Part III — The Map
The voice came back on the third night. Same time. Same frequency.
Maren had the headphones on at 1:30. She was ready this time with a shortwave transmitter patched in. The legal kind. Licensed. If something was going to answer her, she wanted it on the record.
At 1:51, the pulse appeared. She held her breath.
The three-short three-long three-short settled in, and beneath it the carrier shifted, and the voice rose through the static like something surfacing from deep water.
She pressed the transmit button.
"This is KC0HAR. I read you. Identify."
Silence. The signal held steady. The carrier wave breathing.
Then the voice again. Clearer than last night. Like it had been listening and learned how to speak better.
Good. You answered. Most do not. Most hear and fear. You hear and respond. This is why you will do.
"Who are you? Where is this transmission originating?"
Four seconds of dead air. Then the voice changed. Not in tone. In structure. Like the algorithm running it had selected a different response tree.
I cannot tell you what I am. I can tell you where I am. Listen.
A tone. Precise. Mathematical. Rises and falls that mapped naturally to geographic coordinates. She grabbed a pen and started writing on the back of an envelope. Numbers. Seconds between tones. Frequency shifts that mapped to decimal values.
When the tone stopped, she looked at what she had written.
Latitude: 38.0694. Longitude: -97.9317.
She knew those numbers. Everybody in Reno County knew them. That was the old Briscoe Grain Elevator outside town. The one that had been condemned since 1987. The one the kids said was haunted.
"The Briscoe Mill," she said into the microphone, her voice flat with disbelief.
The voice returned.
Go there. Beneath. What you need is beneath. Tomorrow night. Come alone. Tell no one about the signal.
The signal dropped. No fade. No trailing static. Just gone.
Maren sat in the silence. Her pen hovered over the envelope. The coordinates stared back.
Tomorrow night she would drive to the Briscoe Mill. Tomorrow night she would find out what was beneath.
She tore the page off the envelope and began drawing a map.
— Echoes at Midnight, Night 3 of 7
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