The Last Broadcast

The autumn of 2007 found my family fractured, our roots torn from the soil of our New England hometown. The loss of my cousin, Marcus, in the Iraq War had left my Uncle Ray hollowed out, his grief curdling into a bitter, violent anger. He moved to a ramshackle cottage on the edge of a dying town called Blackwood, a place where the internet was a rumor and the only signal came from the local radio station, WKRP, which played a loop of static and old folk songs. My own father, a man who preached order, thought a change of scenery might do us good, so we followed, hoping to help Ray through his darkness.

It was a Tuesday, the air thick with the smell of wet leaves and the distant moan of a train, when I decided to walk over to Ray’s place. He hadn’t answered his phone in days, and the last time I saw him, he was muttering about ‘the voices in the radio.’ His cottage was a sagging skeleton of wood and tarpaper, its porch littered with rusted cans and broken bottles. The door was ajar, swinging on a single hinge. Inside, the air was hot and stale, the smell of cheap whiskey and unwashed sheets hitting me like a physical blow. Ray was slumped in a frayed armchair, facing a vintage console radio that crackled with white noise. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin pale and waxy. He didn’t seem to notice me until I called his name.

‘You gotta hear this, Jenny,’ he slurred, pointing at the radio. ‘They’re in there. Talking. Telling me things.’ I turned the dial, and a garbled voice cut through the static, speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. It was hypnotic, almost melodic, and I felt a cold dread settle in my gut. I tried to pull the plug, but Ray lunged forward, his hand clamping around my wrist with surprising strength. ‘Don’t! They get angry. They take the light.’ I pried his fingers off, my own hands trembling. He started sobbing, his shoulders shaking. ‘Marcus used to talk to me through the speakers. But now… now it’s not him anymore.’

I left that night, vowing to come back with help. But the road out of Blackwood was longer than I remembered. The radio in my car, which I hadn’t touched, began to emit the same strange static. I turned it off, but I could still hear it, a faint hiss in the back of my mind. Over the next few days, the town itself seemed to change. The few locals avoided my gaze. Their conversations, when I overheard them, were clipped, their words wrong. A man at the general store asked if I’d heard the ‘broadcast’. I asked what he meant, and he just smiled, a thin, knowing smile, and said, ‘Nightly. Eleven o’clock. Tune in.’

On the third night, I couldn’t sleep. The static had grown louder, a persistent buzz in my skull. At 10:58, I found myself in front of my own radio, twisting the knob to 88.7. On the hour, the folk songs stopped, and a voice came through, clear as a bell, but it wasn’t human. It was layered, like many voices speaking in unison, and it described, in chilling detail, the layout of my own house. It named my father, my mother, my dog. It then said, ‘She should not have interfered. She will learn the cost of silence.’ I ripped the radio’s cord from the wall, but the voice continued, now coming from my phone, from the TV, from the walls themselves. It was everywhere, pressing in on me.

I ran to Ray’s cottage, my heart hammering. The door was wide open, and the radio in the living room was screaming a high-pitched squeal. Ray was on the floor, his fingernails gouging at his own face, his mouth stretched in a silent scream. He kept repeating, ‘They’re in the light, don’t let them in the light.’ Then he stopped, his eyes going glassy, and a voice that was not his spoke from his lips. ‘The signal is strong tonight, sister. You came too late.’ I backed away, tripping over a stack of newspapers. The front page showed my own face, but the date was a week in the future. The headline read: ‘Local Girl Missing – Believed Lost to the Radio.’

That night, I didn’t sleep. I sat in the dark, listening to the town’s sounds die one by one. At 10:58, I turned on my flashlight and spoke into the beam. ‘I hear you,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’ The static answered, but this time, I understood. It was not a plea, but a command. It wanted a new voice to carry the signal, a voice that could reach beyond the town’s borders. It wanted me to become the next night’s broadcast. I looked at the mirror, and my reflection was a figure made of shifting, gray static, its eyes like dead pixels. I didn’t scream. I just listened.

Now, I sit here, in this cottage, the console radio humming by my side. Every night, at eleven, I speak into the microphone, and the static around me listens. My family, my friends, they call my name, but their voices are just echoes in the void. The town of Blackwood is gone, swallowed by the signal, but I still broadcast. If you’re reading this, and you feel a sudden chill, or you hear a faint hiss in the quiet of your room, know that I’m talking to you. And the signal is always stronger when you listen.