Lost Signals (31 page)

Her parents had never allowed her to cuddle with animals when she was a little girl. She could see the resemblance clearly, a goat standing alone in a pen at a petting zoo, waiting for her touch. She wanted so badly to touch him. But Pammy hadn’t been allowed to. Pammy wasn’t allowed to have toys. Pammy wasn’t allowed to have fun. Pammy wasn’t allowed to do anything because she had to grow up to be a nurse so she could help keep the nice man in room 603 asleep.

But he was awakening now. His eyes moved beneath black lids, lines of orange light flickering at the seams. The fire consumed everything, washing over the walls and ceiling until there was nothing left. The bed crumbled into ashes, becoming a stone altar upon which the patient took his final form. He was naked now, almost nine feet tall, his red skin covered in majestic patches of dark hair. His feet had become cloven hooves. His tail moved back and forth, a serpent whipping at the flames.

The feeling was everything to her now, an orgasm of fire. She looked down and saw the white pony between her legs, ready to take her for a ride. All her wishes would soon be granted. No desire left unfulfilled.

The creature on the altar opened his eyes, revealing the beautiful fire deep within them. His patience had finally run out. He stood then, towering over the blood-red sky, and reached out to her. She seemed so small in comparison, so sweet and innocent that it was almost impossible to believe that little Pammy was going to ride alongside the man who would bring fire to the world. But it was all for her. It was everything she’d ever wanted.

And together they played as the world burned.

‘We’re online, boys.’

He folded the laptop closed and tucked its sleek chassis into the black leather case slung over his shoulder, which blended in with his black suit, glossy black shoes, and, so creatively, his matching black tie and sunglasses. Only the subtle gleam of his silver wristwatch and crisp white shirt broke the monotony of his appearance, and even then, they remained the selfsame features of some vague government suit overseeing the installation of a “latest and greatest” surveillance line. Big Brother was now listening better than ever before. The public had never been more secure.

At a final nod from Mr. Black, the head contractor waved his workers to begin packing up. Their job was done, and a stack of signed Non-Disclosure Agreements along with the healthy little bonus in their pay cheques acted as the modern and civilised alternative to the age-old tradition of slaughtering the slaves to keep the secrets.

None of the fluoro-garbed grunts knew any truth worth killing over, anyway.

***

Pearl Harrison startled at the squalling voices pouring through her telephone. She laid the handset down in its cradle, palm pressing to her chest and the race of her heartbeat therein, then used her free hand to slide oversized glasses farther up her nose. Her small spaniel gave a ready bark of warning. She hushed Marco in distracted tones and lifted the receiver again. Now three minutes past four o’clock, when she was due to call her sister Mabel and speak for half an hour, as they had every Friday afternoon, Pearl grew anxious at the unprecedented delay.

The harsh voices remained on the line when she pressed the cold plastic to her ear. Their words were indecipherable, hissing, frantic. She barely resisted crossing herself.

‘Who is this
 
?’ she demanded. Local kids might have nothing better to do after school than mess with the phone lines and play practical jokes on an old lady, but she absolutely must speak to Mabel, and no disrespectful youth would get in the way of her call.

The phone silenced. Pearl waited a moment longer, quietly pleased with herself for taking such a firm tone with those jokers. Before she could begin dialling Mabel’s familiar number, someone spoke up, clear as day.

‘Hey, doll.’

‘Who’s there
 
?’ she asked again in a considerably gentler voice, one hushed with nostalgia and a glimmer of superstitious fear. Only George ever dared called her “doll”. And it couldn’t be him. Her late husband left the mortal coil a decade and a half prior.

Her brain took that short utterance and turned it into a loop.
Hey, doll. Hey, doll. Hey, doll.

She had nothing more to say. The shock took all the stuffing from her.

‘You forgetting your old man
 
?’ His unmistakeable laughter rolled out of the phone line and trembled down Pearl’s aged body.

‘George is dead. You can’t just go around impersonating people’s loved ones.’
How cruel. How unutterably cruel.

Hey, doll. Hey, doll.

‘Aw, don’t be like that. I just wanted to have a little chinwag with my favourite sea treasure.’

The light-hearted banter was in perfect imitation of George’s carefree nature, and Pearl simply couldn’t take it. The beloved voice curled in her gut, sick and aching. ‘My husband died fifteen years ago. Stop this nonsense right now. Why would you torment a lonely old woman
 
?’

She slammed the handset down, crooked, so the bulky piece of plastic fell off the cradle and clattered to the floor. It dangled by the spiralled cord, wavering back and forth in a mocking little dance. Marco leapt from his basket and began a manic barking spree, spittle glistening on his exposed teeth as he snarled and nipped at the phone. Pearl backed away from the receiver and her brave dog. She gave in to the urge to sign the cross over herself.

Hey, doll.

I-I shall just have to call the phone company,
she thought, trying desperately to hold onto logic and reason, yet failing utterly to consider how she was to dial out to anyone if this evil prankster stayed on the other end of the line. When the obvious realisation dawned upon her, Pearl took herself down the hall and knocked on the one closed door inside her house, pretending all was normal the whole while. Her grandson audibly moved within the room and showed his face around the large panel of wood.

‘Samuel, dear, you have that mobile telephone, don’t you
 
?’

‘Yeah, Gran, what’s up
 
?’ he asked with a sleepy blink.

‘Someone is making prank calls to the house, I will need the telecom people to do something about it. Mabel is waiting for my call.’

‘Ah, sure, I’ll give them a ring before I go for my walk.’

‘Thank you, dear.’

Hey, doll.

***

The turning earth granted sunset to another day. Everything was graced with surreal hues and the humidity and lakeside breeze were in conflict over whether the night should stay a summered warmth or drop temperatures until goosebumps would skitter across exposed skin.

Samuel’s hands were laid at rest in the cosy fleece pockets attached to the front of his hoodie, safe from any threatening chill. Quiet, beneath the grumble of traffic on the distant freeway and wildlife chittering, he heard the wide pant legs of his jeans scuffing together. The sound of moving denim kept him on edge. He shouldn’t have been able to pick up the abrasive rumple-scruff with each step. The world around him, or the stony-metallic sounds of his sneakers crunching over coarse basalt should have drowned out the noise, but no. The loose fabric called out from each stride, dominating his aural attention. Some days, his Cochlear implants seemed to provide a landscape of sound beyond what he wanted. His grandmother liked to call him sullen. Ungrateful for what he’s received from the technology. He loved her, sure, but did she ever have a judgemental streak.

What would she know.

He considered reaching up to switch the processor off and bask in the blackout, but the notion passed in a roil of apathy, and his hands remained motionless, buried in his pockets.

The track ballast relinquished its thermal takings of the day, residual heat wavering up from the black aggregate mounded beneath tarry rail-road sleepers and the dull gleam of metal stretched in endless parallel lines. He stopped at a point no different than the rest, where fields upon fields of chartreuse wheat stems swayed to his left, and the dirt road pitted from rain and wear ran along the other side. Perfunctory fences sagged between star pickets, the wire tired and unconvincing as a barrier or deterrent from anyone jumping over to walk the tracks. The thought had always made him smile, a bored twist of his lips which left his pale grey eyes unmoved. To have fences in place, untended, a half-hearted reminder or stuttered request to stay on your side because
here be dragons
. No longer belching coal smoke from the heart of roaring flame to cross from state to territory, the locomotives which shot along this stretch were now swift and sleek, efficient diesel-electric prime movers to the antiquated steam engines of old.

His attention shifted once the insipid rustle of his jeans had silenced, and he caught a new tremor on the air. He cast a wan gaze both ways along the line, finding no distant sign of an approaching train. His eyes rolled upward, slowly, to reveal the titanic spans of high-tension power lines striding across the landscape. Each framework giant stood with arms spread wide, looming,
humming
.

The cooling sky, purple and grey, lent a quality of distortion to the image above. He felt his senses give the slick-sticky stretch of taffy, lengthening, falling, until his hands and feet gained an artificial weight at the end of elongated limbs and the heaviness cuddled around his chest, constricting each breath until he didn’t bother straining against the grip. He was small, and not. Shrunken, but distended, all at once. The atmosphere ballooned, wider, impossibly, the world growing larger and rounder to envelop him, and all the while, the sounds were rising in volume, a convincing chug, a rumble familiar and alien, not a train or anything else hurtling along the mortal plane, but something untrustworthy—

A voice whispered into his ear, ‘Samuel. My darling boy.’

His mother. By God, his dead mother.

The sensations crushed around the young man, unbearable. He hated her so much. Everything stopped.

He took in a massive gasp, filling his barren lungs with desperate, dust-flavoured air. Between blinks, reality snapped back into place. A normal twenty-two year old, roaming along the train tracks. He resumed walking, keeping his eyes resolutely away from the power lines singing overhead, ignoring the goosebumps prickling along his body.

***

A sharp tattoo pounded out from Pearl’s front door, the thin metal of the screen rapping double-time to each knock. The elderly woman took two steps back and nearly fell over her favourite floral armchair before she mustered the tenacity to consider, maybe, seeing whoever had dropped by.

She went through the motions of turning the cold deadbolt and sliding the chain out of its narrow channel to open the door to a smiling technician in a dark blue button-up shirt and pressed slacks. His attire was somehow more formal than she would have expected from a workman, but his bulky work bag with wires and unfamiliar tools protruding from its pockets and the embroidered logos which emblazoning him as an employee of the telecommunications company were also clean and tidy, maybe this was just normal. He wasn’t some grubby plumber or mechanic. He worked with phone lines and electrical things.

Her hand trembled as she inserted her key into the screen lock to let him inside to assess the trouble. ‘I didn’t realise you would make it out so soon,’ she said, more glad than she had any business being to see a friendly,
living
human.

The technician tucked his sunglasses into the front pocket on his shirt and gave her a winning grin. ‘Our systems are now set up to monitor for connection issues, ma’am. The computers warned us of an unspecified interruption at this address before we received the call, so here I am.’

It’s a whole new world
, she marvelled.

‘I’m so pleased. I tried to call my sister, Mabel, just the same as I always do, but th-there’s . . . There’s something wrong with the phone,’ she finished, strangely embarrassed to relate her experience. The voice had spooked her properly. Rational thought had cast sufficient doubt on her experience and Pearl concluded no kids could have mimicked George’s speech. He had died too long ago. But if they weren’t young pranksters . . .

Maybe it’s someone older. More malicious.

That didn’t feel right, either.

‘Lewis Carlisle.’ He extended his right hand in Pearl’s direction while lifting the thin screen of his tablet computer to scan a row of text. ‘You must be Mrs. Harrison.’

‘Please, call me Pearl.’ His hand was both firm and cautious not to crush hers, showing an amount of respect which surprised the old woman. By the time she reached her seventies, the best she got from most people was a cursory attempt at courtesy. Once she styled her hair into a silver perm and more of her skin sagged than didn’t, Pearl had become a non-human. No one special. Not worthy of real respect. More condescension towards her condition than real empathy.

But Lewis didn’t show any of that. He shook her hand like she still mattered.

‘Marco is in the kitchen, he’s a good boy but might give you a little telling-off until he’s gotten the smell of you.’ They moved through her comfortable home toward the sitting room. She’d had the presence of mind to re-set the phone in its cradle before answering the door. There would be no evidence of her minor panic, not unless someone had waited this long to continue their harassment and answered Lewis’s investigation with the voice of a dead man.