The Cynic’s Guide to the Supernatural

Another Tuesday in the booth. Another three hours of filling the dead air between midnight and 3 a.m. with spooky music and the desperate calls of lonely insomniacs who’ve seen a shadow that looked a little too much like their ex.

People don’t call for the truth. They call for the story. They want to be the hero of their own little ghost story, to feel the chill of something *more* in a world that’s become painfully, digitally mundane. My job isn’t to debunk them. It’s to play along. To give their paranoid fantasies a polished, radio-friendly narrative.

It’s entertainment. Theater. And business is good.

But tonight… tonight was different. The filter must have been down. We got a raw one.

The call came in at 1:17 a.m. The line was thick with a hissing static I haven’t heard since we upgraded our equipment a decade ago. It was the sound of a bad line, of distance.

**Caller:** “Hello? Is… is this on? Can anyone hear me?”

His voice was a tremor, a leaf in a hurricane. Not the usual dramatic flair. This was the real, acrid taste of fear.

**Me:** “You’re on the air with ‘Static and Shadows.’ What’s your name, friend?”

**Caller:** “Elias. My name is Elias Reed. I’m in… I’m in Perdition’s Grove.”

I rolled my eyes. Cute name for a town. I pulled up a search tab. Nothing. Not on Google Maps, not on any geological survey. A ghost town in more ways than one.

**Me:** “Perdition’s Grove? Can’t say I’ve heard of it. What can we do for you tonight, Elias?”

**Caller:** “You have to tell someone. You’re the only signal that comes through clean. The phones are dead. The internet… it’s just symbols. Nothing works. It’s been watching the town for weeks. But tonight, it’s coming down the main street.”

**Me:** “What’s coming, Elias?”

A long pause. The static swelled, and for a second, I thought I heard something underneath it. A dry, rustling sound, like pages turning.

**Caller:** “We call it The Archivist. It’s tall. So tall it has to stoop under the telephone wires. It wears a… a wide-brimmed hat, like an old preacher. You can’t see its face. Just shadow.”

I leaned into the mic, my cynicism piqued. “And what does this ‘Archivist’ do?”

His voice dropped to a shattered whisper. “It collects. It doesn’t kill you. It… unfolds you.”

**Me:** “Unfolds you?”

**Caller:** “It touches you. And you just… come apart. Not in pieces. In layers. Like an origami person being smoothed back into a flat sheet. Your insides become your outsides, your memories become colors, your screams become… a kind of terrible, silent art. It leaves these… these paintings on the streets. Portraits made of meat and memory.”

I felt a genuine chill. This was a new one. Morbidly creative. “Elias, that’s quite a story—”

**Caller:** “IT’S NOT A STORY!” The scream was raw, tearing through the static. “Mrs. Gable lived across the street. I saw it! I saw it take her! It’s real! It’s coming! The static is getting louder— Can’t you hear it? It’s in the static!”

The line dissolved into a shriek of white noise, a digital avalanche. And then, clear as a bell, I heard it. A single, dry, rustling step. Then another. Then the line went dead.

I sat in the silence of my booth, my heart hammering against my ribs. Theater. It was all theater.

I cut to a long music track and went to my blog. I typed up the encounter, playing it for laughs. “Another night, another creative caller from a town that doesn’t exist!” I posted it and tried to forget the sound of that rustling step.

I couldn’t.

### [BLOG POST: ‘STATIC AND SHADOWS’ – MARCUS RIDLEY – November 4th, 2:45 AM]

**Title: What the Hell Was That?**

It happened again. Ten calls. All from different numbers. All from different area codes that don’t match any known numbering plan. All from people claiming to be in Perdition’s Grove.

A waitress hiding in a walk-in freezer. A mechanic barricaded in a garage. A child, whispering from a closet.

All describing the same thing. The tall figure. The wide-brimmed hat. The unfolding.

All begging for help to a world that has no record of their town.

All ending the same way. A surge of that impossible, ancient static. The sound of rustling, like dry leaves or old parchment. A scream that gets turned inside out. Then silence.

This isn’t a prank. The engineering sweat is pouring down my back. There’s no source for these calls. It’s like the signal is being generated *in the line itself*.

The last caller, a woman named Sarah, said something before the static took her.

She said, “It doesn’t like the noise. It hates the truth. But it loves the stories. It’s collecting them. It’s coming for the source.”

What is the source?

### [BLOG POST: ‘STATIC AND SHADOWS’ – MARCUS RIDLEY – November 4th, 3:15 AM]

**Title: It’s Here**

The music just cut out.

The board is lit up like a Christmas tree. Every line is open. Every one is pouring forth that same screaming static. It’s bleeding into the master feed. I can’t stop it. The emergency cutoff is dead.

It’s in the building.

The lights in the hallway just went out. I’ve locked the booth door. It’s soundproof. It’s safe.

I can hear it out there. Not a footstep. A rustle. A dry, patient, unfolding sort of sound. It’s scraping against the door. The metal is… changing. Flattening. The colors are bleeding out of it, forming patterns on the wall.

It found the source.

It found me.

Sarah was wrong. It doesn’t hate the truth. It is a kind of truth. A final, terrible edit. It’s the static at the end of the signal. The silence after the story is over.

It’s inside the station.

### [AUTOMATED SYSTEM LOG – WZMB BROADCAST MASTER – November 4th, 3:29 AM]

**LOG ENTRY:** Source feed for Studio B terminated. Power surge detected.

**LOG ENTRY:** New primary source input detected. Signal origin: INTERNAL.

**LOG ENTRY:** Broadcasting initiated.

***

### [FINAL TRANSMISSION – WZMB – November 4th, 3:30 AM – Present]

(The following signal has been broadcasting on a loop on WZMB for 72 hours. Authorities have been unable to shut down the transmitter. It is currently the strongest clear-channel signal in the tri-state area.)

*A symphony of screaming static, layered and deep. Within it, a familiar voice can be heard, but stretched, distorted, and folded into the noise.*

**Voice (Marcus):** …can’t… stop… the signal… it sees you… it sees all of you… it’s in the wires… it’s in the silence between your heartbeats…

*A new sound rises above the static: a dry, relentless, rustling. It grows closer, and closer, until it is all that can be heard.*