unmistakable, “…by the window, that is where I’ll be.” The falsetto. That specific, wrong-register falsetto.
I turned the tap off and stood there with wet hands.
Then I went back into the studio and checked the playlist. We were three tracks into a scheduled block. The current song had forty seconds left on the counter, and it was a recent pop track. I told myself it was fatigue, which was plausible. I believed it, mostly. But I stood at the studio window for a moment longer than I needed to, looking out at the city, and I was aware, without quite articulating it, that there was a garden below. That the window faced east. The emergency exit doors were directly to my left, and that the gap beneath them, when the air pressure changed, made a sound not entirely unlike breath.
After that, I made a point of finding Tony. He does the security rounds for the whole building overnight, floors of largely empty offices and one radio station keeping the lights on at the top. He is a heavyset man in his mid-forties, the kind of build that suggests he was once physically capable and has since made peace with no longer being so. He carries his radio on his hip and a thermos of something that smells of instant coffee, and he laughs easily at things that are only mildly funny. He would be useless in any situation that required speed or confrontation, but I found his presence enormously comforting anyway. Knowing another person existed in the building was enough.
I had diagnosed my problem as loneliness and treated it accordingly. I took the longer bus route to and from work, the one that ran through the lit commercial streets rather than cutting through the quieter roads, and I sat near other people and let the ambient noise of them wash over me. During shifts, I kept a chat window open on the laptop and messaged whoever was awake, which when you work until six in the morning turns out to be a reasonable number of people across various time zones. It helped. The nights settled back into their usual texture. Months passed, and I stopped thinking about Tiny Tim entirely.
Then something came through the request line. It comes through as a voicemail, the 0800 number, and calls at that hour are rare enough that I almost didn’t check it. I hit play and listened. The voice was male, older, the kind of vocal texture that comes from decades of cigarettes, raspy at the edges and slightly wet in the consonants. He was asking for Tiptoe Through the Tulips. What unsettled me, beyond the request itself, was the quality of his confusion. He did not seem to understand he was leaving a message rather than speaking to someone live. There were pauses where he appeared to be waiting for a response. A long silence after he named the song, expectant, and then something that might have been disappointment in his breathing before he ended the call without saying goodbye. I deleted it and didn’t play the request. Prank callers and unsavoury messages are part of the job; they always have been, and I have developed a fairly thick skin for it. I filed this one under strange and moved on.
The song is older than Tiny Tim by four decades. Tiptoe Through the Tulips was written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke for the 1929 musical film “Gold Diggers of Broadway”, itself adapted from Avery Hopwood’s 1919 stage play “The Gold Diggers.” Hopwood was one of the most commercially successful playwrights of his era, a writer of farces and comedies who made an extraordinary amount of money and spent it with equal enthusiasm. He drowned in 1928 off the French Riviera, and the legal tangle that followed his death was the kind that estates fall into when a man dies young and wealthy and without having put things entirely in order. His mother took on the work of sorting through it and died herself before it was resolved. There is something fitting about a song that carries that particular history, adding a level of urban myth. Two deaths threaded through its paperwork before it ever reached the ears of the man who made it famous.
What people tend to forget about the 1920s in America is how thoroughly the occult ran through it, not at the fringes but at the centre of respectable cultural life. The period following the First World War produced a grief so enormous and so widely shared that orthodox religion struggled to contain it. Millions of families had lost someone, often young men whose bodies had not come home, and into that absence rushed Spiritualism, which had been building in popularity since the mid-nineteenth century but found its largest audience in the aftermath of mass death. Seances were held in drawing rooms and hotel suites. Ouija boards were manufactured and sold as parlour entertainment. Arthur Conan Doyle, the most rational of men by reputation, toured America in 1922 lecturing on spirit communication to packed houses and was received not as an eccentric but as a serious thinker engaging a serious subject.
The radio, newly domestic and newly strange, the voices of the absent or dead crackling through the air into living rooms, fed the mood without intending to. Sound was becoming untethered from bodies. Music arrived from nowhere visible. The tulip song came out of that world, though I don’t think its original singer sang it quite so eerily.
“Knee deep in flowers we'll stray…”
I could hear Tiny Tim’s wobbling words as I made my way into the building to start work. Someone had again requested it towards the end of the previous shift. During a lull, I picked up the internal security line and called Tony’s desk, keeping my voice light, the way you do when you want to flag something without admitting it has already gotten under your skin. I told him about the song, framed it as a funny story, a weird caller. I laughed once to demonstrate that I found it amusing. He didn’t reply. The line was open, but nothing came back through it. No breath. No shuffle of his thermos. I held the receiver and listened to it for longer than was reasonable. My skin came up in gooseflesh, starting at the back of my neck and moving down both arms in a single slow wave, the hair on my forearms lifting against my sleeves. I set the receiver down carefully, as if noise might provoke something, and sat very still at the desk as I heard something from…
Outside. Loud enough that the window glass seemed to carry it, a vibration more than a sound at first. That voice. That specific voice pushing up through the pre-dawn air from somewhere below. I was across the room before I had decided to move, my palms hitting the window ledge, my breath fogging the glass as I looked down. Three floors below, in the narrow strip of garden running along the building’s eastern face, a figure stood in the dark. Barely visible. The shape of a man, the suggestion of a man, holding something above his head, a boombox, the sound pouring upward.
“Come tiptoe through the tulips with me…”
I could not see his face. The garden lighting did not reach him properly, or he stood in the precise gap between two pools of it. My stomach dropped through the floor. I ran for the phone on the studio desk and picked it up. The line was dead, not silent the way Tony’s line had been silent, but genuinely dead, no tone, no presence, nothing. I went back to the window and the garden was empty. The garden was completely empty, but the song was louder.
“AND IF I KISS YOU, IN THE GARDEN, IN THE MOONLIGHT.”
It was louder again, louder than the street noise at that hour, louder than the ventilation system, louder than the studio, and it was not coming from outside anymore. Or it was coming from outside and also from somewhere closer, from the corridor, from the vent above the emergency exit doors.
“AND WHEN I KISS YOU….”
I pressed my back against the far wall. The gooseflesh had become something else, a full-body response, my legs gone unreliable beneath me, sweat cold at my hairline. I made it to the bathroom. I turned the lock and I slid down the back of the door until I was sitting on the cold tile floor with my knees against my chest, and I stayed there while the song played and then faded and then played again at the edge of hearing, again and again and again and again. I cried in the way that is not really crying but is the body releasing pressure it cannot hold with wet, ragged sobs, my face hot and the fluorescent light above the mirror buzzing its single unwavering note. I stayed there until I heard the morning crew arriving through the walls. Until I heard footsteps and voices and the particular noise of people. The morning producer found me still on the floor holding my hands over my ears.
My boss called me into his office and told me to take two weeks off. He said it gently, said I clearly needed rest, and I nodded and accepted it because the alternative was telling him what I had heard, and I already knew what his face would do. They found Tony in the emergency stairwell. He had been there since sometime around three in the morning, which is when I had called his line. Heart attack. I have thought about that a great deal since, the timing of it, the way the line stayed open, and what, if anything, was present on his end of it in the minutes between.
The two weeks off did not feel like rest. They felt like a container I had been placed inside while other people decided what to do with me. I slept badly, lying in the dark of my apartment listening to the street outside and thinking about the song’s history. The facts of it were thin and returned nothing alarming. Avery Hopwood drowned. His mother died. Al Dubin, who wrote the lyrics, died in 1945 from a barbiturate overdose. The song was a curio. A novelty. There was nothing in its paper trail that explained why it had taken up residence in me the way it had.
It was during this research that I found myself reading about the German tradition of the Rattenfanger, the rat catcher, the figure who would become the Pied Piper in the English telling of it. The Hamelin story, as most people know it, is a children’s cautionary tale, the man with the pipe who leads the rats into the river and then, unpaid, leads the children into the mountain. But the older German variants carry something the sanitised version loses, a specifically gendered dimension that the later retellings smoothed away. In some regional accounts, the piper’s power over women was its own distinct thread, separate from the children, separate from the rats. The music he played operated on the female body as a physical compulsion, an irresistible locomotive force that moved women out of their houses and away from their families. They simply followed. There are accounts from the broader Germanic folk tradition of similar figures, men with instruments whose songs functioned less like entertainment and more like a hand closing around the wrist. I wondered if this was what was happening to me.
The first shift back felt manageable. My boss had cleared the cellphone restriction as a concession, and I had accepted it the way you accept a small offering after a large loss, grateful and aware it changes nothing fundamental. The mace sat in my pocket, a solid cylinder against my hip, and I touched it periodically through the fabric. I hadn’t checked the app requests all shift. I hadn’t listened to the phone line. I kept my laptop open and the chat window running, and I had talked to people about nothing in particular. The shift moved through its usual intervals. 5 a.m. came, and the city outside began its first adjustments toward morning. 5:29 a.m. I was sitting at the desk with my hands around a cup of coffee that had been hot earlier, reading something on the laptop screen that I could not now tell you the subject of, and the power went out.
Not a flicker. Not a gradual dimming. Everything at once. The monitors, the studio equipment, the overhead fluorescents, the small red standby lights on the broadcast rack, all of it gone in a single instant, and the room became the specific black of a space of nothingness. My body registered it before my mind did, a spike of adrenaline that hit me like a face strike, my coffee cup falling as my hands came up instinctively. I knew, because I knew the building, that the electronic lock on the emergency exit door ran off the main supply. I knew this in the abstract professional way you know things about your workplace that you file away and never expect to need. I fumbled the phone from my pocket and turned the torch on, the beam swinging wide across the equipment, and I was trying to navigate to my boss’s number when I felt it. A movement of air against the back of my neck. Cool and directional. The kind of air movement that has a source. The studio door was open. I hadn’t heard it open. The phone left my hand. I heard it hit the floor and I didn’t stop for it. My foot caught the raised threshold of the emergency exit and the stairs took me badly, the first three in a stumbling controlled fall that became uncontrolled by the fourth, my shoulder hitting the wall, my ankle turning on the edge of a step with a bright tearing pain that shot straight to my back teeth. I grabbed the rail with both hands and stopped myself. The pain in my ankle was the specific deep throb of something that has been asked to bear weight at the wrong angle, and it radiated upward in pulses. I got the mace out. My thumb found the safety and pressed it off and I held the canister out ahead of me while I gripped the rail with my other hand and moved down the remaining flights with my weight on the good foot. The bad one taking as little as it could, each step a negotiation. The stairwell was dark and the sound of my own breathing filled it, loud and unsteady. From somewhere above me, or perhaps below, I could hear footsteps. A weight moving on metal treads. Measured. Unhurried. I came out at the bottom into the garden strip along the building, and I went directly into the tall brush at the border of it, pushing into the shrubs until the branches closed around me, and I crouched there with my ankle screaming and my thumb still on the mace trigger and my whole body reduced to listening. The car park lay open beyond the garden. The street beyond that. I didn’t run for it. My ankle would not have carried me, and I knew it, and knowing it produced a particular cold clarity. I pressed my back into the brush, and I waited.
Then came whistling. Wet at the edges, slightly broken, the tune moving through the notes with a patience that was worse than urgency. Low and close and shapeless in the dark, directionless the way sounds become when fear has compromised your ability to locate them. I looked up because something made me look up, some reflex of the eyes, and I saw the window three floors above me, my window, the one I had pressed my hands against the night the figure stood in the garden with the boombox held above his head. I was directly beneath it. I had run from the building and hidden directly beneath the window, in the precise spot where he had stood, and I understood this, and the understanding moved through me like cold water had been dumped on me. I shut my eyes. I pressed them together and held the mace against my sternum, and the whistling continued, and my head began to feel very far away, the pain in my ankle retreating to somewhere distant and secondary, the sound of the city falling off at the edges, the darkness behind my eyes beginning to tilt and soften. The last thing I was aware of was the dew soaking through the knees of my trousers and the smell of crushed leaves rising around me, and then nothing.
The first thing I was aware of was light, and a smell before I had fully arrived back in myself. Antiseptic and something underneath it, the faint organic undertone that hospitals cannot quite launder out no matter how hard they try. My ankle was elevated. There was a drip in the back of my left hand, taped down with that particular clinical neatness, and when I turned my head there was a man sitting in the chair beside the bed, young, mid-twenties at most, in running gear and wearing a light smile.
He extended his hand when he saw my eyes focus properly.
“Nick,” he said. “Nick Teufel.”
His accent sat in an interesting place, American vowels stretched over something older underneath, the cadence of someone who had learned casual English from television and beach holidays rather than a classroom.
“You found me,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“In the bushes.” He stated without judgement. “You were holding a canister of mace like it was the only thing keeping you on the planet.”
I looked at my hands. The mace wasn’t there. “Where is it?”
“Paramedics took it. Standard thing, I think.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You work in that building?”
“Top floor,” I said. “The radio station.”
He nodded slowly, as if this explained something he hadn’t quite been able to place. “I run that route most mornings. Five, five-thirty. You were just…” He made a small gesture with one hand, a shape that meant crumpled, that meant wrong. “I nearly missed you. The light doesn’t reach that part of the garden well.”
“The eastern side,” I said.
He looked at me. “Yeah. Exactly that side.” A pause. “Is there someone I can call for you?”
“No,” I said, and then, because it sounded worse than I intended, “I’m fine. I will be.”
I quit my job that same day. My boss, while understanding, was obviously a little annoyed. My contract states I need to give four weeks, but he seemed to think I was in the middle of some kind of episode. I spoke to the on-call emergency doctor in charge of my wellbeing, and they just referred me to a psychiatrist. Instead, Nick kindly offered to take me to the police station after returning home and fetching his car.
The officer who took my statement was a woman in her late thirties, solidly built, with the kind of face that had learned to stay neutral as a professional survival strategy. Her name badge said D. Kowalski. She had a paper cup of coffee on the desk that she didn’t touch once during the entire conversation, and she typed with two fingers but quickly, the way people do when they have been doing it long enough that speed has compensated for technique.
She asked me to start from the beginning, and I did. I told her about the first request, the Tuesday at 2:04 a.m., Tiny Tim, Tiptoe Through the Tulips. I told her about the bathroom vent and the sound I had heard through it, thin and reedy and unmistakable. I told her about the voicemail, the older male voice, the raspy consonants, the pauses where he seemed to be waiting for someone to respond. She asked if I had kept it, and I told her I had deleted it, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in her expression, not disbelief exactly, more a kind of recalibration. I told her about the figure in the garden, the boombox held above his head, the gap in the lighting where he stood. I told her about Tony. I watched her type his name and stop, and then continue.
“Anthony Gillespie,” she said, without looking up. “The security guard.”
“You know about him.”
“Heart attack in an office building stairwell is a matter of record,” she spoke carefully. “There was no suggestion of any third-party involvement.”
She looked up then. “That’s not me dismissing what you’re telling me. That’s me being transparent about what the file says.”
I told her about the night the power went out. She asked whether the building had CCTV, and I told her yes, throughout, the studio included, and she wrote something down and underlined it once. I told her about the stairwell, the ankle, hiding in the garden. I told her about the whistling. I watched her face while I said it, and she gave me nothing back, which I found more reassuring than sympathy would have been.
“The requests,” she said when I had finished. “They came through an app?”
“And a phone line. The voicemail came through the 0800 number.”
“Those will have metadata attached. Numbers, device IDs, timestamps.” She pulled a form from a tray to her left and slid it across the desk toward me. “I want you to write down every date and approximate time you can remember. Everything you’ve just told me, in order, with as much detail as you can.” She paused. “Has anyone else at the station heard these requests come in? Anyone who could corroborate the content?”
“No,” I admonished myself for not thinking of it earlier. “I work alone. That’s the nature of the shift.”
She nodded, the nod of someone filing that information somewhere specific. “And the man who brought you in today,” she asked. “How do you know him?”
“I don’t,” I said. “He found me this morning. He’s been very kind.”
Minden sits tucked away in a nice corner of Germany, where the land opens out in a way that takes some adjustment if you have spent most of your life among the red dirt and scrub oak of Oklahoma. The sky here is wide, and in late afternoon the light comes in low and gold across the fields and makes everything look briefly consecrated. Nick had described it as unremarkable, the way people describe places they love to people they don’t yet want to disappoint, and I had arrived expecting unremarkable and found instead something quieter and more considered than that word suggested. Old stone and bicycle lanes and a river that moved through the centre of town with the unhurried confidence of something that has been doing so for a very long time.
The pub was called Zur Linde, which Nick told me translated roughly to The Linden Tree, and it had the particular atmosphere of a place that had absorbed several generations of the same families and had arranged itself accordingly, low ceilings and worn wood and a jukebox in the corner that looked original to the seventies but had been updated inside at some point to accept cards. The engagement party occupied the back room and had spilled naturally into the front bar over the course of the evening in the way that parties do when the people involved are comfortable enough with each other to stop performing occasion and simply exist together. Someone had put up a string of lights. There were flowers on the tables, white and yellow, tulips among them, which Nick had chosen and which I had not said anything about because I had decided, consciously and with some effort, not to say anything about.
I was at the bar getting a second round when the man beside me introduced himself as Gerhard. He was a compact, precise-looking man in his early fifties with silver at his temples and the careful handshake of someone who had spent a career in rooms where first impressions were audited. He told me he had worked with Nick at the engineering firm in Hannover, seven or eight years ago now, before Nick had taken the American posting.
“He talked about coming back,” Gerhard said, in English that was grammatically exact and slightly formal in the way that suggests a person who learned the language entirely correctly and has since made peace with sounding that way. “We didn’t believe him. People say they’ll come back.”
“He came back,” I smiled.
“He came back,” Gerhard agreed, and raised his glass in a small acknowledging gesture. “With a reason to.” He looked at me with a warmth that was genuine but also appraising, the look of someone who cares about the person being discussed and is quietly taking a measurement. “He seems well. He seems different to how he was, I think. Settled.”
“Was he unsettled before?”
Gerhard considered this with more seriousness than the social occasion perhaps required. “He was always moving,” he said finally. “Always somewhere else, even when he was in the room. You know the type.” He smiled. “You seem to have fixed that.”
I told him I wasn’t sure I had fixed anything, that I thought we had probably fixed each other, and he seemed to find this answer satisfying in a way that made me think it was the right one.
Later I found myself beside a woman named Petra who had the easy, unselfconscious beauty of someone who has never particularly thought about it, dark-haired and tall, with paint under her fingernails that no amount of scrubbing had entirely reached. She and Nick had worked adjacent desks for two years at the same firm, she told me, and she said it with the particular emphasis of someone conveying that they know a person in the specific and unglamorous way that shared office space produces, which is to say entirely.
“He used to bring in these terrible American cereals,” she said. “The ones that are just sugar with a cartoon on the box. He thought it was funny. Offering them to people very seriously as if it was normal food.” She laughed. “He has strange humour. You’ve noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” and it was true, Nick seemed to find things funny that no one else understood.
“He is very loyal,” she said, and her tone shifted slightly, took on a quality that was almost careful. “Once he decides something, he is very decided. Very constant.” She looked across the room to where Nick was standing with Gerhard, the two of them fallen into what looked like an easy, familiar argument about something. “It is a good quality,” she mused. “Mostly it is a good quality.”
I looked at her. “Mostly?”
She smiled and touched my arm briefly. “Congratulations,” she said, warmly and without quite answering, and moved away toward the table.
I found my way to the corner of the front bar where Diane was standing, Diane who I had known since the third grade in Tulsa and who had spent an unreasonable amount of money on flights and accommodation to be here and was making sure everyone in the immediate vicinity understood this in the most affectionate possible terms. She had a glass of Riesling in each hand for reasons she had already explained and I had already forgotten and she pulled me into a sideways hug that sloshed both of them dangerously.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m going to say it. He’s gorgeous and he’s kind and his accent does something genuinely unfair to me personally and I’m very happy for you and also extremely jealous, and I need you to know both of those things are equally true and equally sincere.”
“Noted,” but I mostly noticed my dear friend’s increasing intoxication.
“Coming back to Oklahoma was good for you,” she said, more quietly. “After everything. The day shifts. The whole thing. You seemed like yourself again.” She looked at me carefully. “You seem like yourself now.”
“I am,” I said, and I meant it. I had been meaning it for a while now. The jukebox in the corner had been cycling through something inoffensive and mid-tempo all evening, the kind of music that exists to fill a room without drawing attention, and I had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing ventilation or traffic, the sound becoming part of the texture of the room, background noise. Which is perhaps why, when it changed, the change arrived before I had consciously registered what I was hearing.
Thin and reedy. Climbing through the noise of the room. A falsetto, extraordinarily high, wavering at the edges in that specific wrong-register way that I had not heard in over a year and had not, I understood now, ever entirely stopped listening for.
I put my drink down on the nearest surface without looking for one. Diane was still talking. I was aware of her voice at a remove, the way you are aware of sound when something has redirected the whole of your attention.
It was Gerhard who said it. He had materialised at my shoulder at some point in the last few minutes, drawn back perhaps by some instinct of sociability, and he was looking toward the jukebox with an expression of mild, pleased recognition, the expression of a man who has heard something familiar and finds the familiarity uncomplicated and warm.
“Oh,” he pointed. “That’s Nick’s favourite song, isn’t it?“
Have you ever been afraid that you are mentally ill? Not the passing kind of fear, the kind you get after reading something unsettling online and spending twenty minutes convinced you have it... I mean the real kind. The kind where you start auditing your own behaviour, replaying conversations, checking your responses against some internal rubric of what a normal person would have said, would have felt.
I have spent most of my adult life certain that I am, on some fundamental level, fine. Ordinary. Unremarkable in the specific way that means nothing is wrong. And then something happens that only you can hear, or only you can see, and the whole architecture of that certainty develops a crack, and you know what cracks do given enough time and pressure. The worst part is the silence you are forced into. You can’t tell anyone. Not because there is no one to tell, but because telling someone is the moment it becomes real. The moment a face shifts across the table from you, softens in that particular way, and you watch them choose their next words very carefully. So you say nothing. You develop small rituals for managing it. You start sleeping with the television on.
The word earworm entered English sometime in the 1980s, a translation of the German “Ohrwurm”, which had been in common use for over a century prior. The German compound is literal and plainly anatomical, a worm of the ear, something that enters through a small passage and moves inward. James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, became one of the first researchers to study the phenomenon systematically in the early 2000s, and his findings suggested that nearly ninety-eight percent of people experience involuntary musical imagery with some regularity. He called sufferers earworm victims, which always struck me as a strange choice of language for something so apparently universal and benign. The clinical term is involuntary musical imagery, abbreviated to INMI in the literature, and the research is largely reassuring. Songs get lodged. The brain, having no off switch for pattern recognition, chews on an unresolved melodic loop the way a tongue finds a loose tooth. Most of the time, the song is recent, familiar, structurally simple. A hook. A chorus. Something with a gap the brain keeps trying to fill. Most of the time, it fades. Most of the time, you are not lying on the floor at 4 in the morning with your hands pressed flat against the cold tile, listening to a voice singing about flowers, and wondering whether the sound is coming from inside your head or from somewhere just outside the window.
I work the graveyard shift at a radio station, four hours a night, 2am-6am, and I have done so for the last six years. The job title is night producer, which sounds more involved than it is. What it actually means is that I sit in a room full of computers and make sure they do not stop doing what they were already doing. Internet radio and streaming killed most of the craft out of it years ago. The playlist runs itself. The ads fire on a schedule. The signal pushes out locally and online through software that, on a good night, requires nothing from me at all beyond my physical presence in the building.
Occasionally, a request comes through the station app around 3 in the morning, someone driving long distance or working a warehouse shift or simply unable to sleep, and I queue it up, and that is the most human contact the job tends to involve. I come in just before 2, take handover from the late evening producer, who is usually already halfway out the door and smelling of whatever they had for dinner, and I sit down and I read, or I tidy the desk, or I run through whatever game I have installed on my laptop that week. Just before 6am, I hand over to the morning news and then I go home and I sleep until the afternoon. It’s a cruisy job. It was, at least, until the earworm started.
They’re usually something catchy in the straightforward sense of the word. Something with a hook that repeats at the right interval and lodges in the pattern-recognition part of your brain. In twenty years of living inside music in one capacity or another, I have never once had a death metal earworm. It’s always pop. When I was a child, it was Britney Spears, “Baby One More Time”, and I remember it being collective, humming it in the corridors at school.
Being at a top 40 station means the music that surrounds me night after night tends toward the recent and the familiar, which is probably why requests for older material are rare enough that they catch me off guard. Which is probably why, when the message came through at 2:04 am on a Tuesday, I stopped what I was doing and read it twice.
Tiny Tim. Tiptoe Through the Tulips. 1968.
I had never heard it. I pulled it up before I queued it, just to check the runtime and make sure it was clean for air. The recording quality is of its era, thin and slightly warped, like sound pressed through wax paper. And then the voice came in and I sat back in my chair without deciding to. A falsetto, extraordinarily high, wavering at the edges in a way that made me feel physically unsettled. The lyrics present themselves as innocent. Flowers. Gardens. Moonlight. But then there is the line, “and if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight, will you pardon me?”, and something in the phrasing bothered me. It reminded me of that particular mode of old cinema where a man corners a woman against something solid and the camera treats it as romance, the no that gets talked over, the permission that gets assumed. Maybe I was reading into it. The song is over fifty years old and I was tired.
You can hear something once, a single unremarkable pass, and somewhere below conscious thought the brain files it, indexes it, and tucks it behind everything else you know. A week can go by. A month. And then one bar, four notes, half a lyric sung in the wrong key, and the whole thing surfaces intact.
It was about a week after I had played the request. I was in the bathroom adjacent to the studio, the one with the loose tap fitting that the building manager had been meaning to fix since sometime the previous year. I was washing my hands. The vent above the mirror pulls air from somewhere in the building’s ducting, and sometimes you catch fragments through it, a door closing on another floor, the lift mechanism, etc. And I swear I heard, thin and reedy and unmistakable, “…by the window, that is where I’ll be.” The falsetto. That specific, wrong-register falsetto.
I turned the tap off and stood there with wet hands.
Then I went back into the studio and checked the playlist. We were three tracks into a scheduled block. The current song had forty seconds left on the counter, and it was a recent pop track. I told myself it was fatigue, which was plausible. I believed it, mostly. But I stood at the studio window for a moment longer than I needed to, looking out at the city, and I was aware, without quite articulating it, that there was a garden below. That the window faced east. The emergency exit doors were directly to my left, and that the gap beneath them, when the air pressure changed, made a sound not entirely unlike breath.
After that, I made a point of finding Tony. He does the security rounds for the whole building overnight, floors of largely empty offices and one radio station keeping the lights on at the top. He is a heavyset man in his mid-forties, the kind of build that suggests he was once physically capable and has since made peace with no longer being so. He carries his radio on his hip and a thermos of something that smells of instant coffee, and he laughs easily at things that are only mildly funny. He would be useless in any situation that required speed or confrontation, but I found his presence enormously comforting anyway. Knowing another person existed in the building was enough.
I had diagnosed my problem as loneliness and treated it accordingly. I took the longer bus route to and from work, the one that ran through the lit commercial streets rather than cutting through the quieter roads, and I sat near other people and let the ambient noise of them wash over me. During shifts, I kept a chat window open on the laptop and messaged whoever was awake, which when you work until six in the morning turns out to be a reasonable number of people across various time zones. It helped. The nights settled back into their usual texture. Months passed, and I stopped thinking about Tiny Tim entirely.
Then something came through the request line. It comes through as a voicemail, the 0800 number, and calls at that hour are rare enough that I almost didn’t check it. I hit play and listened. The voice was male, older, the kind of vocal texture that comes from decades of cigarettes, raspy at the edges and slightly wet in the consonants. He was asking for Tiptoe Through the Tulips. What unsettled me, beyond the request itself, was the quality of his confusion. He did not seem to understand he was leaving a message rather than speaking to someone live. There were pauses where he appeared to be waiting for a response. A long silence after he named the song, expectant, and then something that might have been disappointment in his breathing before he ended the call without saying goodbye. I deleted it and didn’t play the request. Prank callers and unsavoury messages are part of the job; they always have been, and I have developed a fairly thick skin for it. I filed this one under strange and moved on.
The song is older than Tiny Tim by four decades. Tiptoe Through the Tulips was written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke for the 1929 musical film “Gold Diggers of Broadway”, itself adapted from Avery Hopwood’s 1919 stage play “The Gold Diggers.” Hopwood was one of the most commercially successful playwrights of his era, a writer of farces and comedies who made an extraordinary amount of money and spent it with equal enthusiasm. He drowned in 1928 off the French Riviera, and the legal tangle that followed his death was the kind that estates fall into when a man dies young and wealthy and without having put things entirely in order. His mother took on the work of sorting through it and died herself before it was resolved. There is something fitting about a song that carries that particular history, adding a level of urban myth. Two deaths threaded through its paperwork before it ever reached the ears of the man who made it famous.
What people tend to forget about the 1920s in America is how thoroughly the occult ran through it, not at the fringes but at the centre of respectable cultural life. The period following the First World War produced a grief so enormous and so widely shared that orthodox religion struggled to contain it. Millions of families had lost someone, often young men whose bodies had not come home, and into that absence rushed Spiritualism, which had been building in popularity since the mid-nineteenth century but found its largest audience in the aftermath of mass death. Seances were held in drawing rooms and hotel suites. Ouija boards were manufactured and sold as parlour entertainment. Arthur Conan Doyle, the most rational of men by reputation, toured America in 1922 lecturing on spirit communication to packed houses and was received not as an eccentric but as a serious thinker engaging a serious subject.
The radio, newly domestic and newly strange, the voices of the absent or dead crackling through the air into living rooms, fed the mood without intending to. Sound was becoming untethered from bodies. Music arrived from nowhere visible. The tulip song came out of that world, though I don’t think its original singer sang it quite so eerily.
“Knee deep in flowers we'll stray…”
I could hear Tiny Tim’s wobbling words as I made my way into the building to start work. Someone had again requested it towards the end of the previous shift. During a lull, I picked up the internal security line and called Tony’s desk, keeping my voice light, the way you do when you want to flag something without admitting it has already gotten under your skin. I told him about the song, framed it as a funny story, a weird caller. I laughed once to demonstrate that I found it amusing. He didn’t reply. The line was open, but nothing came back through it. No breath. No shuffle of his thermos. I held the receiver and listened to it for longer than was reasonable. My skin came up in gooseflesh, starting at the back of my neck and moving down both arms in a single slow wave, the hair on my forearms lifting against my sleeves. I set the receiver down carefully, as if noise might provoke something, and sat very still at the desk as I heard something from…
Outside. Loud enough that the window glass seemed to carry it, a vibration more than a sound at first. That voice. That specific voice pushing up through the pre-dawn air from somewhere below. I was across the room before I had decided to move, my palms hitting the window ledge, my breath fogging the glass as I looked down. Three floors below, in the narrow strip of garden running along the building’s eastern face, a figure stood in the dark. Barely visible. The shape of a man, the suggestion of a man, holding something above his head, a boombox, the sound pouring upward.
“Come tiptoe through the tulips with me…”
I could not see his face. The garden lighting did not reach him properly, or he stood in the precise gap between two pools of it. My stomach dropped through the floor. I ran for the phone on the studio desk and picked it up. The line was dead, not silent the way Tony’s line had been silent, but genuinely dead, no tone, no presence, nothing. I went back to the window and the garden was empty. The garden was completely empty, but the song was louder.
“AND IF I KISS YOU, IN THE GARDEN, IN THE MOONLIGHT.”
It was louder again, louder than the street noise at that hour, louder than the ventilation system, louder than the studio, and it was not coming from outside anymore. Or it was coming from outside and also from somewhere closer, from the corridor, from the vent above the emergency exit doors.
“AND WHEN I KISS YOU….”
I pressed my back against the far wall. The gooseflesh had become something else, a full-body response, my legs gone unreliable beneath me, sweat cold at my hairline. I made it to the bathroom. I turned the lock and I slid down the back of the door until I was sitting on the cold tile floor with my knees against my chest, and I stayed there while the song played and then faded and then played again at the edge of hearing, again and again and again and again. I cried in the way that is not really crying but is the body releasing pressure it cannot hold with wet, ragged sobs, my face hot and the fluorescent light above the mirror buzzing its single unwavering note. I stayed there until I heard the morning crew arriving through the walls. Until I heard footsteps and voices and the particular noise of people. The morning producer found me still on the floor holding my hands over my ears.
My boss called me into his office and told me to take two weeks off. He said it gently, said I clearly needed rest, and I nodded and accepted it because the alternative was telling him what I had heard, and I already knew what his face would do. They found Tony in the emergency stairwell. He had been there since sometime around three in the morning, which is when I had called his line. Heart attack. I have thought about that a great deal since, the timing of it, the way the line stayed open, and what, if anything, was present on his end of it in the minutes between.
The two weeks off did not feel like rest. They felt like a container I had been placed inside while other people decided what to do with me. I slept badly, lying in the dark of my apartment listening to the street outside and thinking about the song’s history. The facts of it were thin and returned nothing alarming. Avery Hopwood drowned. His mother died. Al Dubin, who wrote the lyrics, died in 1945 from a barbiturate overdose. The song was a curio. A novelty. There was nothing in its paper trail that explained why it had taken up residence in me the way it had.
It was during this research that I found myself reading about the German tradition of the Rattenfanger, the rat catcher, the figure who would become the Pied Piper in the English telling of it. The Hamelin story, as most people know it, is a children’s cautionary tale, the man with the pipe who leads the rats into the river and then, unpaid, leads the children into the mountain. But the older German variants carry something the sanitised version loses, a specifically gendered dimension that the later retellings smoothed away. In some regional accounts, the piper’s power over women was its own distinct thread, separate from the children, separate from the rats. The music he played operated on the female body as a physical compulsion, an irresistible locomotive force that moved women out of their houses and away from their families. They simply followed. There are accounts from the broader Germanic folk tradition of similar figures, men with instruments whose songs functioned less like entertainment and more like a hand closing around the wrist. I wondered if this was what was happening to me.
The first shift back felt manageable. My boss had cleared the cellphone restriction as a concession, and I had accepted it the way you accept a small offering after a large loss, grateful and aware it changes nothing fundamental. The mace sat in my pocket, a solid cylinder against my hip, and I touched it periodically through the fabric. I hadn’t checked the app requests all shift. I hadn’t listened to the phone line. I kept my laptop open and the chat window running, and I had talked to people about nothing in particular. The shift moved through its usual intervals. 5 a.m. came, and the city outside began its first adjustments toward morning. 5:29 a.m. I was sitting at the desk with my hands around a cup of coffee that had been hot earlier, reading something on the laptop screen that I could not now tell you the subject of, and the power went out.
Not a flicker. Not a gradual dimming. Everything at once. The monitors, the studio equipment, the overhead fluorescents, the small red standby lights on the broadcast rack, all of it gone in a single instant, and the room became the specific black of a space of nothingness. My body registered it before my mind did, a spike of adrenaline that hit me like a face strike, my coffee cup falling as my hands came up instinctively. I knew, because I knew the building, that the electronic lock on the emergency exit door ran off the main supply. I knew this in the abstract professional way you know things about your workplace that you file away and never expect to need. I fumbled the phone from my pocket and turned the torch on, the beam swinging wide across the equipment, and I was trying to navigate to my boss’s number when I felt it. A movement of air against the back of my neck. Cool and directional. The kind of air movement that has a source. The studio door was open. I hadn’t heard it open. The phone left my hand. I heard it hit the floor and I didn’t stop for it. My foot caught the raised threshold of the emergency exit and the stairs took me badly, the first three in a stumbling controlled fall that became uncontrolled by the fourth, my shoulder hitting the wall, my ankle turning on the edge of a step with a bright tearing pain that shot straight to my back teeth. I grabbed the rail with both hands and stopped myself. The pain in my ankle was the specific deep throb of something that has been asked to bear weight at the wrong angle, and it radiated upward in pulses. I got the mace out. My thumb found the safety and pressed it off and I held the canister out ahead of me while I gripped the rail with my other hand and moved down the remaining flights with my weight on the good foot. The bad one taking as little as it could, each step a negotiation. The stairwell was dark and the sound of my own breathing filled it, loud and unsteady. From somewhere above me, or perhaps below, I could hear footsteps. A weight moving on metal treads. Measured. Unhurried. I came out at the bottom into the garden strip along the building, and I went directly into the tall brush at the border of it, pushing into the shrubs until the branches closed around me, and I crouched there with my ankle screaming and my thumb still on the mace trigger and my whole body reduced to listening. The car park lay open beyond the garden. The street beyond that. I didn’t run for it. My ankle would not have carried me, and I knew it, and knowing it produced a particular cold clarity. I pressed my back into the brush, and I waited.
Then came whistling. Wet at the edges, slightly broken, the tune moving through the notes with a patience that was worse than urgency. Low and close and shapeless in the dark, directionless the way sounds become when fear has compromised your ability to locate them. I looked up because something made me look up, some reflex of the eyes, and I saw the window three floors above me, my window, the one I had pressed my hands against the night the figure stood in the garden with the boombox held above his head. I was directly beneath it. I had run from the building and hidden directly beneath the window, in the precise spot where he had stood, and I understood this, and the understanding moved through me like cold water had been dumped on me. I shut my eyes. I pressed them together and held the mace against my sternum, and the whistling continued, and my head began to feel very far away, the pain in my ankle retreating to somewhere distant and secondary, the sound of the city falling off at the edges, the darkness behind my eyes beginning to tilt and soften. The last thing I was aware of was the dew soaking through the knees of my trousers and the smell of crushed leaves rising around me, and then nothing.
The first thing I was aware of was light, and a smell before I had fully arrived back in myself. Antiseptic and something underneath it, the faint organic undertone that hospitals cannot quite launder out no matter how hard they try. My ankle was elevated. There was a drip in the back of my left hand, taped down with that particular clinical neatness, and when I turned my head there was a man sitting in the chair beside the bed, young, mid-twenties at most, in running gear and wearing a light smile.
He extended his hand when he saw my eyes focus properly.
“Nick,” he said. “Nick Teufel.”
His accent sat in an interesting place, American vowels stretched over something older underneath, the cadence of someone who had learned casual English from television and beach holidays rather than a classroom.
“You found me,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“In the bushes.” He stated without judgement. “You were holding a canister of mace like it was the only thing keeping you on the planet.”
I looked at my hands. The mace wasn’t there. “Where is it?”
“Paramedics took it. Standard thing, I think.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You work in that building?”
“Top floor,” I said. “The radio station.”
He nodded slowly, as if this explained something he hadn’t quite been able to place. “I run that route most mornings. Five, five-thirty. You were just…” He made a small gesture with one hand, a shape that meant crumpled, that meant wrong. “I nearly missed you. The light doesn’t reach that part of the garden well.”
“The eastern side,” I said.
He looked at me. “Yeah. Exactly that side.” A pause. “Is there someone I can call for you?”
“No,” I said, and then, because it sounded worse than I intended, “I’m fine. I will be.”
I quit my job that same day. My boss, while understanding, was obviously a little annoyed. My contract states I need to give four weeks, but he seemed to think I was in the middle of some kind of episode. I spoke to the on-call emergency doctor in charge of my wellbeing, and they just referred me to a psychiatrist. Instead, Nick kindly offered to take me to the police station after returning home and fetching his car.
The officer who took my statement was a woman in her late thirties, solidly built, with the kind of face that had learned to stay neutral as a professional survival strategy. Her name badge said D. Kowalski. She had a paper cup of coffee on the desk that she didn’t touch once during the entire conversation, and she typed with two fingers but quickly, the way people do when they have been doing it long enough that speed has compensated for technique.
She asked me to start from the beginning, and I did. I told her about the first request, the Tuesday at 2:04 a.m., Tiny Tim, Tiptoe Through the Tulips. I told her about the bathroom vent and the sound I had heard through it, thin and reedy and unmistakable. I told her about the voicemail, the older male voice, the raspy consonants, the pauses where he seemed to be waiting for someone to respond. She asked if I had kept it, and I told her I had deleted it, and something shifted almost imperceptibly in her expression, not disbelief exactly, more a kind of recalibration. I told her about the figure in the garden, the boombox held above his head, the gap in the lighting where he stood. I told her about Tony. I watched her type his name and stop, and then continue.
“Anthony Gillespie,” she said, without looking up. “The security guard.”
“You know about him.”
“Heart attack in an office building stairwell is a matter of record,” she spoke carefully. “There was no suggestion of any third-party involvement.”
She looked up then. “That’s not me dismissing what you’re telling me. That’s me being transparent about what the file says.”
I told her about the night the power went out. She asked whether the building had CCTV, and I told her yes, throughout, the studio included, and she wrote something down and underlined it once. I told her about the stairwell, the ankle, hiding in the garden. I told her about the whistling. I watched her face while I said it, and she gave me nothing back, which I found more reassuring than sympathy would have been.
“The requests,” she said when I had finished. “They came through an app?”
“And a phone line. The voicemail came through the 0800 number.”
“Those will have metadata attached. Numbers, device IDs, timestamps.” She pulled a form from a tray to her left and slid it across the desk toward me. “I want you to write down every date and approximate time you can remember. Everything you’ve just told me, in order, with as much detail as you can.” She paused. “Has anyone else at the station heard these requests come in? Anyone who could corroborate the content?”
“No,” I admonished myself for not thinking of it earlier. “I work alone. That’s the nature of the shift.”
She nodded, the nod of someone filing that information somewhere specific. “And the man who brought you in today,” she asked. “How do you know him?”
“I don’t,” I said. “He found me this morning. He’s been very kind.”
Minden sits tucked away in a nice corner of Germany, where the land opens out in a way that takes some adjustment if you have spent most of your life among the red dirt and scrub oak of Oklahoma. The sky here is wide, and in late afternoon the light comes in low and gold across the fields and makes everything look briefly consecrated. Nick had described it as unremarkable, the way people describe places they love to people they don’t yet want to disappoint, and I had arrived expecting unremarkable and found instead something quieter and more considered than that word suggested. Old stone and bicycle lanes and a river that moved through the centre of town with the unhurried confidence of something that has been doing so for a very long time.
The pub was called Zur Linde, which Nick told me translated roughly to The Linden Tree, and it had the particular atmosphere of a place that had absorbed several generations of the same families and had arranged itself accordingly, low ceilings and worn wood and a jukebox in the corner that looked original to the seventies but had been updated inside at some point to accept cards. The engagement party occupied the back room and had spilled naturally into the front bar over the course of the evening in the way that parties do when the people involved are comfortable enough with each other to stop performing occasion and simply exist together. Someone had put up a string of lights. There were flowers on the tables, white and yellow, tulips among them, which Nick had chosen and which I had not said anything about because I had decided, consciously and with some effort, not to say anything about.
I was at the bar getting a second round when the man beside me introduced himself as Gerhard. He was a compact, precise-looking man in his early fifties with silver at his temples and the careful handshake of someone who had spent a career in rooms where first impressions were audited. He told me he had worked with Nick at the engineering firm in Hannover, seven or eight years ago now, before Nick had taken the American posting.
“He talked about coming back,” Gerhard said, in English that was grammatically exact and slightly formal in the way that suggests a person who learned the language entirely correctly and has since made peace with sounding that way. “We didn’t believe him. People say they’ll come back.”
“He came back,” I smiled.
“He came back,” Gerhard agreed, and raised his glass in a small acknowledging gesture. “With a reason to.” He looked at me with a warmth that was genuine but also appraising, the look of someone who cares about the person being discussed and is quietly taking a measurement. “He seems well. He seems different to how he was, I think. Settled.”
“Was he unsettled before?”
Gerhard considered this with more seriousness than the social occasion perhaps required. “He was always moving,” he said finally. “Always somewhere else, even when he was in the room. You know the type.” He smiled. “You seem to have fixed that.”
I told him I wasn’t sure I had fixed anything, that I thought we had probably fixed each other, and he seemed to find this answer satisfying in a way that made me think it was the right one.
Later I found myself beside a woman named Petra who had the easy, unselfconscious beauty of someone who has never particularly thought about it, dark-haired and tall, with paint under her fingernails that no amount of scrubbing had entirely reached. She and Nick had worked adjacent desks for two years at the same firm, she told me, and she said it with the particular emphasis of someone conveying that they know a person in the specific and unglamorous way that shared office space produces, which is to say entirely.
“He used to bring in these terrible American cereals,” she said. “The ones that are just sugar with a cartoon on the box. He thought it was funny. Offering them to people very seriously as if it was normal food.” She laughed. “He has strange humour. You’ve noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” and it was true, Nick seemed to find things funny that no one else understood.
“He is very loyal,” she said, and her tone shifted slightly, took on a quality that was almost careful. “Once he decides something, he is very decided. Very constant.” She looked across the room to where Nick was standing with Gerhard, the two of them fallen into what looked like an easy, familiar argument about something. “It is a good quality,” she mused. “Mostly it is a good quality.”
I looked at her. “Mostly?”
She smiled and touched my arm briefly. “Congratulations,” she said, warmly and without quite answering, and moved away toward the table.
I found my way to the corner of the front bar where Diane was standing, Diane who I had known since the third grade in Tulsa and who had spent an unreasonable amount of money on flights and accommodation to be here and was making sure everyone in the immediate vicinity understood this in the most affectionate possible terms. She had a glass of Riesling in each hand for reasons she had already explained and I had already forgotten and she pulled me into a sideways hug that sloshed both of them dangerously.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’m going to say it. He’s gorgeous and he’s kind and his accent does something genuinely unfair to me personally and I’m very happy for you and also extremely jealous, and I need you to know both of those things are equally true and equally sincere.”
“Noted,” but I mostly noticed my dear friend’s increasing intoxication.
“Coming back to Oklahoma was good for you,” she said, more quietly. “After everything. The day shifts. The whole thing. You seemed like yourself again.” She looked at me carefully. “You seem like yourself now.”
“I am,” I said, and I meant it. I had been meaning it for a while now. The jukebox in the corner had been cycling through something inoffensive and mid-tempo all evening, the kind of music that exists to fill a room without drawing attention, and I had stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing ventilation or traffic, the sound becoming part of the texture of the room, background noise. Which is perhaps why, when it changed, the change arrived before I had consciously registered what I was hearing.
Thin and reedy. Climbing through the noise of the room. A falsetto, extraordinarily high, wavering at the edges in that specific wrong-register way that I had not heard in over a year and had not, I understood now, ever entirely stopped listening for.
I put my drink down on the nearest surface without looking for one. Diane was still talking. I was aware of her voice at a remove, the way you are aware of sound when something has redirected the whole of your attention.
It was Gerhard who said it. He had materialised at my shoulder at some point in the last few minutes, drawn back perhaps by some instinct of sociability, and he was looking toward the jukebox with an expression of mild, pleased recognition, the expression of a man who has heard something familiar and finds the familiarity uncomplicated and warm.
“Oh,” he pointed. “That’s Nick’s favourite song, isn’t it?“