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If Aimsey ever saw anyone else do this, she might shoot them.
-
Moose up ahead, the man says. Hold off until further notice. There’s static, and then: Noted, comes the reply. Keeping them with me.
-
The ladder rungs chilled her fingers bone-deep as she ascended: adorned with drops of dew. The night before had been the coldest in a week: a drizzle of sleet in the evening had her worried about a freeze, but it stayed above. If it had frozen, she likely would not be here. But it had not, and she was 200 feet in the air.
This had been her haunt since she was nineteen. An old radio tower juts out of the lush forest, perched atop a small bluff, rocky soil rooting it to the ground. It had been decommissioned not too long before that. She’d give it maybe another year, and then leave it. The foundation and lines would likely hold for at least ten years, but she didn’t want to be the one to find that to be false. But she was twenty-four now, and it had been four years since her last real sunset, and she was learning what happens when your life ends quietly, quietly and painfully.
Injured hiker, compound leg fracture. Transport ten minutes out. She’d listened, listened for hours, but never heard a response.
There were about thirty minutes until the sun would touch the horizon, and the trees below would be lit with their dull glow. The moon had only been a sliver of a thing, and now that it was gone, there was naught but the occasional flash of headlights on the nearest road, a few miles east, and her handheld lantern, lashed to the side of the tower, and coating the metal in a bloody aura in a five foot radius around her. Her harness was clipped to the rung an arm’s length above her, and her feet were resting on the lower half of the cross-brace.
She’s never seen anyone else here before. She’s not sure anyone else knows about it: it’s far enough off the road and out of any nearby towns that anyone who’s in this area is likely a ranger, a lost hiker, or a lonely wanderer, which. She supposes that’s her category, isn’t it? There’s some kind of property battle over the tower itself, but the people involved are too far away and too wealthy to care about some little piece of land in an abandoned forest.
They’d never see the land the way she can see it. They haven’t felt that eventual rust under their once-soft hands, laid in the dirt as the grasses and weeds kissed their face gently. They haven’t cried out from the top of the tower and heard their own voice break against the hills, strange to them as that of an outlander. Nobody who owns this place has half as much a claim to it as her. She feels fiercely protective of it, as though it were a younger sibling. God knows her own example of a protective sibling had been terrible and strange.
There had been crows as she’d climbed: beautiful and raspy in the evening, allowing Aimsey to close her eyes and imagine the coming of autumn. She envied their voices, the deepness. Years ago, she’d done that with friends, lowered their voices and thrown as much grit as they could at it, posturing around. It is increasingly hard to remember what should be relevant memories from her youth every year she gets older.
She tried journaling, a year ago, but it made her angry, pens better suited to be snapped in her hands after hours of bending, paper better suited to be torn up and thrown away when nothing came out right, not the words nor the lines meant to be faces or the space outside her window. Was it remembrance when every new day was the same?
-
It takes at least seven tries for her to recognize it as real.
She hears weird shit on the radio all the time. It’s not uncommon to get the tail end of an urgent transmission, or a talk show that ended 20 years ago on permanent rerun, repeating itself forever until the recordings warp. The bad shit isn’t all on the radio, either. It’s pretty easy to figure out that you’re hearing voices when you’re the only human around for ten miles. And when that voice belongs to your dead brother.
But the hallucinations are infrequent, enough so that she’s got part of a wall covered in sticky notes containing the details of what she heard, but it can’t be more than fifty notes, scattered from floor to this lower part of the roof, where the house swings down, and she has her corner: radio, desk, water cooler, boots, walking stick, gun. The other room in the house besides the bathroom has an east-facing window, and more often than not Aimsey wakes up with the sun in her eyes. That’s on the nights she doesn’t climb the tower.
Scott’s voice is always easy to pick out. He’s only really gotten her a few times, when she was exceptionally tired, or scared, or out of it. Tricky fucking bastard. The other voices are worse, because even though she knows there’s nobody there, she’ll be checking the door for two hours.
–ello? Is anyone there? I need help, plea–
The radio crackles happily into Aimsey’s left ear, and she shifts, feeling the soreness spread throughout her legs. Her forearm is red from pressing into the desk, and she’s folded a paper up against the radio. Her mouth is sour with sleep, and her cheeks and tongue cling to each other like lovers. Blearily, she takes the paper, and presses it against the corner, tugging it back and forth in a futile attempt to get rid of the line. The sticky notes sit by the abandoned terrarium. She’ll grab one in a second. Just got to get this paper sorted first.
Property Records: 1832 - 1909. God. She has to get this dealt with before those people from the county come back. They were friendly, sure, and they weren’t chasing her off the land or anything, but the crunch of gravel in her roundabout driveway is quite unwelcome, and if those people are here, who knows if scum of the earth housing developers will show up. She’s not selling them shit.
–one out there, please! Can you hea–
Aimsey’s hand is on the pen before she even tries covering one ear. Best way for her to make sure, but she’s pretty confident: nobody would be out here this late–
–only one I can find, I don’t know–
She freezes, pen halfway to the paper. The voice is definitely coming from the radio. Which means it’s real. Not in her head. Shit.
Her finger slips over the buttons, still weary from sleep, but she’s talking into it before it’s even transmitting, tongue running awkwardly into her teeth.
“Contact 329 here, I hear you. I hear you. Where are you?” Beep. Her hands are shaking. They rely on her for this. That’s part of why she’s out here. If she’s missing stuff like this– if she’s not sure what’s real–
Picked up – thank god you’re there, need – sure where I am. The sound keeps cutting out. The voice is garbled, as any voice would be, and it’s hard to make out anything about it. Aimsey swears and thumps the radio, like that’ll do shit: it’s most certainly a transmission issue. This person must be just on the edge of range. Important things first. Her eyes lock on to the card the county dropped off two years ago, pinned up on the wall next to a band poster and a scrap of fabric.
“Stay where you are, unless there is reason to move. Are you in immediate danger?” The first thing she needs to ask.
No response from the radio. She has to get to the car. Has to start searching.
The radio slots fairly well in the compartment within her car. The stereo is blasted from the last time she drove, and it hits her neatly with a wall of sound that shakes her further out of any sleep she got. Fumbling with the knob, she manages to turn it down, and spins the wheel with her other hand, first aid kit handle clenched in her teeth. The handle of the kit grates against her jaw, bruising her cheek as the box jolts with the movement of the car. Bam as the car hits the root peeking up through the road, and the faint clatter of plastic as the bump dislodges the radio, sending it to the ground. Shooting down to get it results only in the knocking of her forehead across the horn, and the subsequent panicked press of her foot on the gas, sending her up the road at considerable speed. Well. It should be a little easier for this person to find her now.
The voice (female? young?) has been silent for a while, and Aimsey repeats her lines from the card: stuck in between the panels of the dashboard. She’s chewing at the inside of her lip. They need to speak again. If not, they could have lost the radio, and Aimsey does not want to report a missing person. That, and–
The car is complaining, her seatbelt isn’t buckled, and the side door is not fully closed: none of that matters at this time. She’s approaching the edge of her original radius, and with every bit closer she gets, the more the futility of this sets in. There is no fucking way she is finding this person. The radius is simply too large. Besides, if they have a radio that can reach the channels she listens to, they have a radio that can reach the fire service, and get real help. Not some half-crazed woman mad with grief chasing you down in the forest. With a gun. She just– god damn it, she wishes they would fucking talk again, fucking say something, please, don’t leave–
Not even other headlights grace the road as she reaches the end of the zone. It’s dark and alone out here, and Aimsey’s not sure even she counts as good company.
-
The trunks of the pine trees are auburn in her headlights. Shadows extend out far into the forest, slashing illumination across the deeper woods in blinks too fast to catch. There is truly no hope out here.
Aimsey has to hold herself back from pressing on the gas until she flies out of this forest, over the plains, and into the sea, sinking so far that no part of this car or this body will see the light again, living with her lungs full of dark water, alive and as close to asleep as one can be. The car slowly rolls to a stop, smooth movement on the paved road transitioning with a step to the faint crunching of gravel.
The door opens with a creak, and one boot hits the ground. Moths are dancing and weaving in front of the headlights, accompanied by smaller, less discernible bugs in their dance. In the trees, cicadas drone their song, and once upon a time Aimsey heard a voice in that. She’d dutifully written it down on a note, tucked it in the corner, and given herself eleven hours of blackout drunk sleep. This radio voice may take more than that.
Usually the forest is calming. Especially in summers like this. Even at night, when she hikes out to her tower: even when she can’t see shit through the trees and eats three spiders on her way to those barbed gates, even when she noses the door of the base station with her lantern to find it same as it ever was, just a bit older, and more forgotten. The danger out here has never been the environment.
As she’d driven, she’d only gotten more sure, and the land around had only grown more unfamiliar and unfriendly. Her fingers clenched around the wheel and bit into the soft covering. The suspicion had bloomed beautifully into a thistle running up the side of her leg, around her waist, peaking at her throat with a gnarly twist. This voice couldn’t be real. It was not a genuine SOS.
Because the thing was, the thing she’d been trying to avoid: she’d heard that voice before. She’d heard that voice before, and as with her brother, the dead do not speak.
-
She sits there for two hours at least, car headlights leeching power into the night. The gravel below proves an excellent medium to release her anger, grinding her boot into the ground, and eventually her knee, her hands: roughing up the skin with the redness of pressure, using the sensation to bring herself back. It has to be let out in small portions. That is part of the deal. If she feels it all, lets it hit her, something will break, and the list of irreplaceables already stacks too high. Aimsey is almost in the car and towards the tower before her mind kicks up what a fucking stupid idea that is. Doesn’t even have her harness.
Cause she’s done it before, when she was still naive enough to look by land, when she would sit atop the tower and broadcast out in a faint mimic of the glory of that place, and scream and cry into the wind as it took all of that away without a trace. Aimsey has thrown everything she could get hold of off that tower, and not much has kept her own feet on the rungs.
The door is slammed, and the engine is choking to life, first aid and radio forgotten on the dirt-stained floor. She needs to get home. She’s not stable like this, and while driving is an extremely poor idea right now, it is yet miles better than the alternative. Each side of her cheek is bleeding, and so is her hand: her palm darkens the wheel as she yanks it to the side, contact burning at the abrasion, a sweet reminder of her pain and her body. It’ll be just as long a drive back as it was here. As she comes to speed, the radio shifts under her thumb.
“Contact 329 leaving the area. Get– get your own fucking help,” she manages, feeling small and terrible and helpless.
–and would you say that to her can you see her eyes turn down and the way she moves away cause you hurt her you hurt her and now she’s gone–
It’s not worth it. It never is. And yet she cannot help the whispers, low enough as to have no tone, broken and dead like the bush that does not come back from being burned away.
“Can’t do this,” she tells her, which is funny because she is gone, and not funny because the world is this car and nowhere else. “Just– any other. Any other, please. Fuck. Don’t tell me what I did.” The radio tumbles once more to the ground, cheerily chattering its seconds of static, and there is no more from the hole inside the car.
-
Her sleep is fitful and varied in the next days. She wakes once to pain blooming from her left foot– she’d lashed out in dream, hitting the edge of her too-small bed on the top of her foot where the veins are visible, and it felt like dying for a minute before she rolls over, groaning, and pulls herself to the desk. The radio had been running while she slept, but as of that moment, there was nothing, soothing, quiet static filling the small space. Her sticky notes stay untouched. She hadn’t been able to recount that day on them, not sure how it would fit on a note, unwilling to reflect upon her failure.
There were more anomalies than usual on the radio: number stations (those, she hadn’t heard for quite a while), Morse, which she’d tried to decode: more of the hallucinations. The morse had been a bad joke. Save me. Do you hear it? Don’t let go. She damn near threw her radio out the window, contacted the rangers to say sorry but she just couldn’t, they needed to get someone else up here, someone who didn’t hear voices. She couldn’t bear waiting the hours it would take for them to get to her, seeing their eyes as they removed her official radio, the emptiness of being alone in her house afterwards with one of her only purposes in life gone, nothing but the gentle creaking of the floorboards, the birds that only sing deep in the forest silence, the creeping of the insects into the leaf litter all around, and that wind, the ever-present hiss of the currents in the air all around her.
The messages got more demanding. When she started ignoring most of them, turning away the second she heard those telltale beeps, they got louder, more present, on more channels, including ones there should be nobody on at all. It gave her a painful sense of satisfaction. These were surely hallucinations. She hadn’t failed her duty. She was just losing her mind.
In her slumber, the messages persisted, strange and evil dreams that woke her gasping, sent her out to the woods in the odd hours to stumble around, lying on the ground and digging her hands into the dirt as far as they would go, violently taking the mud out from under her fingernails later with a knife. She began leaving the radio off as she slept– poor form for a contact, but it became a necessity. Without it, she would not sleep at all, constant chatter playing in her ear.
It was evening, and she was tired. The insects outside had begun to sing– she had been out back for a few hours, as the light faded through the trees, head laid back on the ground and pouring water on her forehead when the last round had dried. When it got too dark to see the distant birds nests, she came inside, knees pulled to her chest on her rickety chair by the radio like a child. The volume of the radio was down, from the afternoon, but the sound of Morse chattering away was distinctive. Hell. Maybe she should transmit back, shut them down, shut them up. They weren’t supposed to be using that frequency at all. And sometimes responding to her hallucinations made them go away. That had worked on Scott at least twice.
Sighing, she pulled open her desk, reaching for the booklet she’d bought as a child containing decoding materials. She didn’t have a Morse transmitter, but the whistle tucked in the mug on the corner should do. A piece of paper first, to write out the message. Five minutes later, she was opening the channel, and sending out her message, eyebrows furrowed in concentration and anger. Why her? Why did she have to deal with this sick joke? Astonishingly (or perhaps not, she figured: it quite made sense her hallucinations would pause to listen) the airwaves were silent when she sent her message. Afterwards, there was nothing for perhaps a minute, and she relaxed slightly into her chair, cautiously awaiting the return of the sounds.
Leave me alone, she’d sent. She figured that about covered it.
It took three minutes before she got a response. She missed it the first time, scrambling for the pen, but on the second repeat she got it all down: I missed you.
What do you want? Of course it wouldn’t leave her alone. No. That would be too simple. There was silence again, for five minutes, and she opened it up again, to repeat the message. When she hit the final mark, a faint howling sound wafted through the speakers. Aimsey pressed her ear to the radio, turned the dial up, searching for a signal in the noise. It continued, uniform, until it began to warp, change, and it almost sounded like words, but not quite: she closed her eyes, trying with all her might to focus.
“ You,” sighed the girl from behind her, and there were light hands on her shoulders, a breath on her neck, that smell that incense mimics, and Aimsey whirled with a scream.
It was Guqqie, but it couldn’t be Guqqie, because Aimsey had seen Guqqie die on those train tracks five years ago, and she knew, she knew the dead didn’t speak. She was out of her chair and against the wall, hands up like it would do anything: this was the first time she had seen things instead of just hearing them. Guqqie still looked young, soft– she was in a white lab coat, embroidered with flowers. As the thread went further down the coat, it got messier, more frantic, less recognizable as flowers and jagged. Under that, she wore a pink tank top, light and patterned, and lilac chinos. She rested a foot above the ground, floating there not as if standing. She looked comfortable resting there, and Aimsey’s heart, though she knew it was false, though she was scared out of her mind, tugged painfully to see her girl safe, alive, happy like that, even if her face was wrong. The last thing she had seen from Guqqie was so painful that she almost didn’t care, didn’t heed the warning bells tolling in the back of her mind, screaming danger, danger.
“ Guqqie? ” The woman’s eyes flashed, and her teeth came exposed when she smiled. They were ragged, bits missing like the top of a bluff that had broken off.
“Not anymore,” she said. “I’m Hera. And I’m here to kill you.”
Scott had tried this one before. A good few of the voices did.
“Yeah, right,” said Aimsey, who had lived here for years and hated this life for longer. “Get the fuck out of my house.” The girl eyed her, mirth dancing in her eyes.
“I always love this bit,” she said. “You’re so earnest. It’s unimaginably cute.” She moved, effortlessly, towards the desk, hands trailing over the prints and posters on the wall. “Nice place, sweetheart.”
“Don’t call me that.” Aimsey’s nose wrinkles in disgust. “You’re not her. I don’t want you here.”
“You certainly don’t need me,” it agrees. “This was quite the fun one. I should do more like this.” Aimsey shakes her head, terror creeping up her spine with little claws.
“What the fuck are you even talking about?”
She giggles, hands twitching around like she wants something to do with them, to wring her neck, face contorted sweetly. Aimsey’s stupid animal brain almost craves it, almost says: take me, wring my neck so I have an excuse, let me feel your hands again even if it’s not really you. There’s this funny little catch to her laugh, a sigh at the end, and Aimsey cannot recognize her at all. She cannot look at this girl and see anything she knows.
“Oh, sweetheart! I didn't even need to make you suffer. You did it all yourself.”
It burns like whiskey going down. Aimsey shudders, as if slapped, and her chin falls down with a breath. She can’t– fuck– they can’t touch me, I–
“Oh, only if I’m not real, right?” The apparition grins again, uncannily, and reaches out one broken finger to graze Aimsey’s cheek. It feels like that of a teardrop, and Aimsey slaps it away at once, pulling back like she would have done for a bug at a younger age. When she rubs at her cheek, she comes away with blood on her hand.
Gun. Her gun is in her drawer. If she can get to that, this will go away. It would be better if she could get outside– gunshots in the trees around her house are more common than ones inside, but maybe she can hit something disposable. Her hand moves slowly towards the handle of the drawer.
“Like that matters,” she says, five years of practice keeping her voice steady. “You’re not even real. You can’t hurt me.” The apparition had been watching her with a chilling combination of pity and… something else, but this makes her narrow her eyes, and set her jaw.
“I’m the only one who can hurt you,” she says simply. “In the most important way.”
Aimsey is between the drawer and the apparition ( Guqqie? Hera?) , so she thinks it does not watch her as her hand slips into the drawer. Unfortunately, the gun is locked. For safety. Fuck her fucking safety. She needs to think fast.
“Why now? Why come back now?” There’s new feeling on her face, more blood, its origin unknown. “You’ve been missing for five years. Left me alone for that long. Why now?” Hera, still stationary in the air, reaches up to pull back her hair, teeth pulling at her lip. Her skin stretches too far, too strange– she’s pulling at her face like she’s not used to having a body, and it’s so wretchedly disposable. Aimsey shuts her eyes fast before Hera pulls off her lip in front of her, knees shaking.
“Excellent question, darling,” she says, voice high as it was, but cool and uncaring. “But I’m afraid I don’t have a perfect answer for you.” Aimsey turns the key in the lock, and inches the case of the gun open. There’s a rush of air, and she opens her eyes wide, to Hera directly in front of her face, smiling smugly. Broken fingers come up, and grasp her chin– it feels like bugs burrowing into her skin with every place Hera touches. Hera laughs at this, delighted, and Aimsey’s stomach twists cruelly at it. Her mind used to crave that laugh, stay up for it, follow it around like a lost, faithful dog. It is devastating to have it turned on her like this.
“I think I just missed your pain,” Hera croons, mouth brushing Aimsey’s cheek. Aimsey feels nauseous. Hera smells like flowers and the sting of grass dried out in the sun, a warm summer’s day, the slightly damp dirt, the hint of steel. Her finger slips on the edge of the case, and it drops, case closing with a click. Hera’s eyes turn, and Aimsey can only think no, please.
“What’s this, puppy?”
“ Stay the fuck away from me.” Hera moves, faster than blinking, but Aimsey has thrown the case open, and snatched the gun, darting against the wall. Now, she has her trapped, gun trained on her. It’s fine. She’s safe. But Hera doesn’t look worried at all.
“Oh,” she says, and smiles, almost sadly. “Oh, I missed this. Doesn’t this feel familiar?”
“Get any closer and I’ll fire.” Hera doesn’t approach, but she shifts, and starts pulling at her fingers, bones snapping in and out of place.
“ God,” Aimsey hisses, unable to watch without her skin crawling. “Stop that.”
“Don’t like to see her hurt, do you?” Hera pulls harder, and one finger completely comes clean, with a squelch and a snap. Aimsey yells, hand flying up to cover her eyes. Hera cackles.
“ Oh Aimsey,” she mocks, twisting her voice to resemble how it was those years– those years ago when– but she couldn’t have been there, she didn’t exist, she’s not real! “ You have to save me, Aims– why are you letting go? Please, please don’t let go–”
“Shut the fuck up!” Aimsey’s hands are shaking so bad she can’t hold the gun right, couldn’t fire off a shot if she needed to– there’s a rushing noise in her head, the sound of train tracks, the siren call of a lonely horn, the–
“I love you so much, sweetheart. I need you. Please don’t let me go!” Hera’s mouth is red and dripping, beautiful as it ever was, turned up with that quirk she used to have. Aimsey’s teeth are chattering, buzzing, the room in front of her is blurry and she feels the ache in her arm, the weight.
“I didn’t! I didn’t fucking– drop her, or let go, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t my fault!”
Hera pulls back, hair floating up eerily around her head.
“Shoot me,” she offers. “Make it all go away. You can kill her like you killed her last time.” She tilts her head. “Because I know you loved that so much, right, darling? Couldn’t wait to get rid of her?” Her mocking is ugly now, lilting tone gone: she’s furious, shooting the words across the room. “It’s all you’re good for, just fucking get on with it–”
The shot hits Hera’s left shoulder, below her clavicle. Aimsey is not prepared for the recoil, and the gun falls from her hands, hitting the floor. The bullet is lodged in her skin, no exit wound or damage behind. It could mean anything. She could vanish, nothing but that apparition, and Aimsey could have certainty in the fact that she’d lost her mind. Hera does not vanish.
She sighs, and outside, the trees in the forest sigh along, a high breeze rustling the tops of them.
“I knew you’d do it,” Hera says. “You’ve always been so bloodthirsty.” She brings a hand to her shoulder, and prods the wound, seeming completely indifferent to the pain. Aimsey stares in revulsion, feet glued to her floor, unable to pick up the gun or move or run or call for help or anything. Hera’s bone is visible through the hole, and she touches it, tracing her finger from the bone where it is covered by skin to the wound. “I suppose we can get to the fun stuff now.”
It’s not an instant shift. For a few seconds, Aimsey is still in her home, clinging weakly to the wall, paralyzed by the slow drip drip drip of Hera’s blood onto her floor. But the walls are different, thin, and the sounds of the forest wind around them get louder and the sky gets brighter until her feet slip, no longer on sound footing: instead of the wooden planks below her, there is a thin metal rung. She gasps, hands frantically grasping at the air, and she makes contact with another rung, knuckles bruising against the steel, but she’s got it, eyes wildly darting up to see the sky and the trees and Hera and–
She’s at the top of the tower.
“I can see why you like it here,” Hera says, conversationally. “Quite peaceful. Delicious that you needed it.” She smiles at Aimsey, anger from just a second before quelled. She looks hungry, dangerous.
“Get me down,” Aimsey says. Her voice quavers. She feels too painfully young again. God, she doesn’t even have– her harness, or anything, and this high up, the ladder stops having that ribcage of iron: her back is exposed to the open air, hundreds of meters down. She’s never gone this high before. Her hands are shaking badly, clutching the ladder as well as she can, but her grip is not firm. Hera is on the other side of the ladder, floating.
“I won’t keep you long,” she says. “You’re already so goddamned sad, there’s not much point in drawing it out.”
“I’m sorry,” Aimsey gets out, eyes blurring again, heart pounding. “I did everything I could. Fucking everything. You have to know that, right?” Hera’s eyes harden.
“I’m not her, girl. I already told you that. There’s no use pleading your case to me.”
The safer part of the ladder is several meters down. There’s no time. Hera floats closer, hands reaching out as if to embrace. Aimsey cringes away from them, and Hera laughs, laughs and laughs.
“You don’t actually have a choice, sweetheart,” she says. “You made it so long ago that you don’t even remember.” Her hands touch Aimsey’s shoulders, body passing through the ladder without resistance. The wind around them is howling, higher than it’s ever been. Aimsey dares not remove a hand to push her off.
“Fucking stop, don’t touch me,” she chokes. Hera’s eyes get wider and closer, and she presses her mouth to Aimsey’s forehead. “ Get off!”
“You first,” she purrs, into Aimsey’s skin, reverberating around in her skull, and it washes over Aimsey in a second that she is her creature, her plaything, her world designed for merriment and revenge. The girl who once was Guqqie pushes, hard, and Aimsey’s hands are torn from the rungs. Arms wrap around her, and as she falls, she is cradled, a strange song hummed around her as her tears fling up past her eyes along with the air around her. Guqqie’s hair smells again like that sweet grass, burned in the sun, and the metallic taste of a sword in her hand and her girl’s blood splattered on her face.
It’s a long way down.