I started the cataloging again tonight. The archive smells like wet paper and burnt dust, the air conditioner humming somewhere behind the walls. Most of the boxes are routine—interviews, grant reports, lab dictations from decades ago.
One cassette caught my eye because the ink on its label had bled into the cardboard sleeve. Someone had written Test log 10-22 in a hand that looked a little like mine. I turned it over, expecting the tape to be blank. The reel was wound tight, as if it had been played recently.
The deck still works if you nudge the playhead. The moment the tape engaged, the room filled with a hiss that settled into breathing. Then a voice began reading environmental notes—temperature, humidity, a faint tapping from the ceiling vents. It took me half a minute to recognize the voice as my own.
I paused the tape, rewound a few seconds, and played it again. The cadence was identical, but the words had changed. Where I’d heard humidity sixty-two percent, it now said sixty-three. Small, but enough to make me check my notebook.
I replayed that segment with the headphones on, volume low enough that the hiss felt inside my skull. For a few seconds, I was sure I heard something moving beneath it—like a drawer sliding shut or the slow creak of a chair shifting weight. The tape didn’t capture it the same way twice. Each playback drifted, as though the machine were improvising.
I made a note in the margin: possible background interference. Then I wrote it again, smaller, until the words blurred together. When I looked up, the clock had advanced by several minutes I didn’t remember.
I told myself it was an illusion—magnetic drift, syllables collapsing into noise—but when the recording mentioned the crack in the right corner of the desk, I looked down and saw it there, a thin vein of splintered veneer I’d never noticed before.
I stopped the tape. The hiss continued for three breaths after the motor died.
—
I left the recorder running while I made tea. When I came back, the tape had reached its end and the counter blinked zeros. The silence in the room felt engineered, as though the soundproofing had thickened while I was gone.
Out of habit I pressed play again, expecting only hiss. Instead, the voice resumed—not from the beginning, but halfway through, as if it had been waiting for me.
“…he’s standing now,” it said. “He’ll check the window next.”
I did. The window was closed. The night beyond it looked motionless, the rain reduced to drifting threads.
I rewound several seconds. This time the voice sounded farther away. It listed new details: The light above the desk hums at fifty hertz. The subject’s pulse: irregular.
The subject.
I wrote down the words before they faded, then compared the handwriting to the label on the cassette. The loop of the h, the slope of the t—both mine, but older, more deliberate.
When I played the tape a third time, the breathing between sentences synced with my own. I counted to four, stopped breathing, and the tape went silent with me.
I exhaled. The hiss returned.
The voice spoke one last line, softer than the rest.
“Don’t stop until you’ve written it down.”
I did what it asked. The ink trembled on the page, forming two small smudges side by side. They looked like numbers, but I couldn’t tell which.
I listened again, just to prove the silence was clean. The sound had changed—no longer breath, exactly, but a pulse running through the wiring in the walls. Every light in the room dimmed and brightened once, in rhythm with it.
I told myself it was electrical. Everything in this building hums. Still, I boxed the cassette carefully, slid it under a stack of folders, and promised myself I’d log the anomaly tomorrow. I didn’t. The box stayed on the desk all night, warm to the touch when I passed it.
—
Morning came gray and slow. I tried playing other tapes to clear my head—old lectures, half-erased dictations—but most of them stopped mid-sentence, their magnets gone slack. A few carried only a thin breath of static, as if waiting for me to answer.
By noon the room smelled of ozone and metal, and my hands trembled when I reached for the recorder. I kept telling myself I’d imagined the voice. Machines repeat things; that’s their nature. I just wanted to hear the sound again without the words.
I started a fresh page in the logbook, dated it, and pressed record. Nothing. Just the hum of the power supply. I spoke into the microphone—my name, the time, the words verification test. Then I rewound, played it back.
The voice that answered was again my own, but the phrasing was wrong. It began before I’d spoken, predicting me.
“Verification test,” it said. “He will say his name next.”
I stared at the machine. On the counter, the numbers advanced to 10:21, then paused, as if waiting for permission.
I told myself it was mechanical error, an old sensor stuttering near the end of the reel. I waited anyway. At 10:22 the tape rolled forward by itself.
The voice on the recording had gone quiet; what came through instead was the sound of writing. Pen on paper. My pen.
When it stopped, I looked down. The new line in my notebook was in my handwriting, but I hadn’t moved:
Play the next one.
There was no next cassette. Only the empty box, its label peeled halfway away. Beneath the torn paper, a second line of faded ink showed through—a different number, almost invisible.
I started to copy it, but the pen wouldn’t write. The ink had dried to the color of ash.
I switched off the deck and sat listening to the static on the tape until it ran smooth and blank. Then I wrote the final note of the session.
Session complete. No anomalies detected.
I closed the book. The hum in the walls followed me into sleep.