I don’t know how long we were down there, minutes maybe, silently listening to the thump upstairs and the scuttling across joists. The strange pressure in the air, like the whole house had filled with something thick and invisible, like we were underwater, clung to the basement.
The walls of Katie’s basement didn’t have clocks, and none of us wanted to check our watches for fear of looking away and missing something. Time had started to stretch the moment her mom taped the door shut.
The radio inside the cage hummed. The single red light blinked slow and steady. At first, that was all. Then came the static. Sharp bursts like someone twisting a knob too fast, then stopping, then again. The bursts had rhythm. A pattern. Not quite Morse code. Not quite random either.
The hum in the room deepened, like the basement itself was reacting. Elijah stepped forward first. “Do you hear that pitch?”
“It’s splitting,” I said. “Like… two signals at once. Layered.”
Ace didn’t move. “That’s not just static.”
The sound changed again.
Beneath the static came a voice. No—fragments of a voice. Glitched syllables, smeared vowels, broken consonants—like a cassette getting chewed and played at the same time.
It said:
“Ben—j—y—no—no—please—I didn’t—”
“It’s c—coming—don’t—look—”
Katie sucked in a breath. “That’s Tony’s voice.”
“No,” Elijah said. “It’s trying to be.”
Another burst of static, louder, sharper, and then silence. The red light on the radio stayed lit. Steady. Watching.
Katie stepped closer to the cage, her eyes locked on the radio like she wanted to rip it apart. “I heard my parents talking. A few months ago. They thought I was asleep.”
“What were they saying?” Elijah asked.
“That something got out during a test. A signal. They said it wasn’t like a virus or a chemical, it was… emptiness. A pattern. A pulse that could hollow people out.” She paused, voice tightening. “They called it something. Like it was a thing.”
“The Hollowing,” I said before I could stop myself.
Katie’s head snapped to me. “Yeah. That. How do you know that?”
Before I could answer, she moved fast, crossed to the cage, popped the latch, and stepped inside. The mesh door creaked, and cold air spilled out like the cage had been holding its breath.
“Katie…” Ace started, but she didn’t stop.
Katie rifled through the folders stacked beneath the radio. Half were typed forms, the rest handwritten notes, some dog-eared and stained at the corners. She pulled one out slowly, her hand shaking.
“This is my mom’s writing,” she said. “Look…”
She laid the page flat on the table. The pen strokes were sharp, precise, until they weren’t. Certain words had been circled, underlined, scratched over and rewritten in rushed loops.
Interrupt the Signal.
Overwhelm the Airwaves of W.E.D.N.
Stop the Signal.
“Why does she want to overwhelm W.E.D.N.?” I asked.
W.E.D.N was Eden Falls’ own radio station. It broadcast all the music we listened to as well as The Garden Newspaper’s news throughout the whole town.
Katie didn’t answer. Elijah did.
“They’re using it,” Elijah whispered. “The signal, whatever this is, it’s hijacking W.E.D.N. Not replacing it, but layering under it. Slipping in through something we all trust.”
“And maybe,” I said, “that’s how we push it back.”
Ace looked at me like I’d suggested fighting the bugs with a slingshot. “Push it back? With a radio?”
I stepped closer to the cage, eyes locked on the blinking red light. “Not the radio. The cage. It’s designed to block signals, right? But what if it can do more than that?”
Elijah snapped his fingers. “What if we use it to scramble the signal?”
“Like white noise?” I asked.
“Like a jam. If we can generate a counter-signal from inside the cage, maybe we can block the Void Signal from spreading further. Interfere with it.”
Ace still looked skeptical. “What if scrambling it just pisses it off?”
“It beats sitting here doing nothing, Ace.” I said.
Katie nodded. “My mom always said this wasn’t for experiments. It was for containment. If we can figure out how to activate the right output, there might be a way to disrupt it.”
I looked at the cage, at the quiet hum of the machines, the glowing vials, the table that felt more like an altar than a lab station. A ritual built out of science.
“We’ve got to try,” I said.
Then, from upstairs, came a sound like static wrapped in a scream. No breath. No voice. Just raw distortion in the shape of something trying to speak.
And the swarm began to move again.
Elijah stepped into the cage, ducking under the low mesh door as if entering a temple. His fingers ghosted over the edge of the radio, then traced the thick cable trailing from the back. It snaked across the table and disappeared into a reinforced conduit bolted to the wall.
He followed it.
“It’s shielded,” he said, crouching beside the junction. “Full wrap. 360-degree grounding. Like, military-grade… but heavier.”
He looked back at us, his voice hushed. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The cable pulsed faintly under his hand, almost like it was alive.
I leaned in closer to the mesh. “You think you can make it work?”
Elijah nodded. “Well, yes. It’s just a matter of tuning it to the right signal. This is both a receiver and a dampener. Like a lockbox that talks back.”
He glanced at the radio again. The blinking light had stopped. The machine was dark now. Listening. Waiting.
Katie was flipping through more pages, fingers stained with graphite and old ink. “My mom said once… that silence is worse than noise. Because silence means the signal got in.”
Upstairs, something scraped across the floor, slow, deliberate.
Ace stepped back from the stairs, her voice low. “We need to figure this out now.”
Elijah pulled a simple wooden chair into the cage and sat down, putting on the headphones. He slowly turned the tuning knob and tilted his head, listening to the signal.
The skittering pressure of the bugs outside intensified, growing into a low, sickening hiss that rattled the windowpanes of the basement. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a feeling, a pressure against the very walls of the house, as if the entire swarm was a single, vast, living organism trying to force its way in. Their black-and-red bodies coated every surface, obscuring the dim light from the streetlights and forming shifting, undulating carpets across the glass. I could feel the minute vibrations of their collective wings, a thrumming that seemed to bypass my ears and resonate directly in my teeth.
Elijah, inside the mesh cube, closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in concentration. His fingers ghosted over the radio’s large tuning knob, making minute adjustments. The single red light on the machine, which had blinked to life moments before, now glowed with a steady, watchful intensity. He was trying to find something in the static, something hidden beneath the noise and the growing pressure from outside.
Katie was furiously flipping through the pages she’d pulled from the folders, her hands smudged with what I now recognized as dried ink, the same color as the streaks on Tony’s posters. She muttered to herself, her eyes darting across handwritten notes and typed forms. “Frequency… counter-harmonic… phase cancellation…” Her words were a frantic, whispered incantation against the rising tide of the insects’ hiss.
Ace, meanwhile, was at the bottom of the basement stairs, pacing back and forth and looking up to the door that Kim taped shut. Her bat was held loosely at her side, but her eyes, wide and darting, tracked every creak from above, every subtle shift in the muffled thumping that continued to echo from the floorboards directly overhead. It wasn’t just the skittering any more. There was weight. Like something was methodically testing the house’s frame.
The hum from Elijah’s cage deepened, mirroring the pulse I’d felt in Tony’s room. He turned the knob with excruciating slowness, his head tilted, listening not just with his ears, but with every fiber of his being. The static from the radio began to change, no longer sharp bursts, but a low, guttural murmur, layered and thick, like the grinding of slow, rusty gears. And then, from within that grinding, came the voices again. Distorted, fragmented, the collective whispers of countless souls, all speaking at once, all trying to be heard, all trying to be unheard. It was the sound of the Hollowing itself, seeping through the signal.
Suddenly, a wave of overwhelming memory echoes washed over us. Not individual flashes, but a chaotic deluge of sensations: the cold, impersonal touch of steel, the metallic tang of fear, the echo of desperate, whispered commands, the vast silence of forgotten places. I saw a fleeting image of a vast, dark chamber, lit by sickly green lights, filled with the viscous, ink-like sludge. It was a place where light twisted and sound died, a place of processing. My mind screamed, trying to reject the invasion, clutching at my own memories, at the names of my friends, at the familiar comfort of the clubhouse.
“It’s everywhere!” Katie gasped, clutching her head. “It’s trying to write over us!” All of our ears were ringing with a feedback whine, the sound of our own brainwaves battling the encroaching static.
“Hold onto it!” Ace yelled, her voice strained, not at us, but at the ceiling, at the walls, at the insidious pressure. She pressed her hands to her temples, her face contorted in a silent battle, her jaw tight, but I could see the raw defiance burning in her eyes.
Elijah’s face was slick with sweat, but his glow intensified, pushing back against the encroaching darkness. He turned the knob one last fraction of an inch, and the radio’s hum changed. It rose in pitch, becoming a piercing, almost painful counter-harmonic drone. The single red light flared.
Outside, the incessant skittering of the lovebugs faltered. Their collective hiss broke apart, replaced by a confused, fragmented buzzing, like a swarm suddenly deprived of its leader. The pressure against the house eased, momentarily.
But the relief was fleeting. Inside the basement, the drone from the radio, now a sonic disruption, vibrated through the very floorboards, shaking the concrete, rattling the exposed beams. The faint, sickly green light from the glowing vials in the cage flared to an unbearable intensity. The metallic disk on the table began to spin, faster and faster, emitting a low, guttural thrum that vibrated in our bones, like a machine being pushed past its limits.
“It’s working!” Katie cried out, scrambling back to the table, her hands hovering over the turning disc. “But… it’s hurting it! And it’s draining us!”
Elijah gasped, a thin trickle of blood appearing from his nose. His hands, still on the knob, trembled violently, the warm light around them flickering like a dying flame. “It’s a two-way street,” he rasped, his voice strained. “It’s trying to unravel the counter-signal.”
From upstairs, the methodical thumping intensified, accompanied by a new, wet, tearing sound, like adhesive being slowly ripped from wood. The door at the top of the stairs creaked, a thin line of darkness appearing along its edge.
“Mom!” Katie screamed.
The copper mesh of the cage began to glow faintly, an ethereal, internal light. It wasn’t a light of comfort, but a cold, sterile luminescence, illuminating the metallic disc that spun on the table inside. The disc spun faster and faster, a high-pitched whine emanating from it as if it were a siren.
“The radio!” Elijah choked out, his eyes wide, fixed on the red light, which was now pulsing erratically, like a frantic heartbeat. “It’s… it’s pulling too much!”
The hum from the cage reached a deafening crescendo, a sound that drilled into my brain, threatening to shatter my eardrums. My teeth ached, and my vision blurred at the edges. I could feel the raw Ochre trying to pry apart my own memories, trying to make me forget what I was doing, what I was seeing, what I was being.
Then, with a final, agonizing shriek of feedback, the radio in the cage, the very source of their counter-signal, erupted. Not in sparks or smoke, but in a silent, implosive flash of pure, blinding white light. The light didn’t just dissipate; it seemed to absorb the air, leaving a vacuum of pure, absolute silence in its wake.
The physical pressure in the basement vanished. The humming stopped. The light from the cage was gone. Even the sound of my own frantic heartbeat seemed to vanish into the sudden, profound stillness.
A sudden loud bang hit the door at the top of the stairs. I could hear the duct tape ripping in a long, excruciating draw.