The Signal at Kestrel Point — Chapter 4: The Corridor · a supernatural serial, a new chapter every three days.
For three days I didn't write in the logbook, and I stopped going to the station with the lights on. Each evening I climbed up at dusk, swept the floor, checked the wire, and left before eleven, like a man locking up a shop that sells nothing but air.
The radio stayed quiet. No 23:47, no voice. The silence was worse than the sound had been, because the silence had a shape to it, and I kept walking it, blind you can't see but know you're walking down.
On the fourth day I did the thing I'd been avoiding. I opened the floor.
The foundation had a crawlspace door in the back corner, a trap painted to match the planks, rusted at the hinges. Hal had kept it sealed with a hasp and a lock as old as I was. The lock was still on it. I cut it off and swung the door up.
Underneath, instead of dirt and rock, there were stairs.
Stone stairs, dry, going down into the dark of the cliff. They hadn't been built for a radio station; they were made for something else, some other time. The walls were damp but the steps were dry, each one worn smooth in the middle, worn by feet, and the feet had gone up and gone down for a good long while.
I went down.
The corridor ran about twenty paces, ending in a timber door set into the rock, bolted with iron the size of my arm. The bolts had been driven from the outside — someone had sealed it shut for good — and then someone else had unsealed it. The newest bolt lay on the floor by itself, clean, not rusted.
Hal had come down here. Hal had opened this door.
I put my ear to the timber.
Under the door, faint and far, like sound traveling up a drain, the sea was breathing. It wasn't slapping the rock. It was drawing a long breath in and letting it out, a body of water that belonged to no tide I knew, moving in the dark behind the door.
I pushed on the timber. It gave an inch and held, and something in the gap, a thin green light, came through like the crack under a door in a sickroom.
I never opened it. But evening after evening I kept going down to look at it, like you keep worrying a tooth that hurts, to check if it's still there.
On the seventh evening, when I came back up from the stairs, the logbook was open.
It held a new entry. The hand wasn't Hal's. It was mine, dated tonight, in ink I had not put there:
Corridor, 20 steps. Door holds. Sea behind it breathes. I will not open it until I've played the deck true.
I read it with the back of my neck cold. I hadn't written that. The handwriting was better than mine, calmer, the hand of someone who'd been keeping this book for years.
Beneath it, in Hal's hand, the reply:
Good girl. Once the door opens it doesn't close. Make the deck true first. Play 142.7 over the submerged deck at dead low tide and let the door hear its own name.
I put the book down very carefully and went to stand at the window, looking out at the sea, calm and gray and large, owing me nothing.
The inventory of the night came together then, item by item: a rowboat, a frequency, a deck that shouldn't have been under the channel, a door in a cliff that breathed. I still couldn't say what I was listening to, or what would happen if I made the deck true. But Hal had known. He'd gone out on the calm water with his oars locked, and my handwriting had started writing things I never typed.
That night, at 23:47, the radio came back on.
The voice over the water was no longer backward. It was forward, it was Hal's, and it rose from under the station floor, from the dark behind the timber door, and it said the longest thing it had ever said to me:
Dead low is tomorrow at three in the morning, Marit. Don't bring the rowboat. Bring the radio, bring the logbook, bring your nerve. If the deck answers the door, you'll hear the wire for what it's been all these years. Whatever you do, don't put your hand in the water when the name comes up.
I wrote it down myself this time, steady because I made it steady.
Chapter 4 of 10 · Start from Chapter 1 · Previous: Chapter 3 · Next chapter tomorrow.