The Intermittent Signal

I remember the smell of old wood and dust in that house, a place that seemed to hold its breath between the creaks of its bones. I was nineteen, living with my aunt and uncle, who both had their own tales of strange occurrences: my aunt swore she saw her late mother standing at the end of the hallway one night, and my uncle had a habit of finding his tools moved to odd places. That night, the house was quiet except for my friend Marcus and me, sitting on the floor of my attic bedroom, the only light coming from a streetlamp outside and the glow of my laptop screen.

We were talking about the usual high school gossip when my oscillating fan, which I had propped in the dormer window to catch the summer breeze, made a sharp beep and its motor whirred to life for a brief moment before clicking off. I noticed it but didn’t think much of it; the fan had a thermostat that would kick it on if the room got too warm. I explained this to Marcus, who shrugged, and we continued our conversation. But then, about twenty minutes later, the fan beeped again and spun up, but this time it was different—the blades moved in a stuttering, jerky motion, as if something was obstructing them. The air in the room felt cold, despite the summer heat outside.

We both stared at the fan, and I got up to check it. As I approached, the fan stopped abruptly, and the digital display flickered, showing a sequence of numbers that meant nothing to me. I touched the base; it was ice cold. Marcus laughed nervously, but I felt a prickle at the back of my neck. I turned the fan off, but a moment later it beeped on again, this time oscillating slowly back and forth, as if searching for something. That’s when I noticed the air in the room had thickened, and the sound of my own heartbeat echoed in my ears.

We decided to go downstairs to get a drink, but as we reached the top of the stairs, we heard a faint tapping from the attic above. It was rhythmic, three taps, pause, then three more. Marcus looked at me, his face pale. We crept back up, and the tapping grew louder, coming from inside the wall behind the fan. I had a sudden, irrational urge to open the window and lean out, but I fought it. Instead, I watched as the fan’s blades began to turn slowly, then faster, until they were a blur, and the beeping became a constant, shrill tone. The room grew icy, and our breath misted. Then, as suddenly as it started, everything stopped.

The silence was profound. The fan was lifeless, the tapping gone, the cold lifted. We didn’t speak, just exchanged a look and hurried downstairs, leaving the house without a word to my aunt and uncle. I never used that room again, and I learned later from my uncle that the previous owner had died in that attic, a man who was obsessed with weather patterns and had rigged a complex system of sensors throughout the house. But the most unsettling part came months later, when I was going through old belongings and found a small notebook in a box of my uncle’s things. It contained a series of numbers and dates, and on the date of that night, there was a single line: ‘Signal received. They are coming.’ I don’t know who ‘they’ were, but every time I see a fan or hear a beep, I feel that same cold prickle, wondering if the intermittent signal will be answered again.