The Last Broadcast of KX-9

My uncle Marco told me this story, and I never forgot it. I was a kid, maybe twelve, when he came to visit and sat me down in his old wooden shed, surrounded by dusty radio equipment. I had just said that hell was just a fairy tale to scare kids. He smiled, but his eyes were dead serious. He said, ‘You think that now, but let me tell you about the town of Dustmere and a man named Emil.’

Emil was the night janitor at the local TV station, KX-9, a small broadcast station that ran old movies and reruns after midnight. Emil was a heavy drinker, a lonely man in his forties, and the only people who ever saw him were the security guard and the stray cats that hung around the dumpsters. Every shift, he’d sit in the control room, surrounded by clunky monitors and spools of tape, and he’d get drunk. He’d talk to the static, to the empty studio. He’d scream at the screens, ‘You’re nothing but ghosts and noise! Show me what’s real! Show me the devil’s face!’

Well, one night, a storm rolled in. Lightning knocked out the main transmitter, and the station fell silent. Emil, stumbling drunk, wandered into the broadcast booth. He saw a faint blue glow n the monitor—No, it was a signal, not from the antenna, but from the building itself. It was a low frequency, thrumming like a sick heartbeat. Emil leaned in, and the static on the screen began to coalesce. It formed a shape—a black, featureless silhouette, like a man made of the void between channels. It moved, and Emil could have sworn it was looking at him.

He laughed and shouted, ‘Look! A face! Finally!’ He clapped his hands, but the silhouette raised one arm, pointing at him. The monitor crackled, and Emil felt a sharp pain in his chest—like a needle pushing through. He drew back, but he couldn’t move. The image pulsed, and a voice, not from the speaker, but from inside his skull, said: ‘You’ve been broadcasting on my frequency, boy. Now I’m going to use your eyes to see.’

Emil’s hands began to tremble. He tried to pull the cables, but his limbs turned to lead. The silhouette spread across the screen, and the entire room went black except for the glowing monitor. When Emil’s vision cleared, he was seeing through his own eyes, but he was not in control. He saw a mental image of a small house with a warm porch light, and he felt an overwhelming hunger.

Two days later, Emil’s sister, Rosa, came to the station because he hadn’t called their mother. She found the studio empty, but every monitor was showing a test pattern. On the main screen, in bold white letters, was a message: ‘I’M IN THE SYSTEM. SIGNING OFF FOR GOOD.’ Rosa never saw Emil again. But some say that late at night, if you pick up a certain frequency on your radio, you’ll hear Emil’s voice, pitiful and clear, saying, ‘I’m still here, I’m still here—’ and then a click, and that’s all.

Uncle Marco leaned back and said, ‘I used to think hell was a place below. But it’s not. It’s a frequency. And once you call out to it, it can find you. Emil called out his whole life, and one day, it answered. So don’t joke about the devil. He might be tuning in right now, waiting for a signal that’s strong enough to hijack.’