The Ghost Frequency

Arthur lived in the quiet, and that’s what made his job as a post-production audio editor perfect. His workspace was a black, soundproof cube deep within a downtown studio, where the air was always stale and the only light came from his three glowing monitors. It was 3 a.m., the city silent outside the building’s thick walls, and Arthur was meticulously cleaning an interview track.

The track was mostly flat: two people talking, the occasional squeak of a chair, and a low, persistent ambient hum—the usual digital dust. His task was to remove everything below a certain decibel threshold, a process he could do in his sleep.

He ran the noise reduction program, scrubbing the first ten minutes. When the clean track played, it was pristine, almost sterile. Yet, a tiny spike remained at the 4:13 mark. It was too soft to register consciously, but the program flagged it as a "Ghost Frequency"—an artifact the algorithm couldn't categorize as silence or noise.

Curiosity, that terrible impulse, urged him forward. He zoomed in on the waveform until the single spike stretched across the entire screen, a dense, erratic tangle of lines. He cranked the gain—the volume—far higher than any human listener would tolerate.

What he heard was not static, nor was it electromagnetic interference. It was an organic sound.

It was breathing.

Not the casual sigh of a person, but a slow, wet inhalation, followed by a ragged, rattling exhalation. It was too low to be human, too close to be an outdoor echo. It carried the chilling texture of something vast and ancient, forced into a labored rhythm.

Arthur pulled back, slamming his hand down on the keyboard, cutting the audio. The absolute silence of the studio rushed back, heavy and instantaneous. He swallowed, his heart hammering against the soundproofing of his own chest. It was a stray recording, he told himself. A microphone glitch.

But a chilling realization took hold as he stared at the sound wave. The recording he was cleaning was from a lavalier microphone pinned directly to the interviewee’s shirt. The Ghost Frequency was so low, so physically close to the source, that it must have been captured by the second mic in the studio—the wide-angle condenser mic that recorded the room tone.

Arthur switched tracks to the room mic recording, the one capturing everything inside his soundproof cube during the interview. He found the corresponding 4:13 mark.

He did not crank the gain this time. He didn't have to.

The ragged inhalation was louder now. It had a direction. It wasn't ambient. It was centered, almost directly in the middle of the room. It was right behind the interviewee’s chair.

He hit play on the next segment. The breathing moved. With each subsequent segment of the interview he checked, the sound of the inhalation and exhalation grew marginally, imperceptibly closer, migrating steadily toward the location of the room microphone.

Which was mounted three feet directly behind Arthur’s head.

The final spike in the recording was at 4:21. Arthur isolated it, his finger trembling over the playback button. He didn't need to hear it. He knew.

He was sitting in the same silent chair, in the same silent room, at the same silent hour. The mic was still live, recording the nothingness around him.

He clicked the spike. The sound was an overwhelming, sudden silence, immediately followed by a sound that made his blood turn to ice: a click—the sound of the mic being nudged, perhaps by a large, slow hand.

Then came the final, low exhalation, no longer ragged, but satisfied, and right next to his ear.