Lost Signals

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LOST SIGNALS

  “This book will probably make you paranoid, if you weren’t already. And if you were already, well, I have it on good authority that tinfoil only amplifies the signals.”

  —Christine Morgan, The Horror Fiction Review

  “The voices gathered here are as diverse and disturbing as sussurating whispers between radio stations or a signal from a dead man’s hand. Lost Signals is one of the most haunting and engaging anthologies I’ve read in a long time, filled with equal measures of darkness and brilliance. If you’re looking to be terrified and entertained, read on but do exercise some caution.”

  —Shane Douglas Keene, Shotgun Logic

  “Lost Signals is a superb anthology. [ . . . ] Creepy and weird.”

  —Adrian Shotbolt, BeavistheBookhead

  “One of the most genuinely disturbing anthologies in recent memory.”

  —Brian O’Connell

  Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing

  Cibolo, Texas

  Lost Signals

  Copyright © Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing 2016

  All Rights Reserved

  The stories included in this publication are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book.

  “Transmission” by T.E. Grau originally appeared in Dead But Dreaming 2, 2011

  “Sharks with Thumbs” by David James Keaton originally appeared in Big Pulp, 2009

  “The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold originally appeared in Weird Tales, 1926

  www.PerpetualPublishing.com

  Cover Art and Jacket Design by Matthew Revert

  Interior Illustrations by Luke Spooner

  Illustration by Allen Koszowski

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction : Scott Nicolay

  If He Summons His Herd : Matthew M. Bartlett

  Transmission : T.E. Grau

  The Dangsturm Interruption : Joseph Boutiette Jr.

  The Givens Sensor Board : Josh Malerman

  Sharks with Thumbs : David James Keaton

  Bad Lieutenant : Tony Burgess

  How the Light Gets In : Michael Paul Gonzalez

  Darkhorse Actual : George Cotronis

  The Desert of Wounded Frequencies : Betty Rocksteady

  Eternity Lie in its Radius : Christopher Slatsky

  Where Night Cowers : Matthew M. Bartlett

  Rosabelle, Believe : Amanda Hard

  The Last Scream : Gabino Iglesias

  The Man in Room 603 : Dyer Wilk

  The Sound of Yesterday : Ashlee Scheuerman

  Children of a German Autumn : Matt Andrew

  The Night Wire : H.F. Arnold

  Armageddon Baby : John C. Foster

  The Small Hours : Vince Darcangelo

  Hush : Regina Solomond

  Feedback Loop : Joshua Chaplinsky

  Little Girl Blue, Come Cry Your Way Home : Damien Angelica Walters

  All That You Leave Behind : Paul Michael Anderson

  SomethingintheCode : James Newman

  Several decades ago I attended a performance by a local avant-garde musical ensemble in a small theater in Edison, New Jersey. The program included one of John Cage’s landscapes for radios, in which the score calls for the performers to adjust both the volume and frequency of the radios according to directions independent of the stations. I was a devotee of Cage at the time but had never heard one of the landscapes performed live before, so I was enthralled. The beauty of Cage pieces like the landscapes is in the way they force the audience to listen to familiar sounds in new ways. No two performances are ever the same.

  About a third of the way through I caught a snippet of voice that made me disengage immediately. I thought I heard the announcer mention missiles. This occurred during the mid-’80s, when Reagan was playing his game of nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union. A moment later the performer spun the dial again and the rest of the message was lost. The members of the ensemble showed no alarm. I spun to examine the audience. They all seemed calm. Had I alone heard the clarion call of the apocalypse ? I froze and listened. If I were right one of the other stations would have to share a similar broadcast soon.

  My mind raced from thought to thought for the remainder of the performance. My concentration was shot. What if nuclear war broke out while we were here, and all we heard were fragments of the Emergency Broadcasting System ? How long would the audience listen, oblivious ? Perhaps it was best to go listening to music—what little could we do now anyway ? Could it be Cage had intended it this way ? And all the while snatches of FM ephemera drifted into the ether, lost for eternity. Had they been our last broadcasts before Armageddon, perhaps some alien race might have found them of interest. Instead they were destined to remain unremarkable, despite my alarm, dissipating unheeded into the depths of space.

  We are each of us antennae, tuned to the deep. And deep calls to deep, over and under us, around us . . . through us. Jack Spicer proclaimed the poem no more for the poet than the song is for the radio. Sun Ra told us there are other worlds that wish to speak to us. Signals are everywhere, piercing our bodies—unheard broadcasts, coded transmissions, via a million unseen wavelengths—T waves, radio, the breath of distant stars. The breath of things behind the stars.

  Though the telegraph has been with us nearly two centuries, it was Marconi’s wireless that first opened our channels to other voices, other sounds. New technologies proliferated until the Information Revolution slowly began taking shape to reveal just how weird our world really is. Born in the blowback of the second world war, midwifed by code makers, codebreakers, and bombsight designers, the greatest change in human history emerged in the shadow of an age originally categorized as “Atomic.” What a mistake that label was. Information proved the bigger bombshell in the end.

  Over a century of wireless, from analog to digital, has opened unsuspected floodgates of Weirdness, straddling fact and fiction and every gray area in between. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, Numbers stations, the Marianas Web, the Videodrome Signal, KLEE, entropy, Edison’s Telephone to the Dead, the Polymeric Falcighol Derivation, WXXT, the Changing Light at Sandover, the Lincolnshire Poacher, Norbert Wiener, Satoshi Nakamoto, EVPs, entropy, the Markovian Parallax Denigrate, the Buzzer, Symbols Signals and Noise, Cicada 3301, the Pip, the Bloop, the Squeaky Wheel, entropy, the last words of Frederick Valentich, the last words of Dutch Schultz, entropy, the Max Headroom Incident, the Taos Hum, the wow, entropy, internet black holes, entropy, Yosemite Sam, entropy, entropy . . .

  Entropy.

  By our very presence we interfere with transmissions to which we are oblivious. Our bodies block and distort, but they also receive. We are better doors than windows, but most of us are closed. Our bodies absorb entire the shorter wavelengths, higher energy particles, and cosmic rays. They imprint themselves upon our genetic codes, spawn our tumors and mutations, make of us fresh messages in turn.

  Longer wavelengths pass right through us. For neutrinos and gravity waves we aren’t even here. Our radio telescopes tune to b
roadcasts from other worlds, but consider how recent Marconi’s breakthrough came for us. How long does the average civilization communicate via the electromagnetic spectrum ? A century ? Two ? How narrow a window are we traversing right now, and how many of our galactic neighbors remain in this same stage ? A handful ? Any ? None ? Likely we are listening on the wrong bands entirely. Perhaps the important messages zoom right through our bodies unreceived, undeciphered . . . perhaps this is our test : to cross the threshold of self-destruction and level up to . . . what ? Subspace funk ? Modulated tachyon transmissions ? Ripples in space-time itself ?

  Meanwhile our transmitters and receivers proliferate throughout the Anthropocene, infesting, messaging, accumulating in our hands, our pockets, and our landfills. Radio, telephone, television, cell phones, tablets. And everywhere WiFi. Or almost everywhere . . . and with the receivers, the Weirdness.

  Our editors, Max and Lori, have risked soul and sanity to seek out these anomalies—tales of calls that shouldn’t come, programs best left unheard. The low end of the FM dial has always been a dangerous place, but some transmissions arrive on frequencies we can never measure or hope to block. Telephones, television, radio—all of them apertures for communication from Outside.

  Really, it’s amazing no one thought of such an anthology before. The original date of the oldest story included here makes the concept’s legitimacy clear. “The Night Wire” first saw print in 1926 in Weird Tales. This enigmatic and iconic tale, by an even more mysterious author, remains disturbing 90 years later, the tragic city of Xebico as much a puzzle as ever. Max and Lori did well to choose it. “The Night Wire” retains its cognitive dissonance and establishes the tone for the other tales, all of which are new to this antho beyond this selection.

  From the start Lost Signals offered something I seek out in an anthology—some authors I know, personally or from their work—a few I even count as friends. Others I know by reputation alone. And a healthy selection of surprises. When I pick up a new book, I want surprises, new voices, or voices new to me at least. I have long haunted the ends of the FM dial for the same reasons.

  It would be wrong for me to run through capsule descriptions of each story here—I’ve never understood that kind of intro anyway. Better the reader encounter these tales like the features of Cage’s landscapes instead. Trust that our editors have done well at intercepting forbidden transmissions. They have, and this is a damn good antho. You will find favorites just as I did, and some of these stories will unsettle you indefinitely. At least two still resonate inside my brain, and they aren’t departing anytime soon.

  Open yourself now to the Lost Signals. Let Max and Lori control the dial for a while. What are we but antennae really, each of us tuned to the void ?

  Scott Nicolay

  July 1, 2016

  Dark myths and suburban legends roam like living things through the halls of Leeds High School, whispered in stairwells over bubblegum-tinted tongues ; scrawled on the wall of the secret room above the auditorium stage ; argued over in the shaded courtyard adjacent to the cafeteria, buoyed on grey-brown clouds of cigarette smoke. There’s the Weird House up on Tremens Terrace, haunted by a trio of cannibalistic fiends with a taste for wayward boys. And the coven of teachers, including Mr. Gauthier (Chemistry) and Miss Knell (English), who cavort with a charred-skin devil in the glass-walled natatorium after dark. And the secluded hollow in the lonesome wooded hills that stretch for untold miles beyond the eastern border of the school grounds, where a pale, eyeless thing roams, thin as a mantis, eating squirrels and cackling, calling out to unnamed gods.

  Finn Groomer had dragged Rob Chappell to explore the Weird House on a simmering mid-summer day. They’d searched basement to attic, rat-torn couch to stinking refrigerator to bowed and cobwebbed bed-frame, encountering no one and nothing, and emerging decidedly non-cannibalized. Finn knew for a fact that Mr. Gauthier turned up his nose every time Miss Knell passed ; he didn’t like her enough to even say hello in the morning, never mind to dance naked with her by the moonlit swimming pool. And out in those desolate hills ? Finn on an overcast Sunday afternoon hiked for the better part of an hour to the place where the brook trickles down a broad, steep incline into the shadowed hollow, and nothing lived there among the towering black oaks but birds and squirrels and worms. And mosquitos. Lots and lots of mosquitos. For Finn Groomer, the myths of Leeds High were just another string of disappointments in an adolescence teeming with them.

  Finn still held out hope, though, that he might one day finally hear the radio broadcasts he’d heard some seniors talking about one day in the cafeteria. Emanating from somewhere down in the lower numbers of the FM dial, the opposite end from where the classic rock stations blared Two-Fer Tuesdays and Rock-Block Weekends, the transmissions were rumored to be connected in some mysterious way with the kids who’d go missing from time to time. As to what could be heard, reports differed depending upon who was telling the tale. Some said they heard odd music, jaunty and discordant, backed by the cries of the tortured or the weeping of lost children. Some heard a man talking, or a woman, of unspeakable things. Others claimed to have heard thousands chanting, black masses, twisted blasphemies and perversions, the cries of the damned in the furnace of Hell.

  You couldn’t just stumble on the station, or find it at any old time you went searching. Circumstances had to be right. And the exact nature of those “circumstances” differed as well. You had to be vulnerable, in pain. You had to be susceptible to hypnosis and open to the possibilities of the supernatural. You needed a special radio, or a regular radio touched by the hand of a warlock.

  ***

  Three weeks into Finn’s freshman year, Bentley Langschultz, a sophomore, drove to school, walked to the edge of the football field with his father’s shotgun, sat among the varicose roots at the base of a dying old oak tree, and blew his head apart. On an oppressively hot summer afternoon back when Bentley was nine years old, his mother had absent-mindedly walked into the sliding-glass porch door, causing it to shatter. A shard of glass tore into her throat as she fell. Harriett Langschultz bled to death on the ugly green and white linoleum floor in the kitchen of the Langschultz’s raised ranch, alone. Bentley found her when he came home late from school, having lingered to talk about comic books with Garrett Kinder. She lay sprawled in blood, swollen and wide-eyed, ministered to by a cloud of flies.

  The rumor born after Bentley’s death, the subject of the conversation in the smoking area that chilly winter day, proffered by Heather Buffington, who claimed to have received a desperate phone call from Bentley the night before his death, was this : Bentley had happened upon the radio station on the way home from school, and heard the sounds of shattering glass, of his mother gasping, gurgling, trying in vain to draw in breath, and then, as clear as a voice right there in the car with him, crying out, “Bentley, oh, Benny-boy, where were you—you could have saved me. Oh, son, you let me die, you let me die.” All of this, claimed Heather, was against a backdrop of comical music like you’d hear on the Saturday morning cartoons.

  Since that winter day, Finn spent hours spinning the dial of his stereo between his fingers, searching for the signal in static-choked airwaves, listening for a voice, for music, for a wailing ghost, a chuckling demon. Maybe he would hear the voice of Bentley Langschultz. Or the voice of his own mother, who had leapt to her death from the French King Bridge before Finn was old enough to form a memory of what she sounded like. He never heard anything but static. Many times he fell asleep to that noise, so much like roaring rain, like the rush of traffic, like a fierce wind bothering the treetops.

  And then one morning, at the muddy end of a long and wearying winter, the new kid showed up with the answer in his hand.

  ***

  The kid climbed onto the bus at the corner where the shuttered factory slumbered among disarranged blankets of overgrown shrubbery. An oversized army jacket bounced around him as he climbed the steps and trod down the center
aisle. Grey cargo pants with crumpled pockets, the hems rolled crooked, engineer boots. Jug-handle ears and a giraffe neck, a larynx like he’d tried to swallow a pear whole. His hair, the drab dark brown of an old penny, formed an ocean wave over his high forehead, a severe part over his right ear showing scalp like an alabaster path. Blue bug-eyes swam behind thick glasses with smoky grey frames. In one long-fingered hand he clutched a small portable transistor radio, scuffed silver with a tattered strap. He looked all of ten years old, except for his height : his hair nearly touched the curved ceiling of the school bus.

  He sat down in an empty seat at the back, his knees up at his chest, and held the radio up to his ear. Rob and Finn swung around in their seats to check the kid out. He stared back at them, his eyes moving back and forth behind those massive lenses, studying their faces. An unintelligible radio announcer’s voice declaimed breathlessly from between the small speaker and the kid’s pimply temple.

  Finn leaned in toward the radio. “What are you listening to ?”

  “Hey, I’ll bet it’s Tears for Queers !” Rob said.

  The kid opened his lips to reveal a jumble of yellowed, chipped teeth. He hissed at Rob, bubbles of spittle forming at the corners of his mouth.

  Rob burst out laughing, elbowing Finn. “Can I get the name of your orthodontist ?”

  Across the aisle, Becky Burns tittered a high-pitched arietta. Finn just stared at the radio as though hypnotized. The kid smiled widely, showcasing the mess in his mouth. His eyes were unfocused, the pupils dilated to pinpricks. His fist clenched and unclenched. He pushed the radio hard against his ear until the plastic casing cracked. Finn and Rob gawked.

  “THAT WAS A MOLDY OLDIE FROM NIFTY, SHIFTY NINETEEN-FIFTY,” the kid boomed in an unexpectedly sonorous voice. Becky Burns emitted a shrill shriek. “UP NEXT, THE THING THAT DWELLS WHERE THE BROOK TRICKLES DOWN THE EARTHEN MOUND, WHERE THE TREES BEND IN PRAYER TO THE STONE-STREWN GROUND. BUT FIRST, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR.”