Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Thank You For Reading

Transmission

A Supernatural Thriller

By Ambrose Ibsen

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Copyright © 2016 by Ambrose Ibsen

All rights reserved.

ONE

No matter how long he listened, Kenji Ando couldn't seem to ignore the strange sound coming in over his headphones.

The dorm room was dim. He'd been hoping to get some sleep, the stress of the previous week's midterms still weighing him down. His roommate, Dylan, was out in the commons area, watching TV, so there weren't any distractions. Kenji should have been able to relax and sleep without incident, and had even queued up some music on his phone for the purpose of helping his relaxation along.

They were in their first days of a five-week winter break. Midterms were over and the campus had emptied out as students went home to visit with their families for the holidays. Kenji and Dylan, though, had decided to stay behind. There were only a couple of other students who'd done so in their entire building, making it eerily quiet at all hours. The campus, too, was a complete ghost town. Where usually packs of students roamed and raved there was only emptiness to be found.

Just an hour before, after scouring the usual illegal torrent sites, Kenji had zeroed in on a particularly rare album he'd sought for a long time. It was none other than a pirated copy of Jackal Priest's Dreams in Black Static, a little-known dark ambient masterpiece. Kenji often listened to dark ambient music when trying to focus or sleep; unless it was too outre, he usually found the soundscapes somehow relaxing.

This album, though, wasn't having the intended effect on him.

He straightened his headphones and sat up in bed, adjusting the volume. The first track, entitled “Cannibalism”, was a mere three minutes long, but already he'd listened to it more than four times. It was a gloomy soundscape, with a droning ambient din and the sound of discordant chimes breaking onto the scene at random intervals. Deep, electronic sounds not unlike growls punctuated the ambient background as well, ebbing and flowing like the waves of a black sea. All of this was well and good enough, and had the song stuck to these conventions it wouldn't have been any different from the dozens of other such albums he had on his hard drive.

This track, however, closed with something of an anomaly. He had to keep going back to it, listening to it with more closeness. Kenji was convinced there was something like a voice reaching out from beneath the undercurrent of noise, bursting out to the listener in even intervals.

The end of the song maintained the haunting, ambient din, however another element was introduced. First could be heard the barking of several dogs. Then, a moment later, came the murmurings of a crowd and what sounded like the gurgling of a fountain. This wasn't cause in and of itself for extra attention or concern; avant-garde musicians often experimented with street sounds or background noise of this kind in their songs. It was what mingled with the muffled voices in the crowd that continued to pry upon Kenji's ears even after the first track ended and the second began.

There was one voice that stood above the rest. It was very subtle, difficult to distinguish amid the mass of vague speech, but there all the same. As he lay in bed, listening, he heard this sound worm its way through his headphones and into his ear, where it warded off what little sleepiness he'd managed to nurture. He repeated the track once, twice, the curious anomaly returning to his ears each and every time he listened to the ending of the song.

Mixed in with the crowd noise was one voice that was somehow more discernible than the rest; and he felt that, if he listened hard enough, he could almost make out what was being said...

Kenji took off the headphones and sat up in bed, his form casting tall shadows against the lamplit walls. He rubbed at his arms, the fine black hairs standing upright and his flesh cold. Usually their room was unbearably warm, but tonight it had grown suddenly chill. Draping a blanket over his shoulders, he looked down at his phone quizzically and turned it over in his hands. He licked his lips, finding them parched, and then sucked in a lungful of the dry, sterile air.

As a student of Linguistics, the bulk of his midterms had been language-oriented. Of particular importance and difficulty had been his exam in Italian. The reading portion had been a breeze; Kenji prided himself on his ability to read and translate written Italian. It'd been the speech part of the test that he'd blown. Though he didn't think he'd failed it, he certainly hadn't passed with flying colors. His parents would expect to know how the exams had gone, would request to see his grades as soon as they were available. He tensed, trying to ease the tension from his shoulders with his thumb. That was the main reason he'd decided to stick around on campus over the winter break. Hanging out with his demanding parents, answering the ceaseless questions about his classes, had sounded miserable. They'd sent him some money the day before so that he could feed himself, and had reminded him over the phone that he should continue his studies every day, despite being on vacation. Sometimes he despised their strictness.

A shiver crept down his spine. His thoughts felt unfocused, were darting around in the petri dish of his brain like tiny, active protozoa.

Slumping against the wall, Kenji put on the headphones once more and queued up the first track, “Cannibalism”, yet again. Listening with closed eyes, he waited for the MP3 to hit the three-minute mark. The sounds of barking dogs met his ears, then the gurgling fountain and the mutterings of a crowd. It was exactly the kind of sound you might record by walking through a park on a warm summer day with a tape recorder in your pocket.

And then there it was.

The voice.

It wasn't like the others. It possessed more firmness, was seated upon the other layers of noise in such a way that it intruded upon them. He listened to the very end, then shut it off and tossed his headphones onto his desk.

Laying back onto his pillow, he threw an arm over his face and loosed a sigh. He wanted to sleep, but it took him only a few moments to realize that sleep wouldn't come.

The alarm clock on his desk read 10:01 PM in red, boxy letters. He stared at it a long while, his ears host to a constant ringing now, and his eyes never growing any heavier for it.

TWO

Kenji abandoned all hopes of an early sleep and crept out of the dorm room. Starting down the silent, carpeted hall in his socks, he passed door after door, all of them closed. Usually there were students chatting in this hall, hanging out of the doorways. Music could often be heard, along with yelling and sometimes less decent noises. Now there was nothing. It may as well have been a funeral home.

Rounding the corner and descending the stairwell, a new noise registered in Kenji's ears and eased the ringing that'd dwelt there ever since he'd taken off his headphones. It was the sound of a television program. Entering the commons room, he found his roommate, Dylan, propped up on one elbow on the ratty sofa in front of the television, eyes wide. Whatever he was watching, he was clearly riveted.

Dylan was an old friend of Kenji's. They'd gone to high school together and had decided to share a room when they were both accepted to the University of Wisconsin-- Madison. Dylan was tall and lanky, with sandy blonde hair that struck quite the contrast to Kenji's raven black. He wore glasses with white, square-shaped rims; the very portrait of hipster chic. Though he usually dressed pretty well, in button-downs and somewhat ironic, loudly-colored vests, with no one else hanging out around campus to see him peacocking he'd settled into comfier clothes for the duration of the break. He turned and presented a real Colgate smile as the program switched to a commercial break. “Oh, hey there.”

Kenji leaned against the back of the sofa, arms crossed. “What you up to?” he asked. The fatigue must've been evident in his voice. Stifling a yawn, he went on. “Anything interesting on tonight?”

“I'll say,” began Dylan, righting himself and patting the cushion next to his. “It's a show about monks-- real esoteric shit. Did you know that there are some crazy guys out there who go into caves to meditate and never come out? Like, they stay in there, in their lotus pose or whatever, until they literally die? That's... hardcore, no? Imagine the kind of mental strength it takes to do that! You meditate until you die, no food or water or anything, in pursuit of nirvana or enlightenment.”

Kenji arched a brow, blankly watching an ad for a new brand of vacuum cleaner. “Uh-huh, sounds like a real blast.”

“You're so uncultured,” replied Dylan with a smug grin. “You're Japanese. Doesn't that mean you're required to have, like, a couple Buddhist monks in your family line or something? You ever go into deep mountain caves to convene with the other side?” He waggled his eyebrows for extra, mystical emphasis.

At this, Kenji couldn't help but roll his eyes. “Dude, I was born in frigging Idaho. Give me a break here.” The show was coming back on and Dylan's attention had returned to the screen. Digging his phone from his pocket, Kenji tapped his roommate on the shoulder. “Hey, mute that for a second. There's something I want you to listen to.”

Dylan frowned, fishing around in the couch cushions for the remote. With it, he brought up a tangle of hair and a stale potato chip, and when he'd successfully muted the TV it was all he could do not to toss the remote away. Wiping his hands on the leg of his sweatpants, he shrugged. “Well, what is it?”

Kenji pulled up the first track on Dreams in Black Static, “Cannibalism”, and held the phone out to Dylan. “This song.”

Dylan groaned. “Come on, man. You know I hate this shit. I've never understood why you get off on this kind of music. I mean, it isn't even really music, is it? It's just a bunch of noise. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were some kind of goth kid, deep down.”

“Just shut up and listen-- to the end of it, specifically,” said Kenji, forcing the phone into his hands.

The track played over the phone's external speaker, the air of the commons room filled with the eerie, disjointed sounds of chimes. It was true that Dylan never listened to music of this kind; usually his tastes tended towards poppier stuff, like The Smiths or The Stone Roses. It was possible he wouldn't even know what to listen for, that he'd completely miss the voice that Kenji had caught at the end of the recording, rising subtly over the other noise. While watching Dylan recline on the sofa, listening with a bored look, Kenji tensed. Would Dylan hear the voice, too, or was it simply something that he had imagined?

Finally the ending of the song began, and the sounds of the crowd started drifting through the air. Kenji leaned in and pointed at the phone. “Here. Listen here. Do you hear, like... a woman's voice in there?” As best he could tell, the voice that had so bothered him had been a woman's. There'd been a certain breathy quality he'd been able to make out, despite the other sounds that served to muddy it. He gulped, working over his lower lip with his teeth in anticipation.

Dylan sat up, holding the phone so that the speaker was closer to his ear. He fidgeted a little, as if unimpressed. “I mean, they sampled crowd noise here. I'm sure there's a woman someplace in the mix.”

“No, that's not what I mean.” Kenji couldn't be sure just why he felt so worked up, but he wanted desperately to know whether Dylan could hear the voice. For reasons he couldn't articulate he'd become mightily invested in the existence of this strange voice over the course of the last half hour. It had its claws in him, and until someone else could attest to its presence he wouldn't be able to let it go.

Dylan perked up a little. “Oh, you mean that voice?” He held the phone a little closer, nodding. “It's a woman's voice or something, yeah? What's she saying?”

Kenji heard the breathy, muffled speech and quivered a little. While listening to it over headphones Kenji had felt it a very private affair, almost as if the woman in the recording were speaking directly to him. Listening to the recording of her voice in the dark commons room, however, which was lit only by the television, the whole thing felt somehow profane. Perhaps it wasn't a noise meant to be communicated in the open. Kenji felt, in a weird way, that it'd been intended for him and him alone, a private message, and that to play it out loud in this way was to discover in it a more ominous aspect. As the undulating speech repeated over the crowd noise, Kenji's eyes darted about the room. The way the track hung in the air, the way the sounds reverberated against the still walls, gave the impression that the space was somehow becoming defiled for it. This was tantamount to uttering blasphemous prayers in a sealed-off tomb.

Kenji was overjoyed when the track finally came to a close.

“Where'd you get it?” was the first question out of Dylan's mouth as he handed back the phone. Judging by the look on his face he wasn't even remotely impressed. The voice in the recording hadn't spooked him in the least.

“Well, I pulled it up on a torrent tonight. The album's kind of rare. I've looked for it before, but never managed to turn up anything.” Kenji stared at the phone in his hands, the screen dark.

“See,” replied Dylan, standing up, “that's your problem. You poke around on those underground torrent sites and then complain when you don't get awesome quality? I'll bet you it's just some shitty rip. Should've bought the album somewhere instead, if you wanted a good copy.”

Kenji paced towards the door. “I didn't come here for a lecture on that. I'm just wondering what you thought of that voice. It kind of... freaked me out.”

“Why?”

Kenji paused. It wasn't something that could easily be put into words. He hadn't even heard what the person was saying. Rationally, there shouldn't have been anything disturbing about it in the least. And yet, here he was, losing sleep over the thing, unable to think of anything else. “It just doesn't seem like it belongs. It feels like someone is reaching out to the listener, like...” His words fell short and he was silent.

Dylan, still unmoved, stretched. “This doesn't make any sense. Industrial goth types put all kinds of weird crap into their music. You should know that. So they added in some little recording of a woman speaking at the end there? It's... it's like the most commonplace thing in the world, if you ask me.” He grinned. “Why is it so weird to you? You listen to this kind of junk all the time.”

Kenji knew that his roommate wasn't far off of the mark. Strange, unplaceable sound effects and eerie voices were par for the course in dark ambient music. He should have been used to such things by now, not at all bothered. And yet for whatever reason, this snippet of voice, indecipherable, had upset him. He felt like an idiot for being so disturbed, but the snippet of speech had left him shaken all the same.

Sighing, Dylan shut off the TV and ambled towards the door. With the warm glow of the television gone, the commons room was plunged into total blackness, with only the dull glow of the hall illuminating the roughest outlines of the furniture within. “Well, the night is young and this is obviously bothering the shit out of you, so what say we have a closer look at that song?” Dylan led the way back to their room, hiking up the stairs with a grunt. His long legs took the steps two at a time, and he was marching down the second-story hallway before Kenji had even climbed the second flight.

“What do you mean?”

Dylan approached their door and shoved it open, stepping into the room. From inside, came his quiet reply. “We'll clean up the audio.”

Kenji cocked his head to the side, rushing into the room and closing the door behind him. “What do you mean? How can we clean up the sound?”

Already Dylan had slipped into the chair at Kenji's desk, and was firing up Kenji's laptop. Pulling up the web browser, he began to type furiously. “Dude, we're living in the twenty-first century here. You can illegally pirate music in a flash these days; what makes you think you can't find a solid audio editor online, too? It's pretty simple, actually. I know this program, totally free, that lets you play around with sound files. You can isolate certain noises, amplify others. You know, mess with it till you've got it just right. If you think there's something to this weird voice at the end, maybe we can clear up the sound and listen to it more clearly.”

Kenji sat at the edge of his bed, watching Dylan work. It hadn't occurred to him to clean up the track and isolate the woman's voice at the end. Even if it had, he wouldn't have known how to go about it. Already Dylan was downloading the necessary program, was zeroing in on the mp3 file on his computer.

“What file is it?” asked Dylan. “Cannibalism?”

“That's the one.”

Dylan scoffed. “Super spooky. These track titles are a goth kid's wet dream. 'Cannibalism', 'Profane Apotheosis'... gimme a break. Why do you download this crap, man? It's so lame.”

Kenji wasn't listening, however. As the download for the audio editing software finished, a strong dread washed over him. Something told him that cleaning up the sound and listening to the woman's voice without the obscuring background noise may not be the wisest idea; that it may reveal to them something better left hidden.

“When we're done with this and we find it's just some basic, occult bullshit, I wanna grab some wings. You game?” Dylan turned and cracked a grin. “Oh, I forgot, your folks just sent you a bunch of money, didn't they? I guess that means it'll be your treat, since I'm being a swell guy and helping you with this, eh?”

Kenji held his breath for a bit, giving a little shake of the head. “Sure, whatever.”

Turning back to the computer, Dylan started into his work.

Gripping his comforter, Kenji watched as the MP3 file was loaded into the audio editing software. It was displayed as a single bar alight in wavelengths of different heights.

This was his last chance to turn back, to call off the whole thing. The dread washed over him again, stirred his senses to life. A knot of fear in his stomach rose up his throat as though it were an elevator and settled there. His hands trembled a bit as he sat upright and watched the screen.

But he said nothing. He didn't ask Dylan to stop. He observed, wide-eyed, as Dylan began tinkering with the file.

Something, though he couldn't say just what, was about to be set in motion.

He felt certain.

THREE

Dylan busied himself at the laptop for more than a half hour, dragging, cutting and pasting till he had something workable. All the while, he explained his process with a hint of pride, as though he were a professor giving a lecture. Dylan was a Chemistry major, and loved to get into the more analytical aspects of the things he took an interest in. In this case, discussing the finer details of the audio editing software was endlessly entertaining to him.

Dylan continued. “So, as you can see, it's pretty easy to do. They make the software damn intuitive these days. In the past, you'd have had to have access to an entire studio, but now a laptop and an internet connection will do.” He turned a bit in the chair so that he was facing Kenji. “First we boot up the audio editor. Then we upload the mp3 in question. All of these different wavelengths look like a complicated mess, but we have an option here, see, to sample certain sounds. We find the part we want to clear up and merely sample the specific sounds we want to minimize. In this case, we want to minimize anything that isn't that woman's voice, right? So, the barking dogs, the fountain noises, the crowd-- all of that gets sampled and then we lower its volume as far as it'll go, stripping the file down to just the woman's voice. It still won't be a hundred percent clear, but it should be worlds better than what we started off with.” Looking at the screen, Dylan clicked around a short while and then pulled up a new, shorter snippet of sound. “All right. It's all set. I've isolated the woman's voice, lowered the volume of everything else and the resulting recording is right here. Ready?”

Kenji would have been lying if he'd said he was ready to listen to the woman's voice without any interference. While watching Dylan work over the past half hour, he'd grappled with continuous unease. Now that the job was done and he had a finished product he could listen to with the stroke of a single key, he felt his apprehensions mount a thousandfold. Still, he issued a slow nod and Dylan hit the space bar, playing the edited audio.

The sample, of nearly thirty seconds' duration, indeed featured a woman speaking. The voice was undoubtedly feminine, though it was marred by a slight echo, and various sound artifacts came in around the edges, muddying it further. Nevertheless, it was clear enough to understand now, and as the woman spoke, the air in the dorm room became awfully stifling for Kenji. He wished he could open a window, let in some of the fresh, winter air, but there was no window to be found in their little room. He leaned forward, eyes focused on the carpet, and listened while the woman spoke. She repeated the same thing a total of three times, with only a brief pause between each instance.

The meaning of the woman's message was something of a mystery, a jumble of seemingly random letters and numbers that went so:

EN17DA43TU85

There was then a pause. Then the sequence was repeated a second time, followed by another pause. After the third and final repetition of the cryptic message, there was silence.

Dylan frowned. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? Talk about a let-down.” He laughed, smacking Kenji's arm. “Don't look so disappointed. What did you think it was going to be? 'Now that you've listened to this, you will die in seven days'? I told you, man, these underground musicians put weird crap in their songs all the time, but it doesn't necessarily mean anything.”

Though Dylan had misinterpreted it as such, it was not a look of disappointment that left Kenji's face a blank slate. It was intense curiosity. He'd heard a mysterious, muddled message in a song that evening. Now, with the audio cleaned up and the message made clear, he was met with an even greater riddle. He'd heard the message, could have no doubt about what had been said, but what in the world did it mean? He puzzled over it a time, then asked Dylan to play it again.

Dylan complied, and the woman's breathy message drifted through the air afresh. As she spoke, Kenji suddenly stood up and took a notebook from his backpack. Listening closely, he jotted down the string of letters and numbers as neatly as he could despite the shaking of his hands. He muttered them under his breath as he wrote. “EN17DA43TU85”.

Dylan scratched at his ear, looking up at Kenji quizzically. “Does this jumble mean something to you?”

Kenji stared at the notebook in his hands, read the letters and numbers one at a time, and tried to parse some meaning from them. None presented itself. Chewing on the eraser of his pencil, he set the notebook on his bed and took to pacing around the room like a prisoner in a cramped cell.

“Kenji?” interrupted Dylan. “Earth to Kenji? What's going on in that head of yours?”

Kenji removed the pencil from his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “I... I don't know what it means, but I also don't think it's bullshit. Why include something like that in a song if it's meaningless?”

Dylan leaned back in the chair, sighing. “I dunno, dude. And I don't know why you give a damn, either. For all we know it's some Illuminati shit and we need to stay away.” His grin faded when he found no amusement in Kenji's narrow gaze. “Look, let's just drop it, yeah? It's probably nothing. I'd bet on it. People include all kinds of weird nonsense in songs because they want to give the illusion of deeper meaning. Who cares, man?” He motioned to the clock on the desk. “It's still early enough to get some wings, and I seem to remember someone in this room promising me a free meal.”

Kenji stuck his hands in his pockets and nodded. “Yeah, all right. Let's get out of here, then.” The two of them found their shoes and put on their jackets, leaving the room and stopping only to lock the door. The march down to the exit was silent; Kenji was far too deep into his thoughts to make small-talk with Dylan as was usually his wont.

Escaping into the deserted campus, which was dressed in thick shadow and revealed to them only by the orangish overhead lights, the pair made their way to the sidewalk that would lead them between the towering, adjacent faculty buildings and to the main drag. Their destination was The Wing Stop, a little restaurant that specialized in wings and burgers. Situated on the corner of the campus, it was usually crawling with customers from the minute it opened to the minute it closed, and it kept long hours, taking orders till four in the morning on the weekends. As the two of them left the shadow of the campus and started across the street towards the restaurant however, they saw not a soul. The shop's signs glowed in eerie hues of green and red, but there was no one else around to see them. Kenji buried his hands deeper into the pockets of his jacket and tried not to focus on the utter desertion that surrounded them.

The wind was ice cold, and while Dylan bitched about it relentlessly with every gust, Kenji found it a welcome change from the stuffy air he'd been breathing in the dormitory all day. His cheeks were flush and his hands almost numb by the time they reached the door.

The bored-looking cashier took their order, looking as though he hadn't done a thing all night, and brought out their food shortly thereafter. He stayed at their table a bit, thankful for the distraction of customers, and even offered them a free dessert. The restaurant was very small; done up in a strange aerial theme, with pictures of old aviators and the propellor of an old plane hanging on the wall towards the back, there were only about ten small tables to be found. Every other table was empty, a stark contrast to the heaps of people who often occupied every single one on any other night.

Dylan chatted with the cashier for a bit and then dug into his food with gusto. Taking advantage of his friend's windfall, he'd ordered a large platter of wings and fries, along with a large soda. Kenji, though, had ordered very conservatively and didn't much bother with his food, too lost in thought to eat.

“What's the matter with your food?” asked Dylan, motioning to him with one of his freshly-cleaned wing bones. The corners of his mouth were covered in a thin layer of barbecue sauce.

Kenji shook his head and took a disinterested bite. The food was fine, but he wasn't hungry. His mind was elsewhere, the sound of that woman's voice still pulsing in his ears. A Prince song came on overhead, and in its chorus he fancied he heard the recitation of those cryptic numbers and letters by the woman in the recording. He stifled a shudder and nibbled on one of his fries.

“It's so dead around here,” offered Dylan, taking a swig of his soda. “Usually we have to wait to get a table, and there's a constant stream of people heading in and out. Campus, too. I haven't seen another person in, like, days. Wild, man. Just wild.” He took another pull from his soda and then crunched on an ice cube. “Have you ever seen campus this way?”

Kenji shook his head. The more they discussed their isolation, the more unnerved he became. He didn't want to think about how alone they were. “I'm looking forward to classes starting back up,” he admitted.

Dylan scoffed. “What's this? You're out of your mind, man. We only just started break and you want to go back to that grind?”

It was all Kenji could do to ask for a distraction. Classwork and socializing could fill the gap as well as anything. At least, if his life returned to normal, he'd have no time to further fixate on this puzzling sequence of letters and numbers that presently dominated his consciousness and threatened to become an obsession.

“You really made out like a bandit, eh? Your parents sending you all of that money. They wanted to make sure that their star student eats well, huh?” Dylan crushed up another piece of ice, then burped. “My folks couldn't give any less of a damn. They sent me a bit, enough for some gas, food and laundry, but they only did it because they don't want me home over the holidays. Probably like it better with me all the way out here. I have to say I prefer it, too. When I graduate and get a job, I'm moving far away from them. They'll probably never see me again.” Dylan had always had a rough relationship with his parents. Even when things were going well between them their dealings were strained.

Not that Kenji was putting much thought into that. His eyes scanned the paper table mat, picking out certain letters and numbers along the way. Here was an 'E'... lower on the page, an 'N'. There was a '1', also. And a '7'. He shook his head. Everywhere he looked he was seeing that string of characters.

By the time their meal had run its course Kenji had scarcely touched his food and was in the throes of an intense agitation. He didn't want to return to the dormitory, but with precious few options available he and Dylan left the restaurant and began their silent walk back. Sensing that his roommate was preoccupied, Dylan didn't strike up any conversation on the way and simply whistled a tune that rang out in the night and echoed discordantly against the brick buildings they passed on campus. The wind was every bit as biting, and Kenji's stomach seized in protest, balling itself tightly around the little bit of food he'd managed to eat.

They arrived at their building and ascended the stairs. When they got to their room, Dylan sprawled out on his bed and patted his stomach. “Thanks for the meal, dude. I'm going to try and get some sleep. Maybe we can go see a movie tomorrow at the mall? My treat.”

“Sure,” replied Kenji without really hearing what'd been said. From the start he marched towards the notebook where he'd recorded the cryptic message.

With a sigh of resignation, Dylan took off his white-rimmed glasses and set them on his desk. Then he started playing games on his phone. “Whatever, man,” he muttered.

Kenji picked up the notebook and had another look at the string of characters, puzzling over what meaning they might hold, if any. It made little sense to him that the artist would have included this soundbite in the song arbitrarily; surely it had some kind of meaning. Perhaps it was just some weird quirk included in the song to lend it an added depth, like Dylan had supposed, but Kenji couldn't believe that. When listening to it, even beneath the wall of sound, he'd felt like the speaker was struggling to be heard, as though he himself were being addressed by the woman. Who was she, and what had she hoped to convey in this message? He felt like he could puzzle over this question for a hundred years and never draw nearer to an answer.

Kenji sat down at his desk and stared at the string of characters he'd jotted down. As he did so, something caught his eye.

The line of writing was circled.

Tonguing his molars and studying the message scrawled on the page, he ran his fingers around the circle that encapsulated them and searched in his memory for a time.

For some reason, he couldn't remember circling the message. He glanced at Dylan, finding him completely engrossed in his game.

You must've circled it before you left, he told himself, flipping the page over and tossing the notebook aside. Perhaps it'd been the cold that had finally tired him out, however Kenji now felt himself capable of falling asleep.

FOUR

The ticking of the clock in the commons area swelled to a deafening height. To try and break up the silence, Kenji tapped his pencil against the tabletop, rapping out a clumsy beat.

It didn't help.

His sigh rustled the piece of crisp computer paper before him. On it, in large, neat characters of black ink, he'd copied the message he'd recorded in his notebook the night before. Next to it was that selfsame notebook, a once-clean page covered in crowded notes and attempts at code-breaking. Much of the writing was crossed out. He'd hit dead end after dead end in trying to make sense of the message.

For two hours he'd been sitting undisturbed in the common room while Dylan slept in. He'd awoken that morning without his usual grogginess, and after ambling out to the bathroom and taking a quick shower, he'd taken his phone and notebook with him to the common room to begin the task of cracking the code.

Because, unless Kenji was mistaken, the string of characters had to be a code of some sort.

This message had to have significance to someone out there; that it was utterly random didn't seem a possibility to him. He'd Googled a few things, considered writing the artist, Jackal Priest, but discovered that the members of the group had died in a plane crash some years previous. They were independent artists, so they didn't have a record label he could send inquiries to. Also, being something of a niche group, they didn't have much of a presence online, and websites dedicated to them were sparse on details and few in number.

The only avenue left to him if he was interested in figuring out the meaning of the code was to try and decipher it himself, then.

Kenji had never considered himself to be much of a code-breaker; puzzle games and things of that sort had always been thoroughly annoying to him. His learning in the field of linguistics however gave him a decent background for this sort of work. Having studied language for some time, especially Italian, he was used to translating foreign texts into English, and if he thought of this task as simply another translation job, it suddenly became easier for him.

The question was, what kind of language was he dealing with?

The cryptic line of text was a combination of letters and numbers, and no meaning or relationship could be found between them at a glance. Probably, then, this was a codified message. Thinking it a cipher, Kenji began to substitute the letters for numbers, dabbled in substituting the numbers for letters, and generally rearranged the characters to try and create something clear.

Two hours into his work, the only thing he'd gained was a slight headache.

Dylan walked in while Kenji had his head pressed to the tabletop and guffawed when he caught sight of the string of characters. “Man, you linguistics majors sure do get bored when classes are out of session, huh? You just never quit!” He was tugging on his jacket, and threw a thumb towards the doorway. “I'm going to catch a matinee. Wanna come with?”

Kenji shook his head. “No, thanks. Come here and have a look at this, please.”

Dylan sauntered to the table and sat on its edge, picking up the sheet of computer paper. “It's gibberish,” he said, without missing a beat. “Plain and simple. You think it's some secret message? Good luck making sense of it. I bet it's just crap.”

Kenji snatched the paper from his grasp and held it up so that they could both see it. “I think it's a coded message. The only thing is that I don't know how it was encoded. If I could just crack the code, I'd find something readable in it. No way the artist just tossed this into the song for no reason. It's too... unnatural-sounding.”

Dylan clapped, throwing his head back in callous laughter. “Listen to yourself. This fascination you have with a ridiculous song is what's unnatural. Come on, let's hit the movies. Some fresh air will help you come to your senses, I'll bet.”

At that moment, someone else walked into the commons room, startling them both. It was Mike. “What's up, guys?” he said, sticking his head through the doorway and blinking at the pair with his large, bespectacled eyes.

Mike was an incredibly awkward Geography major who lived in the private room four doors down from their own. He was the only other one still staying in the building that they'd seen since the winter break began, and both Kenji and Dylan did their best to avoid him whenever possible. It wasn't that Mike wasn't nice; rather, he was too nice. The guy never shut up, and his almost manic fashion of speaking was incredibly grating. The guy had no filter and couldn't seem to relate to other people very well. Dylan had theorized that he wasn't right in the head, or else suffered from near-debilitating social anxiety that he was hopeless to overcome. Kenji didn't usually have a whole lot of patience for him, and had been stopped in the hallway more than once to listen to some rambling anecdote or another. Mike wore entirely too much body spray, which cut through the air and assailed the nostrils of anyone unfortunate enough to walk past, and sometimes, very early in the morning, he'd blast show tunes from his stereo. His singing and dancing could be heard throughout the entire hall, much to the chagrin of the other students on the floor, who all hated him.

At the very sight of him, Kenji suddenly found the idea of taking in a film with Dylan rather palatable.

“N-not much,” muttered Kenji, collecting his papers and standing up. He pushed in the chair and made as if to leave, Dylan following close behind. But they weren't going to get off the hook so easily.

“Isn't it crazy how empty the dorms are, guys? I mean, usually there's all the noise, and... what are you guys up to today?” His chubby, red cheeks were thrust into an expectant smile.

Snickering, Dylan patted Kenji's shoulder with condescension. “Ol' Kenji here fancies himself a code-breaker.”

“Shut up,” muttered Kenji, trying to bypass Mike, who remained stationed in the doorway.

Mike got in his way, however. “What kind of codes?” He sometimes spit as he talked, and Kenji could feel a mist of spittle on his cheek as he tried to leave the room.

“Just, uhh... you know, puzzles and stuff.” Kenji lied and tried to maneuver past him. “Gotta go, Mike.”

Mike's hand came to rest on Kenji's shoulder. “Wait a minute now, I love brain teasers, Kenji. Will you let me have a look?” He glanced to Dylan and Kenji in turn, then tried to peek at the bundle of notes Kenji held to his breast.

Thoroughly annoyed at his lack of progress and now at the meddling of this buffoon, Kenji hesitantly flashed the sequence of characters. “It's just a little code. I... I dunno what it means. It's probably nothing.”

Mike craned his neck and hovered over the sheet of computer paper for some time, his expression narrowing all the while. He nodded to himself, then lowered the paper. “You know, I've seen this before.”

Dylan and Kenji both were taken aback. “W-wait, what? Seriously?” came Dylan. “Where?”

Mike, not used to having so much attention centered on himself, began to stammer. “W-well, I-I... It's not, y-you know, a code or anything like that. At least, n-not like what you're thinking, K-Kenji.”

Kenji took the paper back from him and peered at it afresh. “Right, so what the heck is it, then?”

“Well, they're Maidenhead Coordinates, I t-think.” He peered over at the characters again, then nodded with firmness. “Yeah, Maidenhead all right. We learned about Maidenhead coordinates during one of my geography classes this semester. Y-you have to use a grid map to use the coordinates, but it corresponds to a certain location. Y-you know, like longitude and latitude--”

“So, where does this lead?” demanded Kenji, tapping the paper impatiently.

Mike threw his hands up. “W-well, I'm not sure. But you can look it up online. If you search for a Maidenhead coordinate database, you can type it in, and--”

Kenji was darting down the hall towards the stairwell before Mike could even finish. Dylan wasn't far behind, giving some half-assed excuse for their sudden flight.

The racing of his pulse filled his temples. Kenji's scalp itched something awful; he felt himself growing warm and couldn't stay still. His fingers fiddled with the edges of the paper as he raced up the stairs and made a beeline for their room. It seemed a long-shot, but if these really were navigational coordinates of some kind, then he'd be one step closer to figuring out the riddle that'd so plagued him. Provided that Mike was correct and these were Maidenhead coordinates, where did they lead? And why had such a thing been inserted into a song?

Kenji threw open the door and nearly slammed it shut just as Dylan was trying to edge his way in.

“Dude, calm down,” urged Dylan, sitting down in his chair. “You know Mike's a weirdo. You really think he knows what he's talking about? Guy is into all kinds of conspiracy theories and junk. And he listens to show tunes. Here's a tip: Don't ever take advice from someone who wakes up in the morning and blasts the soundtrack to The Sound Of Music.”

Kenji was already stationed at his laptop, hammering the keys. “Uh-huh,” he replied, pulling up a Maidenhead coordinate database. Just as Mike had said, the thing could be found with a simple web search.

Sucking in a deep breath, he clicked on the search box and slowly typed in the string of characters he'd recorded the night before. He'd looked them over so many times in the past twenty-four hours that he had them memorized.

EN17DA43TU85

His finger hovered for an instant over the ENTER button.

It isn't too late to turn back, he thought to himself. No need to dive any deeper into this, you know.

Kenji hit the enter button anyway, and the results slowly populated the page.

FIVE

I'll be damned,” said Dylan. “They really were coordinates, huh?” He crossed his arms and paced around the center of the room. “Guess even Mike knows what he's talking about some of the time.”

Kenji didn't know what to make of this new find. Cluelessness was fast becoming his base setting in these matters. The string of characters had indeed been Maidenhead coordinates, just as Mike had claimed, and when entered into the database, they spit out what appeared to be a real location. The significance of this was still a mystery to him, however.

The string of characters translated into the exact coordinates of a spot in Akeley, Minnesota. Pulling up the corresponding address on an online mapping service didn't really give them much to work with, however. This part of the map was a discolored splotch; no matter how they looked, this particular section of Akeley was masked by greenish pixels. There could have been anything there; a small forest, an empty field, a gaping hole in the Earth... Kenji tried again and again to refresh the map, but never once did it appear any more clearly.

Another dead-end.

Kenji gnawed on the end of his pencil, swiveling around in his chair to face Dylan. He worked through his confusion verbally for his own benefit, using Dylan as a sounding board. “So, this obscure song has a recording of a woman's voice in it. It's mixed in there, real hard to hear. We clean up the sound and get a very clear set of characters from it. A message, which turns out to be a bunch of coordinates. The coordinates lead to the-middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota.” His molars locked down on the pencil with such force that he could feel his teeth sinking into the wood.

“Yeah, it's a real mind-fuck,” conceded Dylan. “I wonder what's out there. Why isn't the map clear? It's almost like it was intentionally blurred by the makers of the mapping software, you know?”

Kenji chuckled. “Conspiracy theorist much? Stuff like this happens all the time, dude. Real rural spots like this one are often overlooked. More than likely it's just a bunch of trees or something, but... why did the coordinates in this song lead to this exact spot? It just doesn't make sense. Why were coordinates to this place included in the song at all?”

Dylan stared at the screen for a moment, at the blurry mass of pixels, and then offered, “Why don't we go and find out?”

Kenji was floored. Loosing a nervous laugh, he leaned back in his chair. “Whoa, what are you suggesting?”

With more sincerity than he'd hitherto shown the matter, Dylan pressed on. “Listen, you've been obsessed with this thing. And I have to admit, I'm a little intrigued now. There might be something there, there may be nothing there at all, but... until we go and take a look for ourselves you aren't going to drop this. I'm sure of that much, at least. And what else do we have to do around here? The place is dead, empty. Short of going out to eat or taking in movies, there's nothing to do. Why not take a road trip, huh? I've got the car; if you help me out with the gas a little bit, we could probably make the drive out there within a day or so.” His gaze narrowed. “It's in Minnesota, right? That's not so far from here.”

Kenji tightened his grip around the legs of the chair. He was looking up at the ceiling, trying to work out the logistics of such a trip, but all the while something in the back of his head was urging him not to go, to turn away from this new information forthwith and to never look back. It was becoming all too clear that they were getting deeply invested in this thing, whatever it was. There was simply no telling what they'd find when they got out there, and Kenji was unable to rid himself of the impression that the two of them were being somehow lured to the spot. Not all of this could be explained away by simply calling it “coincidence”. Coincidence a good deal of it may have been, but this latest twist, the string of characters corresponding to a particular location, was too unnerving for words.

And yet, Kenji still weighed the possibility of making a day trip out of it.

Reluctantly he ran the numbers, figuring out the distance between this spot in Akeley, Minnesota and the UW-Madison campus. The drive would take them roughly seven hours. It'd make for a long car ride, but the two of them could pass the time easily enough. If they broke it up by stopping for lunch on the way, it might even be fun. More fun, at least, than wasting away in their quiet room.

“C'mon,” continued Dylan. “The clubs are all going to be dead tonight. It's still early; if we set out now we can probably get there before sundown. Aren't you at least a little curious about what might be out there?”

Kenji was more than just a little curious, but couldn't altogether silence the voice in his head that tried to talk him out of it. “Are you sure your car will hold up? And what about the weather?”

Dylan blew off these concerns with ease. “A little snow or ice is no big deal. I've driven through worse, I guarantee it. And the car? She's a workhorse. Got her tuned up last time I was home; all she needs is gas.”

Unable to think of any other excuses to keep them in the dorms, and his curiosity getting the better of him, Kenji agreed. “All right. Why not? Let's do it.”

***

The pair packed a few changes of clothes and toiletries in their book bags. Kenji also brought along his laptop, some notebooks and pens, and a charger they could both use for their phones. After they finished packing, they left the quiet dormitory and sought out Dylan's car in the student lot-- an ancient Honda Civic. It'd once been a bright silver color, but the years had seen it fade something closer to gunmetal, and it sounded like crap whenever it started up. Approaching two-hundred-thousand miles, the little car refused to quit, however. It was a manual transmission, and Dylan rather enjoyed driving it despite its dinginess.

Dylan hopped into the driver's seat and revved up the engine, shaking his head as it roared to life. “How 'bout it, old girl? Ready to make the drive?”

Kenji sat down in the passenger's seat and shut his door. He was still searching for a reason to back out, to keep from diving deeper into this strange riddle that was drawing them into the middle of nowhere. “What about lodging? By the time we get out there we'll probably be exhausted. We don't have anywhere to stay and I don't think I can afford a hotel.”

“That's why God invented gas station coffee, Kenji,” was Dylan's rejoinder. Then, he added, “Plus, if need be, we can crash in the car. Put the seat back and it's about as comfortable as any bed you'll find in a Motel 8.”

Peeling out of the university parking lot, Kenji and Dylan paid a visit to the gas station. They filled the tank and procured a few sacks' worth of snacks and drinks, which they housed in the back seat with their packed bags. Chewing on a strip of beef jerky, Dylan then maneuvered out of the gas station and started onto Washington Avenue, which led to a highway entrance ramp. As he did so, he fished an old dash-mounted GPS system from the glove compartment. Plugging the cord into the lighter socket, he tossed it into Kenji's lap. “Put the address into that thing.”

Kenji glared at the fossil in his lap. The touchscreen on it scarcely functioned, and by the time he got the destination entered into it, they were already on the highway. “You need a new GPS,” he muttered, straining as he pressed the suction cup mount onto the dash.

Dylan straightened out so that he could see it better and stuck another strip of jerky into his mouth. “Here we go! If it's buried treasure, what say we split it sixty-forty? I mean, since I'm the one ferrying us to the spot and all...”

Kenji rolled his eyes. “Are you sure we should be doing this?” he asked. “Doesn't it seem a little bit silly? There may not be anything there, and the fact that those characters in the recording matched the coordinates to this spot may just be...”

“What, a coincidence?” Dylan chortled. “Maybe so. But we're only doing this because your dumb ass is obsessed. Don't you worry-- if we get out there and nothing comes of it, or if it's just a bunch of cows eating grass, I'll never let you live it down.”

Kenji wasn't worried about that. The thought that something might come of this journey was what had him worked up. He could deal with Dylan's jabs, no problem. But what would happen if they made the drive and something did come of this?

Kenji cracked open a Mountain Dew and leaned back against the seat, watching the scenery dart by as Dylan approached seventy miles per hour.

SIX

The old Honda lurched and groaned. With every passing mile Kenji felt sure they'd end up breaking down. The car never quit, however. No matter how dire the sounds the engine made, or how much they bounced whenever they encountered bumps, the vehicle didn't falter. They were making good time if the readout on the GPS was to be believed. Kenji had made his way through his twenty ounce bottle of soda and snacked on some gummy bears by the time they crossed State lines. Once they were into Minnesota, they decided to stop at a highway rest station for a late lunch.

The pair took their time in eating. They'd talked a bit during their drive; girls, classes, family drama had all been subjects of interest. However as they returned to the car, their stomachs full, the true weight of their journey seemed to hit them all at once and they resumed the drive in near-silence. Rolling back onto the highway, they pushed into yet more rural settings than they'd seen in Minnesota so far, leaving tiny towns in the rearview that appeared unpeopled and empty.

The further they went, the more Kenji's apprehension grew. Dylan appeared stone-faced, simply focused on the drive. If he was at all unnerved, then there was no way to know it. Kenji, though, squirmed in his seat without surcease, the dimming sky only adding to the terror he felt. Where were these feelings of dread coming from? Was it simply fear of the unknown? He leaned back his seat a bit and chewed on his thumbnail, his eyes growing a bit heavy. The meal in his gut sat like a brick, refusing to be digested. Up ahead was a barn, set deep into a nest of trees. They passed it in the next instant and it faded from view.

If it'd been up to him, Kenji would've turned back. They'd already made it this far, though, and despite his apprehensions, his curiosity still bubbled beneath the surface. He tried to reassure himself, to remind himself that there was no danger to be found here. He and his friend were simply on a short road trip to a spot they'd heard about in a song. Frankly, there was nothing even remotely sinister on the face of it, and it was because of this that his fearful mindset was all the more distressing to Kenji.

“How much you wanna bet that this is where the members of Jackal Priest are living now?” said Dylan, trying to break the silence.

“The group died in a plane crash years ago,” replied Kenji. “Doubt that's what we'll find there.”

Dylan shrugged. “Yeah, well, maybe they're not actually dead, but just living in hiding. Incognito, or something, and they left little clues in their songs. Like Elvis.”

“Oh, for God's sake.”

With the dimming of the sun a light snow began to fall. The windshield was covered in a thin layer of flakes, and the rickety wipers were called into action, clearing away the wintery mess with a relentless clicking. Kenji sat up, watching the road. The snow was very light, not accumulating in any appreciable way, but he wanted to make sure they didn't roll into a patch of black ice. “You should slow down, just in case,” he said, wiping the heaviness from his eyes.

Dylan motioned to the GPS. “Nah, we'll be all right. And anyway, we're almost there.”

Looking to the display, Kenji realized they were on the very threshold of Akeley. They'd made the drive in just over eight hours. Considering the fact that they'd stopped for lunch and gas, that was quite a marvel. Traffic had been good and Dylan had never let up on the accelerator, so it looked as though they would arrive at their destination just as the sun was fully set. The thought made Kenji tense up a little. He wished that they'd had the foresight to plan their trip in such a way that their arrival would take place during the daylight hours. Instead, they'd just dropped what they were doing and rushed off at once.

The GPS had taken them off of the highway and they were now thrust onto a series of winding and unmarked roads. The way the old display flickered and seemed to second-guess itself made Kenji, already uneasy, still more nervous. Every few minutes the GPS had to stop and recalibrate, searching for the satellites that fed it.

It was about nine in the evening when they arrived at their destination. The GPS gave a pleasant chirp as they rolled up to the spot. The road was a very narrow one, made of dirt and gravel, and as they reached its terminus, Kenji stared out the windshield with bated breath. The snowfall had ceased, and a terrible stillness enveloped them. “Are you sure this is the place?” asked Kenji, gulping down a hint of bile.

Dylan nodded slowly, dividing his gaze between the bright GPS display and the sight directly ahead of them. “Yeah... this is definitely it.”

They had made it to their destination. The coordinates, first gleaned from a recording in an obscure song, had led them to a small shack in the middle of rural Minnesota. It was a single story, looked to be of fairly-recent construction, and featured only a single window, as best they could tell from this angle.

And the window was lit.

The shack sat in the center of an open field. The grass was overgrown in places, and the sky overhead was laced in knotted power lines that were seemingly long out of use. There was nothing else to be seen for miles; this was the first and only habitation they'd run across in the last half hour of their drive.

Dylan cleared his throat and leaned on the wheel a bit, killing the headlights but leaving the car running. Suddenly his care-free visage seemed infected with the very same nervousness that'd plagued Kenji's for the duration of the drive. He gave a weak laugh. “I don't really know what we're supposed to do here. I mean, do we just go knock on the door and tell whoever is in there that we heard their address in a song, or...?”

Kenji tried to calm his breathing. The voice in the back of his head, the one that had tried to warn him off from making this trip in the first place, had changed its tune and seemed to be saying something else.

I tried to warn you. Now it's too late.

Carefully, so as to keep quiet, Dylan killed the ignition and opened the door. Stepping out into the chill night, he shot Kenji a glance and tugged on the collar of his jacket. “Let's see who's home, I guess.”

Kenji exited the car and fell into step behind Dylan. Approaching the door of the shack, they peered at one another nervously before Dylan finally found the courage to issue a firm knock.

The two waited in total silence, scarcely breathing, for an answer.

SEVEN

Reggie Cash sat in his recliner, the olive-colored cushions sinking beneath his bony frame. He'd cranked up the thermostat before sitting down, and a pleasant warmth belched out of the vent just above his seat. Fumbling with the television remote, he turned on his VCR and started up a program he'd recorded the day before, a documentary he'd been meaning to catch for some time.

Sipping at a glass of milk, Reggie crossed his heels and waited for the tape to finish tracking. Then, when it was ready, he hit play and watched as the tail-end of a car dealership commercial flickered away. The opening of the documentary followed. It was a World War Two documentary that dealt chiefly with the black soldiers who fought in segregated units-- of which his father was one. He was hoping there would be some coverage of his father's unit, the 92nd Infantry Division. The credits started up, showing footage of the war. Reggie fast-forwarded through them, taking another sip of milk.

Nearly missing the start of the documentary, he hit play and set aside his glass, watching intently. The scene was one of modern day Normandy, and the narrator, a British man, was discussing D-Day. The scenery was beautiful at present, but footage of the battle, and of its aftermath, was quite another matter. The narrator went on to discuss the regiments of black soldiers who'd fought in that historic battle, and soon thereafter a newly-erected monument was brought into focus.

The monument was made of marble, and was flanked by a large, ornately-fashioned fountain that ran with crystal-clear water. A small crowd ambled about the fountain, which was stationed in a public park in Manhattan. Dogs were walked, passersby sat down and held conversations on benches nearby, while the narrator went on about the enormous number of names that were listed on the monument and the generous donations that'd made its construction possible.

Something else caught Reggie's attention, however. While he should have been looking at the monument and appreciating its sleek design, the emergence of something in the background proved more arresting to him. It was a person standing in the crowd, a woman.

Reggie leaned forward, squinting.

The woman, very pale and dressed in a long, black dress that ended near the tops of her ankles, seemed to be speaking. Her voice melded in with the din of the crowd, but seemed to hover just above it, in a slightly higher register than the ambient noise. The narrator had finished his spiel and the monument was being shown from different angles. In each of these shots could be seen the pale, raven-haired woman. And in every instance her lips could be seen to move.

What struck Reggie as most strange was the way this woman's gaze cut into him from the screen. Unless he was mistaken it seemed as though this woman was speaking directly to him. Of course, he knew that to be impossible. This documentary was old; it'd come out about ten years ago and he'd only recently caught it on television after years of meaning to watch it. But what was she saying? What drove her to stare so intently through the lens of the camera from her spot behind the monument? The makers of this documentary hadn't purposefully zoomed in on her or anything; like so many of the other spectators she'd simply been caught in frame, captured standing in a shady spot beneath a pair of Poplar trees behind the hulking monument.

And then she was gone. She literally blinked out of view just before the next scene started up, and her sudden disappearance proved not a little jarring.

The scene changed, and old footage of US bombers began to play. But Reggie wasn't paying attention to that anymore. A chill worked its way down his spine and he immediately began to rewind the tape. He had to see that woman again, make sure that he hadn't just imagined the whole thing. Zipping through the memorial scene, Reggie paused and found exactly what he was looking for.

There she was, standing in the shade, twenty or thirty feet from the monument and just barely out of focus.

The woman.

Reggie let the tape play once more, and followed her with his eyes as the camera panned this way and that. No matter what angle the documentarians captured the memorial in, the woman managed to figure into the scene in some way. All the while, her lips were moving and a breathy voice sailed into the air which competed with the background chatter of the crowd and the deep tones of the narrator.

And then she fizzled out of sight in an instant. One minute she was there, the next she vanished. Reggie told himself that this was likely due to some film effect, but the more he re-watched the footage, the less sure of that he became. The woman had been there one moment, and was gone the next, fading from view like she'd been suddenly erased.

Rewinding yet again, Reggie played the sequence for a third time. This go around, he cranked up the volume and tried to make out what was being said by this strange, pale woman. He couldn't say just why he was so interested in this oddity; she had probably been some loony, some kook that always talked to herself and whose voice hadn't been fully edited from the finished footage. Still, he felt compelled to listen. The longer he stared at the screen, at the figure's pale countenance and unwavering stare, the more he wanted to know what she was saying. The way she was looking out at him from every shot gave the impression that her eyes were studying the inside of his living room.

No matter how loud the television got, he couldn't make out what was being said. The woman's disappearance coincided with a strange crackling sound, followed by the deep roar of bombers flying over the ocean in the next scene.

It'd been about forty years since he'd left Vietnam, but Reggie could still remember what it was like to have Charlie watch him from deep within the jungle. Sitting in his living room, clutching at the plush arm rests of the recliner, he felt himself transported back in time to the war, felt the very same hostility directed at him from some undetermined point deep in the television screen. The pull of foreign eyes was unmistakable. His pulse began to race, his eyes scanned the shadowed corners of the cluttered living room.

Calm down, he told himself. Ain't no one here. You're alone.

Trouble was, he felt anything but alone.

Though the scene had changed to grainy black and white footage of the era, if he looked to the screen he still saw flickers of the pale woman in his mind's eye. With great hesitance, he began to rewind once more, pausing the tape just a few moments before the mysterious woman vanished from the screen. Lowering the footrest, he stood up from his chair and sauntered across the room, stooping in front of the screen to get a better look.

The tape was paused, so the figure of this woman should have been completely frozen. And though she didn't move or react in any appreciable way, Reggie got the impression that her form on this tape was unnaturally cognizant. He felt that, despite being a mere recording, she existed somewhere within the tape, and was capable of appraising him in some way. She wasn't flesh and blood, maybe, but she existed. The woman's glare was cutting, savage, and even in freeze-frame she had a life of her own.

“Nonsense... you're talking nonsense,” he muttered, reaching behind him for the remote.

He shut off the TV and tossed the remote onto his coffee table.

In the moment before he'd turned it off, Reggie fancied he saw the figure move in some subtle way. Her gaze had narrowed, or else she'd turned her head very slightly. He told himself it was nothing and hurriedly set off for bed.

EIGHT

Reggie had taken longer than normal in getting up that morning. An unrestful sleep was only partially ameliorated by a hot bath and a close shave. When he was through with that, he prepared himself some toast and hot tea while scanning the day's paper in his recliner.

Now and then, his gaze darted off of the page and to the VCR that sat beneath his television, the little red power light glowing.

Reggie, some years retired, lived a rather care-free life. Between his pension, social security and the money he brought in from some old investments, he could do most anything he pleased within reason. With nowhere to be, nothing to do, he should have done as he usually did and called up some friends for lunch, or prepare to spend a day on the town.

His freedom sometimes led to indecision however, and on a morning like this one, indecision was a very dangerous thing. He felt himself on the precipice of choosing a different path for his day, of embarking on a new kind of quest that might lead him to uncharted territory. Without any solid plans in mind, his thoughts were free to wander.

And without fail, they wandered repeatedly to the videotape in his VCR. More specifically, he couldn't stop thinking about the strange woman and the scarcely audible speech she'd uttered in that scene near the war memorial.

Though he knew it would be better to simply banish his curiosity surrounding the thing and forget all about it, he felt a strong urge to investigate, and had even begun to consider avenues by which he might make sense of the woman's words.

A friend of his, Steven, worked in video. He did wedding shoots, mostly, but had a rather large audio-visual set up at his disposal and could easily clean up the tape so that the woman's speech could be heard. Steven probably wouldn't even charge him for it; what did he have to lose?

Pacing in front of the television, he bent down and ejected the tape. The VCR clicked, the edge of the tape sticking out. He plucked it out and quickly stuffed it into his bag. Then, locking up his home, he decided to pay Steven a visit.

What have you got to lose? he kept asking himself, as if to color the errand as a harmless one. It probably wouldn't cost him anything but a bit of time. When the speech proved to be nothing but gibberish, he could lay this fascination of his with the footage to rest and have a good laugh.

But somehow, in the back of his mind, he'd already decided that he did have something to lose by digging deeper. His curiosity might be sated by investigating further, but there was no telling what might come tied up in that knowledge. Just carrying the tape in his bag and tossing the thing into his passenger seat made him feel unclean.

***

Reggie's 1970 Buick LeSabre was a full restoration. Sleek and clean as the day it rolled off of the production line, driving it was one of his life's greatest pleasures.

Today, though, it was all he could do to keep it going in a straight line.

The weather was fair and traffic was light, but the scenery was thoroughly spoiled by the thing he'd brought with him. His foul passenger, the videotape, sat within his leather bag, transmitting a harsh aura all the while. Perhaps it was just his imagination that made him think the tape permeated an evil air, and yet, as he navigated the city streets and pulled into the parking lot outside of Steven's place, he'd counted no less than three pale, black-haired passersby who'd reminded him of the woman in that very tape. He'd felt sharp, hostile gazes locked onto him as he'd driven through the streets, had sensed the exact, nebulous danger that'd struck him the night before in his living room.

Parking the car, Reggie stepped out. He smoothed out his dress shirt and pulled the leather bag out of the passenger seat, slinging it over his shoulder. Then, locking up, he took one brief glance around before setting off for the door to Steven's studio.

Steven ran his small operation next to an old insurance outfit and kept irregular hours. Reggie wondered if he should have called ahead, but lucked out and found the front door lit up with the neon OPEN sign he remembered. Entering, he slipped into the quiet little storefront and past the rows of framed wedding pictures. Inside, he found Steven lounging in his seat, heels up on his desk and a breakfast sandwich in his hand.

At hearing the door open, Steven sat upright and glanced Reggie's way. “How can I help--”

Reggie sported a grin. “Hey there, Steve.”

Ripping a hunk of his breakfast sandwich away, Steve chuckled to himself. “You scared me, Reg. For a minute there I thought I was going to have to get up and do some work,” he managed while chewing. “What brings you out here this fine morning?”

Reggie walked over to the desk and fished around in his bag for the tape. “I wouldn't relax just yet. I got something here I want you to take a peek at. Now, it ain't a big job, but I was wondering if you could help me do something with this tape here.” Reggie held out the tape for Steven's appraisal.

Straightening his glasses and brushing a few crumbs from the breast of his sweater, Steven sat up and took the tape. Flipping it around in his hands, he shrugged. “Yeah, sure, what do you need?”

At the prospect of answering this question, Reggie's mouth grew suddenly dry. How best could he phrase his request without it sounding strange? There was a particular scene he wanted cleaned up. Specifically, he wanted Steven to play with the audio so that he'd be able to hear what the woman in that monument scene was uttering. “You got a VCR in here? I'll show ya.”

Steven led the way to the back room, where all of the audio-visual equipment was held. There were stacks and stacks of dense machines whose names and uses Reggie couldn't be sure of. At the end of the room, stationed beneath a large screen, was something that Reggie recognized however. A tape deck.

Steve switched on the TV and VCR, then inserted the tape. Crossing his arms, he turned the volume up a few clicks and handed the remote off to Reggie.

Reggie had left the tape more or less in the correct spot, and had to rewind only a few seconds to show Steven what he wanted. “This scene here. You see that woman?” Reggie reached out towards the screen, pointing at the pale woman in the background. She was standing in the shade, her lips moving and her breathy voice serving as an undercurrent to the narrator's elegant British annunciation. “She's talking, but I can't hardly hear what she's saying, you know? Think you can clean this up for me? Just this scene. I want to know what she's saying.”

Steve nodded, his gaze narrowing as he watched the footage unfold. Then, he grinned. “Sure, that wouldn't be too much trouble. But what for? She an old friend of yours?”

Reggie laughed. Steven couldn't have been more off the mark if he'd tried. “Something like that,” he replied.

“Tell you what. I haven't got much going on today. Unless I get a bunch of folks knocking down my door I should be able to fix this up for you by this afternoon. Come by around one and I'll have it done.”

With profuse thanks, Reggie left the shop and returned to the LeSabre.

The wait had begun.

Cruising to a little spot downtown he often went for brunch, Reggie decided he'd treat himself to a small meal and to the company of other people while waiting for Steven to finish working on the tape. The thought of returning home, of wandering the streets in search of entertainment, was repellant to him. Some eggs and coffee, perhaps a mimosa, would set him straight and soothe his nerves. Leaning back in the seat as he rolled up to a stoplight, he allowed himself a chuckle. What business did he have being so worked up on a lovely day like this one?

Reggie Cash was, more often than not, a carefree guy. His friends all knew him as such, and he was famously difficult to rile up. Life's slings and arrows rolled off of him ordinarily, but here he'd gone and allowed some old bit in a documentary to unseat his mind. Thinking back on it, he felt almost ashamed for his frightful fascination with the tape. Why had he insisted on going to Steven's? Why was he so damn interested in what was almost certainly foolishness?

Reggie began weighing the possibility of contacting Steven and asking him to just throw the tape away when something caught his eye on the road. He was stopped, the first in a long line of cars, and had looked towards the left side of the crosswalk when he involuntarily gripped the wheel till his arms shook.

A mass of pedestrians began crossing just then, and among the throng Reggie caught a flash of recognition in the gaze of a tall, pale woman with shoulder-length black hair. He had to do a double-take.

For a minute there, he could have sworn it was the woman in the tape.

Studying her more closely, he found she was, in fact, a complete stranger. The woman was on her cell phone, looked ten or more years younger than the woman on the tape had, and had barely spared him a passing glance.

Reggie sank into his seat with an enormous sigh. “Dear Lord, give me strength,” he said, shaking his head.

The group of pedestrians had crossed and the light had changed. Reggie didn't notice at once, and the honking of numerous horns sounded from behind.

The LeSabre lurched onward, its driver dabbing fresh sweat from his brow.

NINE

The egg yolk had pooled upon his plate and was very quickly becoming cold. He toyed with his fork and took a generous sip from his mimosa before handing the plate off to the waitress. He simply didn't have any appetite. Glancing around the restaurant, Reggie spotted some of the regulars. An old, retired couple who made brunch a daily ritual sat in their usual corner. A couple of young professionals in business casual had come by for an early lunch, and were paying more attention to their cell phones than they were to their food.

The windows to his back gave a great view of the small garden outside. It was well-manicured, filled with shapely trees and shrubs. At the center was a small fountain surrounded in flowers that hadn't yet succumbed to the winter. Even from inside the restaurant the dribbling of the fountain could be heard clearly, mingling with the instrumental jazz that came through the sound system.

Whenever Reggie focused on the sounds of the fountain he felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle. The sound reminded him of the fountain outside of the war memorial in the documentary. Though he turned and stole many a look outside those windows, Reggie saw nothing out of sorts. It didn't stop him from repeating the futile ritual numerous times over the course of his visit, though. He couldn't shake the feeling that someone was outside, looking at him intently. His training so many decades ago had taught him what it felt like to be preyed upon. He knew the gaze of another person, of a predator, when he felt it. Just because there was nothing to be seen outside didn't mean no one was staring at him. All it meant was that they had a well-hidden vantage point.

Chewing on his straw, Reggie tried in vain to shove the notion from his head. No, he thought, You're damn crazy, you know that? Ain't no vantage point... no one's staring at you out there. You're just bothered because of that ridiculous tape. Getting old, Reggie. Letting bullshit like this rile you up. You oughta know better.

The waitress came by once again, clearing his empty coffee mug. “You doing all right, hon?” she asked, eyeing him with evident concern. Her name was Karen, and she worked at the place almost daily. She and Reggie were on a first-name basis and she could tell when something was eating away at him. Usually Reggie was talkative, enthusiastic, relaxed. When she returned to the table to find him hunched, nervous, she knew something was wrong.

“Oh, I'm fine, Karen, thanks,” he lied, forcing a smile.

The waitress walked off. “Let me know if you need anything, all right?” Karen stopped at the next table, speaking to one of the young professionals and motioning to her coffee cup. She was probably asking whether the customer was in need of another refill, but the trouble was that Reggie couldn't hear her. Karen's voice was reduced to a murmur; the music, the sounds the other customers made, the gurgling of the fountain outside all came together in a single swell, masking the sound of Karen's voice until it was impossible to make out.

Reggie bit down harder on the straw.

No matter what he did he couldn't stop thinking about that goddamned tape. He checked the time on his phone. It was past noon.

Unable to stay put any longer he hurriedly settled the bill, left a tip beneath his half-finished mimosa and bid the staff farewell. Hopefully Steven would be finished editing the tape. The wait was slowly killing him and he found himself possessed of such an immense nervous energy that he felt he might burst if he didn't get out of the restaurant then.

As he made his way out the door, Karen stopped him. “You sure you're all right, Reg?”

Reggie grinned sheepishly but stopped short of saying yes.

If he was being honest, he wasn't really sure.

***

By the time Reggie walked in, Steven was through with the tape. He met Reggie in the main room and handed over both the original and the edited copy. “All done,” he said, hands in his pockets.

“What do I owe ya?” asked Reggie.

“Not a thing,” replied Steven. “It was simple. Only took me about a half hour. Trouble is, though, that I couldn't make heads or tails of what that woman was saying.” Steven frowned. “I must've watched it a dozen times after I cleaned up the audio, but it sounds like straight gibberish to me. Anyway, I hope it's helpful. Won't be able to clear it up much more than that.”

Reggie placed the tapes in his bag, both the unmarked original and the edited version, which bore a red sticker on the edge, and shook Steven's hand. “Appreciate it a great deal, Steve. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do-- this weekend, what say you and I meet for lunch? My treat.”

Steve laughed. “Sounds good, but I'm not a cheap date, Reg.”

The two bantered back and forth for a time, but for Reggie the usual joy he found in such an interaction was missing. He was simply going through the motions, his mind given over wholly to burning curiosity. He wanted nothing more than to race home and watch the tape. Perhaps it would yield some answers. Steven had gleaned nothing of note from it, but perhaps it would be different for him. Maybe there was, just as he'd fancied the night before when first watching the thing, some message intended for him and him alone.

Firing up the LeSabre, Reggie sped home. He drove quickly, ran all of the yellows and sailed into his garage a short while later. Leaping out of the car with bag in tow, he entered the house and headed straight for the living room.

Upon entering he found the room unseasonably cold. Though it was winter, the weather out was rather fair. It shouldn't have been nearly so cold as this. Moreover, despite the sunlight coming in from between the curtains, the room was draped in a dense, uncharacteristic shadow. Thoroughly unnerved, he removed the edited tape from his bag and paced around the living room for some time, simply glaring down at it.

When finally he found the courage to throw it into the VCR, he didn't bother taking a seat. He stood in front of the television, bumped up the volume and buried his hands in the pockets of his slacks, waiting for the clip to begin.

Steven had pared the thing down to the scene at the war memorial. Its total duration was just over thirty seconds, and from the very first Reggie could tell it was edited. All of the sounds he'd heard on his previous viewings were completely muted, or at least substantially minimized, and when the pale woman entered into view some seconds later, her speech proved chillingly clear.

Without all of the other noise interference in the way, the impression that this woman was addressing Reggie specifically was effectively redoubled.

Reggie was a man who'd traversed the jungles of Vietnam once upon a time, who'd killed men during his years of service and who'd weathered the flashbacks that his tours had saddled him with. He was neither a man of weak nor impressionable mind, and had known, first-hand, the darkest niches of his species.

So, why then did he shake as he listened to this strange woman speaking on the television? His reaction wasn't something he could control. His legs went weak, his pulse skyrocketed and his chest grew tight.

The message was a simple one, and to anyone other than Reggie, it may well have seemed like nothing more than a pointless mess. She was listing off a series of letters and numbers, and the exact same sequence was repeated a total of three times before she suddenly vanished off the screen and the edited recording ended.

The message had gone thusly: EN17DA43TU85

When the tape was through, Reggie was left stunned, and he didn't move from the spot in front of his television for some time. What he'd just heard, he felt reasonably sure, were coordinates of some kind. He searched in his mind, trying to recall just where he'd heard such codes in the past. It wasn't during his military service... the coordinates used by the US military had been different.

No, it'd been during his days as an amateur radio operator that he'd heard such coordinates with regularity. “The Maidenhead Locator System”, it was called, and amateur HAM radio enthusiasts often used them in their transmissions. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, Reggie had taken up amateur radio. As a child he'd been fascinated with radios, and the chance to connect with other enthusiasts had been exciting for him. This was in the days before the internet, and for years he'd engaged in the hobby as a kind of social experiment, communicating with other operators in far-off places he'd never been. That was where he'd become acquainted with Maidenhead coordinates.

Replaying the video and jotting down the string of characters the woman relayed, he felt certain now that they were, in fact, coordinates.

EN17DA43TU85

But where did they lead?

Shutting off the television, he walked back to his bedroom, moving a number of books off of his desk and unearthing the dusty desktop computer he seldom used. It was about ten years old, ran on a discontinued operating system and rarely saw any action these days. Reggie preferred to see his friends in-person, rather than keeping up with them over the computer. Now and then he still found a use for the thing however, and so kept it in working order. When it'd finally started up, he loaded the browser and started searching for a database of Maidenhead coordinates.

When he'd finally pulled up the site, he copied the string of characters slowly into the search bar and hit enter. The old computer whirred as it thought over the inquiry, and then slowly spit out an answer.

The address given was in his home state of Minnesota. A little town called Akeley, which he'd never heard of. The map provided showed it to be a rather rural area, dotted in small lakes. What could possibly be the meaning of this? Pawing at his forehead and fighting off the growing dread that rippled through his stomach, Reggie tried to make sense of this find.

A woman had appeared in the documentary he'd taped, in the background of an early scene. She'd lingered on screen for about a minute before suddenly vanishing, and had spoken quietly all the while. Her message, it seemed, was a collection of characters, a set of Maidenhead Locator coordinates that, when applied, pointed to a remote spot in rural Minnesota. But why? Was it just sheer, dumb luck that the woman's ramblings corresponded to this particular location?

He wanted to say it was so, but his intuition told him otherwise.

This could not be mere coincidence. He felt sure of it. And this certainty inspired yet greater dread than anything that'd come before it.

Scanning the map, he found that Akeley was about three hours away from his home in St. Paul. If he was willing to take a three-hour drive to this spot, whose finer characteristics were unclear and pixellated, it was possible he'd get his answers.

But did he really want to know what this was all about?

Reggie stared at the flickering computer screen and massaged his temples. He wasn't sure what to do with this new information. “Dear Lord, give me strength,” he muttered for the second time that day.

TEN

The door to the shack flew open, and both Kenji and Dylan jumped backward.

Staring out at them narrowly from within the shack was a tall black man with broad shoulders. He looked older, perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, and wore his greyish hair in a closely-shaven style. “What are you doing here?” demanded the man, looming in the doorway, fists balled.

Dylan fell back a couple of paces. “I'm sorry, there must have been some kind of mistake. We're... we're actually leaving now.”

Kenji, too, took the hint and glanced back at the Honda, wondering if they hadn't just trespassed onto this man's private property. “Sorry,” he uttered.

The man in the doorway didn't budge, however. Looking down at the two of them, he repeated, “What are you doing here?” Then, he continued. “How did you kids find this place?”

Kenji and Dylan looked to one another, exchanging nervous glances, and realized there was no telling this guy the truth without sounding utterly insane. What were they supposed to say in such an instance? That they'd stumbled upon a secret message in some obscure song and followed a set of coordinates all the way here on a whim? When he thought about everything that'd preceded their arrival, even Kenji had trouble believing it all.

“Well...” began Dylan, “we were just, uh...”

The man stepped out, cocking his head to the side. There was a shift in his expression; a bit of ferocity ebbed away and curiosity came to replace it. His dark lips were pursed for a time as he appraised the students before him. Then, he actually cracked a slight grin. “Don't... don't tell me you two got the coordinates, too.”

Kenji's heart very nearly stopped. “W-what?” he gasped, staggering forward. “You know about the coordinates?”

The man began to laugh, holding onto the inside of the doorway to support himself. “This... this shit is getting out of hand. Insane, just completely insane!” he proclaimed, his voice echoing through the night.

Dylan sidled up to Kenji and leaned in for a whisper. “Y-you mean we aren't the only ones who followed the message in the song?” Looking to the older man before them, he shook his head. “This guy doesn't look like he listens to dark ambient music, though.”

Relaxing a great deal, the man waved them over and returned to the shack. “I'm sorry about that,” he said. “I've been a little on edge since I arrived. Things have been... strange for me recently. Ever since I got into this mess, I haven't been feeling right.”

Kenji slowly entered the tiny building and Dylan followed. He could certainly relate to the man. Ever since hearing the woman's voice in that song, Kenji hadn't been able to shake a nebulous dread. The fact that someone else had been drawn out to this remote location should have been a comfort to him, however as he entered the small shack and had a look around, comfort proved fleeting.

The shack was possessed of a single room. One window opened out onto the field, giving them a near-limitless view of the vast plains beyond. There were two metal folding chairs to be found within, both of them pushed up behind a wooden desk. Sitting on this desk was a television, VCR and radio. There was nothing else to be seen. Every surface was coated in a dense, mostly undisturbed-layer of dust, except where this man had very recently tread. The light fixture above their heads was a very simple one, a pair of exposed sockets bearing two light bulbs. It appeared that no one had been in this place for a long time. Perhaps several years.

“The name's Reggie. Reggie Cash,” said the man, extending a large hand and shaking theirs with gusto. His grip was formidable for a man of his years. “And you two are?”

Dylan introduced them both as Kenji's gaze scoured the tiny room. “My name's Dylan Hudson. This is my friend, Kenji Ando. We're students at UW--Madison.”

“Students, eh?” replied Reggie. “So, I take it the two of you caught the documentary on TV and followed the coordinates all the way here?”

Kenji was yanked from his trance. “Documentary?” He paused, working over the word on his lips as though it were alien to him. “No, we heard a woman speaking in a song... What's this about a documentary?”

“A song?” Reggie's eyes grew wide and he glanced at the two of them in apparent disbelief. He pulled out one of the dusty folding chairs and slumped down into it, a cloud of hazy dirt rising off of it in his wake. “You mean to tell me you heard that woman speaking in a song? That's where you got the coordinates?”

Kenji nodded, fishing his phone from his pocket. “That's right. You can hear it for yourself if you want.” He found the song in question, entitled “Cannibalism”, and skipped ahead to the part where he and Dylan had heard the woman speaking. When he hit play, the crowd noise started. There was the barking of a dog. The sounds filled the little room and seemed amplified a thousand times, burdening the rarified air with extra weight.

And then the woman began to speak. It was muffled, of course, but Reggie understood at once what was being said.

“We cleaned up the audio. That's how we got ahold of the coordinates,” explained Dylan. “It was too hard to hear in the original track, but once we isolated her voice, it was easy to make the message out.”

Reggie understood exactly, and rose from his seat, picking up a leather bag from the floor. He pulled a videotape from it and walked over to the VCR on the desk. Palming away a thick layer of dust, he cleared the television screen and switched on both machines. They buzzed to life and glowed sluggishly, their components grinding and clicking for the years of apparent disuse. When the VCR had warmed up, Reggie slipped the tape in and hit the Play button, pointing to the screen. “Watch this. I recorded it off of TV a few nights back. It's from a documentary on World War Two, but this woman caught my eye.”

It was a short clip, obviously edited for the muted nature of all the other noises. A large slab of stone, perhaps a war memorial, entered into view. Just behind it, hovering in frame unsteadily, was a pale woman with long, black hair. The dress she wore was the same shade of deep black, and her lips were moving. The breathy voice of this woman was the same as that which they'd found on the MP3 file. The message, too, was exactly the same. She repeated the coordinates, EN17DA43TU85, three times, before she suddenly vanished from the screen. One minute she was there. Then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone, as if plucked away by an invisible hand.

Kenji stared at the television a long while, unable to shake the intense stare of the woman in the video. He'd listened to her voice countless times over the past day, had reviewed the contents of her message until he'd memorized them, but this was the first time he'd seen the speaker.

It didn't feel like the first time, though.

Perhaps he was just being fanciful, however something of the woman's intensity and appearance had been transmitted into his mind previously, despite his only having heard her voice. Though it had been only a vague, unformed notion up to that moment when he'd first laid eyes upon her on the dusty television screen, he'd already glimpsed some aspect of her haunting presence, of her intense stare before. Perhaps it'd been in his dreams. More likely, he'd studied the audio recording so closely that a kernel of dread had been planted in his mind, and the figure of this woman had been fleshed out in full before he even knew it. There wasn't any good way for him to describe it, except to say that she looked precisely the way he'd expected.

Reggie shut off the television and then drooped back into his chair, staring at the floor. His leather shoes gleamed in the dull light, and he buried the tip of one into the floor, making little circles in the dust. “You two heard her in a song. I saw her in a video.” He pawed at his cleanly-shaven cheek. “I wonder where else she might turn up.”

It was a terrifying proposition, that this woman may be present in other media. Not that Kenji himself hadn't considered it. It was entirely possible that this mysterious woman's voice or image would not be limited solely to these two pieces of media. “But why?” asked Kenji aloud, more for his own benefit than anyone else's. “It doesn't make sense. Why was this woman pictured in the documentary. I mean, she obviously doesn't belong there. The camera guy didn't focus on her. And then she disappears at the end of the clip. It's like she was a particle of dust in the lens that blew away in the next instant. Same thing with the song. Her voice just kind of passed through at the end there, masked by other stuff. Like it was interference of some kind.”

Dylan was pacing around the room, looking up at the unfinished ceiling. The mess of wooden rafters was overgrown with dust and featured intricate clusters of cobwebs. “Never saw this coming,” he said. “Thought for sure we'd get some answers coming all this way. Instead, the plot thickens.”

Reggie sighed. “One thing for sure; this ain't all just a coincidence. We can agree on that much, right? All of us followed this little message out here to the-middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota. That's gotta mean something.”

“Yeah, but what?” asked Dylan.

Kenji grit his teeth. Every atom in his body seemed to be shouting the same thing at once. Run. Run far from here. You've walked into a trap.

“If we had any sense,” continued Reggie, “we wouldn't stick around to find out. We'd take off. Get the hell outta here before something happens. Because something about this entire thing just don't sit right. Know what I mean?”

Kenji agreed. There was something ominous about this entire thing. Certainly they hadn't been brought here for anything good. All of the evidence, scant and cryptic though it was, pointed to something uncertain but sinister. Nevertheless, they'd driven more than seven hours to this spot. They'd decided to follow the clues, to knock on this door. They'd had their fair share of chances to turn their backs on this, but they'd insisted on coming this far nevertheless. The time for running away was over, and Kenji knew it. They'd blown any chance they'd ever had of leaving this behind them. They were all-in. “I think we should hang out for a bit. You know, try and talk through this. Maybe we can figure out what this is all about.”

ELEVEN

They could all agree on one thing: No one had been in the shack for years. The utter filth of the spot was sufficient to confirm that. The building was in good repair. There were no leaks to be found, and the structure was sturdily built. It couldn't have been more than a decade old, by Reggie's estimation, but it seemed as though it'd sat vacant at least that long. Someone had built this little shack in the middle of nowhere and placed a couple of items inside. And then they'd never returned, by the looks of it.

Reggie discussed his arrival at the spot. His Buick LeSabre was parked on the other side of the shack, just out of view of the dirt driveway. He'd arrived nearly an hour before the two of them and had been unable to switch on the lights at first. It turned out there was a generator outside, and with a little doing he'd managed to restore power to the shack just a few minutes before the two of them had knocked. He'd had a look around the grounds, too. There was little to be found except for grass. The lawn immediately surrounding the shack was comprised of two types, one short, the other tall, and the nearest tree seemed to be half a mile away. There were no other buildings around that he'd been able to see, and both Kenji and Dylan agreed that they hadn't seen any for quite some distance. They were united in an extremely out-of-the-way place.

“You know,” began Reggie, stretching out in the chair, “ever since I got here I've felt like someone's watching me. Before that, too, but especially once I drove up to this spot. It never stops. It's like someone's looking down at me from above.”

Kenji knew this feeling all too well. The same sensation had haunted him since the first time he'd heard the woman's voice on the recording, back in his dorm room.

Dylan chuckled, trying to keep the mood light. He pointed through the window. “Well, at least you know it's all in your head. Nothing out there but grass. No place for a prowler to hide, you know? Everything's clear, in plain view.”

Kenji knew this was the case, but the feeling persisted nevertheless. He couldn't put his finger on its fountainhead, wasn't sure why it kept on despite the marked lack of a visible threat. But it did. While the three of them milled about in the shack, Kenji felt somehow convinced that there was an invisible fourth occupant among them. Of course, he didn't dare voice this feeling. Any acknowledgment, he feared, would only give the presence more power.

Dylan broke the contemplative silence once again, leaning against the wall and tapping the buttons on the radio at random. “So, who is this woman? I think that's where we should start.”

“That's a good question,” replied Reggie. “Think this is her place?”

Kenji shrugged. They could stand around theorizing till the sun came up and they'd never draw any closer to an answer to their questions, at this rate. They needed to look beyond that; why had this woman, whoever she was, been captured in two disparate pieces of media in this way? What had been her intent in disseminating these coordinates? He cleared his throat. “OK, you saw this woman in that documentary. What was it called? Maybe, if we look it up, we'll find some sort of hint. Could she have worked in the cast and crew?” He was spitballing, but at that point any progress would have been welcome.

Reggie thought about it a moment. “It was called Segregation In The Second World War: A Visual History, I'm pretty sure.”

Kenji wrote down the title in his notebook. Then, toying with his phone, he searched for a reception.

There was no signal to be found.

“I already tried, dude,” said Dylan. “It's a dead zone out here.”

“Awesome.” Kenji was about to stuff the phone into his pocket when the slightest impression of a signal flashed across the status bar. “Wait a minute, I've got a real weak signal coming in here.” He held the phone over his head, hoping that the signal might hold, and when it did, he opened the browser.

Carefully, as though typing too quickly would scare the signal away, Kenji did a search for the documentary, Segregation In The Second World War: A Visual History. The results loaded very sluggishly, and for a while there, as the three of them huddled around Kenji's phone, they feared that they wouldn't load at all. Finally, however, after a wait of some minutes, the results populated the screen and some basic information about the documentary was made available to them.

Of particular interest was the date of its production, which was among the first facts to come up in the search. It'd been released on May 10th, 2006. That made it over ten years old.

Kenji pursed his lips, falling deep into thought. Something about that number, ten years, sent up a red flag for him. It didn't take him long to realize why.

“Wait a second...” Clearing the browser, Kenji typed something new into the search bar. Dreams in Black Static. That was the name of the album by Jackal Priest, which had included the voice of this woman in its opening track. Unless he was mistaken, it was also about ten years old. It was a tenuous link, but he was desperate for something, anything that might further his understanding of this matter.

Again, the three of them waited with held breath for the results to load. The information came  very, very slowly, and more than once the signal was lost. Kenji stood near the window, waving his phone in the air and trying to recapture the single bar he'd locked onto. Finally, when the results had popped up, he looked at his screen and began reading.

What he found there stunned him.

At a loss for words, he held the phone out for Reggie and Dylan to see, and when they failed to notice what'd so impressed him, he began to explain. “The dates... the album we found her voice on, as well as the documentary, were both released on the same day, ten years ago. Both came out on May 10th, 2006.”

Reggie broke out in nervous laughter, pacing away from the other two and clapping his hands. “You're kidding me, right? That's... that's a hell of a coincidence there.”

But they were well past the point of writing things off as mere coincidence. This detail was more proof that something was going on here. “No coincidence,” muttered Kenji, massaging his jaw and pocketing his phone. “We need to look into this connection a little deeper. Gotta find some place with better cell service or WiFi.”

“We passed a Tim Horton's on our way here,” began Dylan. “It was outside the last town, on the highway, I think. Wanna go there? You've got your laptop in the car, right?”

Kenji was already marching out the door by the time Dylan finished.

Reggie followed, smirking. “He's a little headstrong, ain't he?”

Dylan shook his head, closing the door to the shack behind them and heading for the Honda. “Headstrong ain't the word. Obsessed is more like it.”

TWELVE

Kenji and Dylan drove in the Honda, while Reggie followed in his LeSabre. The trio arrived at the empty Tim Horton's along the highway nearly forty minutes later. Upon arrival, Kenji had raced inside, laptop bag in tow, and had set up at the table nearest the shop's only visible power outlet. Meanwhile, Reggie and Dylan placed an order for coffee and donuts. Dylan picked up a pair of Double-Doubles for himself and Kenji, and carried over a half dozen mixed donuts to the large table where Kenji was now stationed and typing away furiously.

Reggie sauntered over with a coffee and bagel, dropping into the nearest booth and taking a noisy sip. “So, what're you finding over there?” he asked, nudging Kenji's leg with his foot.

Kenji scarcely looked up from his screen. He'd pulled up the album, Dreams in Black Static, in one tab, and the war documentary in the other. With lightning fast speed he scanned websites dedicated to both, scouring them for any other similarities aside from the date of their release. He looked first at the listings discussing the album, of which there were precious few. The band members were the only listed personnel involved in its production, and he knew all of them had died in a plane crash. Dead end.

Next, he turned his fevered attention to the official website of the documentary. There was a list of cast and crew to be found there, and he was overjoyed to find that there were photos of the cast posted alongside the credits. Finding the pale woman in the video would be a simple thing if she was at all involved with the making of the documentary.

That was a big “if”, though. A scan of the numerous faces on the page, and then another, failed to yield anyone who looked even remotely like the woman he sought. Apparently she wasn't involved with the documentary after all.

Sighing, Kenji snatched the big red cup Dylan had offered him and sucked in a few mouthfuls of sweetened coffee. “Dead end,” he muttered.

Dylan was on his third donut by that point, and his cheeks bulged out as though he were a rodent hoarding food. “What do you mean?” he asked around a bolus of fried dough. A blue sprinkle escaped his mouth, dropping down onto the tabletop. “Nothing?”

Kenji shook his head. The woman wasn't involved with the production of either the documentary or the album, as best he could tell. “Not a thing.”

Dylan frowned, choking down his food. “OK, what if it's something about the three of us... like, what if there's something that links all of us together and that's why we ended up meeting at this spot?” He turned to Reggie. “What's your story, Reggie?”

Drawing in a deep breath, Reggie shrugged. “Well, I dunno what you want me to say here. I've never seen that woman before watching the tape. I recorded that documentary because I wanted to see if my father's unit was featured in it-- he was a World War Two vet. I fought in Vietnam, myself. Retired now, living in St. Paul. Once upon a time I played around with HAM radios-- that was how I knew those letters and numbers she repeated were Maidenhead coordinates. And you two?”

Dylan went first while Kenji worked on his coffee. “I'm a chemistry major. Still have two years left before I graduate, same as Kenji. He studies linguistics, though. We both go to UW-Madison. We're roommates, in fact. He downloaded that album off of an illegal pirate website and brought it to my attention just last night. I was the one who suggested we follow the coordinates and come out here, though. Some guy in our dorm filled us in and explained the Maidenhead thing. At first, Kenji thought it was some sort of secret code.”

Discussing their lives any further was beyond pointless. He and Dylan were as different from this man as could be. “This is getting us nowhere,” interrupted Kenji. “I don't think this has anything to do with us, in particular. We were just the ones who noticed it. Around the same time, no less. Something... maybe this date, May 10th, has some significance, but...”

Reggie slurped up more coffee and meditated a moment. He was working over his bagel when something suddenly dawned on him. “Well, both these things came out the same day, right? Maybe look it up online. May 10th, 2006.”

“That's a long-shot. We're going to get a ton of hits,” replied Kenji, typing the date into the search bar and reluctantly tapping Enter. As expected, thousands of results were returned. He stifled a groan. He could sift through this mess for days and never stumble upon anything of use.

“Whatcha got?” asked Reggie, leaning in and looking at the screen.

Kenji read off the results in a dispirited monotone. “First three hits all deal with a comet that was passing by Earth on that day. I guess there was a big meteor shower afterward. Second link has something to do with people in South America acting weird afterward, but I'm not going to bother reading that. Oh, this one talks about some political assassination in Africa.” He scrolled further.

“You think anyone else will end up at that shack? Like, you think anyone else out there has picked up on this? What if more people get in on... whatever this is?” mused Dylan, cleaning his mouth off with a napkin. His glasses, usually so neat and clean, were marked up with frosted fingerprints. A red sprinkle clung to the white rims.

Kenji ignored him. It was possible that other people had heard the voice, however neither the album nor the documentary were especially well-known, and it occurred to him that only certain kinds of people would ever care enough about such a thing to investigate further. How many people out there would really bother to isolate certain sounds on an MP3 like he and Dylan had done? How many people out there would pay such close attention to a documentary that they'd zero in on the anomalous, mumbling woman in the background of a single scene? If anything united the three of them, it was a tendency towards neuroticism or OCD.

“Next one is a missing person's notice.” Kenji very nearly scrolled past it, but something he glimpsed in the preview made him pause. It was a new listing, led to a public social media group centered around missing person's cases in the State of Minnesota. “That's weird,” he said. “Think this could be something?” He pointed to the link, and both Dylan and Reggie glanced at it. “It looks like someone put out a missing person's report on this social media site, trying to find some old friend of theirs. They were last seen on May 10th, 2006.”

Reggie nodded. “Why not? Click on it.”

Kenji did so. This was a small social media site, not particularly popular, but he was familiar enough with it to navigate it with ease. He scrolled down the newer posts on the page and singled out the one that'd drew him there, posted just four days previously.

And then, the three of them loosed a collective gasp.

The listing was brief. A woman with the username MARA_ANTALL had made the post, and in it she wrote only the most salient details. She was seeking any information that might help her find her friend, a woman by the name of Agnes Pasztor, a fellow Hungarian immigrant, who'd last been seen on May 10th, 2006, in rural Minnesota. A contact phone number for user MARA_ANTALL was listed.

But it was not these details that shocked the three of them into a momentary silence.

Offered beneath these few lines of text was a photo of the missing woman, allegedly taken shortly before her disappearance ten years ago, and it was this that stunned the trio. Kenji stared at the photo long and hard. Suddenly his gums began to itch and he had to clench his jaw to ease them.

The woman staring back at the three of them in the photograph was the very same woman who'd been in the documentary.

Kenji whispered the name under his breath, trying it on for size. “Agnes Pasztor...”

Reggie loosed a shudder and sank back down into his seat at hearing it. “Ah, hell no,” he mumbled into his coffee cup.

THIRTEEN

The three of them had a name.

The woman whose voice Kenji had heard on the recording, the very same woman the three of them had seen on the tape, feeding them the coordinates to the remote shack, was Agnes Pasztor. She'd been missing for just over ten years and had last been seen in rural Minnesota.

This was a step forward, but all the same Kenji felt as though they'd taken two steps back in their investigation.

“Do you think she went missing at the shack?” asked Dylan, eyes wide. He ran a hand through his sandy hair and held his breath. “Holy shit, dude. This is getting weird.”

Reggie shook his head. “It's been weird, man. Now it's just getting weirder.”

Kenji tried to work through the tidal wave of questions that struck his mind. How and why had this woman appeared in two different pieces of media, each released on the day she'd apparently gone missing in rural Minnesota? And why had she cryptically disseminated the coordinates to an exact location in Akeley during these inexplicable appearances? Had something bad happened to her? Had she somehow known in advance that something was going to happen, and given out the coordinates in this way to try and let the world know where she was? But how was it possible to have appeared on the album and in the documentary to begin with? It simply wasn't possible, as far as Kenji was concerned; that was still the most unbelievable part of this entire thing.

“Goddamn,” said Kenji. “More questions than answers, as always. I can't get to the bottom of this. It just doesn't make sense. This is definitely the woman in the video, the woman whose voice I heard in the song, but knowing her name doesn't make this any easier. We've just hit a different dead end. What I really want to know is how she could have possibly ended up in both the audio recording and the documentary. That shouldn't be possible, especially since she had no part in making the two of them. But that's what happened.” He gnawed on the lip of his cup ans sighed so that the steam from his coffee washed over his face. “I'm lost here.”

“Well, keep looking for more info on this woman,” suggested Reggie. “Maybe there's something more on the web about her. Something that'll clear this up.”

Kenji half-heartedly began searching for information on this woman, Agnes Pasztor, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing else to be found. The digital trail was cold.

There was a single detail to which they could pin their hopes of further progress, however.

The user MARA_ANTALL had left a contact number in her posting. The web wouldn't yield any more clues for them, but this contact seemed a promising lead.

“So, that's it, huh?” Dylan loosed the evening's excitement in a single, drawn-out sight. “Kinda sucks, coming all this way only to turn up nothing online.”

“Yeah, but we have this friend's phone number. We can call her and follow up, you know?” Kenji was quick to add.

Dylan arched a brow, glancing at Reggie incredulously. “I dunno about all that, Kenji. You really think we need to descend any deeper into this rabbit hole? Calling up some random woman to ask about this chick on the tape... I mean, that's...” He paused, chewing on the rim of his paper cup. “What are you supposed to say when she picks up? 'Hullo, ma'am, I'm calling because your creepy missing friend lured me, my roommate and this random guy to a shack in the middle of nowhere. You know anything about that?' It's stupid. Nonsensical. If anything, she'd think we were calling to mess with her.”

Reggie's expression softened a bit. He reached out and tapped Kenji's arm. “Your buddy here is right. I don't think there's much to be done, at this point. We could call, but if this woman hasn't seen Agnes in ten years, then she probably won't be any help.”

Feeling a bit betrayed by his fellows, Kenji shut the laptop and fumed for a moment. Looking out the window into the cool night, where a thin flurry of snow was beginning to fall, he stuffed a piece of donut into his mouth to chase the last, bitter dregs of coffee. The trail wasn't completely cold-- not so long as they had this MARA_ANTALL to speak with. But the other two were apparently uninterested in that. They'd come all this way, gone to a great deal of trouble to make it this far in their investigation, only to throw in the towel when a simple Google search failed to bring up anything concrete? It annoyed him to no end. “OK, so are you two giving up, then? No longer interested in this weird shit that brought us all out here in the first place? Because if you are still in the game, then this phone number is the only way forward that I can see.”

Licking his lips, Reggie shook his head. “I wouldn't say that. If we're being honest, kid, I don't know that getting involved with this sorta thing was real wise to start with, but we can still have us a look around the shack out there. Can still see if there are any clues around the place, or if anyone else shows up.”

Kenji grimaced. “So, what, you just want to stand around in that shack? See if Agnes comes knocking?”

“Better than calling up some old friend of hers and telling her this unbelievable story of ours,” interrupted Dylan. “Sorry, man, but this thing we've gotten ourselves into is really weird. The fewer people we involve in this, the better, in my opinion.”

Reggie agreed, nodding emphatically.

Kenji lost the will to argue. Slumping in the uncomfortable plastic seat, he let his eyes drift closed and thought about everything they'd learned so far. What interested him most however was the coincidence related to the album and documentary. They'd both been released on the same day, ten years ago. More than that, Agnes' friend hadn't seen her in about ten years. The last place she'd been seen was around the spot where they currently dwelt; rural Minnesota. This was no coincidence: Something had happened in Akeley, perhaps in that abandoned, dust-choked shack, ten years ago.

But what?

Kenji stared at the lids of his eyes, kneading his forehead as he fell deeper into thought. What had happened to Agnes?

All he had were speculations and the first stirrings of a serious headache. Standing up, he stuffed the computer back into his bag and turned to the other two. “Well, what say we head back to the shack and see if old Agnes is waiting for us there, huh?”

FOURTEEN

Agnes Pasztor was not waiting for them when they returned to the remote shack, though the atmosphere of the place did feel somehow occupied. The spirit of the abode, despite appearances, was that of a space not long untenanted. The moment the three of them stepped from their cars, the quietude enveloped them at once. Conversations died out, their eyes were drawn to the dim rendering of the property in the moonlight and they were forced to grapple with the question of who would be the first among them to enter.

Standing in the field, looking up at the knots of long-unused power lines, at the swaying, calf-length grass that surrounded them, it would have been easy for them to dismiss the entire journey as little more than a fool's errand-- as a mistake, owed to collective hallucination.

A nigh overwhelming aura circulated about the space, commanding them inside, and it was with shuffling, hesitant steps that Reggie eventually led the way. He opened the door, the dim interior spilling out into the inky night. “No one's home,” he tried to say with a grin. The grin crumbled away, however, and his pearly teeth were clenched in a scowl.

Dylan paced around, looking up at the light fixture. Behind him, Kenji eased the door closed and rubbed at his upper arms to bring back a little warmth. Of the three of them, Dylan seemed the least bothered, though as his eyes scaled the walls and dusty fixtures of the shack, it was all too clear from his cloudy expression that he felt something was amiss.

Kenji and Reggie sat down across from each other in the chairs while Dylan continued to pace.

“The three of us can agree that we were led out here, right?” started Dylan. He pointed to Reggie. “I mean, we followed different clues; a song, a video, and drew the same conclusions. This woman, Agnes, left the coordinates buried in those things, hoping that they'd be found.”

Kenji nodded. “Yeah, but why did she do it?”

Dylan rested his hands on his hips and stopped pacing. Then, he shook his head, his expression gathering up something of intensity. “Nah, I'm not worried about that at the moment. I'm wondering who these coordinates were intended for if not the three of us. It's pretty clear we don't know what the fuck any of this is about. The three of us just stumbled upon this stuff without knowing what we were getting into. That says, to me, that those coordinates in the recordings were intended for someone else, for someone who'd know what they meant. Someone who'd recognize from the very beginning what they represented.”

Reggie glanced around the space narrowly. It was a very small room, and there were no dark corners for anything to hide in. Gripping at the edge of the desk however, his shoulders stooped forward as he sat, listening, he looked as though he expected to get jumped at any moment. “That friend, who posted the missing person's notice... you think maybe Agnes wanted to reach her friend?”

Dylan continued, shaking a finger at Reggie. “Look, I thought we covered that. I'm not interested in calling her. What I'm driving at with all of this is that I'm not sure it's any of our business.” He rubbed his hands together. “I'm saying we ought to wash our hands of all of this. Forget about it, completely. It wasn't intended for the three of us, so maybe we should just leave it alone. Know what I'm saying?”

Kenji was far too drawn in for that, however. He and Dylan had sacrificed a weekend to come out and investigate this curious phenomenon. Another person, Reggie, had been roped in as well. The odds of such a thing happening naturally were pretty damn close to zero. Dylan may have had a point in believing that these coordinates were not intended for the three of them, specifically, but it seemed entirely possible that the message could have been intended for whoever was listening. What if it'd been a cry for help, an SOS of some kind, broadcast widely in the hopes that someone, anyone would hear? Kenji was getting ahead of himself again, but he wasn't ready to go. Not yet.

“I think we should sleep here for the night,” said Kenji. “There's no way we can make the drive all the way back to campus with how long we've been up. Plus, we came all this way; I'd like to have a look around in the morning. If there's nothing else to be found in this place, then maybe we'll consider getting ahold of this friend, Mara Antall.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Still harping on that, eh? Whatever, man. You can call her if you want. I'm not so interested in dragging another stranger into this mess.” He turned to Reggie. “No offense, of course.”

Reggie waved one of his hands. “No big deal. I was about to say that I could use some shuteye. That coffee ain't doing much for me tonight, I'm afraid.” Stretching out in his chair, he splayed his legs across the floor, giving his ankles a turn till the joints popped and cracked. “If y'all don't mind, I'll just sleep in this chair.”

Dylan looked down at the floor, drawing a line in the dust with the tip of his shoe. “Oh, this looks great. Real healthy, laying down and breathing this shit in all night. I might go sleep in the car.”

Kenji shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Fluffing up his book bag, he set it gently on the floor and laid down, perching his head on it like a pillow. It was stiff and uncomfortable, and the floor was disgustingly dirty. He knew there was no way he'd get to sleep in the folding chair, however. “Take the chair, if you want.”

Dylan plopped down into the seat, causing it to groan under his weight. Setting his heels on the edge of the desk, he closed his eyes and crossed his arms. “Man, I wish I'd never brought up the idea of going on this trip. My back is going to be killing me in the morning.” He stretched, fighting to get comfortable. His lanky limbs wouldn't cooperate.

“You guys want me to kill the lights?” asked Kenji, sitting up slightly.

Neither Reggie nor Dylan replied. They looked to one another, lips set in a frown. Kenji shared their apprehension; sleeping in the shack was bad enough. Turning off the lights would be a whole other kettle of fish, though.

Sitting back, Dylan sighed deeply. “Wake me up if Agnes comes home, will ya?” Yawning, he crossed his legs and began to court sleep in earnest.

Kenji threw an arm over his eyes, blocking out most of the light. The floor was hard and dirty, and his makeshift pillow was too stiff, but if he didn't manage some sleep he'd be a complete wreck in the morning. The drive in had taken a lot out of the two of them, and though his drive had been shorter, Reggie was also looking the worse for wear. Sleeping in the old Honda sounded pretty miserable; there was an awful kind of vulnerability about it. At least this way they had four walls around them. They weren't truly secure, but they could pretend if they stayed inside.

Kenji was very nearly asleep when a sudden burst of sound saw him stir violently awake. The other two nearly fell from their chairs, looking around with wide, heavy eyes for the source of the commotion. They all glanced first at the door of the shack, finding it closed, before zeroing in on the culprit.

The television had come on, seemingly of its own accord. If any of them had reached over to switch it on then they weren't confessing to it. Kenji watched in abject horror as the footage of Agnes Pasztor flickered on the screen. The air was filled with her voice reciting the Maidenhead coordinates that had led the three of them to the shack. The image seemed less stable than before, the tape skipping and tracking as though it were having some difficulty in playback. Agnes' voice was rather slowed down as a result, and the drawn-out syllables took on something of a demonic cast in the otherwise silent shack.

“Which one of you turned that on?” asked Kenji, after searching in his parched mouth for the slightest trace of saliva.

Reggie just shook his head, extended a crooked, shaking finger and turned it off. He didn't stop there, however. He hurriedly ejected the VHS tape, took hold of it and cast it across the room, where it landed with a clatter. Scooting back in his chair so that he built a bit of distance between himself and the television set, he forced his eyes shut.

“Must have been a power surge or something,” mumbled Dylan. He massaged the back of his neck, but there was no easing the hint of terror that dwelt in his eyes.

“Power surge my ass. I tell ya,” added Reggie, shaking his head fervently, “if I weren't so damn tired I'd be getting the hell outta this place right about now.”

FIFTEEN

Morning came, and the three of them gained their feet like the risen dead. They groaned and cursed while their joints crackled and muscles smarted. Sunlight cut into the space from the single window, bathing Kenji's spot on the floor in warmth.

Upon standing, Kenji took to batting away the thick layer of dust that now clung to his clothes. It didn't take him long to realize that there was simply too much of it to wipe off. He quickly changed into a fresh shirt and pair of pants and balled up the dusty garments.

Dylan didn't say a word as he ambled around the room and stretched out every part of his body. His eyes were red, and while he shambled about he began to sneeze repeatedly. Kenji, too, could feel inflammation in his sinuses. The back of his throat tasted like dust, and he wished he had a bottle of water right then to guzzle. A tickle in his throat incited him to cough again and again.

When he finally caught his breath, Kenji walked over to the door and threw it open, the cool winter rushing through him like a knife. Still, the fresh air was preferable to the dusty air of the shack. “So, how'd you guys sleep? Did either of you notice anything in the night?” He leaned back and stretched, his shirt riding up and baring his navel to the ice cold breeze as he did so.

Reggie gave an unenthusiastic shrug and shook his head. More curious was Dylan's reaction. Pausing in his shuffling stride, Dylan glanced over his shoulder at Kenji, his tired eyes shooting open in tremulous fear for an instant. Just as quickly he beat this terror away and then shook his head vehemently. “Ready to get out of here?” he asked.

Kenji looked out the door at the vast expanse of field ahead. Their cars were visible less than twenty feet away, looking completely undisturbed. The tall grass rocked this way and that in the breeze like so many thin, green fingers. “I wanna have a better look at the outside,” he said, running a hand through his hair. A cloud of dust escaped his raven locks; from up-close he looked like his hair had gone gray overnight.

“Knock yourself out, but I'm setting off in twenty minutes, with or without you,” warned Dylan. There was nothing of joviality in it; Dylan seemed altogether more agitated than he had when they'd gone to bed. There was no accounting for this change in him; a poor night's sleep was one thing, but the two of them weren't strangers to all-nighters.

Kenji stepped out of the shack, bracing himself against the cutting breeze. He began walking the perimeter of the building, looking for anything he might've missed the night before. To his dismay however the exterior of the place was thoroughly ordinary. There were no telling marks, no hints as to the owner of the building. The shack's chipped, white exterior glowed brightly in the morning sun. In the rear he stumbled upon the slate-colored generator Reggie had found the night prior, covered in a small, weatherproof enclosure. Normal. Everything was perfectly normal.

Somehow, finding nothing awry was more disturbing to him than anything. This shack was in good order despite its having been abandoned for no less than a couple of years. To Kenji, it seemed almost as though the spot had been preserved by an unseen presence. For what purpose he still didn't have the foggiest idea.

Walking out into the field a bit, he studied the ground. It was flat as far as the eye could see, and the bulk of the grass was a tall, deep green. There was one spot, a rather large patch nearly twenty feet from the shack, where the grass was shorter. It was clearly a different variety, and aside from boasting much stouter blades, it was a bluish-green color. It was a strange contrast; the owner, probably, had mindlessly scattered some random grass seed to cover up a bald patch in the field without matching it to the pre-existing growth. Kenji wandered further, to the dirt drive where their cars were parked. There was nothing of interest there, either.

All around him the open fields expanded without limit. There were scarcely any trees to be found, and there were no buildings aside from the shack visible from where he stood. He felt himself standing on an island in the middle of a vast, green ocean, such was their isolation.

Dylan and Reggie walked out of the shack, yawning and stretching loudly. They mumbled to one another about how miserably they'd slept, and carried their things out to their respective cars. Dylan snapped his fingers in Kenji's direction and motioned to the Honda. “You ready to go?”

Kenji took in another lungful of the cold air and had one last look around the property. There was nothing more to be done. He'd stayed the night in this abandoned shack, had done a bit of research into the identity of the woman in the recording, but as he began for the Honda he had to ask himself what the point of it all had been. He felt he'd been led to the place, and had played host to a nebulous dread all the while. Now that he was on the verge of leaving, he didn't feel any closer to an answer. The previous twenty-four hours hadn't brought him to the heart of this strange occurrence. It'd only burdened him with more questions.

Reggie shook their hands and the three of them traded contact information. “I'll let y'all know if I find anything else about this, but if we're being honest, I don't plan to look so hard.” Reggie grinned for the first time all morning. “Gonna make the drive back to St. Paul and hit the shower. Then I'm going to sleep till the cows come home.”

“Sounds like a plan,” replied Dylan. He fumbled with his keys, throwing his bag into the back and dropping down into the driver's seat. “Was nice meeting you, Reggie.” For some reason, Dylan seemed in a hurry to leave. This was more than mere impatience; a few times since walking to the car he'd looked out in the direction of the shack furtively, the terrified look Kenji had glimpsed in him earlier that morning suddenly resurfacing.

“Nice to meet you, Reggie,” said Kenji with a nod. “Drive safe.”

Reggie stepped forward. “One last thing,” he added. “That, uh, phone number we pulled up last night. For the friend to this Agnes woman? Mind if I have it?” He smiled sheepishly. “Just in case, you know.”

Kenji nodded and pulled the sheet of paper with the phone number on it out of his notebook. He copied it down a second time and tore it off, handing Reggie the scrawl.

“Appreciate it, young man,” was Reggie's reply as he tucked it into his breast pocket and started for the driver's side of his LeSabre. With a little wave, Reggie put the key in the ignition, backed out and disappeared down the road in the direction of town. Kenji watched the little olive green car vanish into the distance before getting into the Honda.

“You ready now?” asked Dylan, his hands fidgeting atop the steering wheel. His agitation hadn't lessened; his jaw was tensed, his eyes firmed up into a steely gaze through the windshield. “I want to get out of here.”

Kenji closed his door and put on his seatbelt. Without another word, Dylan started up the car and began pulling out at high speed. “What's gotten into you, man?”

Dylan gulped, then said nothing. Once they'd backed out onto the main road, he wheeled around and took off in the same direction Reggie had gone. After a while, he finally muttered, “I wish we'd never come out here.”

Something caught Kenji's notice as they drove away from the place. For a distance of at least a couple miles, Dylan's gaze spent more time fixed in the rearview than it did on the road ahead. This fixation with the rearview ended once they crossed into town, but even as they started onto the highway, Dylan would sometimes stare as if he expected something to materialize in the little-tread road behind them.

Kenji suggested they stop at a small restaurant for breakfast before they dove into the seven-hour drive, but Dylan would have none of it. He drove for almost two hours before finally yielding to his empty stomach and pulling into a McDonald's for coffee. He'd seldom spoken, gripping the wheel and cruising at a generous clip some fifteen miles over the speed limit.

Finally, in the McDonald's parking lot, while Kenji worked over a breakfast sandwich, Dylan showed signs of a sluggish return to his usual demeanor. He slurped his coffee and then stirred at it pensively. Reclining in his seat, he began with a hint of nervousness in his voice. “You know, it's really strange, but...” He shook his head, seeming to reconsider, but then pressed on. Whatever he had to say it was something he simply couldn't hold back any longer. “Last night? When we were, you know, sleeping in that... the shack? I woke up once or twice. It must've been pretty late at night. I didn't check the time or anything, but I, uh...” Another sip of coffee steadied his shaking hand. Not trusting his grip, he set it into the cup holder and then folded his hands in his lap. “I looked out the window, and in the moonlight, I thought I saw someone looking at me. Looking at us. The moon was damn bright, and I could've sworn there was someone standing outside, looking through the window into the shack.” He wore a smile as he related this, but the trembling of his lips revealed it to be anything but a joke.

Kenji paused in his chewing. Staring through the windshield, he brought his coke to his lips but didn't take a sip. “Must've been a nightmare or something...” He was looking for something he could say that might comfort Dylan. The fact that the morning light couldn't altogether help him overcome his fear was telling, however.

“Yeah, of course,” declared Dylan after a pause. “It was a dream, yeah... Had to have been.” He rifled through the bag of food aggressively, drawing out a hash brown and eating it a a few bites. “Thing is, though... in my, uh... dream, the person in the window, looking at us as we slept, well... it looked just like that chick in the video, Agnes.” He gave a brief titter, then fell silent.

“Pretty crazy,” was all Kenji thought to offer in reply. If he closed his eyes, he could clearly picture that dusty shack they'd spent the night in. He could remember where everything was situated, where he'd slept, where the window was. And if he focused hard on the scene, he could paint in the profile of that mysterious woman, Agnes Pasztor, leering at the three of them from the moonlit window.

Kenji sucked in so much soda his stomach started to hurt. “Ready to head out?”

Dylan nodded and the car rattled back to life.

Except to top off the gas, they didn't stop again till they reached the UW-Madison campus later that evening.

SIXTEEN

A week came and went. To Kenji's mind, it was fascinating just how much could change in a week, and yet, how much stayed the same. Returning to their empty campus, the two of them had more or less resumed their aimless schedule. Binging on Netflix, visiting the near-empty restaurants and cafes near campus and generally frittering away their time was all they could think to do. In that week, Kenji spoke to his parents on the phone no less than three times, each conversation involving some lie on his part, wherein he'd claim to be studying day and night in anticipation of his new classes. He didn't mention the trip he and Dylan had taken to Akeley, of course.

The mood was gloomy, and Dylan didn't much leave his bed for the first couple of days after their return to campus. He spent a lot of time knotted in the bedclothes, playing mindless games on his phone and listening to music. When hunger finally drew him out of bed, he'd eat whatever he could get his hands on, but he'd do so with a good deal less gusto than usual.

In the past week, the two of them hadn't spoken of their trip to the shack once. They hadn't heard from Reggie, either; something that Kenji figured was a good thing. His thoughts had begun to wander from the strange journey, from the character of Agnes Pasztor and the cryptic message she'd somehow embedded in media, almost as though his subconscious mind sought to drive out all memories of his involvement.

Now and then he considered calling up Mara Antall. The woman who'd posted the missing person's report on a social media website, and was a friend of Agnes', was likely the only lead they could follow if they desired to wade any deeper into this bizarre chain of events. But every time he flipped to the hand-written phone number in his notebook, he thought better of it. Some little voice in the back of his head would gently advise him not to, and he'd drop it. Better not. No telling what might come of that.

***

No matter what he did, Reggie Cash couldn't seem to sleep.

Oh, he'd manage just enough shuteye to function during the day. But when the sun set and he found himself laying in his queen sized bed alone, beneath the warm, flannel sheets he used in winter, sleep proved elusive.

But there was more.

Songs, television, movies were all ruined for him. He'd long decided to keep his television and stereo off. Once that week, while out for lunch, he'd asked the manager of the restaurant to shut off the music playing overhead, citing some specious headache.

He'd had no other choice. That was the only way to keep her voice out of his head.

In every song, every bit of film, Reggie was finding bits of Agnes Pasztor. His favorite tunes carried with them dreadful undercurrents that suggested the breathy tones of her voice. Films and television shows showcased flickering figures in his periphery that he could not help but take as same. He couldn't enjoy those usual pleasures any longer, and his life was made miserable for it. Fear gripped him whenever he left his home; more and more, passersby took the look of that tall, pale woman with the jet black hair. The ordinarily social Reggie was turning down invitations from friends and leaving his house less and less.

That he was being urged on by something outside of himself was painfully clear. God, the devil, or Agnes Pasztor herself-- and he couldn't be altogether certain that she wasn't some mixture of the former two-- wanted him to dig deeper. He could think of no other reason why his dreams should be so haunted by the specter of those coordinates she'd uttered in the documentary. He'd memorized those coordinates now. Reggie couldn't help but think about them with great frequency till their utterance became a very simple thing for him. Now and then, in those quiet moments when his thoughts were inclined to wander, he'd find himself mumbling them.

EN17DA43TU85

It was only by one avenue that Reggie could conceive of progress being made, and that was in reaching out to this Mara Antall, the woman who'd claimed to be a friend of Agnes'. Maybe, by doing so, he'd be able to put a stop to the dreams, to the visions that encroached upon him whenever he took in a film or set foot in a crowded place.

It was an overcast morning, nearly a week since he'd returned from the shack in Akeley, when he finally decided to make the call. Unfolding the slip of paper Kenji had given him, he descended into his recliner and slowly dialed the number. It was after three rings that a quiet, hesitant answer came.

“Hello?” The voice was uncertain, faint.

“Hello, is this Mara Antall?” Reggie waited a beat before continuing. “I'm looking to speak to a miss Mara Antall in regards to a missing person's notice.”

The change in the speaker's demeanor was clear from the very first. Her replies came in clearer, seemed sunnier from here on out. “Oh, yes. I am Mara Antall.” Her voice was touched by a vague accent that was hard to place. Reggie recalled reading that Agnes was Hungarian and figured her friend, Mara, was the same.

“My name is Reggie Cash, and I was hoping that I might be able to speak to you about this friend of yours, Agnes Pasztor.” He cleared his throat, then added, “In-person.”

“That's no problem,” replied Mara. Her openness to meeting with a perfect stranger was a bit surprising to Reggie. He'd half-expected to meet some kind of resistance but took her willingness as desperation.

“I noticed your area code is the same as mine. I don't suppose you're living in St. Paul, are you?” Reggie took a pen and prepared to jot down any details the woman had to give him.

“Yes, in fact. I live on Thurber street, just outside of downtown St. Paul. Do you know it?”

Reggie furrowed his brow, conjuring up a mental map of the city. “Yes, I do.”

Mara supplied him with an address to her apartment without the least hesitation and assured him any time was fine. She proved amicable to the idea of meeting the next day, around noon.

Reggie remained in his recliner long after the plans were laid and he'd hung up the phone. This woman, though seemingly polite, hadn't batted an eyelash at meeting with him out of the blue. It rubbed him the wrong way, but he couldn't say why. She'd placed the notice on social media, supposedly hadn't seen her friend Agnes in about ten years. It wasn't hard to believe that she'd be desperate to reconnect with her. But her complete willingness to meet with him had been a little unexpected.

Prior to hanging up, Mara had asked him, with not a little excitement, whether he knew where Agnes was. “Have you found her? I haven't seen her in ten years. If you know where she is, I'd love to know.”

“No,” Reggie had replied, chuckling. “I am sorry about that. I don't know where she is, however... I was hoping you might be willing to clear something up for me.” He'd paused. “I'm pretty sure it has something to do with her. Anyhow, I'll see you tomorrow at noon?”

“Very well,” had been her only reply before the line went dead.

Reggie fixed himself a warm glass of milk and settled into bed. That night, he rested more peacefully than he had in some time, almost as though the forces of the universe were pleased with the course of action he'd chosen.

SEVENTEEN

Mara Antall was nothing at all like what Reggie had expected.

Pulling up to her apartment building, which was in a lower rent area and bustling with rough-looking types, Reggie stepped out of his LeSabre and started for the main entrance, only to be met half-way by the hunched, shawl-wearing figure of Mara Antall. He knew it was her before she'd even introduced herself. Standing a touch over five feet tall, she had roughly-drawn, severe features; deep-set eyes, a crooked nose and thin lips that seemed never to have worn a smile. She appeared a woman of fifty, but certain characteristics bespoke a higher tally of years, such as the coarseness of her grey hair.

Mara wore a flowing headscarf made of red silk, and had a cream-colored shawl draped over her slight shoulders. The dress she wore, a loud combination of blues and browns, flowed just behind her as she walked, reaching all the way down to her ankles. She wore, too, loads of jewelry. Her earrings weighed down her ears, large golden hoops of no little thickness; and her wrists appeared similarly clad, in gaudy bangles. Her fingers, looking knotted like fibrous little root vegetables, bore colorful rings.

The sharp-dressed Reggie, who'd opted for a pair of khakis and a polo shirt, had to stifle a grin as he approached her. She looked rather eccentric, precisely like what he and his family would have referred to as a gypsy in days passed. The air around Mara was haunted by a thick, sweet-smelling perfume. He reached out, offering to shake, but she did not take his hand. She gave him a slight smile, very obviously a formality, and then held the shawl tightly while ambling out the door. “There is a small cafe around the corner. Shall we have some tea?”

“Certainly,” replied Reggie. He was going to offer to drive the two of them over, but Mara was shuffling along the cracked sidewalk towards their destination before he could say anything more.

A silent, five-minute walk saw the two of them stepping into a small, empty cafe. Mara, apparently a friend of the owner's, ordered two cups of hot tea in a language Reggie had never heard, and seated herself at a table near the front window. Looking out at the street, she waited for Reggie to join her. When the tea was delivered, she gave it a stir but didn't once take a sip.

“Thank you for the tea,” began Reggie, tasting it. It wasn't like any other tea he'd ever had; lemony, but with a spicy sort of kick. He didn't much like it, but took a pull from the tea cup now and then so as not to appear rude.

“Mr. Cash,” she said, straightening one of her earrings, “what is it you wish to know about my friend, Agnes?” Her eyes met his for an instant, and in them Reggie found a hardness like steel.

This was the kind of thing he'd have to go about discussing carefully. To share the wrong details up front, or worse, to spill his guts completely, would only make him look crazy. He held the tea cup in his hands and allowed the warmth to seep into his palms while searching for the right way to begin. “Some acquaintances of mine were recently made aware of Agnes' disappearance.”

She arched a thin, grey brow, leaning forward. Her pinched expression momentarily gave way as a bolt of something like excitement passed over her. “You mean to say you've found her?”

Reggie smiled. “No, no... it's like I told you over the phone. We haven't found her. But we... there were some things that led us to your posting. Certain coincidences that may be related to her, well...” He took a gulp of tea and tried to find the words.

Before he could continue however, Mara was wagging a long, crooked finger at him. The afternoon sun was caught in the gleam of one of her golden rings as she replied. “In this world, there are no coincidences.”

Reggie nodded. “Right... Well, I was just hoping to learn more about her. If I should find something out, I'd be happy to let you know, but at the moment, you see, I'm curious about how this relates to some other things...”

Mara studied him with a curious, firm expression, but didn't ask for an explanation. Reggie had already admitted that he didn't know anything about Agnes' whereabouts. She wasn't going to press the matter any further. “Agnes and I were like sisters,” she began. We used to share a house with a number of other Hungarian immigrants.” Then, with a touch of reticence, she added, “Though, Agnes moved out of there. She'd grown apart from the others, left suddenly, without warning.”

“I see.” Reggie couldn't think of anything else to say at this point. “Uh... when did she move out?”

“It must have been a bit over ten years ago now,” said Mara after a time. “The two of us moved out, in fact. We looked for a new place to live, but then... Agnes disappeared.” She appeared vaguely troubled as she recounted this, pursing her lips and toying with the edges of her shawl. “I can tell you the address of the house where we used to live, all of us, but I'm unsure it will help you. Why is it you wish to know about Agnes?” There was a glint of real curiosity in her eye.

Reggie wasn't sure how he could phrase his reply without sounding insane. “Well, I saw... I saw Agnes on a tape,” he started. “And something in that tape pointed me towards this shack out in Akeley, about three hours from here.”

Mara's eyes widened till the yellowed orbs looked like an owl's staring eyes. That she was keen to learn more about this was all too clear. “A tape?” she muttered. She repeated it a few more times, trying the word out like it didn't fit right. “A tape? A tape?” Then, settling back into her chair, she nodded. “Yes, go on. This shack. Where is it?”

Reggie pushed his tea cup aside. “I haven't got the address handy, and anyway, I don't want to get your hopes up. We didn't find anything there. But if I find something out in the future I'll be sure to let you know. If I could get the address to that house where the two of you lived with the other immigrants, that would be swell.”

Mara remained silent for a time before finally calling over to the woman working behind the counter. A short while later, the cafe employee came by with a pen and paper, and Mara hastily scrawled an address on the slip, handing it over to him. “That is the place,” she said simply. “Please let me know if you find anything. I am no longer on speaking terms with those that stay there; I'm not even sure that they still live there, in fact. If you find Agnes, please contact me.”

Reggie nodded, tucking the slip of paper away in his wallet. “Sure, no problem.”

Donning a thin smile, Mara leaned forward and held out her hand. “Would you like me to read your palm?”

Reggie chuckled uncomfortably. He was thinking of some polite way to refuse when Mara suddenly reached out and grasped his hand, baring his palm.

One of Mara's long fingers traced the lines running against his flesh. She took in a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then began to nod. “Oh, yes,” she said, again and again. “It's just as I thought.”

Reggie, growing a bit nervous, squirmed in his seat. “What is it?”

When Mara finally let go of his hand and stood up, the motive behind her toothy grin was hard to discern. “You are destined to facilitate something great. You are on the trail to a great discovery, Mr. Cash.” With that, Mara began shuffling out of the cafe. The door closed behind her and a faint chime sounded. Reggie remained seated, watching her creep past the window and around the corner from whence they'd come. He didn't feel, just then, that he could stand up. Staring down at his palm in the sunlight he could still feel her touch on his skin. Touching the warm tea cup did nothing to banish the clamminess that now claimed him. The skin itched. Wiping his hand off on his jacket, Reggie stood up, left a couple of singles on the table and nodded at the woman working the counter.

Stepping outside, Reggie quickly walked around the corner, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the strange Mara Antall as she returned home.

She was nowhere in sight, however.

***

Reggie wrestled for some time with the idea of paying the house a visit. A house full of Hungarian immigrants who'd had a falling out with Agnes more than ten years ago: What good would it do for him to visit such a place, to speak with such folk? He doubted he'd learn anything useful, and even Mara hadn't been sure whether anyone still lived there.

Ultimately led by his curiosity however, Reggie found himself driving out to the house some hours later. The temperature outside was dropping and snow seemed a frigid certainty. Clutching at his woolen coat, Reggie parked the LeSabre along the curb of a narrow street and scanned the row of dilapidated old houses whose tenants glared out at him from behind mottled curtains. His gaze settled on the blue, two-story house at the street's corner. The lawn was overgrown and a laundry line overburdened with long-abandoned garments dipped and fluttered in the empty driveway. From inside came the scarcest impressions of light however, and Reggie started towards it. On closer inspection, a trail of smoke wormed its way out of the blackened chimney.

Holding his jacket closed and shoving the slip of paper into his pocket, Reggie walked across the lawn, up the uneven concrete steps and to the front door. He reached out and knocked, unsure of who might answer his calls. There was no way for him to know who was living in the house; there was no name on the mailbox, nothing he could go by. For all he knew it was full of squatters. He hoped the immigrants still lived there, that they would be able to tell him some things about Agnes Pasztor, though the longer he waited on the stoop the more foolish he felt for coming out there to begin with.

His knocking was eventually answered by a stocky middle-aged woman. Her face was a collection of creases, and her burly frame bristled at the sight of him. Apparently, she was much averse to company. The woman lingered in the doorway, scowling, and said not a word.

It was up to Reggie to break the ice. Donning the warmest smile he could manage, he nodded. “Hello, I'm sorry to bother you. I'm looking for a group of people who used to live in this house; people, I'm told, who used to be friends of a woman by the name of Agnes Pasztor?”

The bulk of his opening spiel was unnecessary; it was only at the mention of Agnes that the woman showed any evidence of comprehension. But when she did react, appearing not a little startled by the utterance of that name, her face went a shade whiter. “Agnes?” she said, her breath failing her like she'd been punched in the doughy gut. “Who send you?” she continued, raising her eyes to meet his and almost seeming to jab at him with her stubby nose. “Who?”

Reggie hesitated. “I was... I was just wondering if Agnes lived here,” was all he could think to say. The very mention of her name had been sufficient to upset this woman; he knew he'd gain nothing by being forthright. Playing dumb and pretending like he thought Agnes still lived there was his safest bet.

“No,” spat the woman. “No, no, Agnes does not live in this house,” she began, smoothing out her grey-black hair and muttering what Reggie took to be a quiet prayer. “Agnes, a witch. She is shunned from here.”

A witch? What was that supposed to mean? Reggie cracked a smile, cocking his head to the side. “She doesn't live here anymore, then?”

The woman shook her head fervently.

“Do you know where I can find her?” Reggie was regretting this visit. Still, the woman's reaction to talk of Agnes, her claim that Agnes was a “witch”, drew his curiosity. “And what do you mean, that she's a witch?”

The woman reached out and took hold of Reggie's arm, pulling him inside. Her eyes were locked onto his, her long eyelashes quivering. Taking a quick glance out into the street, she shut the door behind them and cradled her arms. “Who send you?” she asked again.

The house was smaller on the inside than it'd appeared from the street. In the little foyer, which was connected to a dingy kitchen, the only light they had to see by issued from a number of kerosine lanterns staggered about the counters. Three of the stove's burners were burdened with large pots, each of which bubbled with liquids whose scents he couldn't place. Deeper into the abode he heard the shuffling of other feet, hushed speech, and finally glimpsed a few nervous pairs of eyes leering from around the corner.

How was he to answer the woman's question? Should he have said that Mara Antall had sent him? He hesitated to mention the name of his informant only because he feared the woman's reaction to Mara's name would be equally severe. He was here, in the house where Agnes and Mara had once lived with the other immigrants, and stood to learn a bit about their pasts. The last thing he needed was to get thrown out. “No one sent me,” he lied. “I just heard rumors that she used to live here, with the other Hungarians. Is that not the case?”

The woman looked up at him, muttering something under her breath. Even if Reggie had heard there would have been no deciphering it. “More than ten years,” she began, “Agnes leave this house.” Raising a crooked finger over her head, she pointed at the ceiling. “Upstairs, her room.”

“She lived upstairs?” asked Reggie.

“She still live up there,” replied the woman.

Reggie felt his chest tightening. The warm air in the space seemed to momentarily grow chill. Agnes Pasztor still lived in this house? “She's here, now?”

The woman started through the kitchen, into the living room, whose windows were covered in thick, dusty draperies, and led him to the stairwell. As they went, other figures darted out of view. The house's other tenants, no doubt. Without another word she began to climb, and Reggie followed behind her with a growing sense of dread welling in his gut. Was the woman just messing with him? Hadn't she said that Agnes had left ten years ago, been shunned for being a “witch”? So, what was this about, then? Holding onto the handrail, Reggie wondered if he was truly about to meet Agnes Pasztor in the flesh.

The very thought made him want to run.

The upstairs was unlit, and a gloomy darkness enveloped the hallway. There were five doors, all of them closed. From one or two of the rooms could be heard muffled speech and movement. The woman's destination was apparently the room at the end of the hall, which she stopped outside of. The stocky guide paused at the door and seemed unwilling to go any further. In fact, as Reggie arrived at her side he noticed that she made a conscious effort to look away from the door. “Agnes' room,” she said, motioning weakly at the door.

Reggie wet his lips. The heavy wooden door was possessed of a thick, brassy knob. He stood before it, then glanced down at the woman at his side. “Agnes is inside?”

The woman didn't answer him outright, but turned her head slightly and frowned. “Agnes leave ten years ago,” she began, “but since she leave, no one go in room. Sometime, in the night, we hear noise inside. It is desecrate.”

The woman's English was rough, but Reggie understood well enough. He gulped, his throat seizing around a bolus of nerves. He wanted to speak, to ask more questions, but was at a loss.

The woman motioned at the door with a toss of her head. She was allowing him to go inside, to explore this space that she and her housemates apparently considered desecrated.

“Is it locked?” managed Reggie, appraising the knob.

The woman shook her head. “No need. No one go inside; everyone know not to enter.” With that, the woman started back towards the stairs. She was apparently happy to let Reggie explore on his own. The permission he'd been granted was a curious thing; under any other circumstances, he'd have been thrown out of a stranger's house. That he was left alone to search the room now was unbelievable. It was almost as if Agnes Pasztor's name was some kind of code-word, something that lent him legitimacy or made him trustworthy in the eyes of the tenants.

But then, what had been that talk of it's being an unhallowed space? Of hearing noises inside this room that no one had supposedly entered in the last decade?

The woman disappeared down the stairs and Reggie was left to his own devices at the threshold to Agnes Pasztor's former quarters. Steeling his nerves, he turned the knob and gave the door a push. As he did so, something in the back of his mind begged him away from the spot.

He felt himself on the verge of a great and terrible discovery.

EIGHTEEN

The empty energy drink cans clattered to the floor as Dylan shifted his laptop to the other side of his desk. His mouth felt like cotton; all day he'd been snacking on salty foods and drinking only highly caffeinated beverages. His bladder felt close to the breaking point but he didn't want to get up. The articles he'd stumbled upon were just too damn interesting to take a piss break now.

He scrolled, his wrist a little sore from the repetitive motions, and loosed a burp. Kenji was asleep in his bed, buried beneath a mass of covers so that only a few sprigs of black hair were visible beneath. Quietly, so as not to wake his roommate, he read the title to the article.

“Electronic Voice Phenomena: Listening to the Dead.”

His descent down the rabbit hole of paranormal phenomena had been gradual. He'd been looking for something to watch on Netflix for the better part of the day and had stumbled upon an old ghost hunting program. Watching a few episodes while sucking down Red Bull, he'd decided to dig a little deeper, figure out whether all of these recordings the ghost hunters had made were real or fake. This had led him to websites dedicated to electronic voice phenomena and white noise anomalies. For the past two hours he'd been riveted, going from site to site, article to article, learning about all kinds of different paranormal manifestations in recorded media. A lot of what he found was rather suspect, sometimes even humorous, but now and then he'd stumble upon a supposed spirit recording that carried with it something of sincerity. Hunched over his laptop with his headphones on, he'd gotten chills listening to messages captured on tape. The speakers were a mystery, more often than not, and he couldn't rule out the possibility that they were all fakes. Aside from the obvious forgeries where charlatans conversed with dead Presidents and celebrities however, the rest seemed somehow authentic to him. At the very least, he was open to the possibility that the voices of the dead could indeed be captured on tape.

His reading into EVPs and white noise led him deeper still. Photographers the world over had dabbled in spirit photography, capturing a wide range of images that were reputed to feature hints of the paranormal. Some were faked-- they simply had to be-- but others, which pictured strange blobs of light or curious shadows, appeared real to him. There were examples of spirits being caught on video cameras, too; Dylan watched more than his fair share of spirit footage.

All of this led him to evaluate the strange case of Agnes Pasztor in a new light. Since their return from the shack more than a week ago, Dylan hadn't thought about the whole thing too much. Frankly, he couldn't bear to. Even if he wrote off the queer sights through the shack's window that night as a nightmare, to think too deeply on the matter of the tape, of Agnes' voice, was to risk a sleepless night. Now, however, that he'd done a few hours of reading on the subject of paranormal phenomena in recorded media, he fancied himself an expert on the matter. Coming at it from a more scientific angle put a fresh face on the matter and cut down on the irrational fear the ordeal had inspired in him.

Creeping out of the room and down the hall, Dylan made his way into the communal bathroom. The air was icy within as he walked past the stalls to the first urinal. When classes were in session it wasn't uncommon to find guys passed out in there, or heaving in the sinks. Now, he was completely alone. Aside from himself, Kenji and Mike, no one had been in this bathroom for quite a while. It looked rather clean; a stark contrast to its usual messiness. His steps echoed and the hair on his arms stood on end. When was the last time he'd felt this isolated and alone?

He tried not to think about it and simply loosed the night's drinks into the urinal with a sigh.

Thinking back upon his reading, he wondered whether Agnes Pasztor was not a ghost. Her appearance in the documentary, along with her presence in the song Kenji had downloaded, could conceivably be considered two distinct paranormal events. If spirits were energy, like so many paranormal researchers insisted, then it stood to reason that Agnes' energies could interfere with recording equipment and end up captured on the finished products.

It was a pretty threadbare hypothesis, but the similarities between the recordings of Agnes and the EVPs he'd been listening to were uncanny.

Zipping up, Dylan strolled out of the bathroom and continued down the hall back to his room. As he walked he was painfully aware once again of just how empty the dormitory was. Or, was it? All night he'd been reading up on the supernatural. Some people believed that the dead were present at all times, and that their voices could sometimes be pulled out of thin air, as it were, and recorded. A terrible shudder coursed through him at the thought and he quickened his pace. At that moment, despite the lack of any visible presence, he felt like the silent hallway was teeming with furtive life.

When he returned to the room, he found Kenji sitting up in bed, wiping at his eyes. “How long have I been out?” he asked, pawing at his phone.

“A while,” replied Dylan, shutting the door. He made his way to the desk and plopped down into his chair, stretching. “I've been doing some reading,” he said, pointing to the laptop. “About EVPs and stuff.”

“EVPs?” Kenji drew in a deep sigh and let his legs dangle over the edge of the bed. His black hair was a mess, with several cowlicks sticking out in wild directions. “You still talking about that ghost hunter crap?”

Dylan scoffed. “Look, just because you don't think it's real doesn't mean there isn't something to it. I mean, look at what we found-- that recording of Agnes?” His voice trailed off a little as he went on. “What if it were, like, the same kind of thing?”

Kenji shifted at the mention of the woman's name and looked up uncomfortably. It'd been a while since he'd thought about the trip to the shack, the mysterious recordings of Agnes Pasztor. The two of them had successfully avoided any deeper involvement in the matter and had even begun to put it out of their minds completely. This conversation was evidently dragging him back to the shack, to the unease their discoveries had dredged up. The details they'd sought to forget were highlighted now in harsh focus. “What are you talking about?” asked Kenji, shaking his head. “That's ridiculous.”

“Not really,” insisted Dylan. “Think about it. If this Agnes is, you know, a ghost, then this all makes a lot more sense. EVPs have been captured for a long time now, and I think some of them may be genuine. The dead live on as energy, and when that energy interferes with recording equipment, or...” He paused, looking for the right words. He brought a can of Red Bull to his lips but found it empty. “Let's say that a dead person-- a spirit-- wants to reach out to the living. How could a disembodied soul do that without a conduit? They'd need some kind of outlet to make themselves heard, and I think that media... sound waves, recording equipment, things like that, would work. If the souls of the dead are energy, then they should be able to interfere with our recordings. Thus, Agnes wanted to reach out, tell the world something. And she managed to do so through audio and video.” Crossing his legs, Dylan grinned widely, pleased with himself.

Throwing a piece of gum in his mouth, Kenji worked over the notion for a short while. Arms crossed, he eventually shrugged. “Seems far-fetched. I mean, to begin with, this isn't just some isolated photo or grainy recording. We have Agnes appearing in two very different pieces of media that come from two distinct content creators. I mean, unless the members of Jackal Priest secretly worked on a World War Two documentary.” Dylan was about to protest his skepticism, but Kenji continued before he could get a word in. “What seems more likely to me, is that this was an intentional implantation of information by a living person. Agnes inserted herself into two pieces of media that would be heard and seen by others because she wanted to spread a message. That message was a set of coordinates. Ten years ago, she disappeared, and the last traces we have of her are these weird recordings. She hasn't been seen since. I wonder what happened to her. When you look at this as a whole, there's something undeniably suspicious about it. Agnes disappears ten years ago, but has the foresight to leave behind a cryptic message. I not only wonder what happened to her, but whether she knew it was going to happen in advance. Know what I mean? If something happened to Agnes, did she know it was coming? That's the only thing that makes sense to me, otherwise why would she go through the trouble of inserting her message in those recordings? Something like that would take planning, foresight...”

Dylan massaged his jaw. “Not necessarily. What if I'm right and she's a spirit reaching out from the other side? Maybe it was a cry for help. Just think: something bad happens to her. She gets killed or whatever. Murdered, right? In death, her spirit reaches out and she sends out an SOS. Some clue about what happened to her in the hopes that her killer will be found. Maybe that shack belongs to the person who killed her!” He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with his shirt.

Kenji chortled. “Dude, shut the hell up. You're out of control. This is all so ludicrous I don't even know where to start. If your theories are dependent on the existence of the supernatural then they're crap theories. I expected better out of you, what with your being a chemistry major and all. This is hardly scientific.”

“Whatever,” said Dylan, turning back to his computer and scrolling around. “You're just being dense. This is clearly some paranormal shit, man. Either that, or...” His gaze narrowed as he clicked through a number of pages.

“What now?”

Dylan skimmed a new article. He was on a site dedicated to conspiracy theories, a large forum whose membership was constantly posting new threads and articles. Even at this hour things were bustling. Among the newest threads in the EVP section was a discussion on what were called “numbers stations”. This was the first Dylan had read of them, but as he skimmed he gave Kenji a rundown. “Ever hear of a numbers station? It's a radio station that just dishes out jumbles of letters and numbers. No one knows what they're for or who runs them. Says here, that... maybe they're a government project. Or that secret societies use them to transmit information to their followers. Think it might be something like that? Think that Agnes was a secret society member wrapped up in some classified project? Like, maybe the Illuminati were trying to spread some message through the media and we were just the ones who picked up on it? Maybe they held meetings out at that shack, and...” He shut the laptop and massaged his eyes. “Ah, fuck it. I'm going to bed,” he declared.

NINETEEN

The air that met his nostrils was heavy with more than dust. It was cold, filthy air, reaching out to him in waves as though generated by the movement of some unseen thing within the room. Stepping into the small space however, it became obvious that there was no one inside, and further, that no one had been in there for many, many years.

The dust on the floors was unbroken. The woman's claim that the house's occupants knew better than to enter this room rang true. There was a window to his right, next to a neatly-made bed weighed down by a blanket of dust. A dresser sat at the foot of this bed, and the opposite wall featured a medium-sized bookcase that still had a couple of volumes in it. Crouching beneath the edge of the bed like some beast lying in wait was a small wooden trunk. These objects, and a small, woven rug at the room's center besides, were all the room had to offer. There was no closet, no frivolous furnishings or anything else to be seen in the inkiness.

Reggie closed the door behind him and immediately regretted doing so, distinctly feeling as though he'd just locked himself in an enclosure with a lion. Holding a hand up to his nose to block out some of the dust that circulated through the air, he took a couple of nervous steps inside. The floors beneath his feet squealed, much unaccustomed to foot traffic. This space had all the allure of a dim funeral parlor and was every bit as unsettling to him, but still he felt pulled deeper in. Try as he might, Reggie couldn't simply turn around and leave. He was supposed to be here, had visited this house for a reason. As much as he would have liked to deny it, something had been set in motion the minute he'd decided to look into the footage of Agnes Pasztor. Walking through her deserted room was simply the most recent development in this investigation of his, and that he was slowly, blindly ambling to a yet unseen end-point was never in doubt.

Standing in the center of the room, the door and the hallway that would lead him to freedom seemed so very far. He canvassed his surroundings slowly, cautiously, reverently, half-afraid that the room's occupant, missing for ten years now, might barge in at any moment and accost him. No one came, however. From other rooms in the upstairs Reggie could make out hushed murmurings and doubtful shuffling, but nothing more.

Scanning the bed, Reggie realized that Agnes Pasztor had probably made it herself. A tremor seized his hand as he reached down and touched the dusty bedspread. One day, about ten years ago, Agnes had taken great care in making this bed. Then she'd been shunned from the house by the other tenants. Not long after that, she'd disappeared without a trace, but not before appearing in two recordings with a cryptic message to share.

Once, Reggie had watched a television show about serial killers and their upbringings. During this program, the host had toured the childhood homes of numerous killers. Their belongings, bedrooms and families were featured, and he remembered feeling terribly uneasy as he watched. It wasn't every day that one got such a glimpse into the private lives of others, and it was even rarer to learn about the day-to-day lives of infamous killers.

What had disturbed him most about the whole thing had been the utter normalcy of the killers' homes and upbringings. Their houses and lives and belongings hadn't been so much different from his own. He hadn't expected that. Savage men, he'd always assured himself, must live strange and savage lives. That hadn't been the case, however.

Looking at this room, which was more or less frozen in time, unchanged since the last moment Agnes herself had set foot in it, Reggie realized he didn't know a thing about the woman. Who was Agnes Pasztor, and what was she like? Watching that program years back had taught him that a mere perusal of the subject's bedroom or belongings was insufficient proof of their character. The woman who'd let him into the house had called Agnes a “witch”. What had she meant by that? The Hungarians he'd interacted with so far seemed to him a very eccentric bunch; even Mara had dabbled in palm-reading. Was the title of “witch” one that was commonly thrown about by this group, or was it something more nefarious that had to be earned through misdeeds? There was no way for him to know.

Reggie was shaken from his thoughts by a sudden desire to inspect the bookcase. He ambled over to it, allowing his eyes to scan the spines of the remaining dust-soaked volumes therein. Most were in a language he couldn't understand, and looked old enough to sit in museums. Leather-bound volumes packed with yellowed paper, mostly. He thought to pick one up and leaf through it when a singular book on the far right side of the top shelf called his attention.

This one didn't look like the others. For starters, its cover wasn't made of leather, but metal. Reggie brought a finger to its spine, allowing his skin to brush up against the cool exterior of the book. He shivered as he did so. Sure enough, it was metal. His touch left a faint trail in the grime. Easing the book from its spot very carefully, Reggie was stunned by its weight. The book must have weighed at least ten or fifteen pounds.

Running his hand against the front cover and taking in the intricate designs pressed into the silvery metal in the faint light that came through the edges of the boarded window, he was transfixed. Very detailed etchings had been made across the cover and spine of this book. It was a job done with the utmost care, a task that would have taken no less than a lifetime. Squinting in the low light, appraising the front cover, Reggie could make out what seemed like thousands of little impressions in the metal which all came together to create a unified work. The design, a series of interconnected circles, was hypnotizing.

That it was a thing of great age was clear from the moment he picked it up, but just how old the strange book was he couldn't accurately guess. There was an aura of antiquity surrounding it that could just as easily have given the impression of a hundred years or a thousand. Opening the book, Reggie struggled to make out the words on its first page. There was no writing to be found on the cover, but he felt the need to try and learn the title of this strange and wondrous book that'd so captured his attention. What he found there was gibberish to him, but he shivered all the same as he tried to pronounce it quietly.

“Carte de Umbra Lungi.”

A draft passed through the room at that moment, as if the utterance of the ornately-rendered title had invited something into the space. The shadows seemed to quiver as the air shifted, and when the atmosphere was returned to its normal stuffiness, Reggie couldn't help but pick up on a change in the room. He'd fancied earlier that there'd been another presence there with him, that he could still feel the room's long-vanished tenant dwelling there in some vague way. The feeling was doubled, tripled now. So sure was he that Agnes would storm into the room at any moment that his heart began to race. Rocked by intense panic, Reggie lowered the book and scanned the room quickly, fist balled and legs growing weak. He wanted to run, to flee from this place. The entire house, the street it was situated on, no longer felt safe to him.

He left the room, feet pounding hard as he scaled the dark upstairs hallway and trotted down the stairs. He bypassed the kitchen, entered the foyer, and was out the door he'd entered from before his guide ever materialized. He felt the woman's eyes on him as he marched down the stoop and raced for his car. Fumbling with the driver's side door of the LeSabre, Reggie jumped in and engaged the lock at once. The fluttering of curtains at the blue, two-story house told him that its tenants were still watching him closely.

Shaking, Reggie wiped sweat from his brow and started up the car, peeling out of the spot and tearing down the street. He narrowly missed a number of parked cars as he sped onto the main road and took off. “Good Lord, give me strength,” he said in a near-whisper. The common refrain barely left his lips; he was out of breath, stricken by a fear he couldn't put a name to. Why was he so terrified? What'd come over him in that room and caused him to flee as if being pursued?

Glancing at the passenger seat, he found himself with yet another question on the growing pile.

Why had he seen it fit to bring with him the strange, old book with the metal cover?

He hadn't let go of it, had absentmindedly carried it out of the house with him in his flight. Or had he? The book, its cover glimmering in the dim sunlight, seemed to suggest otherwise. It had wanted to leave that house, had wanted to go with him. That was what it seemed like. That he'd made off with it was no mistake; his poking and prodding in that house, his insistence on further investigating the matter of Agnes' disappearance had won him this curio. The book entering into his possession was what was supposed to happen. Like a character written into a play, Reggie only wished he'd been made privy to the script.

No one in that house would care that the book was gone from Agnes' room. Guilt did not assail him, only fear. Something left to fester in that room over the course of the last decade was now out in the world again. He looked at the book in the corner of his eye as he rolled up to a stop light and felt an overwhelming sensation as of foreign eyes upon him. His car was the only one at the light however, and there were no pedestrians in sight. He was alone. Knowing it didn't make the feeling cease, though. It was just like it'd been up in Agnes' room. His car was host to another presence, another energy.

Reggie steadied his breathing and tightened his grip on the wheel. There was one place he could take this, one person he could count on to give him some insight into the nature of the book. Hitting the gas, he took off for Corso's Books.

TWENTY

Victor Corso was an old friend of Reggie's, a man he'd met not long after coming home from 'Nam. Victor had owned the little bookstore on the corner of Tenth and Washington Street for almost thirty years now, and dabbled in less conventional things, too. His was a shop dedicated not only to books, but to his other eccentric hobbies, namely astrology and tarot, as well.

Reggie stumbled into the book store with the strange, heavy book barely contained under one arm, sweating as if he'd just run a marathon. A few customers wandered around in the aisles, leafing through books, while Victor sat behind the counter and rearranged a few stacks of magazines. At sighting Reggie, Victor's face lit up.

“Reggie,” began the Italian bookseller with a clap of his hands. He was a short man, somewhat stocky, with dark, bushy eyebrows and a flamboyant swagger. Dressed always in his signature salmon dress shirts and pressed, tight-fitting slacks, it was Victor's custom to greet old friends with a handshake and kiss on the cheek. As he left his seat and started towards Reggie however, he must have seen that something was amiss. He paused just shy of Reggie and narrowed his gaze. “Are you all right, Reg?”

Reggie clutched at the book as though it were a dagger buried in his side and licked his lips. He attempted a smile, but didn't have it in him. Sweat continued pouring off of him. He'd thrown off his jacket before leaving the car, but his shirt was soaked through. His Adam's apple quivered as he tried to state the reason for his visit. “Victor, I gotta... I got a book here...”

Victor's gaze sank to the metal-bound volume under Reggie's arm. His eyes grew narrower still and he pressed a pudgy finger to one of his eyebrows, smoothing it out. Sniffing the air, he tapped Reggie's arm and motioned to a room in the back, just past the counter. “You need to speak alone, yes? Let's go in the back, hon.” Standing on tip-toe, Victor snapped at one of his staff on the other side of the store. “Luis, watch the counter for me. I'll be in the back room.”

Reggie followed Victor behind the counter and into the back room, where the staff usually appraised rare books, counted money at day's end and often lazed about when things were slow. Reggie had been back there once or twice to share a drink with Victor after business hours, but the errand he was on now lacked anything of pleasure or pleasantry. His request was very simple. Staggering to the nearest table, he cleared away the clutter of discount paperbacks and candy wrappers and set down the heavy book with a thud. “Please, tell me what this book is.”

Not that he didn't already have some idea. Before walking into the store, Reggie had leafed through it a bit on his own. Inside, he'd found about a hundred pages of flowing, foreign script. But what'd really captured his imagination were the illustrations.

There must have been at least a dozen. He couldn't be sure, because he simply hadn't had the stomach to seek them all out. Depictions, each of them, featuring grisly, medieval scenes. The first he'd glimpsed was of a woman's throat being slit and her blood collected in a chalice. The art was very old and its style was somewhat sketchy, however the roughness of the pictures only added to their morbid allure and grotesque realism. In studying that bit of art, Reggie had gotten the impression that the artist was someone intimately familiar with the act of murder; the strokes that'd laid this hideous work on paper were those of a hand that possessed also a considerable experience in the slitting of throats, he felt quite certain.

The next illustration, featuring a horrible, hair-covered thing standing before a king on his throne had been, if it can be imagined, more awful than the last. Reggie had squinted through the dying light at the image, fearing that at any moment the monstrosity might leap from the page. He hadn't gone any farther in the book than that, hadn't had the strength to, but hoped that Victor might be able to shine some light on its provenance. Anything he could learn about the book and its potential involvement in the disappearance of Agnes Pasztor would be welcome.

Victor locked the door to the room and walked over to the table, hands in the pockets of his slacks. He plucked a pair of reading glasses from a table nearby and took a long look at the book, whistling sharply. “What have we here?” He furrowed his brow, touching the book's dusty cover and then suddenly recoiling. Stealing a glance Reggie's way, he sauntered off into the corner where he always kept a bottle of spiced rum inside of a cabinet. “Where'd you get this, Reg?”

Reggie considered his answer carefully. There was nothing much to tell, however. Where he'd gotten it wasn't the important thing. What he'd do with it now that it was in his possession was what most worried him. “Wouldn't believe me if I told you,” he replied, palming away a handful of sweat from his brow and massaging his scalp.

“Want a drink?” Victor produced the bottle of rum and gave it a little shake. The usual mirth in his expression was missing. He wasn't offering because he wished to unwind or have fun; Victor wanted a drink because he knew, perhaps instinctively, that there would be some unsettling things in the book that he'd be better able to handle with a buzz. He always had a kind of sixth sense about objects like this one. Reggie shook his head, but Victor wrenched off the cap nonetheless. “I'm having one,” he said, taking a pull from the bottle. “Two, depending on how this goes,” he continued, walking over to the book and pulling up a chair.

Seated before the book, Victor set down his bottle and picked it up with evident difficulty. It was cumbersome, heavy, and the filth that tumbled from it in small puffs with every move made it a terrible thing to hold. But it wasn't simply the filth clinging to the silver cover that disgusted Victor. Reggie knew all too well, could sense even from across the room, the other filth that emanated from it. He'd have been hard-pressed to put a name to it, and under any other circumstance, would have felt just as foolish as the whimsical, superstitious Victor for attempting to do so. But this book, whatever it was, had an energy about it.

Opening the front cover, Victor leaned over the book and began to study it. He ran his finger across the crisp paper, taking in the script. “Carte de Umbra Lungi,” he said. Turning to face Reggie, his olive-colored face went a little pale. “I never was any good at Italian. Grandpa spoke it around the house when I was little, but for the most part I only ever retained how to order at restaurants.” He gulped, the flicker of humor in his voice dying out at once. “But unless I'm losing my mind, the title is translated loosely to mean “The Book of Long Shadows.”

Reggie cringed. Taken in turn with the hideous illustrations he knew to dwell deeper inside, the title was a fitting one. “It's... it's an Italian book, then?”

Victor shook his head. “Don't think so. Whatever it is, though, it's real close to Italian. I'm thinking maybe it's Romanian or something.” He paused just long enough to take another swig of rum, before flipping ahead a few pages.

The illustration of a woman getting her throat slit came into view, and the rum very nearly spilled from Victor's lips. Reggie wasn't even close enough to the table to get a good look at the image, but still he stepped further away, fearing that he might glimpse it afresh.

“What the hell is this, Reg?” demanded Victor, pushing away from the table.

“I was hoping you could tell me that, actually,” was Reggie's rejoinder. “I don't know what this book's all about, but...”

Victor shut the book. Pacing from the table, be rifled through a small cabinet in the corner that teemed with junk. Reggie could hear the clinking of glass, the rustling of paper as Victor rummaged. “I tell you one thing,” muttered Victor, returning to the table with a stick of incense and some sprig of plant matter with long, pale leaves. “I've never seen an old book quite like this one. It's bad news.”

Reggie grimaced. He wanted to disagree but knew on an instinctual level that his friend was correct. “I mean, it's just an old book, Vic. Right?” The words sounded forced and cheap even to him.

Squaring the book in the center of the table, Victor lit the incense and vegetation with a silver Zippo and blew on them both until they began to smoke profusely. Then, holding them both in one hand, he began waving them over the volume. “It's an old book, sure... one that's probably worth a lot of money to, you know... certain types of collectors. But me? Personally? I wouldn't want anything to do with it, Reg.” The smoke was mild, sweet-smelling.

“What is that you're burning?” asked Reggie, watching the smoke pour off of the burning materials in small puffs.

“White sage and incense,” replied Victor, never once taking his eyes off of the book. “Look here, Reg.” He was holding the burning materials close to the Carte de Umbra Lungi, allowing the smoke to linger around it. And yet, something strange seemed to be happening. The book, by some method which Reggie couldn't explain, was somehow warding off the sweet smoke. Though Victor waved the burning mass again and again, the smoke would not accumulate around the book, but would instead part, as if the smoke didn't want to get too close to the thing. The sight made Reggie shiver; he'd felt some sort of aura surrounding the book before, but to see it manifest physically in this way was more than a little alarming. Having made his point, Victor stood back and put out the smoking bundle. “I'd wash my hands of this thing, and fast, if I were you. That's purifying smoke I've just used, but as you can see...” He coughed a little, pursing his lips. “That book's rotten, incapable of purification.”

“Vic, I'm sure there's... there's an explanation...” Reggie searched in his mind but rational theories proved elusive. Could an object be considered truly malevolent? Could a book exude an aura or energy of some kind that could interact with the outside world?

“You laugh when I talk about my horoscopes and such, Reg. I know you think I'm a chump, too whimsical. But you and I can both feel the power dripping off of this book, and I'll tell you, straight up, that it's something that shouldn't be messed with. Leave it be, Reggie.”

Reggie paused, his gaze wandering back towards the glimmering cover of the book. Its metallic shell glistened in the light of the back office, seemed to beckon to him. After a moment's hesitation, he reached over and picked it up, tucking it under his arm and nodding. “I'll keep that in mind, Vic. Thanks.”

Throwing the book into a trash bin and never thinking about it again might have spared him from the feelings of dread that now assailed him, but such a course would never soothe his curiosity. Though he had no good reason to be, Reggie was frightened by the book. Nevertheless, his fear couldn't altogether extinguish the intrigue that surrounded it. An object with this much personality, he felt sure, must be linked in some way to the disappearance of Agnes Pasztor. It would be valuable to his investigation, would open some doors where previously he'd thought himself at a dead end.

Thanking Victor profusely, he left the book store in a hurry, ignoring Victor's repeated calls to “Get rid of it!” Rushing out into the evening, he dropped into the LeSabre and tossed the book once more into the passenger seat, where it seemed to leer and fume like an irate hanger-on. Starting the car, he pulled out and zipped along the dim streets, corralling his thoughts away from the book; from the dim, dusty room where it'd been found; from its former owner, whose pale visage still glowed bright in his memory.

Pulling into his garage, Reggie sat in the driver's seat for a few moments, hands on the wheel, and attempted to collect himself. Suddenly, his cell phone began to ring, the vibration against his thigh sending a start through him. He didn't recognize the number. Lowering his voice, he gave an unenthusiastic “Hello.”

“Hello, Reggie?”

“Yes?”

The caller cleared their throat. “It's Kenji Ando. Remember me? I'm one of the guys who met you out at that, uh... shack. In Akeley?” He paused. “My friend Dylan here seems to have stumbled upon something. Do you think that Agnes' disappearance might have to do with numbers stations?”

Reggie worked his jaw over in his hand. “Nah,” he finally replied. Then, looking narrowly at the book, he shuddered. “I think things are moving in a different direction, actually. I... I think I got a pretty good lead going here. I don't suppose you fellas could meet me at the shack again soon, could you?”

Kenji chuckled weakly. “You want us to go back there?” From the background, Dylan's reluctance came through in a series of mutterings. “What have you found?”

Carefully, Reggie picked up the book. Setting it in his lap, he cracked the cover and scanned the title page. “You study languages right, kid? Tell me, does Carte de Umbra Lungi mean anything to you? I found this old book with that title, and I think it's got everything to do with this... thing. I can't read a word of it. Buddy of mine wagers it might be Italian or Romanian or something of that kind. Pretty sure we'll find something in it that ties this all together. And it ain't looking good, because our buddy Agnes was probably into some weird shit.”

“Yeah, I'll look into it. I speak pretty good Italian. That title sounds like one of the Romance languages, for sure. I'll... I'll see what I can do when we meet up. When's good for you?” Dylan's hushed protestations reached a fever pitch.

“The sooner the better. I got this awful feeling that we're on a deadline here. Not much time to be had.”

“We can drive out there tomorrow,” replied Kenji. “Sound good?”

Reggie had to force himself to reply in the affirmative. “Sounds great,” he said. Of course, “great” wasn't really the word. Returning to the shack sounded awful. Dangerous, even.

“We'll see you then.” Kenji hung up.

Reggie remained in the driver's seat for a long while, looking down at the book in his lap. The garage light dimmed and a pestilential quiet filled the space. He gulped, his eyes scanning his surroundings slowly.

More than once, while peering into the rearview mirror, he fancied he'd seen a human silhouette crouching behind the car. The corners of the garage, too, when glimpsed in the side mirrors, yielded similar shadows. Shaking his head as if attempting to knock the sights from his eyes, he stepped out and entered the house.

The book, however, would be staying in the car. There was nothing that could possess him to bring it inside.

TWENTY-ONE

The arguments had gone on almost without surcease since the minute Kenji hung up the phone. Kenji and Dylan still had a fair bit of their Winter break left, but Dylan was vociferous in his desire to stay out of this missing person's debacle. He would have preferred staying in the dorm, whiling away his time, and said as much no less than a dozen times before they actually set off in the clear, cold morning.

Dylan white-knuckled the steering wheel of the old Honda as they skipped up onto the entrance ramp. “I can't believe I'm going through with this,” he groaned. “It's my fault to begin with. Never should have driven you out there in the first place. I really wish I hadn't. And the only reason I'm going back there now is because...” Dylan fell short of completing his thought. He didn't have a good reason for making the trip, and wasn't ready to admit that, despite his fear, his curiosity had gotten the better of him.

“Just drive, man. I want to take a look at this book Reggie found.” Kenji nibbled on his thumbnail and looked out at the frigid scenery. The grass along the shoulder of the highway was frozen, a pale green, and every blade looked like a glistening needle in the light of the morning sun. He pressed his forehead against the window, the cold sending a shock wave through him. “That book... he gave me the title. I'm pretty sure it's in Romanian. Carte de Umbra Lungi. Unless I'm mistaken, that means 'The Book of Long Shadows'. I picked up a Romanian dictionary from the linguistics department before we left this morning, so hopefully that'll help me translate it.”

Dylan didn't even look over. He kept staring out at the road ahead, coldly. “Sounds great. Sounds real fun, Kenji. 'The Book of Long Shadows', what a hoot. I'll bet it's a medieval cookbook or something, right?” He shook his head. “I was an idiot to get mixed up in this shit with you. This is all my fault, really. I'm the one who helped you clean up that audio. I don't know what I was thinking.”

“Cool it, man.” Kenji sipped at his gas station coffee. Frowning, he choked it down, grounds and all. “I think we're going to get this all figured out very soon now. And just think; we could crack a missing person's case. Don't you think it's kind of exciting?” He spoke as energetically as he could, but that he was gripped by a terrible fear was undeniable. The slight tremor in his voice, which he might've attributed to the cold, was proof positive. He'd hardly slept a wink the night before. After translating the book title Reggie had given him, Kenji had spent an hour or two searching the web for any mention of the book. His search had turned up nothing, however. Neither the original title, nor the translation yielded anything.

“After this, I'm not coming back,” Dylan declared. “I'll drive you out this one time, Kenji. One last time. But after this, I'm tapping out, got it? If you want to keep up with all of this after today, you're going to have to call a cab or something. I won't... I won't drive back to this place again after this, got that? We shouldn't even be wasting our time. It's none of our business. But I'm going to humor you. Next time, well... I won't be there to watch your back, man. I'm just warning you now, in case you decide to keep this up. It's not my scene, Kenji.”

“I get it.” Kenji crossed his arms and closed his eyes. “I appreciate your coming along nonetheless. I'm a little creeped out by all of this, too. But we've gone too far to give up now. I want some answers.”

Dylan scoffed. “Creeped out?” He muttered something unintelligible afterward. It was clear he wasn't willing to voice his apprehensions in full, for fear that he appear a coward. But he didn't have to. The terror was scrawled all over his face. Kenji knew he'd tossed and turned all night in anticipation of the drive. No matter how hard he worked to appear indifferent or annoyed, Kenji knew Dylan to be every bit as frightened, and interested, as he was.

Traffic was very light. Even during their pit stops for gas and food the eateries and gas stations were almost wholly deserted. They ate and drank in silence, the two of them too deep in their own thoughts for further arguments or discussion on the matter. Till they arrived at the shack and met with Reggie, there would be nothing new to discuss.

While munching on a lukewarm burger at a rest stop diner, Kenji wondered what sort of woman Agnes Pasztor was. Or had been. This book, which he presumed to have some link to her, was certainly not a normal, everyday kind of book. It sounded ominous, and to hear Reggie nervously tell of it was enough to make him uneasy. Nothing in this case was easily explained or natural, and the emergence of some sinister book wasn't so hard to believe when everything else was taken into consideration. Agnes may have been a strange woman with stranger interests. Till he'd had a few hours to look over the book and decipher it he wouldn't know for sure just what they were dealing with, but to say that he had a bad feeling about the case would have been something of an understatement.

On the road again, Dylan navigated a light snow. The snow transitioned into a warmer rain, which dressed the sides of the highway in a vaporous mist as the day wore on. Passing once again through the sparse, rural towns of Minnesota, they entered into Akeley. The GPS unit dinged, indicating the long, seldom-tread road that would lead them straight to the shack.

It was with no little reticence that Dylan steered them onto it.

They hadn't spoken much since their last stop. With the familiar, open scenery now running past their windows they said even less. Kenji watched the boring fields fly by at sixty miles an hour, the dread in his gut welling and welling till he feared it might dribble from his mouth. He gripped the edge of his seat, waiting for the small shack to come into view.

When it did, the two of them could be heard to loose a small gasp at once. There was nothing in the shack to warrant such a reaction; it was as nondescript and unmolested as it'd been during their first encounter with it, and yet the two of them, at seeing it in-person once more, could barely believe their eyes. Here stood the quiet little habitation where the two of them, along with Reggie, had spent a strange night together just over a week ago. This was the spot that the vanished Agnes Pasztor had led them to in her cryptic transmission.

And soon, probably, they would come to understand why. It was very possible that Reggie's newest lead would shine some light on the reasons for Agnes' transmission of the coordinates.

More to the point, Kenji had never expected they would return to the spot, and at seeing it once again, felt suddenly as though he'd made a terrible miscalculation of some kind. A great mistake had been made in returning, one whose consequences would be felt for some time. The time for turning back, for throwing in the towel in the search for Agnes, was over. Not for the first time Kenji considered that the three of them had been led back to the shack as pawns by some invisible hand. Reggie, the third pawn, was not in sight, however. There was no sign of his olive green LeSabre. Apparently he hadn't arrived yet.

Dylan let the Honda creep up the snaking drive and then parked a dozen yards away from the front door. His expression was one of trembling hopelessness. He, too, could feel that returning to the shack was a mistake, and could be seen to long for the quiet comfort of the campus. “Goddammit,” he muttered, wiping his eyes. He looked at the structure ahead as though hoping it were a mirage, but when it didn't vanish he grit his teeth and sank back in his seat, allowing the car to idle while he let the sight sink in.

“Let's go inside,” offered Kenji, taking his book bag in hand and unbuckling his seatbelt. “Doesn't look like Reggie's here yet. We'll wait for him.”

Without a word, Dylan killed the engine. Then, limping out of the car, he made his way towards the door, eyes glued to the crisp grass. A cool breeze shot across the field, but he didn't seem to feel it as he lingered outside the shack. Kenji met up with him, reaching for the knob and pushing the door open. The light outside was quickly fading, and the pervasive inkiness of the shack was profound. Carefully, Kenji reached inside and sought out the light switch. Flipping it, the dull bulbs in the ceiling came on, bathing the room in light.

The desk. The TV and VCR. The window. The bulky radio. The videotape Reggie had brought with him during their first visit, only to subsequently toss across the room. Everything appeared exactly as they'd left it. At the center of the room were the folding chairs, where Reggie and Dylan had passed the night. Their footprints were visible in the dust that coated the floors, proof of where they'd tread.

Something didn't sit right, however. With a howling wind to his back, Kenji shuffled inside and shut the door as Dylan entered. The place was undisturbed, completely. Nothing had been moved since they were last there, more than a week ago. And yet, something felt awry. Walking into the tiny structure, Kenji picked up on the weight of some other presence. It was as if someone had been there only an instant before he'd opened the door, and had disappeared through an unseen exit. It was impossible, of course; he knew that wasn't the case. Still, the feeling persisted. The dusty air within felt as though it'd been stirred up by the movement of another inhabitant, just seconds before they'd made their nervous entrance.

Kenji sought to force the fear from his mind and set his bag down on the desk. “Hope Reggie gets here soon,” he managed.

Dylan paced through the room, arms crossed. His face was looking pale, and the quick, twitchy glances he cast about the room, and especially towards the single window, revealed just how uneasy he was. “Feels like someone's watching us,” he said through grit teeth.

“Don't...” began Kenji, shaking his head. “Just don't. Reggie will be here soon, I bet.” He furrowed his brow, recalling that Reggie lived in St. Paul. He lived a lot closer to Akeley than the two of them did. Kenji thought it strange that they should have made it there before him, but knew better than to say anything out loud. No good would come from speculating over Reggie's tardiness.

The two sat in the shack silently, waiting for the third member of their party to arrive.

TWENTY-TWO

It was roughly an hour after Kenji and Dylan arrived that Reggie showed up. The sun had fully set by then and the fields were draped in shadow. The moon was a sliver of gold in the sky, barely visible behind a knot of angry clouds.

The sounds of Reggie's LeSabre coming up the gravel drive stirred them both from their frightened stupor. A few moments later, he came inside, a leather bag slung over his shoulder and a bit of sweat dotting his brow despite the intense winter cold. “Hey there, fellas,” he offered, closing the door. “Sorry I'm late. Didn't set out till later in the day.”

Dylan nodded a greeting, but remained in his chair, staring at the window.

“Thanks for coming,” said Kenji. “Did you bring it?”

Patting the leather bag he wore, Reggie nodded. He walked over to the desk, sporting a seasick grin. “You ready for this?”

Kenji nodded. “Brought a book that should help me translate it more quickly.”

Slowly, Reggie rifled through his bag. His eyes widened as his grip closed around the book, and he slowly drew it out, setting it before Kenji on the desk. It landed on the wooden surface with a deep thud, the metal cover shining in the light. “What do you think of that?” he asked, chuckling.

Dylan looked over Kenji's shoulder and tongued his molars for a time before asking, “Where'd you get this thing, man?”

Reggie started into his tale, describing the events that'd united him with the strange book, Carte de Umbra Lungi. First, he detailed his meeting with the mysterious Mara Antall. Then, he told the two of them about his visit to the old house where Agnes and Mara had once lived with a number of other Hungarian immigrants. He described the room that had once been Agnes' in no little detail, and then told them about his visit to Victor's, giving them the bookseller's pointed impressions of the thing. When he was through, he sighed, as though the information had been weighing him down all that time, and shook his head. “It's damned crazy, I tell ya.”

Kenji touched the cover. The metal was slightly warm to the touch, despite the coolness of the air. Studying the outside, he ran his fingers along the impressions in the metal. Though he was no expert, it was clear that this was an exceedingly old book, likely hundreds of years old, and that it'd been shaped by someone who held its contents very dearly. The delicate flourishes spoke of a craftsman who cared a great deal about the book's message, and who wished to dress it in an exterior that matched its importance.

“This book was in Agnes' possession before she went missing, then?” Kenji frowned, opening the front cover and looking over the title page. There, rendered in flowing script, were the words Reggie had given him. Carte de Umbra Lungi. The work was not attributed to any author, and there was no other information to be gleaned from this first page. “Why did she have this? And if she was kicked out of the house by the other immigrants, why didn't she take it with her?”

Reggie shrugged. “She didn't take anything with her by the looks of it. The room was dusty, but nothing was out of place. A bunch of clothes and such were still there. Looks like she just skipped town. Didn't take a thing.”

“All right.” Kenji fished the Romanian dictionary out of his bag and set it beside the Book of Long Shadows. “I'm going to start now. Please, keep it down while I try and make sense of this. If it's really Romanian then it won't take me too long to crack it. I've studied Italian for a long time, and the two languages are fairly close.” Turning the page, Kenji looked over the opening passages, but suddenly stopped short.

The flowing script was very neat, and the black ink was still readable despite the passage of years. It wasn't the writing on the page that drew his attention however. Pictured on the lower portion of the leaf beneath a chunk of text was a picture that made his stomach sink to the floor. “What the...”

Dylan, who'd still been peeking over Kenji's shoulder, recoiled at the sight of it. “OK, what the fuck is this about?”

The subject of the picture, a masterfully-drawn piece replete with great and realistic details, was a woman. Her throat had been slashed, and a bright trail of blood gushed from the wound. Her attackers surrounded her on both sides, held her arms so that she couldn't break free. The victim's blood was flowing down her bare chest and into a chalice. It was all Kenji could do not to shut the book at once.

The imagery was altogether too vivid. Though this book had been written long before the days of photography, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was some kind of primitive photograph, such was the intensity of the detail. Otherwise, it was very likely a scene drawn from life-- a drawing done by someone who was there, witnessing the grisly events thus depicted and rendering them with the skill of a master in realism. He closed his eyes and looked away for a moment. The image burned on in his mind, however.

“Yeah...” began Reggie, pacing nervously behind them. “There's some... weird shit in that book. Lots of... pictures and whatnot. I should've warned you. Sorry about that.”

Dylan sat back in his chair, his curiosity surrounding the book completely diminished. “Fuck this, man. I don't think we need to be looking at this kind of crap in the dead of night, out in the middle of nowhere. You know, this Agnes chick was probably into some freaky shit, and now she's missing. It's  for the best; knowing what kinds of books she read, I'm not sure I wanna find her anymore.”

Kenji returned to the book, trying not to look at the picture and focusing only on the text. It was a battle he could barely win, though. If ever he let his gaze wander in the least, he found himself staring in horror at the grisly scene below. “W-well, it's an old book, guys. Stuff like this was featured all the time in b-books by writers in the ancient world...” Kenji stammered.

Dylan chuckled incredulously, standing up. “Bullshit, Kenji. You ever seen anything like that on the History Channel? I mean, what does this have to do with anything? We came out here because we followed this chick's message, but... now we're reading her old book and it's full of murder scenes? Nah, screw this. We should get the hell out of here, now.”

Kenji shook his head. “Just calm down, man. Let me try and read some of this. I'll get a handle on it and then we'll figure out what sort of book this really is. See if it has anything to do with Agnes' disappearance. OK?” He scooted closer to the desk and scanned the book afresh, tearing a sheet of paper out of one of his notebooks so that he could cover up the distracting image while he attempted his translation. “Just keep quiet. I'll tell you what I find in here in a little while. It's too early to freak out. For all we know she just... collected old books.”

Dylan grumbled, pacing around behind Reggie. “Yeah, that's why her Hungarian buddies shunned her, right? Not because she was a witch who slashed people's throats, but because she collected old books.” He pointed to Reggie. “That's what they said, right? That she was a witch? Something's not right here, and the more we stick around this place, the closer we're gonna get to finding her. Does that sound like a good idea to you, Reggie? You want to stand around waiting for ol' Agnes to come back, looking for her gruesome book?”

Reggie buried his hands in his pockets and ambled around the room, shoulders stooped. “Now.... let's just let Kenji here work his magic, huh? If we find... if something comes outta this we'll hightail it outta here, young fella. No doubt about that. No doubt. But we gotta... we gotta see what this thing's all about.”

“You guys are fucking hopeless,” spat Dylan, leaning against the wall, fuming.

Kenji had blocked out the chatter and was better able to focus on the text after covering up the grisly picture on the bottom of the page. Scanning the text, he could pick out several familiar words. It wasn't long before things began to fall into place for him. A couple of quick dictionary references hammered out the differences in tense and usage that he came across, so that, before long, he felt like he was reading straight Italian. It helped that the style was very formal and literary. Though archaic, he could make out a good deal without even having to glance at his dictionary. The only trouble was that the book was rather long; it would take him more than a single night to get through its hundred or so pages. Moreover, there was no telling what passage, if any, was relevant to Agnes' disappearance, or what other terrible images he might run across while attempting a translation. His skin crawled just thinking about the first image. Whenever he pictured it in mind, Kenji couldn't help but agree with Dylan: The owner of a book that featured such terrible illustrations as this must be rather depraved.

Kenji had started this investigation as an unbiased party. He and the others had been led to the shack without knowing a thing about the woman who'd fed them the coordinates. Now that he was learning a bit about Agnes' life and interests however, matters had taken on a very different cast.

As best he could tell from his readings on the first page, the contents of this book were extremely esoteric. It appeared to be something of a magical or alchemical text, referring to means through which supernatural abilities may be gained. In other words, it was something like a witch's spell book.

Outside of movies or books, Kenji had never seen such a thing. He knew books had been written on the subject of paranormal phenomena in centuries passed, but this wasn't like the historical texts he'd seen in documentaries. This, for all intents and purposes, was a grimoire chock full of actual spells and rituals. Whether these methods succeeded at conjuring what they proposed was open to debate, however it was clear in the volume's painstaking craftsmanship that the person who wrote the book thought it all to be true.

Kenji scoffed inwardly. No, this was a book of nonsense. It had to be. Magic, spells, rituals, the paranormal... these things didn't exist. He'd been listening to Dylan too much, entertaining too much ridiculous talk about EVPs and things of that sort lately. His unease about the gruesome art in the book had unseated his reason for a moment, made him consider the possibility that the book's contents were genuine, but he very quickly dismissed the notion and returned to his reading. Turning the page, he found a wall of neat text. Thankfully, there was no awful drawing on this or any of the next few pages. Sighing deeply, he pressed a few fingers to his forehead and treated the book like any other dry translation job. Kenji didn't bother taking notes; he simply wanted to get a good idea of the content so that he and the others could make sense of it. Possibly there would be some link in this book to real-life events, and it would lead them to the truth behind Agnes' disappearance.

The little voice in the back of his head seemed to mock him as he read on. You just couldn't let this go, could you? You've spent so much time investigating this random string of occurrences, digging deep where you had no business doing so. You'll regret it...

Dylan and Reggie fell into small-talk while Kenji worked through the first few pages of the book.

Outside, the night deepened, growing darker and quieter than before. A gust of wintery air struck the shack and the lights overhead dimmed briefly. As the breeze settled down, it almost sounded like a far-off sigh. The trio glanced out the window almost in tandem, half-expecting to find someone there.

There was nothing.

TWENTY-THREE

Dylan paced. Reggie was sitting with his arms slung over the back of one of the folding chairs, looking up at him. They chatted in hushed tones, not wanting to interrupt Kenji's reading.

“So,” continued Dylan, “it's just like I was saying. Sometimes, the dead can be captured on audio recordings or video. Experts don't know exactly how or why this happens, but they speculate that their energies interfere with the recording equipment, and that they reach out with a message for the living. Of course, they don't have the energy to say a whole lot, so the messages are often condensed, right? A little cryptic, maybe.”

Reggie's gaze hardened as he pondered this. “Like a set of coordinates, you mean.”

Dylan nodded gravely. “I told Kenji over there that this could be some kind of paranormal EVP thing, but he doesn't buy it. I think, though, that it's entirely possible. Just think about it. Maybe this Agnes lady died, right? And she wanted to let someone know about where she died, or the person who killed her, so she shares these coordinates. A string of Maidenhead coordinates like what she shared is brief enough for a spirit to convey, probably. Why not, right?”

Stroking his chin, Reggie glanced over at Kenji, who was hunched over the book, reading feverishly. “We'll see, I guess. I want to know what your friend over there makes of the book first.”

“Nah, think about it, man,” continued Dylan. He was trembling slightly, a mixture of excitement and unease coursing through him. He chewed on his lower lip, going through his theory again. “It's the only thing that makes sense. Her spirit got picked up on these two recordings because she wanted to leave a message for the living.”

“Sure, but then how's this book figure into all of this?” asked Reggie.

“Maybe it doesn't,” countered Dylan. “I hope it doesn't. That's some freaky shit in there. What I'm saying is that we're maybe dealing with a ghost trying to reach the living. I don't even want to consider that it could be an evil, witchy ghost we're chasing.”

Reggie yawned. He'd brought a thermos of coffee with him, and every now and then he'd take a long pull from it. “I've got a friend, Victor. The book store owner. He had a look at that book there, like I told you. He's kinda eccentric. Likes astrology and all kinds of New Age stuff. But he told me once, when discussing some murder in the local news, that the victim might never rest in such a case. A spirit, in death, is sometimes 'broken', he said. A violent end can scatter pieces of their spirit so that they can't know peace till the end of eternity. And those pieces, you know, they end up in all sorts of places. God knows where they might end up. Maybe in a video or song or somesuch. It's not impossible. Could explain why voices get picked up in these radio recordings, or why our buddy Agnes... you know.”

Dylan shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah... yeah, you might be onto something. I'm telling you,” he said to Kenji, patting his shoulder, “this is an EVP thing. She's a ghost of some kind, and she's reaching out to us from beyond, man. You know I'm right.” Kenji shook him off, focusing hard on the dense text before him.

“You think Agnes was murdered?” asked Reggie. “It's possible she was killed by someone and wanted the world to know what happened to her. When she died, her restless soul got busted like a mirror, into pieces, and those pieces ended up in a song, a documentary, that were released on the day of her death. Those things are examples of EVPs, a spirit caught on video, yeah? Her message was spread, transmitted...”

“Could be...” Dylan trailed off, balling and un-balling his fists. He was glancing repeatedly at the radio on the desk while he paced. He reached over Kenji and toyed with the knobs on it, his forehead dressed in a bit of sweat. “I, uh... once, in a movie, I saw someone try to...” He shook his head, decided not to finish the sentence.

“What's that?” asked Reggie, leaning forward.

Dylan hesitated. “Well, I'm not saying this is legit or anything, but... I saw in a movie once that you can use a radio as a kind of ouija board, to communicate with the dead. Know what I mean? Ghost hunters online use 'spirit boxes'-- they scan the frequencies in search of anomalous noises. They claim it's the voices of the dead. I saw a few videos on that not too long ago when I was researching white noise and EVPs, too.” He gulped, issuing a nervous laugh. “It's dumb. But maybe Agnes lured us here because she wanted us to use the radio, right?”

Reggie sat bolt upright. “Now we're talkin'. You might be onto something there, kid.” He stood and walked over to the radio, brushing a thick layer of dust off the top of the black console. “Think we should give it a try? Maybe switch her on and see what we pick up?” He nudged Kenji's arm, drawing him out of his reading. “What do ya say, Kenji?”

Dylan shook his head. “Nah, we're... we're not in a great place to do this sort of thing. We're just going to hear what we want to hear in the static, guys. Not wise to mess with spirit boxes in our state of mind.” He'd gone pale again. “Let's just forget I said anything. It's a long shot. Movie rubbish.”

Reggie pressed, however. “No, I think you might have a point. It'll help us kill some time if nothin' else.” He tapped Kenji's shoulder again. “Let's have us a séance, boys. If we're right, and Agnes is really no longer of this world, then we stand a chance. Think about it; she's the one who led us here, and we've got a radio at our disposal. Let's fire her up.”

Kenji massaged his temples and stood up, stretching. “I could use a break, I guess.” He yawned, cracking his knuckles and resting his hands behind his head. “What do we have to do to set this up? I don't want to waste too much time on this, mind you. I've got a lot of reading to do yet.”

“What've you found in there so far?” chanced Dylan, wincing like he wasn't interested in the answer.

“Not much, yet,” replied Kenji. “Nothing that seems to have anything to do with Agnes going missing, anyway.”

Reggie worked through the hypothesis once more. “So, Agnes died ten years ago. Maybe got murdered or had some unfinished business, and we found her in EVPs or what have you. Now that we're here, she wants us to make contact. Let's get the radio going.” He motioned to Dylan. “Do it just like they did in those videos ya saw.”

Dylan laughed, shaking his head. “I don't think this is smart. We're just going to scare ourselves. Most of those videos I saw were fakes, I'm sure-- people hearing gibberish and interpreting it as something profound.” He stood before the radio and glanced at the numerous buttons. Finding the power button, he clicked it. A red light flashed on, and the unit powered up, spitting out a discordant hum of radio static. Turning the volume down and looking not a little spooked for the sudden burst of sound, he tried to voice his reservations one last time. “It looks like the radio works, but... guys, I don't think we oughta mess with this.”

Reggie slurped some coffee from his thermos and plopped down into one of the chairs, crossing his legs. “Worst case, we don't hear nothin'. Best case, I'm right and we make contact with her. Nothing to lose but a little time. And we got plenty of that, young man.”

Kenji reluctantly agreed. “It's worth a shot, if only to finally put this to bed. You think she's a ghost, well, let's see if she wants to talk.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Dylan busied himself with setting up the radio. He lifted it from its dusty perch on the desk and sat it on the floor. The cord was just long enough to extend to an outlet nearby, and the three of them plopped down beside it, sitting in a semi-circle.

So far, everything Kenji had read in the book gave him bad vibes. It wasn't that he believed in magic or ghosts or anything of that sort; he'd always been something of a skeptic, rather even-headed where matters like these were concerned. Perhaps it was merely the strange case he'd found himself wrapped up in-- that of Agnes' disappearance and all of the strange happenings surrounding it; or maybe it was the frightful and graphic artwork that was found in every chapter of that book that opened his mind, however slightly, to the possibility of a supernatural influence. The book spoke of rituals whose currency was human blood. Sacrifice, it seemed, could bestow a devoted killer with myriad benefits if only they knew what to do with the payload.

Among the most unsettling rituals Kenji had read was one roughly translated as The Forbidden Sustenance. Its execution was rather simple; one needed only to recite a certain passage from the book, a prayer, and to drink an equivalent to three pints of blood from the body of a freshly-sacrificed victim. This, in turn, would grant the practitioner something like ten years of additional youth. The consumption of human blood as medicine was not unheard of in the myths and legends Kenji knew from around the globe. He was reminded of vampires, chiefly.

There was a troubling thread that seemed to unite these various rituals and incantations, however. One character, called only “The Dark One”, appeared repeatedly. His name was to be uttered during the cryptic proceedings and was to be spoken, it was noted, with the utmost caution. This “Dark One”, it was written, was always listening. From whence it listened, or what it was, he hadn't yet found an explanation. Kenji figured that this was a nod to some ancient Romanian deity or demon. Though he didn't put much stock into it, there was no denying that this “Dark One” was an integral figure to the mythos of the Carte de Umbra Lungi, and to the magical horrors it claimed to facilitate.

The Dark One had not been depicted in the book so far. Drawings of torture, of executions and primitive diagrams featuring body parts or rare ingredients were plenty, however the core figure behind these strange rites was never pictured. It was just as well; among the most disturbing things Kenji had read in the volume were descriptions of the Dark One. It was written that the entity could take the shape of a man, but that it was, in reality, a beast. Of its shape only vague things were noted. The writer of the book had taken liberties with the description, rendering the Dark One in eerie, poetic language. It was said to possess a gaseous form like “the smoke of a funeral pyre”, and yet on the same page, there was reference to the thing boasting “a thousand and more searching legs, like those of a spider.” The descriptions were varied, but that the author had intended to describe a creature sordid beyond all imagining was clear.

Further into the book, Kenji noticed a couple of pages that sat apart from the rest. They looked thoroughly dog-eared, as though they'd been referenced a good deal more than the rest by a previous owner. He wished to skip further ahead and have a closer look at this section. Something told him that it was a chapter of particular interest to Agnes, but Dylan's insistence on holding a makeshift séance had distracted him from that goal. The book would have to wait.

Appearing somewhat deflated, Dylan slowly explained the procedure he would be following in conducting the séance. “The way I saw it performed required a continuous scan of the frequencies. We'll use the AM signals exclusively, and we'll scan them in reverse. I don't know why, but several experts agreed this works better for some reason.” Studying the stereo, Dylan allowed his finger to rest on the power button. “Before we start, we have to announce our intent to speak to the dead. That way, any spirits in the area will know we're tuning in.” He cleared his throat, lips quivering, and fought to summon the words. A few moments passed however, and he couldn't muster the nerve.

Eventually, Reggie spoke up, holding his knees and letting his deep voice boom through the pervading stillness. “We're reaching out to anyone out there who's listening-- especially you, Agnes. Agnes Pasztor, if you're listening, we want to have a chat.”

Without even thinking about it, Kenji felt compelled to add, “And the Dark One, too. If you're listening, we want to speak to you.”

Reggie and Dylan looked over at him curiously, but said nothing. Returning to the radio, Dylan switched it on and set it to scan the waves in reverse. Out here in this remote spot there were not many signals to lock onto, but the crackle of static and weak, far-off transmissions did begin to turn up. The noise was unpleasant, and he wrestled with the volume knob, settling on a reasonable level that would minimize the more grating screeches coming through the dusty speaker. He then sat down, legs crossed, and dropped his hands into his lap. “Now we wait a bit.”

The trio waited in silence, listening to the radio scan the frequencies over and over again. Once it had cycled through four or five times, Dylan nodded.

Kenji took this as his cue. Licking his lips, he leaned forward and spoke towards the radio as if it were a microphone. “Hey, is... is anyone there?” The crackling of the speaker startled him, and he loosed a little gasp before feeling suddenly ashamed of himself. Once more, he asked, “We want to make contact with the spirits. Is anyone there? We wish to speak to Agnes Pasztor.”

With every passing minute, while the three of them listened closely for any answer, Kenji felt more and more like an idiot for participating. This is bullshit, he thought. His time was better spent working on translating the old book.

Dylan spoke up next, his voice half-trapped in his throat and almost unintelligible. “Agnes, are you there?”

For some minutes they sat, but only the occasional pop of distant radio stations met their ears, coming through in one instant and vanishing the next. “This is pointless,” said Kenji, starting to stand. “Let's shut it off. I want to get back to the book.”

Reggie urged him back. “Nah, sit down. Let's give it a real shot before we throw in the towel.” Leaning towards the radio, Reggie spoke. His voice boomed through the cramped shack like the howl of a high priest in some night-shaded shrine of old. “We wish to speak to the spirit of Agnes Pasztor. Are you there, Agnes?”

The three of them sat, waiting for a reply. Kenji's gaze returned to the book on the table. The silvery cover beckoned him; the key to everything was in that tome somewhere. He felt sure of it, though he couldn't say why. This séance was a fool's errand, the kind of thing that bored conspiracy theorists engaged in. The sort of experiment that charlatans posted to the internet in order to rack up more page-views and ad revenue. When a minute went by without a discernible response, Kenji stood up and snickered. “This is crap, guys. Let's quit it.”

“Now wait a minute, young fella--” began Reggie.

“For what? What more do we need to do? If Agnes is really listening, what more could she possibly ask for?” Kenji shook his head. “You really believe this crap, Dylan?”

Dylan shrugged. “I mean, I saw people do it online. It worked for them...”

“Oh, right. Because everything you see online is real, right? You know, it's probably not working because we forgot to draw an upside-down pentagram on the floor in pig's blood, or chant 'Bloody Mary' into a mirror.” Kenji returned to his chair and sighed.

Reggie opened his mouth to reply, but the voice that entered the shack just then didn't come from his mouth. A breezy, slightly androgynous voice broke the tension and threw the room into a panic. It was only a single word:

“YES.”

Kenji, Dylan and Reggie froze in place, their eyes fixed to the radio. The unit continued its reverse auto-scan through the frequencies. Some burst of sound, like something at the tail-end of a radio advertisement sounded, then disappeared just as suddenly. They all knew what they'd heard, however. It'd been very clear, clearer than any dialogue through the old radio speaker should have been.

“Y-you guys heard that, right?” asked Dylan, panting. He grit his teeth, looking at the radio narrowly.

“Agnes, is that you?” chanced Reggie, reaching up and taking Kenji's arm. He pulled him back down to his spot on the floor.

Kenji didn't need guiding; he returned to his spot in front of the radio and listened closely.

In the next instant came a flicker of a reply. It was the same voice, a hoarse whisper this time. “YES.”

“Holy shit,” muttered Kenji. “Did we... did we really make contact?” He pondered the other possibilities. Was this just some voice they'd caught on the waves, some speaker being interviewed about current affairs or fashion trends on an AM radio talk show? He watched the display as the channels skipped by in reverse. Somehow, he didn't think it was just a coincidence.

“I think we did,” replied Dylan.

The three of them hovered near the radio on the floor of the old shack. And through the speaker there came a fourth participant in the conversation:

Agnes Pasztor.

TWENTY-FIVE

A long time passed before any of them found the nerve to speak again. Kenji put his skepticism on hold and stared at the radio in abject disbelief. Dylan or Reggie were messing with him, they had to be. It wasn't really possible to make contact with the dead this way, was it? Moreover, the fact that Agnes might be a spirit-- that their target in this search was a deceased woman, filled his blood with ice. Suddenly, prior events seemed less strange to him. The transmission Agnes had sent out, relaying the coordinates to the shack, was clearly something that only a powerful supernatural manifestation could explain. But for what purpose had the three of them been gathered there? Why had Agnes cast her net so wide to begin with?

Kenji ran a hand through his hair and spoke up. “Where are you, Agnes?” He looked at the other two, whose eyes betrayed disbelief. It'd been due to their urging that Kenji had participated in the séance at all, but they apparently hadn't expected to actually make contact in this way. Now that they'd encountered something, there was no smugness in their expressions, no pride or hints of “I told you so” as they looked back at Kenji. Only fear.

The radio crackled with a fresh wave of static as the channels passed one by one. A burst of noise broke the silence soon thereafter, but it was a muddled mess. If it was a reply from the other side, then it was too garbled to make out. The trio sat in silence for a time, each of them wondering whether they should ask again or simply turn the thing off.

“Agnes, are you still with us? Where are you?” asked Reggie, breaking the ponderous quiet. He brought the thermos to his lips with a trembling hand but did not drink. The steam rose from the inside of the vessel in a steamy tentacle, which teased the tip of his nose.

A burst of static prefaced the ghostly reply. It was only a single word, a command passed down by the croaking, androgynous voice. “DIG.”

A collective shudder passed through the room. “What do you think that's supposed to mean?” asked Dylan, his voice low. “Do you think... that this is even Agnes we're speaking to? It doesn't sound like her.”

Kenji shrugged weakly, keeping one eye on the radio all the while. “It's hard to say. Did it just tell us to dig? Why? And where?” He folded his arms and rocked from side to side. “And if it isn't Agnes, then who could it be, man?”

Reggie pointed a finger Kenji's way, bobbing his head. “You said something else there, earlier, didn't you? You reached out to someone else when we started all of this. The Dark One, ain't that right? Who's this Dark One?” He arched a brow.

“It was... it was something I read in that book, that's all. I was just fucking around, guys. It's not like we made contact with something... else. It has to be Agnes-- we asked just now and it told us it was Agnes. It wouldn't lie, would it?”

Dylan chuckled to himself. “I don't know about that. Some of the articles I read suggested that one should never fully trust the voices that come through. You never really know who you're talking to. You might've called up someone... or something... completely different.” He gulped. “We need to make sure this is Agnes somehow.”

Returning to the radio, Kenji spoke once more. “Agnes, is this really you? What do you mean, 'Dig'? Where do you want us to dig?”

The three of them were startled when the reply came furiously through the speaker. There seemed to be an echoing, muddy quality to the voice, as though the reply were issuing from some tightly enclosed space. The speaker repeated, “DIG. DIG. DIG. DIG.”

Even as Kenji and the others exchanged puzzled glances, the voice on the radio went on, becoming ever louder and more frenzied with each repetition.

DIG.

DIG.

DIG.

Losing his nerve, Reggie reached forward and shut the radio off. The shack was plunged into perfect quietude once again. “That's enough of that,” he said, panting. He struggled to stand. Sipping from his thermos, he clutched the handle till his arm shook. “We need to leave here. Never look back,” he declared.

“No, hold on a damn minute,” interrupted Dylan. He switched the radio back on, quickly setting the unit to auto-scan in reverse once again. “We didn't sign off. Whenever you have a conversation with a spirit you have to sign off-- cut the link-- otherwise the channel between our world and theirs remains open. You can't... you can't just shut this shit off and pretend it never happened, man!” Red in the face, Dylan cleared his throat. “Agnes, are you still there? Agnes?”

They waited several minutes, but their repeated requests for Agnes went ignored.

“Goddammit, we blew it,” said Dylan, yanking the power cord from the wall and shutting down the radio. He shoved it across the floor, beneath the desk, and fell into a heap. Balling himself up, he placed his head between his knees and gave a shuddering sigh. “We fucked up. Shouldn't have done that.”

“Come on, man,” said Kenji. “It's not that big of a deal, right? We got what we needed. We made contact.”

Dylan shook his head fervently however. “No, you don't get it! We were supposed to follow a certain procedure. We needed to sever the link. Now for all we know the spirit we were talking to is in the room with us; watching, listening...”

Reggie's lips quivered. “You don't really mean that, do ya? You're just telling stories now, right kid? I don't need you messing around like this after everything we heard on that radio, so cut the shit, you hear?”

Dylan looked up at him gravely. “I'm not messing around. We may have just shot ourselves in the foot.”

“Look,” interrupted Kenji, rising to his feet, “I'm pretty sure that was Agnes we made contact with, and her message was clear. She wants us to dig. Think about it. The two of you thought she might be a ghost, a murder victim. Well, everything's fallen into place now. I can picture it clearly. One day, about ten years ago, Agnes gets murdered by someone. The murderer brings her out here, buries her in this remote patch of land where no one will ever find her. In her final moments she uses whatever psychical energies she's got to reach out to the world of the living. She announces the coordinates of her final resting place in the hopes that someone will find her down the line and reveal what actually happened to her. Think about it! It all makes sense!”

Dylan nodded, but made no move to get up off of the floor. “Maybe so,” he said, “but we don't know where to dig. And beyond that, we still aren't sure who it was we were just speaking with because you just had to go and run your mouth in the beginning. What the fuck is the 'Dark One' and why did you think it was a good idea to name-drop him?”

“So maybe we were right about Agnes getting killed. I dunno about you fellas, but I don't think it's my job to go digging up bodies,” added Reggie, slumping against the wall. “We need to get the police involved.”

“Sure, and tell them that a ghost guided us to her own remains?” replied Kenji. “They'd laugh us out of town. Or maybe they'd consider us suspects. Anyway, we should hold off on contacting the authorities until we actually have a body to work with.”

“You're not suggesting that we actually start digging for Agnes, are you?” Dylan jumped up, steadying himself on the desk. “You want to go looking for her body? This is nuts. This is... this is beyond anything I ever agreed to do, Kenji.”

“We came all the way out here to get some answers. We were led here, the three of us, by her message. You want to back out now? You want to turn tail and run? Think about it, guys. If we're right about this, then we stand to solve a ten-year-old missing person's case. This is the end of the line. If we find Agnes' remains, then her spirit will finally be able to rest. Her transmission won't have been in vain!”

“Oh, Jesus,” muttered Dylan, massaging his temples. “I can't even believe you right now. How can we be so sure that she was really murdered? I mean, who killed her? One of her Hungarian buddies?”

“It's possible.” Taking everything he'd learned about Agnes into account over the course of their search, Kenji felt that the only people with a motive to murder Agnes were the other Hungarian immigrants living in the house that Reggie had visited. The tenants of that house had shunned her for being a witch; it wasn't a complete stretch to think that they'd want the witch dead. “Anyway, we just have to look. We need to start digging.”

“Where do you propose we dig?” asked Reggie. “She could be anywhere. Under this shack, for all we know.” He tapped the floorboards with his heel.

Kenji fell into thought. Where could Agnes be buried? Where had her murderer disposed of her remains? Were they under the shack? It wasn't out of the question, but at the same time he had trouble imagining a number of poor Hungarian Immigrants constructing a shack to cover up a grave. It strained credulity. Agnes had given out the coordinates to this very spot where they all stood, but it was possible that her body wasn't actually inside or underneath the shack. There was a good deal of land surrounding the edifice, and--

Suddenly, he had an idea.

Rushing for the door, Kenji stepped out into the cold night. His breath left his lips in large, white trails of mist as he pushed into the field. The grass, cold as ice and partially frozen, made his skin burn as he went. Looking out over his surroundings, Kenji attempted to recall just where he'd seen it.

There was one spot, he knew, where the grass was different.

Almost as if a large hole had been dug in that spot and had then been haphazardly covered over with a different species of grass.

Looking over the moonlit plain for the place where the grass didn't match, Kenji quickly zeroed in on it. “Here,” he muttered. Walking to the spot, he stood in the shorter grass, certain as he was of anything that he'd found Agnes' final resting place. “Guys, I found it.”

The other two peeked out at him from the doorway of the shack. “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Dylan. “What did you find?”

“The grass here is different,” replied Kenji, stamping on the ground with his foot. “This is the spot! This is where we need to dig!”

Reggie whistled, shaking his head. “I'm too old for this shit. You fellas are going to have to do it. It's the dead of winter out there, Kenji. Ground's going to be hard as hell.”

Undeterred, Kenji started for the Honda. “Let's go, guys. We need to get ahold of some shovels.”

TWENTY-SIX

The three of them were packed like sardines into Dylan's rickety Honda. Kenji and Dylan sat in the front seats while Reggie tried to contort his lengthy frame into the back. The car rattled on down the road as they passed into the nearest town. Not far from the highway entrance ramp they came upon a 24-hour chain store they knew to have a sizable hardware department. Dylan wheeled into the almost-empty parking lot and rolled to a stop beneath a bright, white streetlamp. He shut off the car but didn't jump out at once, even as Kenji appeared raring to go.

“Hold up,” said Dylan, grabbing Kenji's arm. “We need to talk this through first.” Glancing into the rearview, he nodded to Reggie. “All three of us. See, this is some serious shit. When I first helped you clean up the audio in that song, I never expected things to come to... this. Following the clues, we were led all the way out here, to a spot where there might be a fucking body buried. I don't want to go through with this, if we're being honest. I think it's a shitty idea. But if you're both invested in digging up ol' Agnes and solving this thing, then I'll do what I can. Promise me, though, that we'll call the cops when it's over. I want to bring in the cops the minute we discover a body. I mean, if there's really one to be found.” He sighed. “Kenji, man, I don't think we should be doing this. I had a terrible feeling about coming back to this place, and now I really wish that I hadn't.”

Kenji slugged him playfully in the arm. “We're the good guys here. We have a chance to solve a crime, to put a restless spirit to rest. It would be wrong of us to just wash our hands of the evidence we've found and turn our backs on Agnes. This whole thing has been insane, I agree. But we're at the end of the road now and we're about to bring it to a close. Help me out tonight and I won't ask anything else of you. Aren't you at least a little curious, Dylan? Don't you want to know whether we're right about this whole thing? Don't you think we owe it to Agnes to do the right thing in this case? Am I right, Reggie?”

Reggie nodded firmly, trying to shift his legs in the crunched back seat. “Kenji's right, much as I hate to say it. I don't feel great about what we're doing, but it's necessary. We were all brought here to see this through, and Lord knows I won't ever sleep again if I don't. Let's have us a dig and see what we find. With any luck we'll help Agnes move on from this world. It's a good thing. We're doing good.” He grasped Dylan's shoulder and gave it a supportive squeeze.

Dylan nodded slowly. “I see what you mean. But Kenji...” He trailed off for a bit. When he finally started back up, his voice was frail. “I'm a little too curious. I'm so curious about what's happening here that I'm kind of afraid. Have you ever considered what might happen if we're wrong? What if we start digging in that field and we find...” Again, the words died on his lips. “Something else,” he finished feebly.

“No chance,” said Kenji. “You're being paranoid. Come on, let's go in there and buy a few supplies. The night's young.”

They made their way across the parking lot, passing through the automatic doors. The lights in the store were dimmed, and a handful of staff could be seen to amble through the aisles sleepily while still others stocked the shelves. Somewhere across the massive store a loud floor buffer could be heard to roar. Cutting past the registers, past the tall white racks loaded with magazines and candy, Kenji led the others to the rear of the store, where the sporting goods and hardware were kept. Selecting shovels equal the job was only a moment's work; the ground would surely be frozen and tough, which would require them to use a sharp, metal shovel with a sturdy handle. Three of them were plucked from the rack and placed in a rusty shopping cart. Wheeling out of the aisle, Kenji continued into the grocery section. Reggie and Dylan said little as they sauntered behind. They weren't nearly so excited at the prospect of solving this mystery as he was. Their moods were a somber contrast to his; as he pushed the cart past the freezer section, Kenji was practically whistling a tune.

His intense curiosity was about to be sated. For so long Kenji had wondered about the cryptic message he'd heard in the song-- the message that Agnes had transmitted. Now he was tantalizingly close to figuring out he meaning behind it. All that he needed to do was dig in the field; when the job was done, he'd have his answers, would know if his hypothesis held up. The digging would be rough, no doubt, but he felt a thrill coursing through him, adding an extra tension to his muscles.

Rounding another aisle where the bottled drinks were kept, Kenji tossed a 12-pack of Gatorade into the cart, and then snagged a couple bags of trail mix off of one of the end caps. They'd need some fuel if they were going to spend the night digging into the cold, hard ground. “You guys want anything else?” he asked, stopping just short of the registers.

Dylan glared at him balefully. “I'd love to head back to campus, actually. But that's not what you're offering, are you?” With a sigh, he grabbed a king-sized Snicker's bar from one of the racks near the registers and tossed it into the cart. “You're picking up the tab, I hope?”

Kenji laughed. “Yeah, I'll take care of it. You want anything Reggie?”

Reggie shook his head. “No. Let's hurry back. Time's wasting.”

The sleepy cashier rang up the cart-full of goods. With bloodshot eyes and scarcely a hello, she didn't seem to wonder in the least why two young guys and an old Vietnam veteran were stopping in after midnight to pick up a bunch of shovels. Kenji paid and hurriedly wheeled the cart out of the store, making a beeline for the Honda. When Dylan had popped the trunk, Kenji took to loading the shovels inside. Returning to the passenger seat, he sat down with a couple bottles of gatorade in hand and a sack of trail mix. “We should eat and drink; it's going to be hard-going, this dig.”

Dylan nibbled at his candy bar disinterestedly while he started the car. Reggie accepted a Gatorade but refused the rest, struggling to get comfortable and having to leave his left leg splayed to the side.

This is it, thought Kenji. You were meant to do this. The three of you were led here for a reason. What began as a mere sound on a song you downloaded has led to this shack, where a woman may have been buried a decade ago. It's no accident; fate brought you into the fold so that you could solve this mystery and find justice for Agnes. He washed down a handful of peanuts and M&M's with a swig of his sport's drink. His energy was high. He felt committed to this path, felt as though he'd stumbled upon his life's calling.

Dylan shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat, tonguing his molars and swallowing the last of his Snicker's. “You know, I'm going to sound like a broken record, guys, but should we really be doing this? Is this something we ought to concern ourselves with? You keep saying it's a good thing, that it's for the best. But is it, really? What if whoever killed Agnes did it for a reason?”

Kenji scoffed. “Dude, whatever. Of course it's a good thing. Doesn't matter what books she owned or what she believed in-- no one deserves to get murdered and buried out in the middle of nowhere. Whoever did this to her probably thought they were being really clever by burying her in a remote field, but they never counted on her reaching out to the world from the other side.” He nodded. “I'm still having trouble believing that part... the EVP stuff. But I guess crazier things have happened.”

Reggie sipped on his Gatorade and looked out the window as they rolled back onto the main road and started for Akeley. “I'd still feel more comfortable having the cops with us. We could always tell them we heard she was buried there from someone. It just doesn't sit right, this digging around for a corpse. We're in over our heads, fellas.”

“Hey, I'd love to call the police myself, but the only proof we have is this cryptic, phantom shit. They'd never believe us.” Kenji straightened out his seatbelt and turned his gaze to the dark shoulder of the road. The further they drove from town, the closer they got to the shack, the taller the grass on the side of the road seemed to become.

“I hope you know what you're doing, Kenji,” added Dylan, giving the car a bit more gas. “I wonder if you won't regret it when it's all over.”

Kenji shook his head with firmness. “I'll regret it if we don't go through with it.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

They pulled up to the shack, guided by the beacon that was its single, dimly-lit window. Following the ghostly light, Dylan pulled up onto the gravel drive and parked the Honda beside Reggie's car. The three of them stepped out into the chill, stretching and shivering. Kenji took to unloading the trunk, distributing the shovels and heading straight out into the field. When he'd singled out the patch of shorter grass, he lifted the shovel up high and thrust the tip into the icy ground with a grunt.

He wasn't interested in waiting for the others. Every moment he hesitated was just another moment he'd have to spend wondering. He needed, more than anything, to know whether his suspicions were correct. The narrative he'd put together was a simple one; Agnes had been murdered, possibly by the Hungarian immigrants who'd shunned her for her esoteric beliefs, and was buried in this exact spot. Agnes had subsequently reached out to the world of the living in the hopes of disclosing her final resting place and perhaps seeking revenge against her killers.

All that was left was to dig.

The ground was rather tough, though the soil proved easier to work with the deeper he went. Propelled by a wave of adrenaline, Kenji barreled through an inch or two of soil before the others walked over and joined in. Together they widened the aperture till they were working on the entire spot, somewhat round, where the grass was incongruously short. When the grass had been dug up, they pressed on through the lower layers, falling into a sort of rhythm. Heaving and panting, the trio wielded their shovels with all the force they could muster.

Dylan worked with a nervous energy, more than once dropping his shovel and cursing. His hands and upper arms shook; both due to tension and the strain of the job. Reggie fared better; though older than the two college students, his service in Vietnam had highlighted for him the importance in maintaining physical strength. Most mornings he went for a short run around his neighborhood and did several sets of push-ups. When time allowed he'd visit the gym and lift weights with friends. As a result, he managed to keep pace with Kenji even as Dylan fell behind and complained.

The night sky was densely packed with clouds. Now and then the sliver of moon overhead would completely disappear behind them, leaving them to work in almost total darkness. The shack's solitary window glowed eerily behind them as they toiled, but did little to further light up their surroundings. The cold wind buffeted them constantly, cutting through their jackets and cooling the sweat they wore till they felt frozen to their very cores. Not only was the work brutal, but the conditions they were forced to work under bordered on hostile.

Kenji didn't care.

All he wanted was to dig deeper, to find what he knew must be buried in this patch of land. Reggie and Dylan retired briefly to warm up and rest their muscles, but Kenji would hear nothing of stopping. Though his palms and fingers ached, he pressed on, plowing deeper and deeper. Over the course of three hours, wherein they'd worked almost without surcease, the three of them had managed to dig to an admirable depth. Simply eyeballing the spot, Kenji theorized that they'd gone just over a foot deep. The soil at this point was a bit more workable than the stuff on the surface, and he was encouraged by its softness.

How deeply would the killers have buried Agnes' body? Two feet? Six? It was hard to say. He hoped that they wouldn't have to dig for much longer, but Kenji knew he'd have dug for a hundred or more feet to find what he sought. He was a man possessed by his goal, and with every jab of the shovel his curiosity only grew.

Reggie and Dylan returned from their break. Reggie half-heartedly began to dig, but Dylan simply leaned on his shovel, staring out across the field. His pale face was made to glow in the light of the moon, and his wide eyes shimmered like puddles of bluish water.

“Why aren't you digging?” asked Kenji, barely bothering to look up from the end of his shovel.

Dylan shook his head, sniffing at the breeze and playing with his glasses. “Don't you guys feel it? Ever since we've been out here, digging around, I've felt like someone's watching me. Watching us.” He looked over his shoulder, then turned back to the shack, shuddering.

Kenji grunted, heaving a shovel's worth of soil over his shoulder. “It's always been that way. This place just has that effect. We've always felt like we're being watched here. Just keep digging, man. We're almost done with all of this.”

Fidgeting, Dylan muttered something under his breath. Then, burying the shovel in the ground, he walked off and sat on the hood of his Honda, arms crossed.

“Dude, where are you going?” asked Kenji.

Reggie paused, looking at the two of them in turn. “Maybe he just needs a longer rest,” he offered, nodding at Kenji. “About time you took a rest too, I think.”

“Bullshit. Come on out here, Dylan. Dig. We need to keep going. We've got a ways to go yet.”

Dylan scowled. “No. Fuck this. I never signed up for this, Kenji. Do what you want, but I'm staying right here.”

Gritting his teeth, Kenji returned to the hole. “Suit yourself.” He took firm hold of the handle and pushed as deeply into the ground as his tired muscles would allow, clearing away another shovel's worth of dirt. Then again. And again. Reggie whistled weakly as he joined Kenji in plugging along.

Kenji raised the shovel and jabbed it into the earth, his mind consumed only by his goal.

The blow made the bones in his arm rattle. He felt the impact in his teeth, and promptly dropped the shovel, startled.

He'd hit something solid.

“I think... I think I found something,” he said, his voice cracking in excitement.

Reggie walked over and felt out the spot with his own shovel. “Sure it isn't just another rock?” They'd found a handful of large, dark stones in the spot over the course of their dig. That Kenji had simply happened upon another seemed probable.

This, however, hadn't felt like a stone.

Picking up his shovel, Kenji began to dig afresh, this time more carefully. Then, dropping onto one knee, he clawed a few handfuls of soil away to reveal what looked to be the chipped edge of a wooden vessel. “Holy shit,” he uttered. Looking up at Reggie, he laughed. “It's... it's a box.”

Dylan, hearing the commotion, hopped off of the car hood and walked to the edge of the aperture, arms crossed. “What is it?” he asked, his expression still firm.

“I found something! I think it may be the edge of a box... a coffin, maybe.”

At hearing the words, Dylan's features crumpled into panic. “C-coffin?” He dropped his hands to his sides and paced around the cusp of the hole, shaking his head. “Fuck, there's a coffin? Is this real?”

Reggie traced out the edge of the box with his shovel and then cleared away a bit more of the soil with his hands. “Sure is. That's an old coffin if I ever saw one. I think we've found our girl.”

Possessed by an animalistic energy, Kenji cast his shovel aside and began pawing at the ground like a dog, his sore fingers carving away the soil and leaving the long wooden vessel in sharp relief. Minutes passed, and the first signs of a crooked lid entered into view. He walked around its perimeter, trying to feel for the edge of the lid. He pressed his fingers into the weathered wood and tried to loose it. To his surprise, it gave without much difficulty, weighed down only by a bit of soil. “Doesn't look like the lid's been nailed down. We should be able to open it easily enough.” Kenji turned to the other two, who were now huddled beside him. “Will one of you help me get the lid off?”

Reggie nodded, reaching down and taking one side of the wooden lid. The wood was very dark, stained by the soil, and somewhat misshapen. As the two of them pulled on it, it seemed almost ready to crack in two. Very slowly and with the utmost care, they pulled the lid up and over, dropping it into the grass so that they might look inside the coffin.

Within the box was not what they'd expected.

TWENTY-EIGHT

They'd found what they were looking for. After hours of digging, the three of them had come upon the weather-beaten coffin and had succeeded at prying off its lid. A single glance at the contents of that coffin was sufficient to throw the three men into a frenzy of terror, however.

At the sight of the coffin's contents, Dylan staggered back, gasping curses and inching his way towards the Honda. His steps were unsteady, and more than once he wiped out on the ground. When finally he backed into the car, he edged his way towards the driver's side door as if preparing to drive off.

Reggie, too, backed away. “Jesus,” he muttered, his achy body given over to repeated shivers. He looked up into the sky, exhaled and began to pray quietly. “That ain't right,” he finally said, leaning against the shack. “Come away from there, Kenji.”

Kenji, though, was riveted. He was the only one with the courage to appraise the horrific sight within the coffin. Standing at the edge of the newly-dug aperture and gazing into the wooden box, he marveled at its contents. His mind was in overdrive attempting to find some explanation for what they'd found; the truly terrifying aspect of the find was in its being virtually impossible.

Within the coffin they had indeed found Agnes Pasztor's body. It had not been exactly in the state they had anticipated, however. Staring down at Agnes, Kenji wondered for an instant just what he had expected to find. A pile of bones, a desiccated mummy; something nigh unrecognizable.

What they found instead, however, was something like a healthy human body.

Agnes Pasztor was laying in that coffin. She'd supposedly been inside of it for something like ten years. And yet, she appeared as though she'd only just walked over and laid down inside of it. There were no signs of decomposition to the corpse; though it may have only been a trick of the moon, Agnes' pale skin showed remote traces of what Kenji interpreted as vitality. The woman drew no breath, was certainly dead, and yet she looked as though she'd settled down for a nap and would soon awaken.

She was dressed in a coarse, black dress; the very same they'd seen her wearing in that video. There was nothing else within the coffin. The body lay supine, and Agnes' arms were crossed over her chest, calling to mind images of Egyptian mummies. Compared to the dried out, hollow husks found in the mausoleums of Egypt however, she appeared very much alive.

Worst of all, perhaps, was the smile she wore.

On her back, with eyes closed, Agnes smiled widely. From where Kenji stood, she looked like a woman in the middle of a pleasant dream. It was this detail, atop all the others, which ultimately prompted him to step away from the grave and join Reggie.

Why hadn't her body broken down, decomposed? Agnes had been underground for a decade; there should have been at least a few signs of decay. Her body was beautifully, perfectly preserved, however. So much so that she didn't appear dead at all. Kenji ran through the events leading up to the exhumation, recalled the details that'd propped up their hypothesis. Agnes had been murdered, hadn't she; possibly by the Hungarian immigrants she used to live with? So, where were the wounds that'd done her in? The marks showing foul play? Had it been a poison that'd killed her?

And why, for the love of God, was she smiling?

Kenji could make no sense of the find. A dead woman placed into a grave over a decade ago by her presumptive murderers was exceptionally preserved, had not decomposed in the least. And rather than donning a look of fear or anger at the end, Agnes had chosen to wear a smile. What did it mean?

Numb to the cold, Kenji wiped his brow on the sleeve of his jacket. Dylan, looking on the verge of tears, had pulled his phone from his pocket and was desperately searching for a reception.

“What do we do with this?” asked Kenji, gulping.

Reggie shook his head. “That ain't for us to say. Now we call the cops.”

Kenji wasn't satisfied with this, however. He had an intense desire to discuss what they'd found, to try and make some sense of it. “But... but her body. Why hasn't she rotted away? It's been ten years... there's just no way her body could be...”

Reggie took hold of Kenji's shoulder and shook him softly. “That's enough. We'll lose our minds trying to piece it together. We need to get the cops and--”

“No, Reggie, listen. There's something wrong here. I mean, even if this soil were...” Kenji tapped the ground with the tip of his tennis shoe. “Do you think this soil is just extremely alkaline? Maybe some property of the soil keeps things from decomposing... maybe there's a natural explanation for her preservation after all these years...”

Dylan cursed and threw his phone against the ground. “Goddamn it! There's no signal out here. Fuck it, let's drive, guys. Let's go.” He rifled through his pockets for his keys, but when he found them his hands were shaking too hard to put them to any use. He dropped them onto the grass and cursed. “We need to get the fuck out of here, guys,” he pleaded. “We're done with this.”

Kenji approached the grave once more and looked at the body within.

It was Agnes, all right. Her features were exactly like he remembered them. He'd seen her in the video and in the photograph provided in the social media posting. She appeared exactly the same, looked as though she might open her eyes at any moment and walk right out of the grave. As he peered down at her he thought he could hear her soft, breathy voice on the wind, uttering the string of coordinates.

“Maybe she hasn't actually been buried for ten years,” offered Kenji, turning to the other two. “That has to be it. She's only been buried a short while.”

“I don't care how long she's been in the ground,” replied Dylan. “I want to get the hell out of here.”

Reggie made a beeline for the LeSabre and all but dove into the driver's seat. “Listen, fellas, I'm going to head to the nearest Highway Patrol station. Now, you two can either come with me, or you can stay here arguing.” He paused, shaking his head. “If you wanna stay, then clean things up and get ready to talk to the cops, because they're going to have a load of questions for us about this mess, and if we don't answer 'em, we're going to be up Shit Creek with no paddle, got that?” He motioned to his back seat. “Hop in. Let's get out of here and come back with some troopers.”

Dylan rushed towards the LeSabre and prepared to get in.

Kenji, though, didn't budge.

“What are you doing, Kenji?” asked Dylan with one foot already in the backseat.

Kenji buried his hands in his pockets. “I... I'm not leaving yet.”

Reggie and Dylan cursed in tandem. “The fuck you talking about, kid?” blurted Reggie. “Get in the car. You can't just hang around here by yourself.”

Kenji was determined, however. Something about this wasn't adding up, and he had to know what it was. The answer, he was certain, would be found in that silver book inside the shack. His memory returned to that dogeared portion, a chapter that had evidently been referenced more than the others. “I have to stay here. I'm going to look in that book and see if I can't make sense of this before the cops show up and detain us. Things are going to get messy from here on out. This is the only chance we're going to have to get some answers. Go, if you want, but I'm staying behind. I have to know what's really happening here, guys. I have to look at that book.”

Reggie slapped the wheel. “Enough of this! Just get in the damn car, kid! It's... it's not safe to stand around in this place anymore.” He ran a hand through his cropped hair. “I think something unnatural is going on here, and you'd be a hell of a lot safer coming with us. We can get our answers some other time. Better yet, maybe we shouldn't give a fuck about any answers. I don't know about you fellas, but I'm going to be working real hard to forget all of this shit after today. I've seen enough. We did what we set out to do. We found her. The rest is outta my hands, you hear?”

Kenji opened the door to the shack. “I'm staying.” He stood in the doorway and looked out at them.

With a pleading gaze, Dylan wandered away from the LeSabre. “Dude, no. Come on. You need to go with us. You can't just... you can't stay here with... with her...” He trailed off, his gaze moving towards the direction of the grave. He shook as he went on. “Please, Kenji. Get the hell over here. We need to go.”

Reggie started the car and slammed the driver's side door shut. Rolling down his window, he barked at the two of them. “Look, I'm getting out of here. I'm bringing the cops. You,” he said, pointing at Dylan, “keep an eye on your stupid buddy here. He's lost it. He's in too deep. Stay with him and make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. You'll be safer if you stick together. I ain't going to just leave him here by his lonesome, but I'm not waiting on getting the cops involved either. If he's staying, then you stay with him till I get back.”

Dylan's eyes widened and his Adam's apple trembled. “No... don't leave, man. Don't leave me here.”

Reggie was already reversing.

Dylan followed the car for a few paces. “Reg, man... don't leave me here!”

Reggie stuck his head out the window. “I'll be back as soon as I can and I'll bring a load of cops back with me. But you gotta keep on eye on him.”

The LeSabre disappeared into the darkness, only its yellow headlights visible as it approached the main street. Kenji could still feel Reggie's eyes on him as the car turned and started barreling away in the direction of town. The sound of the LeSabre's engine filled the night for an instant.

And then the silence was reinstated.

Dylan quivered in the gravel driveway. Standing next to his Honda, he considered driving off, thumbing the keys while stifling his sobs. Kicking one of the tires, he shot Kenji a foul look and stomped towards the shack. “You've got shit for brains, Kenji. I can't believe you. I ought to just leave your ass behind. You're sick in the head. Obsessed.”

Kenji entered the shack and waited for Dylan to walk in before shutting the door. Dylan wasn't wrong; Kenji knew that he was obsessed with all of this. His thirst for answers was insatiable and urgent. He didn't begrudge Dylan his anger. His frustrations were justified. Nevertheless, Kenji had no intention of leaving the shack until he knew what was truly happening here. Even though Dylan spent his time pacing around the shack, cursing under his breath, Kenji was still immensely thankful for the company.

They had only a short while before Reggie returned with the cops. If he was going to figure things out, he'd have to start reading immediately. Sitting down at the desk, he picked up the Carte de Umbra Lungi and flipped ahead to the dogeared chapter.

A frightful illustration marked the top of the page. Stationed above a particularly dense chunk of text was a drawing depicting a vaguely human-shaped figure. Its skin was black, like ink, and its eyes were rendered in a burning yellow. In the dull light afforded him by the tiny fixture above, the thing almost seemed to shift on the page, writhing like a centipede. Wispy, shadowy things like tendrils issued from its body, giving it the look of a large, human-insect hybrid.

Kenji knew what this image was meant to depict without even reading a word.

This, he knew, was the Dark One mentioned throughout the book.

Taking a deep breath, Kenji settled over the book and began to read as quickly as he could. As he did so, his heart began to slam against his sternum. Pressed for time, he needed to work fast if he was going to get the answers he so craved. But that wasn't what worked him up to such an extent.

What really stirred up his pulse and saw his gut swell with dread was the very real possibility that the answers he'd gain in his research would paint matters in a far graver hue than he'd hitherto imagined.

He read, his curiosity driving him almost to the point of nausea.

But deep down, Kenji really didn't want to know what was happening. Not anymore. He was simply propelled by a fearful momentum at this point, unable to back down or brush aside his curiosity.

He knew that once he understood the night's events, life would never be the same.

TWENTY-NINE

The headlights cut through the dense darkness as Reggie sped down the road. Though he wasn't sure precisely where it was located, he seemed to recall passing a large police station about thirty minutes out from Akeley, on the highway. He'd head towards it, or would drive just far enough to pick up a reception on his phone and call the cops from there.

He rapped a nervous beat against the steering wheel, gritting his teeth. The darkness seemed to encroach from all around him, enclosing the LeSabre in a cocoon of pure shadow. Reggie struggled to shake off the memory of the face revealed to him in the grave as he went, and any remembrance of the corpse, or of its queer, hardened smile saw the car swerve very slightly. His chest felt tight, and despite the cold the collar of his shirt was totally soaked through. The soreness caused by the night's dig faded into the background as he sought to focus on the drive.

Keep the car straight. Get to the police station and you'll be able to put this all behind you.

He mouthed the words, trying to solidify his resolve, but the fear returned time and again. The passage of every dark mile did nothing to efface it. The scenery never seemed to change, and was so engulfed in blackness that he couldn't be sure whether he was actually making any progress. Accumulating just beyond the fear in his breast was a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that, no matter how fast he drove, he'd never manage to make it to his destination. There was a distinct feeling, too, that even if he did manage to get to the police station, that it was already too late. Something had happened back at that shack.

Suddenly, something entered into his periphery, and it was only by a quick tug of the wheel that he avoided hitting it.

Pounding on the breaks, Reggie steered the LeSabre to a halt and looked into the rearview.

It'd looked like a person crouching near the road. A hitchhiker, perhaps? It seemed unthinkable to him that someone should be seeking a ride at this hour in so remote a locale, however a glance proved his suspicion correct. The figure, draped in some fabric, shambled towards the car from the shoulder and peered in at him through the passenger side window.

Reggie loosed a sigh of relief. He recognized the face looking back at him. He unlocked the door, allowing the hunched, panting form of Mara Antall inside. “W-what are you doing all the way out here?” he asked, his heart still pounding for the fright.

Appearing winded and tired, Mara leaned against the seat and shut the door. She was wearing a number of shawls, some of them thick and woolen, though her style of dress appeared far too light for such cold weather. She rubbed her wrinkled hands together and offered a slight nod. “Thank you for stopping.”

Reggie, recalling the purpose of his errand, straightened out his seatbelt and cleared his throat. Maneuvering back into his lane, he started once more down the road, a bit more slowly than before. “It's no problem,” he said after a time. Both hands on the wheel, he glanced at the woman from the corner of his eye. “So, what brings you out here at such an hour?”

He wasn't asking simply to make conversation.

The moment she'd sidled up to the car he hadn't thought twice about letting her in despite his usual aversion to hitchhikers. Mara, though eccentric, had never seemed particularly dangerous, however her appearance on the side of the road well after midnight, in Akeley, proved immensely troubling to him. The timing might have been viewed as a mere coincidence, however judging by the night's events Reggie was inclined to believe her arrival in the area to be anything but. He waited patiently for her answer.

Still panting, Mara donned a thin smile. “Oh, it's been a very long day for me. After what you told me, I thought about coming out here on my own, to have a look around. I hoped I might find Agnes. Unfortunately, I wandered too far and lost my way.”

Reggie nodded. “Where's your car at?”

“Oh, I had to abandon it some miles away. I ran out of gas. I've been walking for some hours now and feared I'd spend the night sleeping on the side of the road.”

The story seemed to check out, but that didn't mean Reggie wasn't unnerved by the timing. He wet his lips and decided to share the news with her. “I know where your friend Agnes is at,” he said, his voice withering into something of a whisper.

Mara glanced at him and perked up in surprise. “Really? Did you find her?”

“I did,” he replied. Reggie didn't care to divulge the details. Describing the process by which he and the two students had found the site of Agnes' burial alone would have sounded insane. The news that Agnes had been found dead and buried, however well-preserved, may have been rather upsetting as well.

The news inspired a low chuckle in Mara. It grew until her whole body shook, and peaked in the higher register, sounding like something more befitting a schoolgirl.

Probably she was happy that her friend was found and was entertaining the thought of being reunited with her after a ten year separation. It must've been a joyous laugh. A laugh indicative of great relief.

Why, then, could Reggie only sense insidiousness in it?

He grasped the wheel and gave the LeSabre more gas.

THIRTY

Dylan paced in a circle, mashing his hands together. “We never should have come. I mean, what the fuck is that out there? She doesn't look dead. Not in the least. And yet, who could live that way, underground, for ten years? No one. Not unless they were a witch, Kenji. Not unless they were, like, a real-life freakin' horror film. This... this is all bullshit.  What if she gets up out of there? We shouldn't have ever done this. I regret the day I chose to help you clean up that audio. I regret the day I drove us out here. I wish I'd never done it...”

Kenji's eyes were locked onto the book. He slammed his fist into the desk, sending up a cloud of dust, but never stopped reading as he muttered, “Shut up.” His gaze worked over the page line by line, letter by letter. The gears were turning. Though it was slow-going, the archaic prose was gradually translated into something he could make sense of. Now and then he stumbled, and would have to reference the dictionary he'd brought. He flipped through the dictionary's pages so hard that they tore in the corners.

It didn't matter.

Nothing else in the world mattered.

All he wanted was to know what secrets the book held. If this strange matter was to be tied up in some way, then it was the book that held the key.

The more he read however, the more he could feel the blood draining from his face. Things were falling into place. The pieces were being arranged in the proper order and he needed only to connect them. As he made sense of the text, reading and sometimes re-reading certain sentences to make certain that their content was fully understood, he felt his grip on sanity loosening. There was simply no way that a rational mind could embrace the heretical, nightmarish ideas proposed in this section of the book; and yet, after all he'd witnessed that night, he found himself with precious little choice but to entertain them.

Finally, when he reached the bottom of the page, he let his arms go limp. Sitting dazedly in the folding chair, he looked up vacantly towards the ceiling. “Oh, my God...”

This got Dylan's attention. He stopped marching around the shack and stationed himself beside the desk. “What now?” he demanded. “What's happened? Did you find something?”

Kenji couldn't answer at once. His mouth was suddenly dry as stone and his tongue didn't seem to want to move. His limbs were sapped of strength and he barely remained upright on the chair, slumping forward so that his upper body rested against the desk. He felt his guts roiling, felt his entire digestive system coiling and rebelling for what he'd read.

He had enough energy left for one thing, however. With a whimper, he reached out and batted the large, silver tome off of the desk. It landed on the floor with a metallic thud.

Then, with no little difficulty, Kenji hoisted himself out of the chair and looked through the window. He could see the field outside, could see the borders of the hole they'd dug. Their shovels were still scattered about.

“What's going on with you?” asked Dylan. He peered nervously through the window. “Is Reggie back with the cops?”

Kenji's breath fogged up the glass as he finally spoke. “Do you remember,” he began, “how I mentioned the 'Dark One' before the séance?”

Dylan nodded. “Yeah, what about it?”

Kenji had some trouble in continuing but soldiered on regardless. He still couldn't believe the words coming out of his mouth as he sought to convey what he'd read in the accursed Carte de Umbra Lungi.

No, that wasn't quite right.

He didn't want to believe them.

But, after all that had happened, he knew them to be true.

“I found a ritual in that book. A ritual that a previous owner of the book seems to have referenced with frequency. The Dark One is mentioned constantly... and this ritual is meant for summoning it into the world.” He gulped, but his throat only seized up and a groan wormed its way out from his deepest reaches. He supported himself against the wall. “You know how it works?”

The look of frightened bewilderment on Dylan's face said all. He shook his head.

“In order to bring the Dark One into the world, a willing participant must be b-buried for a period of ten years. Buried underground, as the dead are buried. When the right preparations are made, however, the body never really dies. They are preserved in a state between life and death, wherein they may mingle with the world of the dead... create a strong connection with it. This takes a decade. In that time, the soul of the buried individual encounters all sorts of things as it straddles the border between life and death. It is in this way that the Dark One is called upon. The longer the individual remains underground in the trance state, the more powerful the connection becomes, until one day, after ten years, the person gets dug up.”

Dylan took Kenji by the shoulders and shook him. “And?” The white rims of his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.

His legs failed him. Kenji toppled over and fell onto his ass. “When you come back from that space between the world of the living and the dead... when you've lived as the dead have lived but are unearthed, you come back to life.” He grit his teeth. “And you bring it back with you.”

“What... what does that mean, exactly?” asked Dylan, dropping to one knee. “What do you bring back with you?”

Slowly, Kenji turned and gazed at the book on the floor. The Carte de Umbra Lungi sat in a dusty niche beside the desk. “You bring the Dark One with you. The book says... it says it walks out of the grave with you, hand-in-hand. After ten years of s-stewing in the ground and forming that connection, you literally haul it into the world with you.”

The laugh that left Dylan's lips wavered on the borders of tearfulness. “You serious?” he asked. “That's not right, though. There was only one person in that grave, Kenji. We all saw it. Just one body. And, you know, she's dead in there. I mean, of course she is. She has to be! Body looks real good for a dead woman, but she's dead, right?” He massaged his temples and whimpered, trying again and again to convince himself that the old book was nothing but fiction. “We all saw her, for God's sake. She wasn't breathing, wasn't moving or anything. I know what I said earlier, but goddammit, I was scared. Agnes is definitely dead, though... she has to be dead. I'm... I'm trying to look at this rationally, man. That stuff you're talking about is impossible. N-no one can live that long in a trance.”

Kenji wiped his eyes. They were sore and hot. He felt like crying, despair coursing through him till he was completely overwhelmed. “Are you really so sure? What if... what if it's like those monks we watched on TV? People have managed all sorts of feats while meditating for long stretches of time.” He shook his head. Even in that moment it sounded ludicrous to him. “No... that shit isn't real. And neither is any of this. You're right. Agnes died while trying to complete the ridiculous ritual in this book. Who do you think helped her out? Someone had to have buried her. Someone had to have had a hand in it. Think one of her Hungarian buddies may have helped her do it?”

“Who knows,” replied Dylan. “But what I do know is that someone's probably looking for her. She had that friend, Mara, that put out the missing person's announcement. Probably wanted to find her, to know if she'd actually risen from the grave like they expected. Wouldn't be surprised if she knew more than she was letting on, or if she were actively looking for Agnes as we speak.”

Talking through things in this way helped Kenji calm down somewhat, but there were still a few things he struggled with. “What about the video? And the song? Agnes' voice is what led us here. She fed us the coordinates in the hope of being uncovered. Why?”

“Simple. The transmission was a plan-B. If she was buried but her accomplices in the ritual somehow forgot where she was, or died before they could unearth her, then Agnes wanted someone else to do it. The people following her directions would have no idea what they were getting themselves into.” Dylan gulped. “We didn't know what the hell we were getting into. We thought we were helping a spirit who'd been wronged. In all actuality, Agnes probably wanted to manipulate us so that she could get her way even if her friends failed to dig her up.”

Kenji furrowed his brow. “But how did she transmit her message? How did she imprint upon the media? Is she... is she really a witch, then? Do you think she actually has... had powers of some kind?” The more he ruminated on the question, the worse the pounding in his temples became. It appeared Agnes was indeed capable of projecting her voice and image onto media in some supernatural way.

This being the case, was it so impossible to think that she might pull off the summoning ritual; that she might have somehow stayed alive underground for all those years?

Dylan was grasping at straws. He motioned to the radio, to the space above their heads. “Look, man. I don't know. No one knows exactly how spirits tap into technology and manifest. They project their energy in some way that interferes with radio waves and such. Maybe Agnes had a radio and she used it to tap into the grid. Or the power lines outside this place. All of that stuff is connected in some way, you know? The whole world is connected through technology, through energy. If Agnes tapped into that network of connections from all the way out here, it's entirely possible that her energies were projected elsewhere, to places they didn't belong.”

“Like that song, or the documentary.”

Dylan nodded solemnly.

It was clear that the two of them would never have full answers to these questions. It was simple enough for Kenji that, somehow, Agnes Pasztor had injected herself into bits of media in the hopes of luring some do-gooder to the shack. Once there, the chances that she might be unearthed and that her ritual would be completed rose exponentially. On the day of her burial ten years ago she'd inserted hints into a song and documentary, had invaded them like a virus entering a cell.

Gaining his feet, Kenji walked to the door of the shack and paused. “There's really only one thing for us to find out, then.” His voice was low, his tone bereft of humor. He sounded like a broken man, standing before the closed wooden door and reaching shakily for the knob.

“Where are you going?” asked Dylan, rushing towards him.

Kenji opened the door and stepped into the cold night, barely avoiding Dylan's grasp. “I'm going to see whether she's really dead or not.”

Dylan couldn't even argue, but instead remained in the doorway, knees knocking against one another. “K-Kenji,” he pleaded, “come back here. We've g-gotta wait for Reggie.”

But Kenji was already starting across the field. His heart quaked in his chest, skipping into palpitations as he approached the lip of the aperture. The clouds parted in the sky above, allowing the moonlight to wash over the grass and rendering it a sea of swaying, frost-bitten green.

It was just as he'd expected.

Kenji stood beside the grave, staring down at it for a long while. His eyes swelled with tears. He ignored Dylan's repeated cries to return to the shack and instead stared into the coffin that sat a few feet away in the icy ground.

The empty coffin.

There were footprints in the freshly-dug soil where someone had walked off in the direction of the main road only minutes ago. In some places, the blades of grass that'd been tread upon still shifted for the weight that'd been placed on them. He narrowed his teary gaze and scanned the dark fields, looking out towards the road and beyond.

There was no sign of anyone.

“D-do you know what we've done?” Kenji muttered too softly to be heard.

Dylan finally mustered up the courage to pursue him, and when he arrived at Kenji's side a single glance into the empty grave was enough to send him into a panicked sprint towards the Honda. “W-what?” He stumbled, fell onto his knees and then clawed his way across the cold field till he took hold of the Honda's front bumper and pawed his way up its length. “W-where... where did...?”

Kenji staggered away from the grave, joined Dylan at the car. “Do you know what we've done?” he repeated, this time baring his teeth and quaking with equal parts anger and terror. “We set her free, Dylan. We played her game. All this time, we were just following her lead. But not because she was a victim. This was what she wanted all along.”

Dylan fumbled with the door to the Honda, eventually flopping into the driver's seat. “Kenji, come on. We... we gotta catch up to Reggie. We have to let him know what just happened before he drags the cops into this. A bunch of police are about to storm this place where we just dug up a body, but there's no fucking body anymore. Do you think Agnes is... is still here? Think she's going to come after us?” He shook his head. “You know, screw this. It doesn't matter. We're getting the fuck away from this place.”

Kenji thrust himself into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. Agnes' whereabouts were less important to him at that moment than they should have been. They needed to warn Reggie that their “corpse” had walked off, needed to regroup and decide what this meant before the authorities got involved. “Drive,” he said, holding onto the dash as the rickety beater screamed in reverse down the gravel drive. “I hope we can catch him.”

THIRTY-ONE

“This place,” said Mara, face turned towards the dark scenery outside the window, “is so remote, isn't it?” She took a deep breath, fogging up the glass slightly. A little grin worked its way across her lips. “It is easy to lose one's self in a place like this. Everything blends together, does it not? Even particular destinations in places like this are hard to pinpoint, when some years have passed.”

Reggie was approaching eighty miles per hour. He tried not to glance over at his passenger, tried not to listen to what she had to say. Nevertheless, he couldn't get past the feeling that she was dropping veiled hints to him, that she was teasing him with details that she shouldn't have known.

“Where did you find her?” she asked, though the tone she used was anything but calmly inquisitive. It was very clearly a demand for information.

Reggie pursed his lips, letting the question hang in the air for a while before finally giving an awkward laugh. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

Apparently displeased by this response, Mara's face was dressed in a deep-set scowl. She peered through the window once again in her periphery. “Once, about ten years ago, I visited this area with Agnes. It was a very nice spot. Just the two of us came. It was not long after the other immigrants had kicked the two of us out of that house, in fact.”

Reggie's shoulders stiffened. Both of them had been kicked out of the house the immigrants had shared? Mara hadn't mentioned that before. Previously, her narrative had only mentioned Agnes' being shunned. He listened closely as the woman went on, the tiny hairs on his ears pricking up all the while.

“I'd long lost track of the place where we stopped that day, a decade ago. I suppose that's where you found her, isn't it?” She turned to him, her face veiled in shadow but her eyes reflecting the greenish light coming off of the clock on the dash. “Will you take me to see Agnes?”

The request sent a shudder through him so that he could barely keep the car straight. His arms were tired from all of the digging, from white-knuckling the wheel. “N-no,” he said with all the gentleness he could summon. “I'm driving to the police station.”

With each passing mile marker Reggie was feeling increasingly suspicious of the strange woman who now filled his passenger seat. Mara said nothing for several minutes, simply sighing and leaning back. Then, just as Reggie's nerves were beginning to recover, she began to speak once more. “It's funny how many buildings have gone up in this area over the past ten years. It changed the landscape. Made me lose my way whenever I came out to look for my dear friend. Somehow, though, you found her. You knew where to look. Even though she was hidden, even though the landscape has changed, you managed to discover where she was. How is that?”

Reggie's heart thundered in his chest. Mara knew more than she was letting on. There was no longer any doubt in his mind. His eyes darted over to her hunched form once, twice, before he finally found the nerve to ask her the question on his mind outright. “Did... did you know Agnes Pasztor was buried outside that shack? Did you know it all this time, Mara?”

The corners of Mara's lips curled into a wicked smile. “Let me ask you this,” she began. “Do you think that Agnes buried herself?” She cackled for a time, relishing the look of surprise on his face. “Back then, there was no shack. That was probably what threw me off of the trail. I'd even marked the spot in stones... built a monument of sorts, but that was probably cleared away when the shack was built.” She sighed. “A shame, isn't it? I could have taken care of this sooner had things just stayed the same. We picked this area because of its remoteness. We never expected anyone to come out here and build on that land.” She shrugged dramatically. “The best-laid plans sometimes fall through, don't they? Alas.”

Reggie had broken into a cold sweat. “What y-you did to her... was murder,” he spat. The car was weaving in its lane. His vision was going double and he could scarcely focus on the way ahead for all of the sweat pooling in his eyes. He could hardly believe what he was hearing, and would have thrown the woman out of the car at once if only he'd been able to stop. But it was only a few more miles before they made it to the highway, and a short distance beyond that before they arrived at the police station. What was Mara's reason for admitting all of this? Was she confessing out of guilt?

No, the wicked smile on her lips spoke of anything but guilt.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” he asked, breathless.

“You did good work,” replied Mara, the smile fading suddenly. Her eyes narrowed in ferocious intensity and from beneath her shawl she drew what appeared to be a long blade. Glancing over at him, she allowed the polished knife to catch a flicker of moonlight. “You've driven far enough. I thank you for your help in the matter.”

THIRTY-TWO

The Honda groaned. Its engine could scarcely handle the stress of bolting down the road at more than ninety miles an hour. The suspension creaked and popped with every bump, and the tires squealed at every course adjustment. Dylan was leaning over the wheel, foot glued to the accelerator and gaze fixed on the distance ahead. They hadn't passed a single car in the ten minutes since they'd sped off from the shack. There was no sign of Reggie's LeSabre to be found.

Kenji stared ahead. Reggie had driven off quickly and had a considerable head start. There was no way they could hope to catch up with him. Still, he thought it strange that they hadn't crossed his path yet. By now, he wagered, Reggie should have been returning to the shack with a fleet of cop cars in tow. There were no blues and reds on the dark horizon, however. The further they went, the more his gut tensed up over the thought that Reggie hadn't made it to the station as intended.

Did Agnes get to him first? Did she catch up with him on his way to the station? Or... was it the Dark One?

Something captured their attention in the distance. Red taillights.

“Is that the LeSabre?” asked Kenji, pointing to the red glow.

Dylan tensed. “I hope not. Look.”

In the next instant, Kenji understood what he meant.

The car ahead of them was upside down in the middle of the street. Smoke rose from the thing and there was no sign of movement from within. Dylan swerved onto the shoulder and parked, but before he even got out to have a closer look, there could be no doubt that it was the LeSabre. “Holy shit,” he muttered, pacing from the Honda towards the wreck. “R-reggie?” he called out.

There was no reply, except for the shuffling of Kenji's feet as he followed behind. The car had seemingly rolled, at great speed, coming to rest between the lanes. The green finish on its exterior was worn away where it had made contact with the road and the smells of smoke and oil were prominent in the chill air. From somewhere within the fuming heap Kenji could hear a steady dripping. It might've been gas or anything else; standing so close to the thing he feared it might burst into flame at any moment.

Dylan pushed forward, rounding the corner of the ruined vehicle and kneeling down to have a look at the driver's seat. In an instant he'd recoiled and scrambled away from the car on hands and knees, cutting himself on shards of the busted windshield. He seemed to want to say something as Kenji came up from behind. His eyes were wide, but his mouth had lost the ability to produce words.

Kenji looked inside.

The interior of the car was painted in blood. The source of that blood was outstretched across the front seats and slumped partially against the dash. Two lifeless eyes stared back at them from the cracked driver's side window.

Reggie.

The life was gone from those eyes, and it was evident from the very first that it wasn't the crash that'd done him in. His jacket and the clothes underneath were soaked in clotted crimson, owing to the enormous gash that spanned across his throat. Someone had cut him from ear to ear. The rest wasn't hard to fathom. Driving at high speed, he'd probably been attacked and then lost control of the LeSabre, rolling the thing. One of Reggie's hands still clutched the wheel with steely firmness, while the other hand was tangled in what looked to be a blood-soaked blanket or shawl.

There was no sign of any passenger. Stumbling around the car, Kenji looked for traces of the assassin, but found none. “Who did this?” he squeaked, pulling Dylan up off of the ground. “Who?”

Dylan rifled through his pockets in search of his phone. “You know who it was, goddammit. You know exactly who it fucking was.” His phone was still back at the shack, however. He'd left it in the grass after casting it down in frustration. “Dude,” he continued, grabbing hold of Kenji's collar with his bloody fist. “Do you have your phone? We need to call this in. Get someone out here... some police.”

Kenji pulled his phone out and started looking for a reception. All around them the fields were bathed in shadow. What lurked there, in the tall grass, was impossible to say, but the two of them had more than a few terrified guesses. With only the light emanating from the headlights to go by, the pair huddled beside one another, tapping repeatedly at the phone's screen and trying to find a signal.

The darkness seemed to move, to close in around them. The moon was gone, had been swallowed up by a tangle of black clouds. While pacing around the road, his nostrils stinging for the smell of gasoline, Kenji felt an incredible hopelessness weighing him down. Fear and fatigue disappeared, replaced by a burden of despair that he couldn't crawl out from. It would crush him, would eclipse all else and hang over him till the end of his days.

They'd done something terrible, something unspeakable in helping Agnes. And it had all happened because he hadn't been able to let go of his curiosity. Now a good man was dead. This, of course, was only the start. There was no telling what would happen next, what the long-term consequences of their actions might be.

It was a seeming miracle when, suddenly, Kenji's phone picked up a weak reception. Without a moment's hesitation, he pounded in 9-1-1 and sat down on the cold asphalt. When he'd spoken to the dispatcher and given her their current location at mile marker 14, he hung up the phone and began to dry heave.

THIRTY-THREE

The light of the desk lamp hurt his eyes. Kenji rolled onto his back and covered his face with a pillow, taking in deep, steady breaths. He could smell the fabric softener his parents had bought him in bulk before the semester's start. It smelled like lavender. From the other bed in the dorm room, Dylan could be heard to groan in his sleep. His body was wrapped tightly in several layers. Even though the heater belched warm air into the room, Dylan hadn't been able to rid himself of a constant cold since their return from Akeley.

The aftermath had been hell.

Kenji didn't want to remember it again. He'd tried, and failed, countless times over the past two weeks to blot out the memories in his head. No matter what he did he couldn't stop reliving that final night, however.

Staring into the pillowcase, Kenji breathed in the lavender scent and thought, for an instant, that he could make out faint hints of gasoline in it.

Whenever his thoughts returned to that night, at the roadside where they'd waited for the cops to arrive, Kenji almost felt as though he were there all over again.

Waiting for about twenty minutes beside the ruined LeSabre, Kenji and Dylan had fallen into a catatonic state. Even as the fleet of cruisers and ambulances arrived, they barely reacted. The two were hauled away from the wreck, and watched blankly as Reggie's body was pulled from the driver's side door of the toppled car.

The questions had been the worst. The scene had been utterly baffling to the first responders. They didn't know what to make of this wreck. Why did the driver have his throat slashed? What were two UW-Madison students doing out in the-middle-of-nowhere, Minnesota at such an hour?

It was all the two of them could do to spill their guts. They told all, explained the unbelievable circumstances that'd led them to the shack, and even directed the cops to the site.

Not that the authorities believed a word of it. They searched the property extensively, but no sign of the reported body was ever found, and subsequent searches into the persona of “Agnes Pasztor” yielded nothing. The esoteric book, too; the Carte de Umbra Lungi, or Book of Long Shadows, had disappeared from the shack by the time Kenji and Dylan arrived with the police. This former detail wasn't especially surprising; being a Hungarian immigrant, it was entirely possible that documentation on Agnes was lacking.

Their confessions landed them in a rural Minnesota jail for more than twenty-four hours. Though the responding officers did not believe the pair to have anything to do with the murder of native Minnesotan Reggie Cash, they had admitted to breaking and entering on private property. The shack belonged to a man living in St. Paul, and there was talk that he might sue the two of them for damages.

Thankfully, the owner of the shack and the land surrounding it was an understanding man. Middle-aged, he'd inherited the spot from his father and had never used it for anything; in fact, he'd more or less forgotten about it until the cops informed him of the damages. His father, just before his death eight years ago, had constructed the shack as a placeholder for what was to one day become a proper home in the country. The man had died before he could construct the house however, and with him had gone all the plans for anything more substantial on the property. The current owner, a Mr. Franklin, decided not to press charges and both Dylan and Kenji were released late the next afternoon.

And so the two of them made the solemn drive back to campus. Neither of them spoke the whole way home. Kenji ignored calls from his parents; he had no plans whatsoever to discuss what had happened in Akeley. Making the return journey in a single day, they'd gotten back to the dormitory late at night and had retired at once.

Things hadn't been the same since. They barely spoke to one another, barely left their rooms or ate. The place was still empty; they had about two weeks left before students would begin to return in anticipation of the new semester, and were consequently steeped in isolation.

Neither of them had had a desire to talk about all they'd gone through. In many ways, it felt to them like a terrible dream they hadn't been able to wake up from. The trauma was still too fresh. Kenji wondered if they'd ever be able to speak about it, if their friendship hadn't been ruined by the hideous things they'd uncovered in Akeley. Where usually traumatic experiences can bring friends together in the long-run, the strange case of Agnes Pasztor was a very different matter. The two of them had come down with a potent hopelessness in the days since those horrors had unfolded, and would never again look at life the same way. When classes resumed and they were forced, by circumstance, to participate in the activities that their status as students demanded of them, it was possible they would become acquainted once again with normalcy.

But Kenji doubted it.

After the things they'd unearthed, the strangeness they'd weathered, there could be no returning to the innocent baseline they'd once known. Kenji felt the change in himself; the events in Akeley had affected him on a cellular level, had completely changed his outlook on life. In many ways, he felt his capacity for joy utterly demolished. Here he was, a young man in his prime. He and Dylan should have been entering the best years of their lives. Instead, they lived a nightmare every time they closed their eyes.

Worse, perhaps, than the disorienting despair that plagued them was the distinct impression that they were being monitored at all times by something they couldn't see. This was a feeling that the two of them had gotten to know very well at the shack, but to experience it in their unpeopled dormitory at all hours of the day was particularly distressing. They didn't talk about it, but now and then the pair would exchange worried glances when the unseen presence waxed dominant, communicating in their gazes an acknowledgement of the oppressive, omnipresent thing they could not put a name to.

Wherever he went, especially during those times when the feeling of being watched was at is most intense, Kenji feared he might encounter Agnes. Though she never actually materialized, she seemed to lurk around every corner, to stand behind every door, so that Kenji's imagination was always on full tilt. He could never relax unless he sat with his back to a wall and closed his eyes. But then the memories would begin darting through his mind once again like a horror film that he simply couldn't switch off and he'd be administered a fresh dose of hopelessness.

There could be no escaping the truth of what had happened. He, Dylan and Reggie had been utilized as pawns in Agnes' game. The woman had been buried in the hopes of fulfilling a strange and dangerous ritual, and had reached out to the world so that she might be unearthed should her helper fail to locate her resting place. But what had happened once she'd been released from her tomb and entered once again the world of men? Had she truly brought something back with her from the other side? Now and then Kenji's thoughts would revisit that terrifying book filled with macabre illustrations. He remembered all too well the hideous visage of that which was dubbed repeatedly the “Dark One” in the pages of the Carte de Umbra Lungi, and tried to imagine what it might be like if such a thing were to truly emerge into the world.

Perhaps if he'd had a while longer to study the ancient tome he'd have learnt more. Perhaps that ancient book had even included instructions on how to reverse the hideous events that'd unfolded. Unfortunately, the book had vanished before he could take another look at it. And even if it hadn't disappeared, he probably wouldn't have been able to find the courage to lay eyes on it again.

What would Agnes do, now that she was among the living again? Kenji grappled with the thought again and again but never drew closer to an answer.

In the end, it never was his role to know the greater gist of Agnes' mission. He and the others had just been pawns after all. They'd done their part. Now all that remained was to sit and wait for they knew not what.

THIRTY-FOUR

Dylan tapped the remote against his thigh impatiently. “Doubt there will be anything good to watch, but it's worth a shot, I guess.” Retreating back into his nest of covers, he sat cross-legged on his bed and waited for the Netflix menu to load up on the TV.

Kenji stuck a Twizzler into his mouth and killed the lights, hoping that they'd find a movie worth streaming. It didn't have to be a work of art. Any old distraction would do. There was less than a week left before classes started, and already the dorm was showing sluggish signs of a return to normalcy. The day before had brought a few carloads of students back, and tomorrow morning Kenji felt sure there would be many more.

Things were still awfully quiet in the building, but the thought of things going back to normal there, of the halls and bathrooms becoming crowded again, was strangely comforting. Even if his own life never managed to get back to baseline, the hustle and bustle of a new semester would serve to keep his mind from wandering back to less pleasant things.

Kenji and Dylan had put some distance between themselves and the events in Akeley, but like a deep wound, the horror would not scab over. They were still haunted by nightmares, still felt paranoid whenever they wandered the halls. As students came back to campus, the two of them held out hope that their minds might eventually heal over those frightful memories.

Kenji had to constantly remind himself of how fortunate he and his roommate really were, in the grand scheme of things. They carried the dreadful memories of Agnes' apparent resurrection, of the remote shack and more, but at least they were still alive. Reggie hadn't been so lucky. He had to concede, even in those moments when his fear and paranoia swelled to incredible heights, that he and Dylan had been spared the worst of those unsightly terrors in Akeley.

This night, they'd rediscovered their appetites, and after going for days with minimal food and activity, they'd set out on a long walk in the cool evening, visiting a convenience store and hauling back all the junk food they could carry. Upon demolishing a few more pieces of licorice, Kenji cracked open a soda and a bag of potato chips. The food tasted glorious to him. The Mountain Dew he drank was like ambrosia, the snacks a virtual feast. Dylan, too, began to eat with gusto, and they played around on Netflix for some time, munching contentedly.

“A comedy. Definitely a comedy,” said Dylan from around a mouthful of cheap pastry. “I need something funny.” He straightened his glasses and shrugged off the blankets he wore just a bit, scanning the rows of comedy films on offer. “I think I saw a new Will Ferrell movie on here last time I checked...”

Dylan often spent more time trying to find something worth watching on TV than on the actual feature itself. Their ritual involved perusing every last movie in any given category, disagreeing on them all, and then finally settling on something random. “Dude, just pick whatever. I don't care. I'm getting tired.”

Dylan fooled around for another twenty minutes, debating the merits of this movie and that, before finally turning on an old John Candy film. The opening credits began and Dylan watched pensively, one hand buried in a bag of Funyuns.

By this time, Kenji was bushed. Struggling to remain upright, he began nodding off. He laid out across his bed, facing the TV, but this only made it more difficult for him to keep his eyes open. He sipped lazily at his can of soda, but the caffeine didn't touch him. He was down for the count. Laughter and commotion on the screen came to his ears, but he didn't pay them any mind. Kenji drifted off into a light sleep as Dylan snickered at the film.

Kenji's mind grasped at the frayed edges of vague dreams. He dreamt of a swirling darkness, of long, cold country roads. The smell of soil entered the sensory equation. The taste of earth, too, overcame the aftertastes of candy and soda while he slept. Twitching, Kenji felt himself teetering on the very border between sleep and wakefulness. He was vaguely distressed by this; unable to move, unable to speak, he felt like he was frozen in place. Paralyzed. He could open his eyes, and in doing so he saw the television, saw his roommate looking towards him with wide, worried eyes.

Closing his eyes, there was only pitch black darkness. He felt the crushing weight all around him, smelled the cold, hard earth as it pressed in from every side.

He was having a nightmare, dreaming that he'd been buried in the ground.

Like Agnes.

Kenji thrashed as he awoke, falling out of bed and almost knocking Dylan over. Dylan hovered over him, his eyes still wide, his face pale. Wiping the sleep from his face, Kenji sat up on the floor and sucked in a deep breath. “Bad dream,” he muttered. “Just a bad dream.”

The look of panic on Dylan's face didn't waver, however. His blankets had been strewn on the floor, and he stood still as a statue, seemingly incapable of drawing a full breath. He looked intensely worried, like he'd just seen something traumatizing. To Kenji's eyes, Dylan looked just like a wounded animal, tail between his legs.

“I'm fine, man,” said Kenji, sitting on the edge of the bed. Cracking a smile, he mimicked Dylan's frightened expression. “Are you OK?”

Dylan pointed to the television and gave him a yank. “Look,” he said under his breath, his fist trembling as it locked around Kenji's shirt.

Kenji turned to the TV. In his frightened awakening, he hadn't hardly glanced at it, but now that he'd had a few seconds to regain his cognizance he could tell that something was wrong. When he'd drifted off they'd been watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but that wasn't what filled the screen now.

The screen was frozen, the image on it flickering unsteadily. The movie hadn't been paused by the looks of it; more likely the playback had locked up of its own accord. Maybe the campus internet was lagging. Looking at the image on the screen, Kenji narrowed his gaze and tried to make sense of it. Then, it hit him.

Kenji sat bolt upright.

He knew the face that looked back at him.

Agnes Pasztor was staring at them through the television screen.

Her visage was roughly-cast, pixellated somewhat, but that it was her there was no doubt. The background was an off-white color, and behind her there loomed something amorphous and dark. It might have been her shadow, except that it moved, shifted, in a strange way even as Agnes remained stationary at the screen's center.

“I shut off the TV,” explained Dylan, shaking. “I turned it off. And then it turned back on.”

The image of Agnes on the screen flickered, her pixellated face changing ever so slightly. The television speakers crackled as her voice began to come through. She spoke in hushed whispers, the words too muddled and low to understand. If he listened closely, Kenji thought he could make out not one, but two voices speaking in unison. One of them a low growl, the other breathy and feminine. The combination reminded him of the terrible voice that'd come through on the radio so many nights ago during their makeshift séance in the shack.

Then Agnes, and the pitch-colored shadow behind her, lurched forward.

The image, though still scattered and marred by pixels, had become unfrozen, and the two figures were coming forth, becoming clearer and clearer to the viewer. They approached jerkily, shambled as though they intended to walk straight out of the screen and into the dorm room. Very soon the entirety of the screen was filled with their distorted, pixel-laden forms.

Kenji backed onto his bed till his shoulders bumped the wall, while Dylan remained cemented before the screen, trembling.

Then the television powered down.

The dorm room was thrust into total darkness. Even the alarm clock on Kenji's desk was turned off, the bright, red numbers dying out as if on command.

“W-what's happening?” came Dylan's voice through the darkness, as softly as a mouse's.

Kenji was about to reply. His words were cut off by a sudden burst of brightness, however. Both of their laptops fired up in tandem, the screens coming to life with a deep blue color. The alarm clock came back on, and as the display blinked 12:00, static from the radio began to blare at an ear-shattering volume. The small radio scanned through the channels rapidly, the swell of frequencies amounting to something like a chorus of wails. Kenji's cell phone lit up soon thereafter, rattling on the desk, its screen showcasing what appeared to be an unknown number. The television had come on, too, but there was nothing on the screen, save for that same off-white background and a hint of shadow in the corners.

Above the ruckus, Kenji took hold of Dylan's arm. “It's... it's just a power surge!” he shouted. His voice joined the swell of electronic chatter like a plea, a wish, but he didn't even remotely believe the words coming out of his mouth.

And neither did Dylan for that matter. The tears running down his face as he turned and looked to Kenji in the low technological glow were rendered in ghostly blue light. “She's here,” he managed, almost choking on the words.

Suddenly, there was a savage pounding at their door. Hinges rattled as the blows of numerous hands met the wood. The band of hall light beneath the door was punctuated by two sets of feet.

No, thought Kenji, his heart twisting in his chest. They're both here.

End

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