The Mangled Broadcast

My old friend Dell had a way of drawing in things that should stay buried. I’d heard enough over the years to learn not to ask, but one night in late autumn, he called me, his voice crackling with an urgency I hadn’t heard before. ‘You need to come see this,’ he said, and hung up. I drove the forty-five minutes to his place, a weary farmhouse on the edge of a wetland that locals called the Fingers — a maze of reeds and black water that seemed to breathe fog even in the daytime.

It was past midnight when I pulled up. Dell was waiting on the porch, a flashlight in one hand, his other hand trembling as he pointed toward the marsh. ‘Listen,’ he whispered, and I did. From the heart of the Fingers came a sound: not the usual chorus of frogs and crickets, but a low thrumming, like a crowd murmuring beneath the earth. Then a voice, or something like a voice, cut through — amplified, as if through a cheap PA system, but the words were mangled, twisted into a slurry of syllables that made my teeth ache. It was loud, yet impossible to parse. Dell said, ‘It’s been going on for an hour. I tried getting closer, but the fog gets thicker, and the reeds start whispering back.’

We grabbed our own flashlights and crept along the dirt path that skirted the marsh. The sound grew, a garbled sermon that seemed to pulse with the heartbeat of the earth. I noticed the trees were wrong — the willows leaned in unnatural angles, and their reflections in the black water were mismatched, as if they belonged to a different season. Dell pointed to a spot where the fog swirled in a tight circle, and from it, a voice boomed, almost clear for a moment: ‘THE BROADCAST MUST CONTINUE.’ Then it dissolved into static.

Something cold brushed my ankle. I looked down, but there was nothing but wet grass. Dell’s face was pale. ‘It’s been following me,’ he said. ‘Every time I come near, it gets more… focused.’ He pulled out a tangled mess of wires and a small speaker from his jacket. ‘I found this by the fence last week. I thought it was old radio junk, but every night, around two a.m., it starts making that sound. I tried to smash it, but it fixed itself overnight. And now the marsh is waking up.’

As he spoke, the speaker crackled to life, emitting a stream of garbled syllables that sounded almost like words in a language I almost recognized. The reeds parted, and figures emerged — not human, but hunched silhouettes of mud and weed, their heads tilted as if listening to the broadcast. They didn’t move toward us, but they swayed, and their mouths opened and closed in silence, matching the rhythm of the garbled voice. Dell said, ‘They’ve been collecting sounds. Fragments of old radio shows, missed heartbeats, the static between stations. They’re trying to rebuild something.’

I wanted to run, but my legs were rooted. The voice from the speaker grew louder, and I realized it was stitching itself into words I could almost grasp: ‘HELLO, HELLO, IS ANYONE THERE?’ Then it shifted, and I heard my own name, spoken in my mother’s tone, but wrong — stretched and hollow, as if sung underwater. Dell grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t listen,’ he said, ‘It feeds on recognition.’ He dropped the speaker into the mud and stomped on it, but it reformed, oozing like a wounded animal.

The marsh erupted. The mud figures rushed forward, and Dell shoved me toward the house. ‘Get inside!’ he shouted. As I fled, I looked back to see Dell standing at the marsh’s edge, the speaker in his hands, placing it to his ear as if receiving a transmission. The garbled voice had found a new frequency, and I could swear it was speaking in Dell’s own voice, reciting secrets I’d never told anyone.

The next morning, I found Dell sitting on his porch, staring at nothing. The marsh was silent, and the speaker was gone. He didn’t speak for a week, but when he finally opened his mouth, out came a stream of garbled syllables that sounded like a radio tuning across a thousand stations. He’s been broadcasting ever since, on a frequency only I can hear. Some nights, from the edge of the Fingers, I hear my name, but I never answer. Because sometimes, the broadcast finds you, and you become its next signal. And the worst part is, deep in the static, you start to think you’re just the same as it is — a kind of broadcast, a message sent out into the dark for someone else to pick up. So I keep a speaker buried in my closet, just in case, and every night I listen. Because I’m part of the broadcast now, too. And it always calls back.