The Papery Rasp of Fading Tape

The reels of magnetic tape were my grandfather’s legacy, and they became my obsession. He had spent his final years in a farmhouse in the Finger Lakes region of New York, a place where the hills rolled like frozen waves and the autumn mists clung to the orchards. After he passed, I inherited the house and everything in it, including a battered reel-to-reel recorder and a plastic case filled with labeled tape spools. He had been a hobbyist, a dabbler in the paranormal, and I had grown up listening to his stories about capturing the voices of the dead. I never believed him, but I respected his passion.

I moved into the house that spring, hoping to escape the noise of the city and write a novel. The house was quiet, almost too quiet, but the quiet was a comfort. I found the recorder in the attic, tucked behind a stack of moldy boxes. The tapes were mostly blank, field recordings of wind and birds, but a few had labels with dates and locations. One tape, dated October 31st, 1989, was simply marked ‘The Orchard.’ Intrigued, I threaded it onto the machine and pressed play.

The tape began with the hiss of blank tape, then the faint sound of my grandfather’s voice, muffled as if he were speaking through a cloth. He was counting down, and then there was silence. For a long moment, only the wind. Then, a whispering, so faint I had to strain to hear it. It was a child’s voice, high and thin, saying something about the apples. Then my grandfather asked, ‘Who’s there?’ And the child replied, ‘I am. You can’t see me, can you? I’m in the trees.’ The hair on my arms stood up, but I dismissed it as a prank, a trick of the recorder. I turned it off and went to bed, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something in the orchard was aware.

The next evening, I decided to try my hand at recording. I didn’t believe, but I was curious. I took the recorder to the orchard as dusk fell, the gnarled apple trees casting long shadows. I set the microphone on a stump and asked a simple question: ‘Is anyone here?’ I let the tape run for a minute of silence, then stopped it. When I played it back, I heard my own voice, and then, underneath it, a soft, dry rustling, like paper being folded too many times. I slowed the playback down, and the rustling resolved into a voice, a girl’s voice, and she was giggling. She said, ‘You sound like a giant, all boom and echo.’ I nearly dropped the recorder. I tried to ask more, but the voice faded, and I felt a chill despite the warm air.

A week passed, and I became obsessed. I recorded every night in the orchard, and each time I heard more. The voices were always children’s voices, and they spoke in a peculiar dialect, with elongated vowels and a lilting cadence that reminded me of a Canadian accent, though I was nowhere near Canada. They seemed to enjoy the attention, but they were also mischievous. One night, I asked, ‘Why do you stay here?’ And a boy’s voice answered, ‘Because the ground is soft, and the roots hold us.’ Another time, I asked, ‘Can you hear me?’ And a chorus of whispers said, ‘Yes, but you sound so far away, like you’re underwater.’ I was frightened, but I couldn’t stop. My novel sat unfinished, and I spent nights in the orchard, shivering in the dark, listening to the tape hiss.

Then, one night, I heard something new. A girl’s voice, clear and close, said, ‘You’re like us now. You think you’re awake, but you’re not.’ The tape crackled, and then there was a sound like a door creaking open. I spun around, but the orchard was empty. The moon was hidden behind clouds, and the silence was profound. I played the tape back, and the girl’s voice repeated, ‘You’re like us now,’ and then she pronounced my name, my full name, which I had never spoken aloud in that orchard. I felt my blood run cold. I ran back to the house, but the feeling of being watched followed me.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening to the wind in the trees, and I could swear I heard the whispering again, just at the edge of audibility. I got up and went to the recorder, and I saw that the tape was still playing, but the take-up reel was empty, and the tape was spooling onto the floor. I stopped it, but when I played it back, I heard my own voice, but it was distorted, warped, and it was saying, ‘I am here, I am here, I am here,’ over and over, like a prayer. Then, underneath, the children’s voices chanted, ‘We have you now, we have you now.’ I threw the recorder across the room, and it shattered.

In the silence that followed, I heard a soft knocking at my door. I opened it, and no one was there, but on the floor was a single apple, perfectly red, with a bite taken out of it. The bite was fresh, and the teeth marks were small, too small for an adult. I picked it up, and it felt warm, and I heard a giggle from behind me. I whirled around, but the hallway was empty. I backed away, and I felt a hand on my shoulder, small and cold. I screamed, and when I turned, I saw nothing, but the hand was still there, a pressure, a weight. I tried to run, but my legs wouldn’t move, and I felt myself being pulled toward the orchard.

The orchard was dark, and the trees seemed to lean in, their branches like grasping fingers. I felt the ground beneath my feet, and it was soft, like it had been freshly tilled. I fell to my knees, and the whispers surrounded me, growing louder, until they were a roar in my ears. I could hear them clearly now, not just children, but all of them, the ones who had been there for decades, talking to me, telling me to lie down, to rest, that I was home. I tried to resist, but my body was not my own. I lay down among the roots, and I felt the earth close over me, not burying me, but embracing me, and the last thing I heard was the tape hiss, and a girl’s voice saying, ‘Now you can hear us as loud as we hear you.’

Months later, a neighbor found my abandoned house, the recorder in pieces, and a single tape, unspooled, lying in the orchard. The neighbor, a woman with a penchant for the macabre, took the tape home and played it. She heard the sounds of a heart beating, a slow, rhythmic thump, and then a child’s voice, clear as a bell, saying, ‘We have a new friend.’ And she swore she could hear, in the background, the sound of someone breathing, and it wasn’t her own. She buried the tape in a drawer, but she never slept well again, and every autumn, she swore she could hear the apples falling in the orchard, even when there were no apples left to fall.