The Last Take at Marker’s Hollow

On a cold October night in 2019, I was buried in the basement of my converted schoolhouse studio in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The building, once a one-room schoolhouse from the 1920s, now housed my modest recording setup. My band, The Hollow Pines, had been tracking our debut album all week, and I was finalizing the mix of our closing track, a haunting folk ballad called ‘The Last Light.’ My girlfriend, Ellen, was upstairs reading in the old kitchen, and I told her I’d be up in an hour.

I’d just printed a rough mix and queued it up for a final listen when my ears caught something wrong. A faint, chattering sound, like distant voices or insects, lay buried under the acoustic guitar. I’d been listening to this track for days and knew every breath, every squeak, but this was new. I rewound and Solo’d the vocal track, but it was clean. The noise only appeared in the full mix, as if it came from the room itself.

I decided I needed a breath of fresh air. The studio had a side door that opened onto the old playground behind the schoolhouse, now overgrown with weeds. I stepped out into the chill, and the night was silent, save for the wind in the pines. I lit a cigarette and looked up at the stars, trying to shake off the feeling that I wasn’t alone.

That’s when I heard it again, the same chattering, but now it seemed to emanate from the old well at the edge of the property, a stone circle covered with a rotting wooden lid. ‘Probably a colony of bats,’ I told myself, but my skin prickled. I flicked my cigarette into the dark and went back inside.

Back in the control room, I listened to the mix again. The chattering was louder, almost rhythmic, like a pattern. I isolated the frequencies and found they were around 4 kHz, mimicking human speech. I pulled up the spectral analyser. The pattern repeated every few seconds, and I could swear I heard syllables. ‘Not tonight,’ it seemed to say. ‘Not yet.’

I called Ellen down to listen. She stood behind me, arms crossed, and frowned. ‘That’s weird. It sounds like… mumbling. Like a crowd of people whispering.’ She asked if I’d left a window open. I didn’t have windows in the studio, only the soundproofed walls. ‘Maybe it’s from the old intercom system,’ she suggested. The schoolhouse had a disconnected intercom, but the wires were still in the walls.

I traced the wires to a panel in the storage closet. Behind the panel, the wires disappeared into an old conduit that led under the floor. I followed the conduit with a flashlight to the far corner of the basement, where it connected to a rusty metal box. The box was locked, but the lock was old and corroded. With a screwdriver, I pried it open.

Inside, there was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, the kind from the 1950s, covered in dust. The tape was threaded, and the reel was slowly turning, powered by a hidden motor. I pressed stop, but the chattering continued. I pressed play, and the chattering got louder, echoing from the small speaker. I realized the tape was recording, not playing. The chattering was coming from my own microphone, picking up sounds from the room.

But the studio was silent. Ellen and I stood there, listening. The chattering began to form distinct words, though they were distorted and guttural. ‘The children,’ it said. ‘They’re waiting. They’re always waiting.’

I yanked the tape out and smashed it, but the chattering persisted. It was coming from everywhere, from the walls, from the floor, from the old playground outside. I threw open the door and stepped out. The well was uncovered, its stone mouth open to the night. And from it, hundreds of tiny voices rose, whispering in unison.

I ran back inside, but the voices followed. They were in the control room, in the headphones, in the speakers. Ellen was covering her ears, screaming. I grabbed her hand and we ran upstairs, but the voices were there too, in the creaking floorboards, in the old blackboard on the wall.

I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a chalk drawing on the blackboard that hadn’t been there before: a crude sketch of children holding hands around a well. Beneath it, in shaky letters, were the words: ‘Join us for the last take.’

I grabbed Ellen and we fled the building. We drove to a motel and didn’t sleep. The next morning, I returned to the schoolhouse, but the well was gone, replaced by a patch of dead grass. The studio’s power was out, and the tape recorder was missing. In my phone, I found a recording I didn’t make: a final mix of our song, but the chattering had been integrated into the melody, creating an eerie choir behind the vocals. It was titled ‘The Last Take.’

I never went back. I sold the building at a loss. But sometimes, at night, I still hear that chattering under the silence, waiting for me to press record again.