Do you know what a perfect summer night looks like? She did. She had spend months dreaming of this, and now finally it was at hand. This unearthly night. August, towards the end of it. Damp, right after a thunder storm.
She fell onto a hard mattress on a rusty iron bed. Some of her hair ended up in bed, some under her back. But she did not care. She focused on the ceiling before her eyes, on the black beams supporting the fiber cement roofing. Everything supporting the roof was visible, there was even a small hole through which she could see black night sky.
There was a burning cigarette between the fingers on her right hand, while the left was limply on the bed, almost lifeless. A thought occurred, that if her left had suddenly become lifeless and paralyzed, at this time this would have been almost a pleasure to her. She curled the fingers on her left hand just to be sure. At the same time her right hand was sliding down her chest, counting the ribs from her breast to the stomach. It was irrelevant though, and the number was soon forgotten.
She took another drag from the cigarette, looking at the tip of it getting brighter. At this moment, it was the only source of light in the room, besides an old military radio with its various faint indicator lights. Although the end of the burning cigarette got a lot brighter, it was still not enough to reflect off her fingernails. Her right hand continued its journey, sliding over the firm stomach, across the navel and ending up between the hip bones which were now keeping the fabric of her dress taut. But this was also irrelevant to her.
A gust of cool wind from somewhere outside blew by. She could imagine it starting off from the rusty scaffolding of the old high tension masts, the bottom anchors of which were long since covered in thick moss. Where the high cables dripping with rain were holding thousands of volts of power within. Hanging so high and yet so low. Those masts looked their best in the evenings of a late summer, regardless of any rain or wind.
This little gust which had blown in through the rotting planks in the wall was now disturbing the trail smoke rising from the cigarette in her hand. Ruining the dream-like perfection of the untouched trail. But also reminding her that she was still awake.
She was not cold, as there was a stove by the wall at the back of the room, still giving off some heat. And in the other wall there was a window, with the panes almost falling out of the wooden frame. A window which she could no longer open. There was a long scar on her left arm, from the last time she had opened said window, and the glass pane did indeed fall out, broke and gave her a long and deep cut. Almost looking like a failed suicide attempt.
Out of the window, there was a view upon a garden, at least there had been a few hours ago, when it wasn't completely dark yet. A small garden full of junipers, slowly dying off, a pond, some old garden furniture made of wood and lots of flower beds. In the corner of the yard, there were big birches. And right beyond the flower beds there was a tall line of various overgrown plants. Years ago there had been a chain-link fence, but surely by now it was nothing but crumbling rust. This fence had been the only thing separating their garden from the neighbor's yard. And by now that thing had become so over-grown that it was almost a full forest.
Tall birches which had looked so familiar and pretty in her early childhood. Taking up so little of the plot, but reaching sky high. How they weathered every storm, always bending but never yielding or breaking. Neighbor's rowan tree, a line of apple trees and his house. And a little towards the right there were the fields and a line of high tension masts running diagonally across them.
She threw her burnt cigarette into a nearby bucket. There was some water in it and many more cigarette butts. Different brands, but they all looked the same, with white paper covering the tobacco and pastel orange covering the filter.
She put her feet on the cold wooden floor and stood up. The floor was lacquered, but decades before her birth. With a few silent steps, she reach the old radio and switched it on. A heavy black plunger button to do it, requiring some force. The indicator lights changed immediately and the cloth-backed dials lit up with incandescent glow. The yellowing fabric for the background of the dials looked almost dirty. A red hand moved across the scale which itself was not on the fabric, but rather painted on the inside of the glass covering the dial. There were four different dials to pinpoint the signal.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
She took the blanket off her bed and laid it down right before the radio. While doing this, she pushed aside old beer and wine bottles, collected there since the beginning of times. Probably since Soviet times when one had to stay in line and pay up just to see foreign alcohol in a bottle. She laid down on the blanket and removed her dress.
The dress had never really accentuated her bodily features. There was a limit. But she did have a some good features. Mainly being tall. She did not like wearing clothes, especially in summer night when she was the only living person within a 10 kilometer radius. Everybody else was away, even the neighbor with the overgrown yard. And to lay on a blanket with no clothing felt good. How at first the cold blanket felt so cool and then, later, warm from her own bodyheat. She loved the feeling. Usually she curled up on the blanket, focusing all her attention to the warmth, as far away from the cold on her back as possible.
She reached out her hand, switching on the speakers and slowly turning up the sound. Due to some weird reason, her radio was always tuned to 666 kilocycles, despite the device having not a single digital part in it, everything was analog, there was no logic, only knobs to turn and switches to toggle. As if something else was always coming by when she was not paying attention and tuned the dial back to this frequency. It could not have been the radio itself. The thought that somebody other than her was here to touch the radio made her judder.
Noise started emanating from the speakers, a stable low-pitched beeping of which nothing could be discerned. It was definitely a signal, but not something the device could have made understandable to human ears. With the following frequencies it was the same, sometimes a hiss, sometimes a hum, sometimes other sounds, sometimes crackling like a fire burning.
All the noises that she could not discern as human language or even anything pleasurable, always led her to two thoughts. One being that some of it was just scrambled, or a video signal or something else technical. And the other was that she had stumbled onto something military. Perhaps an encrypted Russian military transmission sent from some forgotten base at Kamchatka, where people were suffering and trying to warm up with kerosene and vodka, alternatively.
But that was only an errant thought as she went through the spectrum, from low teen kilocycles to hundreds per second. Lots of Russian radio stations, with more or less noise. The truth was that the air was full of all sorts of waves. And after listening to the noise long enough, it was no longer possible to discern whether a faint voice heard was real or imaginary. She had hours of recordings of such sounds concerning which she had never managed to reach a conclusion. And whenever she stumbled upon even a faintly clear signal, whether a radio station or something else, she always stopped to listen to it for a duration.
And in her mind another idea popped up. That the sounds she was hearing were not actually being transmitted right now, rather they had been transmitted in the past and now the air, the aether or something else similar was playing them back. That the signal had been recorded into the air itself. Or they had been incidentally beamed into space and were only just now returning. Or perhaps these were not messages from the past and to the past, but messages from the future, being beamed back into past due to some strange mechanism. Something that most people cannot hear and those who can lack the means to understand the message.
Music stations playing either classical or contemporary music through the noise. She always imagined them as originating from some faraway corner in Russia. Music stations where the operator has left and put the whole system on auto-pilot, to broadcast music from the only good band in his village so far away as Estonia. Or talk radio, which evoked an image in her mind of a cold radio studio in a dilapidated building. The only warmth cause by the radio equipment, a 40 watt incandescent bulb and the cooling water for the small transmitter. And the people in studio, talking in the middle of the night about some obscure topics few could relate to. As if hoping that anybody in this dark and lonely night was listening them, without commercials or paid advertisements and on top of that, with a bad transmission quality as well.
Even more interesting were the Italian and French stations which were as if from the Dead Mountaineer's Hotel in the Alps. Where the diesel generator in the hotel was fulfilling the sole aim of keeping the local transmitter running. A hotel full of people and every night an interesting interview was held on a random topic. And the people in the hotel do nothing else, besides enjoying the nature and life. A place which has no connection the modern world, other than the transmitter.
She continued scanning. Stumbling upon languages she could not even identify, never mind understanding them. And on top of that they faded in and out of the noise. Japanese or Korean possibly, It was certainly being translated, but she could not discern whether into another exotic language or not. And finally Finnish stations, bringing to her mind a small building in Lapland, not far from Ivalo, broadcasting the latest news on horseraces she had never even heard of existing. Radio stations for total fanatics. The exotics of Western affluence. However, every more or less clear signal was worth recording, either for experimental electronic music or some dark drum and bass.
She left the Finnish station behind. It was at least something she could understand. She pulled some of her hair from under her body that had finally started to distract her. Spending her nights, scanning the spectrum like this always made her want to do something similar. To buy an old pre-war water-cooled transmitter and broadcast as a pirate radio station, transmitting music, musings or anything else. Because satisfaction was not only about listening to the airwaves, it was also about giving back to it, with no desire for a return.
A tired feeling finally assaulted her and won. She found a new signal but her eyes were too drowsy to see the gauge indicating the broadcast frequency. However the signal itself was quite interesting. A male voice, weaving in and out of the noise floor. And it seemed to be Estonian.
“That’s the reason, I remained because I thought I would go there early-early-early-early...”
She switched on the reel-to-reel recorder and fell asleep.