AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Benny didn’t answer, but he tapped the play button again.
B—n…fen—vrrr.
I stopped petting the kitten, who was on the cusp of a nap anyway and didn’t mind. “I can’t understand that at all. You said you had a theory, though?”
“Listen again. Come on—listen hard. ” He turned the speaker up another notch, just about as far as it went. “One more time. ”
On a third listen, I thought I heard a vowel in the first word, but I couldn’t swear to it; and the second part sounded a little like the word “fender,” but that didn’t make any sense either.
I shook my head. “Sorry, Ben. I can’t make heads or tails out of it. ”
He swiveled on the piano stool and faced me. He bit his lower lip and looked back at the screen. “Okay, so I lied. I can’t make it out either. I was hoping you’d be able to pin it down. ”
“Nope. Try another one. What else have you got on there?”
“A couple more. Hang on. ” A few more tabs and adjustments later, and the box was ready to play. “This one came before you said, ‘Do you agree with this guy?’ You’ll hear yourself towards the end, but right before that there’s a couple of whispers that overlap. I think it’s two voices, or that’s how it sounds to me. I spent a lot of time cleaning this one up, but part of it is still pretty fuzzy. ”
“That’s all right. Let ’er rip. ”
“Here it goes. Okay. ”
Ey…ereagain…ows…
I heard the rest of it the way Benny suggested, like a second voice was speaking at the same time.
Iah…ows
At which point my own overly loud words kicked in. Benny played the segment back a couple of times, and on the third hearing I was pretty sure about the first part. “I think the first few words are, ‘They’re here again. ’”
“Good. That’s how I heard it too. What about the rest of it? That second part that comes in midway—what about that?”
“That part I’m not so positive about. The second word sounds like ‘outs,’ sort of. And the first word is maybe ‘I,’ but I don’t know. ”
As Benny ran the clip again, both of us strained our ears towards the speakers.
They’re here again…outs…I…outs
“I don’t think it’s ‘outs,’” I confessed. “It must be something else. What do you make of that ‘I’ sound?”
“It sounds to me like ‘dire,’ the way a bad situation is ‘dire,’ you know? Or maybe it’s ‘tire,’ like they’re ‘tired. ’ You said something about them being awake—maybe they were telling you that yeah, they’re awake—but they’re tired. ”
“Do dead people get tired?”
“You tell me. ”
“I can’t. Put it through one more time. ”
He obliged with a flick of his finger.
“Dire,” I said aloud, and the word fit as well as anything else. “Tire. ” Said quickly, even by the living, the two words would be hard to distinguish. The consonants were close phonetic cousins to be so far apart in the alphabet. “Something is dire. No. No, wait a minute. Have you got a newspaper?”
“Um,” he looked around the minimalist clutter of the living room and then told me to wait. He slipped a pair of sandals on his feet and darted out the front door. Tiggy raised her head when he turned the knob, but she didn’t bolt. My lap was warm enough to hold her until he returned, paper in hand.
“My neighbor’s,” he explained. “They’re out of town and they won’t be back until tomorrow anyway. They’ll never know the difference. ”
On the front page, beneath the red rubber band that held the wad together, the paper announced, “Shooting at Chickamauga Battlefield. ”
“It made the front page,” he observed.
