Horror

by Scribes Stories · 5 min read · 1 view

Static Genre: Horror Deborah had hosted the graveyard shift at WKLR for nine years, midnight to four, playing soft jazz for insomniacs and truckers and the occasional lonely soul who called in just to hear another human voice at three in the morning. She knew the rhythms of the late night callers the way a bartender knows their regulars. Most were harmless. Some were sad. None of them, until the night in question, had ever made the hair on her arms stand up simply from the sound of their breathing. The call came in at 2:14, the studio phone lighting up on a night otherwise quiet enough that she'd been considering closing early. "WKLR, you're on the air," she said, settling into the familiar rhythm of her voice. There was a long pause, filled with a strange, textured static, not quite like a bad connection, more like the sound of wind moving through something hollow. "Can you hear me," the caller finally said. A young woman's voice, flat, careful, like she was reading words from very far away. "Loud and clear," Deborah said, though something in her gut disagreed with the word "clear." "What can I play for you tonight?" "I'm not calling for a song," the woman said. "I'm calling because I think I'm lost, and I don't know how long I've been driving." Deborah frowned, glancing instinctively at the studio window, the empty parking lot beyond it lit orange under a single working streetlamp. "Lost where, honey? Do you need me to call someone for you?" "I don't think anyone's looking for me anymore," the woman said, and the static behind her voice thickened, like the wind was pressing closer to whatever poor connection carried her words. "I keep passing the same gas station. Over and over. I think I've been driving the same road for a very long time." "What road?" Deborah asked, keeping her voice level out of long professional habit, though her pulse had started to climb. "Route Nine," the woman said. "Past the old Hendrick's Mill sign. Do you know it?" Deborah's hand went still on the console. Route Nine had been closed for repaving eleven years ago and had never reopened, the old bridge past Hendrick's Mill condemned after a crash that had claimed, if she remembered rightly, a young woman driving home from a late shift somewhere. "When did you say you started driving?" Deborah asked carefully. Another long pause, filled entirely with that wind sound static, patient and unhurried in a way that made Deborah's skin crawl. "I don't remember starting," the woman finally said. "I only remember that I was late for something, and I took the shortcut, and then it started raining, and now I don't think the road ends anymore. I just keep passing the mill sign. Over and over. I thought if I found a radio station, someone could tell me how much further I have to go." Deborah's mouth had gone dry. She glanced at the call display, expecting some prank caller's number, a friend of her nephew's messing about, anything rational. The display read simply: UNKNOWN CALLER, DURATION 00:00:00, frozen at zero the entire time they'd been speaking. "I need you to listen to me," Deborah said, voice shaking now despite her best professional effort. "I think you should pull over. Right now, wherever you are. Just stop the car." "I can't stop," the woman said, and for the first time something like fear entered her flat voice, distant and thin. "I've tried. My foot won't come off the pedal. I think something's wrong with me. I think something's been wrong with me for a long time, and I only just noticed." "What's your name?" Deborah asked, unsure why it felt urgent, only that it did, that a name felt like the only rope she had to throw across whatever gap separated them. "Katherine," the woman said. "Katherine Voss. Please, can you just tell me how far the mill is. I keep passing the sign, and I don't understand why I never get past it." Deborah's blood went cold. She remembered the name now, dredged up from some corner of local history she'd absorbed simply from living in this town for thirty years. Katherine Voss. The crash at Hendrick's Mill. Eleven years ago, almost to this exact date. "Katherine," Deborah said slowly, forcing her voice to stay gentle, though every instinct in her screamed to hang up the phone. "I don't think you're going to reach the mill. I think you already have. A long time ago." The static swelled, filling the line entirely for several seconds, wind rushing through some hollow distant place, and when Katherine's voice returned, it was smaller, quieter, edged with a dawning horror that made Deborah's own throat close. "That's not possible," Katherine whispered. "I have somewhere to be. I'm going to be late." "I know," Deborah said, eyes wet now though she couldn't have said exactly why. "But I think it might be alright to stop trying to get there. I think you've been trying for a very long time." The static thinned, softened, the wind sound fading into something closer to ordinary silence. "I'm tired," Katherine said, barely audible now. "I didn't realize how tired until you said that." "Then rest," Deborah said. "You don't have to keep driving. Nobody's waiting on you being on time anymore, sweetheart. It's alright to stop." The line went dead, not with a click, but with a kind of soft exhale of static fading entirely to silence, the call duration display finally moving, ticking upward once, to 00:00:01, before the call simply ended on its own. Deborah sat in the dark studio for a long time after that, hands still shaking, unable to bring herself to play music for the rest of the shift. She never told the station manager about the call. She never told anyone, except once, years later, a young reporter working on a piece about local ghost stories, who mentioned Route Nine and Hendrick's Mill and asked, almost as an afterthought, if Deborah had ever heard anything strange out there. "No," Deborah told her, which was true, because whatever she'd heard, it hadn't come from the road at all. It had come through the radio, from somewhere much further away than static usually traveled, a voice finally, after eleven long years, allowed to stop driving and simply arrive.