Ghost Frequency

The van door groaned when it opened. Cold air rushed in, sharp and earthy, thick with the scent of wet leaves and iron soil. The world outside was a stripped-bare scene of naked trees and the copper taste of late-fall air. Cal’s boots crunched softly as they stepped down into the gravel.

Sharon blinked through the rotating red and blue lights of her patrol car. “Lord, Cal, you scared me half to death. What the hell are you doing out here?” She stepped closer, one gloved hand up, the other still resting on her belt. “You can put your hands down, honey.”

He did, feeling foolish. “Just been working,” he said.

“Working, huh?” She smiled faintly, that same wry line she’d given him since he was a teenager.

Sharon Halder had been his dad’s friend back when the mill still ran three shifts and everyone drank at O’Grady’s on Fridays. After the funeral, she’d been one of the only people who still checked in, dropping off casseroles, reminded him to eat. Seeing her here, in uniform, under the pulsing lights, twisted something in his chest.

“Not another one of your midnight science projects, then?” Sharon studied him for a moment. In the sharp white of her flashlight, she had the squint of someone who’s seen too much night duty and too little sleep. “You shouldn’t be out here.”

“I could say the same to you.”

Her brow creased. “That a joke? Because I can’t keep covering for you out here.”

He didn’t answer. Sharon’s radio chirped on her shoulder and then went thin, like it had been pulled through wire. Cal heard, plain as day, a fragment of his own broadcast from fifteen minutes earlier, pitched low, as if the tape were over-wound and dragging. Sharon frowned and pinched the PTT button. “254 to base, you get that?” Static answered, dense and close, and beneath it a whispering that didn’t come from any person. Sharon let go of her radio. “Your rig,” she said, voice tightening. “Show me.”

Cal glanced back at the van. The receiver sat on the dash, dead as a brick. He gestured, slow, and Sharon moved with him. She pulled a small Maglite from her belt and clicked it on. The beam carved the van’s interior into hard edges. “You broadcasting right now?”

“Everything’s off,” he said.

The light washed across the receiver’s face and the frequency meter twitched, just a hair, then settled. Sharon’s jaw worked like she was wrestling with what words to speak. “The whole county’s on the lookout for this pirate broadcaster, you know.”

“They haven’t been trying very hard.”

“This isn’t a game, Cal. You’ll end up in jail. I’m not always going to be the one to find you.”

Before he could answer, Sharon’s radio crackled. The sound warped mid-burst, dragging like stretched tape, and through the static rode a low, wet hum. Beneath it came a man’s voice. Cal’s voice.

“…keep your sets warm…”

Sharon looked up, startled.

Cal threw up his hands. “I turned everything off, I promise.”

A vibration trembled around them. It came not from the air or on the wind, but beneath them, within the earth. It started under Cal’s boots as a slow crawl, like something large beneath the topsoil was shifting. The receiver on his dash ticked again.

“Do you feel that?” said Cal.

Sharon frowned. She turned her flashlight toward the tree line. The dark stood in layers of paper birch and bare maple in a web of branches against a quarter moon. Her beam cut across the nearby drainage ditch, where the mud pulsed faintly and bubbles rose through the thin film of frost. The smell hit next, raw dirt, ozone, and the bitter tang of burnt metal.

Cal swallowed. “We should go.”

The cruiser radio cracked, loud. Cal flinched as warbled words spilled out. “…254, status.” Sharon turned, touched her mic. “254, 10-23, unit is-” She stopped, blinking. Her mouth formed a second half of the sentence but her face changed. Her eyes cut to Cal and then past him, to the van.

“What?” he asked.

“Did you just-” she started, then shook her head. “Never mind. Probably my ears playing tricks.”

Someone rapped the metal skin of the van, twice, right behind Cal’s shoulder.

Cal spun, his breath snagging in his throat. The side panel showed nothing but his own distorted reflection. He backed away from it and nearly bumped Sharon, who had moved up without him noticing. Her hand went to her weapon, but she didn’t draw. “Get behind me,” she said.

“Like hell.”

She gave him a look, both of exasperation and care, the same one she used to give when he was sixteen and showed up at the station to borrow jumper cables. “Just stay close.”

The ground thrummed harder in slow rhythm, like a generator buried far below. Sharon turned back toward the tree line. The ditch water shimmered, patterns rippling outward from no source at all. She tilted her head, listening, her flashlight beam steadying on a gap between trees. In the gap, there was movement. Not a shape, exactly, but like the darkness deciding to be something else. Between the trunks, the fog moved against the wind. Then a shape separated from it, a man’s outline, tall, shoulders slouched with age. He stepped into the halo of the cruiser’s headlights.

The light fell on him strangely, catching on certain details and then cutting out as the man approached. Cal registered boots. A jacket that might have been canvas or might have been wool. Shoulders that didn’t hold themselves the way younger men hold them. Then the gait, or the memory of a gait, the right foot lagging half a beat, the side effect of an old sprain. In Cal’s mind, the memory of his father walking filtered through every Thanksgiving and every tool shed trip. The sound of it, the feel of trailing a step behind.

The man lifted his head.

“Dad?” Cal said before he could tell himself not to.

Sharon’s flashlight trembled. “What did you just say?”

The figure stopped ten feet from them. Its features flickered in and out of focus, with light skipping off the face like water. Then, clear as breath:

“Caleb.” The voice was unmistakable, his father’s, only hoarser, shaped like Cal’s own when played through a warped reel. “Keep your sets warm.”

Cal’s stomach hollowed.

Sharon’s eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus.” Her radio squawked, but instead of dispatch it was someone murmuring her name, a voice she hadn’t heard in years. Her husband’s voice, the one lost in the logging accident up north. “Mark,” she whispered. “You can’t be… that’s not possible.”

“What did you hear?” Cal asked, aware of the way his mouth barely worked.

She stepped forward, dazed. “He’s calling me.”

Cal grabbed her sleeve. “Don’t.”

She blinked back at him, confused, as if seeing him through two different channels at once. “You hear your father,” she whispered. “I hear my husband.” Sharon’s head turned back, eyes glassy, unfocused. “He’s calling me,” she said. “He’s…”

The hum spiked, not louder, just tighter, drawing into a narrow band that made Cal’s teeth ache. The cruiser’s light bar locked red for a full second, then blue. The van’s dome light flickered a dull amber with pulsing current, then dimmed again.

The man stepped closer. The light tried to hold him, failed, then smeared across his face. For a fraction of a second, Cal saw both his father and a stranger wearing his father’s tiredness. He saw the corner of a smile that held the same chill as the air around him. The figure’s outline flickered, shedding light like dust. Cal could smell burnt copper now, and wet soil.

“Should’ve come to the funeral,” the voice said. This time there was something in it that wasn’t his father at all.

Sharon shook the daze from her head as if the earth’s current had jolted her senses. She drew her weapon in one shaky motion. “Stop right there!” she yelled, her voice cracking. “Stop!”

The man stopped. The hum dropped out. The air folded around them in ordinary quiet. For a heartbeat, all that existed was chilled breath and the faint tick of cooling metal from the van.

Then the earth in the ditch cracked and thin fissures threaded outward like veins. From each fissure, faint lines of silver light pulsed upward, flickering through the frost and the gravel, climbing toward the van’s antenna. The ground howled with an earthy exhale, and a shock of cold air carrying an unintelligible voice whisked up the leaves around them. Sharon stumbled backward. “Mark!” she screamed.

The flashlight went out. Not a sputter, just gone. Sharon’s voice cut the dark. “Cal, get back!”

Then nothing.

She was gone.

No sound, no flash, no motion. Just gone, as if she’d been unthreaded from the world. Her flashlight clattered to the gravel and rolled, its beam blinking back on and slicing through the trees as it landed.

Cal stood there, lungs locked, staring at the space she’d filled. “Sharon?” he called. The deep hum faded back underground, dragging the light with it. Only the smell of loam and iron remained.

The open cruiser idled nearby, door ajar, dome light burning pale yellow. He went to the open door and made himself look inside. No one. The radio talked to itself in stretched snippets of traffic calls from a town that could have been theirs but wasn’t, a kid asking his mother if he could stay up, the flat drag of morse at forty words a minute that no one had used out here since his grandfather’s time. In the cup holder, a half-drained coffee cup long gone cold.

“Sharon,” he said again, because names sometimes bring people back.

The hum returned, quieter, deeper underground than before. It didn’t ask him to follow. It sat like an animal in the ditch, waiting for whatever animals wait for when they already have your attention.

Cal turned in a slow circle, scanning the ditch, the grass, the track of the service road leading back toward the industrial park. He found marks on the gravel that were probably nothing. He found, just beyond the headlight throw, one impression in the soft ground where someone had stepped and then stepped again, deeper, like their second step had weighed more than their first.

“Okay,” he said to the empty air, to the rig in his van, to the shape of his own name whispered from nowhere. “Okay.”

Then the voice returned, small and distorted, as if spoken through the dirt itself. “You’re getting closer.” The ditch water rippled once more and went still.

He didn’t pack fast. He kept expecting to hear Sharon laugh, sharp and annoyed, and say something about an electrical short and how everyone in this town needed to stop listening to ghost stories. He kept expecting the cruiser door to slam and the night to behave. It didn’t.

He slid the receiver into its milk crate and strapped it down in case he hit a pothole. He unplugged the coax from the transmitter gently, like it had nerve endings. The whip antenna on the roof groaned and scraped as he dislodged the magnetic base. When he threw the master switch on the battery bank, a faint blue spark jumped and died.

As he closed the passenger door, he felt the van’s skin through his palm: cold, ordinary metal, a sheet of conductive quiet. For a second he wanted to press his ear to it like he had as a kid to the old refrigerator in his parents’ garage, listening for the compressor to kick in. For a second he wanted the simple comfort of a machine doing its job.

Instead, he stood with his hand on the door until that impulse went away.

Cal climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there with his hands on the wheel. He looked at the cruiser one last time. He put the van in gear.

As he rolled out onto the service road, the radio on his dash, dark as it was, gave a tiny, involuntary tick, the sound a buried wire makes when it remembers being alive. He glanced at it without meaning to. He glanced at it and caught his reflection, washed pale in the dark glass, and behind it the naked trees standing like antennae, their roots sunk deep into the same soil that had just swallowed Sharon whole.

He drove toward town. The red and blue behind him went small, then smaller, then were only a memory of color on the inside of his eyes when he blinked. Half a mile out, the handheld scanner he’d forgotten to shut off crackled softly, tuning itself without his touch. The voice that came through was low, breathy, familiar. “Keep your sets warm,” it said, as gentle as a father pretending not to say goodbye.

Cal didn’t turn it off.

By the time he hit Main, the streets were almost empty. A light burned in the coffee shop window, the late one that served night shift and insomniacs and people who needed to sit somewhere that wasn’t their own kitchen. He caught himself slowing, like a needle finding a groove.

He kept going. He’d stop by in the morning. He’d ask around. He’d tell himself there were explanations for almost everything. The heater coughed to life again, real this time, blowing warm air that smelled of dust and rust.

Far behind him, tucked into a copse of trees at the edge of town, a patrol cruiser still idled alone, tires half-sunk in the wet soil. The radio whispered through the open door, faint and steady, as though the earth itself were speaking through it now.

*** End of Transmission ***