Chapter Text
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At the heart of a little town called Carollsville is a threadbare radio station responsible for airing KSDR 770.2 AM, Monday through Saturday. Maintained through sheer volunteer work, the station only successfully reaches Carollsville and sometimes even that’s a stretch. Every December, said volunteers organize a fundraiser that usually barely reaches its goal—but it does always reach its goal, because what else are the housewives supposed to listen to while they make dinner?
Nagito Komaeda is no such housewife, and yet he scrupulously extends the antenna and adjusts the volume knob on his personal portable radio. His favorite one. He has another one in the kitchen, yet another in the bathroom. Sometimes if the weather’s poor or the reception is otherwise fickle, he has to try the other radios to get a clearer sound. One of the many charms of AM radio, but he’s hardly one to complain.
“—stening to KSDR AM, and that was ‘You Made Me Believe in Magic’ by the Bay City Rollers. Still highly requested, huh?” The host chuckles mirthlessly, clearly not the target audience for said request. Nagito balks, disinterested in this segment either way.
“Well, folks, that brings us to the end of the hour, but stick around. Coming up next is our Mystery Block, and you don’t wanna miss this one.”
A jingle segues into a furniture ad, giving Nagito a moment to do a lap around his bedroom. He opens a stubborn window with some effort, not especially keen on letting the warmth out, but he suspects it might aid the reception. He preemptively pulls on a scarf and a corduroy jacket, the faux shearling-lined collar sitting warm and familiar against his pale neck. Nagito’s a gawky looking man, coat rack-like in build with a pair of too-long legs and an encumbered posture like he knows he’s taking up too much room. Peers uncharitably compared him to Edgar Winter in high school because of his long, shock-white hair, but Nagito always took the comparison in stride, replying evenly, “Thank you, he’s a very talented man.”
He putters around the perimeters in off-color house slippers—a holdover from his nisei parents—and mutters to himself as he digs for a particular notebook among the controlled chaos. Saturday evenings are always an ordeal for him, but today has him particularly wired. To an on-looker, he may seem angry, but he’s actually elated.
He finds his spiral-bound notebook just in time to situate himself at the desk, regarding his radio the way a devout man might regard a particularly moving sermon. The frayed and densely populated pages of his notebook seem to cling to their binding by a thread—he’ll need to buy another one soon—but for now, he turns to a page marked in whirlwind letters, the margins full to bursting with corrections and notations. He quickly re-reads what’s legible to himself as he picks at the skin on his knuckles. ‘Pesky dry season,’ he thinks distantly.
“Good evening, Carollsville. You’re listening to KSDR AM, and I’m your host, Hajime Hinata. We’ve got a pretty stacked schedule tonight on the Mystery Block…”
Nagito jolts out of his reverie and turns the volume up as high as it will go. The host who takes over for this segment is a young guy who lacks the vigor typical of a good radio host, but he delivers his thoughts clearly and deliberately enough. The Mystery Block is a more subdued segment than the others, anyway, meant for men driving home from work and idle minds starting their night shifts. What Hajime lacks in charisma, he makes up for with a genuine vested interest in his talking points. Though a lot of it is drivel. Pure fiction. Fairytales about local legends that perhaps Hajime makes up himself, sometimes. But some of it…
“—and then afterwards, we’ll be taking calls for anyone who’s spotted any kind of spooky or unusual activity recently. So make sure you have our number on hand—“
Nagito mouths the numbers as Hajime recites, having committed them to memory already. His hands tremble violently. He’s felt unsteady for hours, but now he’s positively possessed with nervous energy.
Of course, he’s looked him up before, this Hajime Hinata. He’s got notes a-plenty about him at the beginning of the notebook. Like many others, Hajime hit adulthood and couldn’t find a compelling enough reason to claw his way out of Carollsville. In fact, records show that Hajime is perfectly ordinary in every way. Normal grades, normal extracurricular activity, normal social life. He didn’t attend college, perhaps strapped for money, but then why he got himself ensnared in a thankless full-time volunteering position, Nagito can’t begin to guess. Perhaps it is precisely because Hajime is so ordinary that he hosts a weekly segment about the supernatural, but it must take a great deal of footwork to find anything stranger than a broken traffic light or a domestic quarrel in these parts.
At least, up until recently.
Normally, Carollsville is a lethargic town of about a thousand people, nestled over a creek and in a forest. It was once an industrious mining site, but ceaseless digging agitated the creek like a raw wound and caused unnavigable flooding come rainy season. Rendered all but isolated, now redwoods are its main export. It’s hard to drive into and harder to drive out of, roads marred with unattended potholes and overgrown branches. It seems there’s always construction cones toppled here and there around the town limits, making empty promises for improvements that never seem to come.
Entertainment is modest, as tourism is all but nonexistent; nearly every business is locally owned and operating at small margins. Options for a burgeoning young adult’s career are usually limited to taking up the family business, or challenging the potholes and leaving town altogether. The locals take pride in their specialties and some have even made a name for themselves in the surrounding counties. The Nevermind family’s orchard is a particular highlight of the town and a lynchpin of local economy. There’s also a dairy farm, a movie theater, and a small community college. Main street boasts a roller rink, a hospital, and a surprisingly robust little guitar shop. Carollsville is quaint but not without its charms.
However.
Last month a baker was found mangled and dead in the woods under questionable circumstances, whipping the sleepy little town into a lucid frenzy. With the illusion of tranquility all but shattered, many want to attribute it to a bear attack gone wrong, but many more suspect foul play. To think! The baker’s body, strewn like streamers around the beautiful redwoods Carollsville is so known for.
Superstition is at an all time high; Hajime’s radio segment has more ears on it than ever before. Though he’s not exactly at liberty to cover real life news, he vaguely gestures now and then towards his own doubts about the randomness of the death. Cannibal poachers? Aliens? Mole people? The possibilities go on, and Hajime pores over these thoughts and more every week.
But frankly, that’s not what Nagito is concerned with.
Time crawls. The radio buzzes. Hajime prattles on pleasantly about crop circles, and though on any other night Nagito would be happy to take notes and ponder life on Mars, tonight he jabs impatiently at his notebook and dirties the side of his palm with ink. It smears across the page like dried blood. He spares a thought for the sad little baker who probably met a similarly grisly end in the woods. Did the baker’s blood dry black against the moonlit soil? One has to wonder. Authorities cleaned up the scene too quickly and had too little to say when prompted to describe it for the local press. They probably thought sparing townsfolk the details would save them from a gruesome mental image, but to the contrary, the ambiguity left those with untempered imaginations to fill in the blanks with the most vicious pieces possible. People with imaginations like Nagito’s.
All at once, his excitement sours, like an indulgent meal settling poorly in his stomach.
“—about time to take calls from listeners! So if you have anything unusual to regale, get ready to dial our number at—”
Nagito only realizes he’s been sweating when a droplet lands on his paper, joining his ink scribbles in a wet tangle of meaningless shapes. He fixes his posture and reaches over for the telephone, just the way he’s practiced doing a million times before. His body knows the motions, even if his mind suddenly feels like static. Area code first. Start small.
“—that number again is—“
“I know,” Nagito says impatiently, distracted, though Hajime can’t hear him. Not yet. “I know the number.”
So he pushes the buttons and listens to the song they spell out and waits for his outgoing call to reach its destination. The wait feels glacial. Where did his excitement go? For months, he’s dreamed of this exact moment, and now of all times it’s making bile crawl up his throat. He does his best to push it down so that he’ll be able to speak. He has to be able to speak.
“Hello, our first caller of the night! You’re on KSDR AM! Can I get your name?”
Hajime’s voice is doubled, a chorus of one in Nagito’s ears, and it stuns him silent long enough for him to remember to stand up and put some distance between himself and the radio. Hajime—his voice is really on the other side of the line. Nagito nearly trips over himself as he strides to the doorframe, minding the limitations of his phone cord, and he’s so focused on moving his body that he forgets a response is expected out of him.
“...Hello? Can you hear me?” A more presentation-oriented host would have hung up and moved on to the next caller already, but naive, amateurish Hajime Hinata waits patiently for a response and Nagito loves him so much for it.
“Y-yes,” Nagito manages after swallowing thickly.
“Let’s hear it, then. What kind of unusual happenings are on your mind lately?” Hajime sounds relieved to still have a caller on the line, regardless of who it might be. Although his show has more listeners of late, callers with relevant info are still few and far between.
“I—“ Where to even start? Nagito glances down at the notebook in his hand, but the outline he’d drafted over and over looks just like the ink blots now: murky, bleeding nothingness. Information wells up within him, and he blurts the first thing that reaches the top. “We’re going to die. All of us. We are going to die.”
If Hajime makes any sound of acknowledgment, Nagito can’t hear it over the sound of his own pulse. He slams the phone down onto the receiver and turns the radio off. He shuts his window and makes sure to lock it. He rips his scarf and jacket off, throws them onto his bed, and makes a beeline for the bathroom where the singular meal he’d had for the day meets an untimely end. Between dry heaves, Nagito turns on the radio he keeps in his bathroom and hears that Hajime has already moved on to the next topic, albeit with a small note of amusement in his voice.
“Goddammit,” Nagito hisses to himself as he pushes sweaty hair off his face. “He needs to know. He—he’ll understand if I just explain it to him. I know he will.”
His words sound small and brittle, even to himself, but maybe it’s just bathroom acoustics. He wipes his mouth and peels himself away from the toilet, a new goal quickly erecting in the ashes of his previously well-laid plans.