Lost Signals (2 page)

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.”

Then his voice jumped up a few octaves, became that of a chirpy commercial voice-over girl, “
There was a girl on my road named Dirty Meg. A dark . . .
”

Without warning, Rob popped the kid in the jaw. The thud of fist on flesh got everyone’s attention, and they began to hoot and bang their fists on the seats. “FIGHT . . . FIGHT . . . FIGHT
 
!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa
 
!” Finn said, grabbing Rob by the shoulders and putting him in a loose headlock. Rob struggled a little bit, half-heartedly, glowering at the kid, batting at Finn’s arms. Tears gathered on the kid’s lower eyelids. A splotch had blossomed bright red on his cheek.

“What the fuck was that, Robbie
 
?” Finn said. “Really, what the
fuck
 
?”

The driver jerked the bus to the side of the road, threw it into park, and stormed down the aisle, belly bouncing under her blue sweater vest, face bright red under a sheath of dyed blonde hair. The other kids stopped chanting, but murmured excitedly, jostling each other, vying for a good view.

“Up,” she said.

Rob and Finn got up.

“You’re sitting up front the rest of the way. C’mon. Rob
 
? Rob Chappell
 
? I know your mother. Come on now,
right
now, and she won’t hear a word about this.”

Among cat-calls and jeers they followed her to the front. Finn spared a glance back at the kid. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his face from under the radio. When the bus stopped, Finn and Rob were among the first to exit. Rob hustled off to class, but Finn waited. He wanted to look at the kid’s radio, to see if that dial sat down in the low numbers, to brace the kid and steal his damned radio and listen for himself. But the kid must have slipped by him somehow. Finn never saw him get off the bus.

***

That evening, Finn and his father sat across from each other in the dimly lit dining room, eating dinner in silence. Tom Groomer demanded that Finn have dinner with him every weeknight, though Finn could not fathom why, as the television was always on, and they barely spoke to one another. Finn was volatile, agitated. He had searched for the kid all day, looked for him in the halls between classes, in the cafeteria. He was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even show up for the bus home.

“Miss O’Connell says Leeds has more missing kids than any Massachusetts city of this size and population count,” Finn said, trying to force eye contact.

Tom Groomer looked at a spot about a foot over Finn’s head. He tore off a piece of garlic bread and his brow furrowed as he dabbed the bread in sauce. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’ve been ten years on the force, I know cops in every city in Christendom. Miss O’Connell should stick to Physics.”

“Do you know three kids were pulled out of school last year so their parents could home-school them
 
? And they were never heard from again.”

His father burst into derisive laughter. “Never heard from again
 
!”

“It’s true. Kelly Kitter.”

“Finny, I
know
the Kitters. Do you want me to call Carol right now
 
? Kelly left school, what, junior year
 
? Carol home-schooled her, and she got accepted at Oberlin College. Full ride, housing and all. As far as I know, that’s where she is right now. Now, that’s the last I want to hear of it.”

Finn nodded, jabbed his fork at a piece of ravioli, shoving it around the plate. Kelly’s best friend Margot hadn’t seen nor heard from Kelly since the day her mom pulled her out of school. When she called, Mrs. Kitter said Kelly had gone out. Or was studying. Or asleep. Asleep at seven in the evening
 
! Kelly hadn’t just moved to Ohio without calling Margot, without saying goodbye. Tom Groomer stared blankly at the television, where the long smoke trail from the space shuttle explosion billowed across the screen for the umpteenth time. He was lying, Finn decided. His father was lying to his face.