The White Noise of Ashes (Three)

THREE

It was a furry looking building. Nestled in a little grove astride highway two, the Holloway Motel was notorious for being about as low maintenance as you could get. It had been cobbled together in the seventies, but fell into disrepair long before Jesse was born. That was how he always pictured it: Sidewalks cracked, shutters peeling paint, the whole place appearing ready to collapse into rubble if you slammed a door too hard. In the humid Pacific Northwest air, moss had soon started forming along the exterior. It gave the building the impression it was transforming into a key-lime werewolf. Nowadays, the only people who stayed at the Haul-away Motel were just passing through town in search of something better.

Walking along the exterior, Sheriff Crawford counted out faded numbers until he found the three ancient digits he’d been searching for. Most of the clientele the Holloway boasted were either trucker’s looking for a lay over or young lovers looking for the same. This had to be the one. With practiced authority he banged on the door in a stentorian knock.

As his hand dropped back, he subconsciously brushed his bare hip. Nothing unusual, but this time it sent a jolt of alarm through his body, as he remembered there was still no pistol there. Jesse tensed up, suddenly feeling like he was standing naked in the street. This wasn’t a normal stop for reckless driving or petty theft, he was investigating a murder. The person on the other side of this flaking door was a witness at least, probably a suspect and the dumb inexperienced sheriff had shown up with no gun and no backup. Hell, no one even knew he was here. This was a bad idea.

Just as he turned to dash back cowardly to where his car was waiting, the door squeaked open on its old hinges. If anything, the sight that appeared made him feel even worse.

Standing there against a darkened room in backdrop was perhaps the most muscular man he had ever seen. The man’s chest looked like layered brick, each ab stacked on top of the next and mortared in place. His arms were massive, tempered by hours of pitiless weight training. His head, completely bald with the faint halo of where a hair line used to be, was shaven tight, the beard stubble thick on his face blending in with the remnants of his hair. Age wise he could have been a decade or two older, as bits of grey had worked their way into his beard, but undoubtedly capable of crushing the younger sheriff before him. He stood there leaning on the door frame, shirtless wearing a pair of loose pyjama pants, blinking like a bleary-eyed Jason Statham. Clearly just awoken, he stared at Jesse as though he could -and would- snap him in half in retribution for waking him.

“Yes?” The man’s deep voice enquired, still blinking the slumber out of his eyes.

Not for the first time that day, Jesse was speechless. He stared at this man who outweighed him by about forty pounds thinking he’d made another catastrophic mistake. A beat of silence drifting by, before a faint howl started up from the darkened room.

The muscle man’s face sagged.

“Oh, damn it…”

He looked back over his shoulder, then disappeared from view leaving the door open a crack. From inside the cry slowly grew louder, sounding like a tiny air-raid siren, then the hulk appeared in the doorway again. On his face was a thick pair of blue glasses, in his arms was a wailing babe. The tiny pink-clad seedling human screeched and flailed as the big man struggled to control her.

“Sorry,” The now spectacled muscle man apologized, trying to hold the infant in his arms. “You’d better come in. I need to feed her now.”

With no further comment, he vanished back into the darkened space leaving Jesse standing at the threshold deeply confused.

As the door closed behind him, and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the sheriff began to wonder if this was some sort of bizarre trap. The room was as vintage as a room at the Holloway had any right to be. Orange textured carpet crunched under his shoes, the kind humanity was ashamed had ever existed. Stretched over the windows were psychedelic style curtains, their groovy swirls and faded colours faintly visible from the light peaking around them. The furniture was a similar blight on the history of style with the bed and dresser blocky to the point they were rhomboid. This room was a kitchenette, and as he stood their awkwardly, the muscle man in glasses rummaged around the counter and sink already strewn with bottles and dishes.

In his arms the baby screamed again, the sound so piercing and high it made Jesse wince from across the room.

“I know honey, I know.” The big man cooed at her. “We’re almost there.”

The little girl screamed even louder, seemingly not believing him. Jesse’s ears rang as she hit a note higher than any soprano, the man still working away.

“Aww, crap.” The near-sighted hulk muttered as some apparatus tumbled to the ground. Before Jesse knew what was happening, he had rushed over and pressed the howling child into his arms.

“Hold her real quick will you?”

Not exactly a fan of babies at the best of times, the sheriff tried to babble back a no, but the man’s bald head was already turned to him. Now with free hands, he took formula out of the room’s mini fridge and began fiddling with beakers and bottles as though this were a science experiment.

Jesse looked down into the little girl’s face, now crimson in exertion. Her tiny eyes tracked him curiously, but her volume remained set to max. He looked to her father, still working on some concoction, then back to the babe in his arms feeling like she was made of easily breakable crystal. In desperation he began to bounce her a little, the way he’d seen in movies.

“Shh, its okay.” He soothed to her clumsily. “Everything’s alright.”

The child vetoed this assessment with another ear cracking tantrum, stressing Jesse further. Just as he was about to panic again, a heavily tempered arm snaked around him with a bottle and popped the nipple into the baby’s mouth. The noise ceased instantly, with the baby leisurely drinking now, its face impassible as though nothing had happened. The only remnant of the tantrum was the whine in Jesse’s ears.

“That ought to do it.” The muscle man said with relief. He was still holding the bottle over the sheriff’s shoulder as Jesse held the baby. “Thank you.”

It took another cumbersome moment, but they managed to shift the baby back to her father’s arms. There she continued nursing at her bottle, looking up at the Vietnam flashback of a hotel room around her.

Now that the baby was safely out of his hands, Jesse mustered a smile. Relieved she was in a steadier grasp.

“What’s her name?” He asked.

“Lucy.”

“Hi Lucy.”

Behind the bottle her tiny brown eyes had fixed on him again. He held her miniscule gaze, then lifted his eyes to her still shirtless father.

“You’re Matthew Salzburg?”

He gave a little shrug.

“Well I’m Matt. What can I do for you?”

He looked at Jesse innocently, reinforced by the infant nursing in his massive arms.

“Did you call in a tip early this morning?”

The look vanished, replaced by a cautious scowl.

“Excuse me,” He countered. “But I was told that tip would remain anonymous. I didn’t even give my name.”

“Yeah,” Jesse conceded, wary of being on the hulk’s bad side. “I’m sorry about that. The operator saw the number of the motel on the call display.”

“How’d you single me out?”

Actually, that had been ridiculously easy. The Holloway only had four rooms booked. One was a pair of sisters, two were long-haul truckers who had only arrived in town late last night. The bald muscled guy who had been here two weeks was an easy catch.

“Again, I’m sorry but it was important we talk to you.” Jesse’s sheriff’s voice was well practiced. “We had to after we checked out the location you gave us.”

“What did you find, a body?”

Something on his face must have told: A twitch, a blink, a part grimace as the burned mass flipped through his consciousness again, because the shirtless man before him instantly knew it was true.

“Oh, God…” From his chest to his near invisible hairline, Salzburg blanched. “Oh Jesus, he did it…”

Jesse tensed up.

“Who did it?”

Matt was shaking his head, staring out through his glasses seemingly at nothing.

“I heard the message and it was so different, but I didn’t think…”

The sheriff’s patience, worn to a nub at this point, nearly snapped.

“What damn message…”

“Shh!”

The hulk suddenly extended a massive arm, palm outward. In his arms the baby had gone silent, the nipple of the bottle drifting away from her mouth. Jesse instinctively clammed up. He followed Matt over to a bassinet sitting next to an unfolded sofa bed.

The father kissed her forehead, then lay the slumbering infant down with all the care of a bomb disposal technician handling a baby shaped grenade. He looked back up at Jesse, then pointed to the door beside them, speaking in a whisper.

“I’ll show you.”

The room off the main suite was obviously meant as a bedroom, but now it served as an office. The bed was up against the wall, clearly slept it. A desk and chair sat nearby, overloaded with paper. Layers of scattered documents blanketed them, with newsprint, photos and loose leaf paper. Looking closer, Jesse found he recognized most of the pictures. The baseball diamond, the rail bridge over Plymouth Creek and a wide shot of Main street all made appearances. Tacked to the wall was a little map of town with markings drawn in red pen. Crosses and question marks at several points seemingly random, and entirely bewildering.

Behind him, mercifully now wearing a shirt, Matt Salzburg eased the door shut.

“Sorry about the mess.” He said, still keeping his voice low. “I don’t usually have guests in here.”

“What is all this?”

“Research.” Salzburg murmured. “I’m a journalist. Well, a freelance one anyway. I came out here to work on a series about the static.”

As if that explained everything, he reached into the maw of paper and produced a tiny video screen. A flick of a switch and a monochrome image of the bassinet appeared on it.

“I just want to keep an eye on her.” The big man affirmed. “I didn’t want to take her out here for work, but I really didn’t have a choice.”

The sheriff watched slightly irritated as Lucy’s slumbering form came into focus.

“Where’s her mom?”

That drew an angry grunt.

“Abandoned her when she was six weeks old.” The sentence came out like an eight-word epithet. He pulled the paper from the chair and took a seat. “Left her at a hospital ER. We adopted her when she was two months, so that means I haven’t slept in another two. Isn’t math fun?”

“Can’t your wife look after her?”

The reporter looked up with a slight smirk under his glasses.

“Husband.” He corrected.

That one produced a quick beat of silence.

“Oh…” Jesse fumbled backward. “Right. Uh, can’t your husband look after her?”

The smirk deepened as Matt turned back to the pile in front of them.

“He’s overseas right now.” He said, pulling a laptop from the mess. “Always gets deployed at the worst possible time.”

As the laptop came to life, Matt reset his thick glasses in place then peered up at Jesse.

“Lets start from the beginning.” He said in his half whisper. “Do you know about the noise?”

Jesse’s brow furrowed.

“Noise?”

From the computer’s speakers came a throaty hiss. It started out rough, loud and grating. Within a half second the bald bespectacled journalist had darted out his hand to turn down the volume, eyes on the baby monitor. As it faded to a quiet purr Jesse listened in fascination. There seemed no pattern, no body, no notes, nothing but the static whisper of a hollow language. It kept going and subconsciously he listened for peaks and valleys. Something to distinguish one part from another. If it was there he never found it. Instead, the buzz just continued on in perpetuity.

He saw Salzburg was watching him.

“What is that?”

The question was met by a shrug.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” He responded. “There’s about a thousand different theories online right now. Aliens, North Korean spies, encrypted data on future stock trades… It built up this kind of cult following online after someone discovered it. A new one of these gets posted to Youtube about every three weeks. Flat audio file, no video. Each burst runs about fifteen hours.”

As he spoke, the muffled chaotic roar of the noise continued uninterrupted in the background.

“It’s just static.”

Jesse had meant that to be a question, but it came out as a statement.

“Almost.” Matt replied. On the screen he scrolled the progress bar forward, the counter spiralling past hours of auditory oblivion in seconds. Fifteen hours did not make for a small file, and there ensued another moment of painful silence as the muscle man scrolled along, and the lawman loomed awkwardly over him.

“Look,” The sheriff muttered, growing tired of the whole exercise. “It’s been a long morning. What does this have to do with the body in that field?”

Without turning his bald head, Salzburg lifted a hand to shush him.

“Give me a second. I’m getting to that,” He scrolled onward, the cursor reflected in the thick glasses he wore. “I memorize each one. This is what brought me to town.”

Jesse halted the contempt in his throat before it passed his lips. He blinked in surprise.

“Wait,” His younger eyes bore into the screen again in bewilderment. “This is coming from here?”

“I had to badger Youtube and the FCC to get a location on the upload...”

“Ashes?” Jesse repeated, not believing the inevitable. “My town?”

“Right here!”

The scroll came to a stop. With a dramatic flourish, the journalist gave a final click. The familiar static reared up anew from the speakers, filling the room with highly organized nonsense once again. This time though, it lasted barely a second before it dropped out into a deadened beat of silence. Just as starkly, a cold clinical voice started up.

“Fifteen percent. Eighteen. Seven, Eight, four.”

Instantly the static roared up again, blanking everything else out. The words had been so fleeting, Jesse almost felt he’d imagined them.

He looked down at the behemoth man hunched at the tiny laptop next to him.

“What the hell was that?”

“Eerie, isn’t it?” Matt grinned back.

It was. The voice had been precise, the words clearly read from a script. It wasn’t as eerie as a burned corpse in the mountains mind you, but everything was relative. For his part, Salzburg seemed to have temporarily forgotten about the elephant-sized barbecued cadaver in the room. He went on.

“It took a while for people to notice,” His finger stabbed at the screen. “But every sound file has a few seconds of words.”

“All of them?”

A smile, his mind clearly still bloodless.

“Every single one. Always English, never makes any damn sense. You have to look hard to find those few seconds in a fifteen-hour file, but they’re always there. I’ve listened to dozens of them.”

Jesse dully beheld the squiggly line on the screen as just another squiggly line.

“Why would people even care about this? Wait, why do you care?”

The bald stubbly head craned up to stare at him in semi outrage.

“Are you serious?” Salzburg raised an eyebrow, somehow also muscular. “This is the ultimate in commentary on our society. Sounds, messages even, from small town America that no one can decipher? Its metaphorical, poetic in its own way. There’s something Steinbeck-ish about the idea that a small town is speaking and no one understands. The moment I pitched this to the ‘Times’ the editor wrote me a travel voucher on the spot. I’ve thinking of turning the whole thing into a podcast series.”

“Can’t wait to hear it.” Jesse grunted, deadpan. His weariness was climbing again; it was time to be blunt.

“Mr. Salzburg, why did you call 911?”

The good feelings seemed to drain from his face.

“You’re right. Sorry.”

His fingers danced and on the screen another audio file appeared, indistinguishable from the rest.

“The most recent file came out yesterday.” He said, more cautiously than before. “Normally, I wait a while before I claw through looking for the message. Hey, usually someone else online beats me to it, but Lucy couldn’t sleep last night so I ran it in the background.”

“What for?”

The journalist looked at him strangely.

“Babies like a little background noise.” He said, like it obvious. Jesse was beginning to think he didn’t know anything. “Drowns out anything else around, and reminds them of the womb. Ever since I started doing this, we’ve been doing them together. She just couldn’t get back down yesterday so we listened to it for hours walking back and forth. We spent the whole night doing that, listening to the noise and pacing circles. Then, about four-thirty, this came up.”

With a kind of finality, he tapped a single key. Once again the static roared, followed by the drop off. Jesse sat back, arms folded, prepared for another random handful of meaningless words. Then the speaker exploded in a rage.

“I know what you’re doing! You think I’m a fucking idiot?!”

The lawman flinched. The voice was the same as before, but the outburst was shocking, violent. The voice started rattling off a bunch of numbers, the GPS coordinates he’d taken down hours ago. He pictured this man’s mouth beside the microphone, spittle flying out in accusation as he seethed these numbers into the airwaves. When he was done he spoke again.

“Be there at nine. If you’re late this time…” There was a beat of silence amid the hate. “I swear to Christ, I’m gonna cut your throat.”

Silence.

Jesse’s eyes flicked over to Salzburg then he jumped, as a hideous bang and squeal blared from the speakers like they were a wounded animal praying for the final bullet. Then the static faded up once again. He stood there for a moment in the aftermath. Looking down he noticed Matt had turned the volume down for the cacophony. His hand still lingered on the knob, his eyes watching the baby monitor.

The lawman standing over him shuddered for a moment, unable to do anything else. The venom in those words infecting his body through his ears.

Slowly Matt began to stir. He pawed meekly at the keyboard for a moment.

“I think he breaks the microphone at the end.” The journalists explained, answering a question no one had asked. “That bang woke Lucy again when we heard it last night. She had just drifted off.”

For his part, the sheriff soaked up the words but remained frozen in place. His young face was stilled as though he’d had a stroke.

“Officer?”

“Uhh… right.”

A few blinks brought Jesse back to reality.

“Right.” He said again, this time firmly. “You called after that?”

He nodded.

“I was pretty scared. Couldn’t sleep anyway. It was another ninety minutes before we drifted off again.”

Under his gaze, the muscular man stirred uncomfortably.

“Look,” He started. “I love this story, but I wasn’t expecting something like that. Its supposed to be something quirky, some kind of novelty or mystery. That was the first time I’d ever heard that kind of… passion on the recordings. I just wanted someone to check it out.”

To Jesse’s ears, this felt like perfect sincerity. But today had taught him a hard lesson about what he thought he knew. He asked the question.

“Can you tell me where you were last night?”

Salzburg blanched a little. He leaned back in his chair away from Jesse as if the lawman had become radioactive.

“I’m a suspect?”

The young sheriff hurriedly shook his head.

“No, no.” He lied. “But we have to cover all the bases.”

Matt didn’t seem convinced, but ventured an answer.

“I was here.”

“Anyone to confirm that?”

“Just Lucy.” He breathed. “Maybe room service? I don’t remember.”

Imagining the kind of meal the Holloway could provide nearly sent a fresh shudder down Jesse’s back. On any other day it might have made him sick. Not today though.

“See what you can do.” His brain was already going a mile a minute. “Either way, I’ll need you to come in and give a statement.”

“Well sure.” The journalist’s muscled bald head tilted toward the babe still sleeping on the monitor. “Can it wait until Lucy wakes up? She’s been all over the place in the last two days.”

Jesse set his sheriff’s face to max, trying not to seem to overwhelmed by it all. It had been a hell of a day.

“Fine,” He hissed irritably. He wiped a hand across the conspiratorial vista of the desk. “And bring all of that with you.”

Until something else came up, that damn noise was the only direct connection he had to the murder. Whether he understood it or not. God, he needed more than peach schnapps.

As he turned to go, trying to wonder how on earth his life had suddenly come to this, Jesse paused. His let go of the door knob and turned back. Salzburg was still there, his massive sinewy form making the chair he sat in look downright flimsy.

“Listen, can you play that for me one more time?”

Matt shrugged and ushered him closer. A few short taps and the room filled with malice once again, the spoken hate and loathing coming in whisper volume from the speakers. He listened to it all again, from the curse to the numbers to the threat that may have been more than just words. Through it all there was one thing that unsettled him, and of everything that had happened maybe this concerned him the most: Jesse knew he had heard that voice before.