by James Sperl
Yes, the room was abuzz with the telltale signs of unexpected tragedy. That there hadn’t been one didn’t seem to matter.
Depositing a pair of empty coffee pots into a bus tray, Clarissa glided over to the beverage station. Snatching up a fresh carafe, she had just placed it under the coffee urn’s stopcock when Valentina sidled up beside her. Her blond ponytail swished over a shoulder as she came to rest against the bar where she crossed her arms over her bosomy chest. Clarissa regarded her friend's ample breasts both fleetingly and enviously before landing on her own meager offerings with a sigh.
“Is this place crazy or what?” Valentina said, chomping gum even though waitresses at Aunt Mae's were discouraged from doing so.
“I vote crazy.”
“Seriously. I’ve never seen it like this.”
“It’s been a while,” Clarissa said, opting not to educate her longtime friend on Aunt Mae’s customer history. “You holding up okay?”
Valentina stared blankly, her emerald eyes fixed on a non-point in the room before they snapped to Clarissa. “What? No, yeah. I’m good. My brain’s just whirling like everybody else’s. You know? Like, what the hell was that noise?”
“I know,” she said. “It’s a total mystery.”
When Clarissa had been so rudely awakened just after 5:00 a.m., the sound had simultaneously captivated and creeped her out. On the drive to work, she couldn’t find a radio station fast enough that had somebody talking about it, and her first minutes on the job had been steeped in wondrous mystery, as spooked patrons shared their interpretations of the noise. Now, however, after two-plus hours of entertaining table after table of wide-eyed Pastorans and their theories, which ranged from the sensible to the outlandish—UFO engine problems? Really?—she found she couldn’t stomach any more on the subject. Too bad nobody felt the same way she did.
“Like, I wondered if it was the Northern Lights or something,” Valentina said, a freshly chewed thumbnail hovering in front of her lips. “You know? Like it had migrated south or something.”
Clarissa exhaled as she finished filling the coffee pot.
“Well, for starters, I didn’t see any lights, and secondly, I don’t think the Northern Lights make noise.”
Valentina looked away as if this were a revelation.
“Oh, yeah. God, I’m so stupid.”
“You are not stupid. I hate it when you say that about yourself. You’re just curious like everyone else. We all want to know what it was.”
“Well, I can tell you,” came a husky voice from in front of the women. “But it’s not like anyone’ll listen to me.”
Clarissa fixed on Hubert Hashford, who sat by himself at the bar—just as he had nearly every day since she started working at Aunt Mae's. A coffee cup was perched just below his grizzled face.
“Yeah, Mr. Hashford?” said Clarissa, who gave Valentina a covert hand squeeze. “You know what that sound was, huh?”
The woman to Mr. Hashford’s left and the man to his right glanced at him cursorily before looking away.
“Of course. They’re grinding the blades down on the snowplows, getting ’em ready for fall.”
Clarissa stepped over to him and refilled his coffee cup, though he hadn’t asked her to.
“Snow plows? Seems a little early to be doing that, don’t you think? We only just started summer.”
Hubert held up a hand to signal enough coffee. Clarissa backed away as he took a steamy sip. “It’s never too soon to prepare,” he said. “You don’t want to get caught with your pants down.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” Clarissa winked at Valentina, who bit her lip to hold back a giggle.
“Excuse me?” said a rotund man from the table behind Hubert in the dining room.
Clarissa looked past Hubert to the man, who held up his phone. His wife and daughter watched him curiously.
“I don’t mean to eavesdrop,” the man said, “but I couldn’t help overhearing someone say they thought the sound was the grinding of snowplow blades?”
Hubert twisted on his bar stool to face the man, whose soft, moist features lay in stark contrast to Hubert’s stubbly, weather-beaten face.
“That’s what I said,” Hubert grumbled.
The man held up his other hand defensively. He glanced at his wife with the guilt of a man who had been given heedful advice but regretfully chose to ignore it.
“Well, I just…I thought you’d like to know that that’s not what they’re saying it was.”
“What’re you talking about?” Hubert said, his eyes narrowing. “Who says?”
“Uh, pretty much everyone. The sound wasn’t only heard locally.”
Clarissa set down the coffee pot.
“What do you mean, it ‘wasn’t heard locally’?”
“Just that,” the man continued. “Apparently, what we heard here in Pastora was heard all over the world.” He held out his phone as if doing so backed up his claim. “CNN, ABC, BBC, NBC—all of them are reporting the same thing. It’s been trending like mad on Twitter and Facebook.”
“What?”
Clarissa’s chest heaved. She dug her phone from her back pocket and swiped it awake with a damp thumb. How is it that she’d been at work for half the morning and this is the first she’d heard of it? Granted, Aunt Mae’s tended to attract Pastora’s older population, who weren’t too keen on tapping phones and monitoring social media feeds, but still. Certainly, she should have heard somebody mention it. On an average day, she would have had her phone out a dozen times or more by now, needlessly checking her stagnant social media accounts, and discovered the news firsthand. But today had been anything but average.
Valentina stepped up beside her, phone in hand.
“What are they saying?” she said to the man, as she teased a straggler of hair, her eyes fixed on her firmly clutched Samsung.
The man paused when he realized more than just Clarissa and Valentina looked at him—several neighboring tables now angled to listen.
“Well,” he began, his jowls jiggling behind a swallow, “no one seems to know. But from what I’ve read, it sounds like everyone heard the exact same thing we did—a giant metallic-like scraping sound.”
Clarissa navigated to the first news icon she saw, CNN the winner. The man wasn’t lying. The headline filling the top of the screen read “The Sound Heard ’Round The World.” A quick skim affirmed what he had been saying: Everyone heard it; no one knew what it was.
“Holy shit,” Clarissa muttered. She met Valentina’s troubled gaze, her brows dipped into Vs of concern, before turning back to the man. “Is anyone at least speculating as to what they think it is?”
“Oh, sure,” the man said. “There’re tons of theories. Pick one. Uh, astral disturbances, massive tectonic displacement—though no one reported feeling movement—uh, what else, low-atmosphere bomb testing, solar disruption, you name it.”
Hubert turned back to the bar. “Bunk. All of it.”
“I agree,” the man said. “It’s all noise put out there to hide what’s really going on.”
“Dennis,” the man’s wife muttered. She leaned over and placed a well-meaning hand on his chubby forearm. Her eyes danced skittishly to the people listening in, which were growing in number. Something told Clarissa this was an area of contention between the two, but Clarissa was too intrigued not to bite.
“You have a theory?”
Dennis regarded his wife respectfully, but even she recognized he couldn’t trot back such a loaded statement.
“I do,” he said after a trio of contemplative seconds. “You ever heard of a government program called H.A.A.R.P.?”
Clarissa frowned and searched the faces of those around her. All looked as clueless as she.
“No. What is it?”
“It’s an acronym. Stands for High Altitude Aural Research Program. It’s the government’s secret project to weaponize radio signals. Been working on it for years.”
“Weaponize radio signals?” said a squat woman at a nea
rby table holding a forkful of waffles.
“It’s true,” Dennis continued. “Up in Gakona, Alaska. They’ve got a massive antennae array there that shoots a radio signal up to 10 megahertz in strength into the ionosphere and beyond. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn the sound we heard had something to do with that. Some say they’re using it to try and control the weather. Others say its purpose is more nefarious, that they’re trying to bounce waves off the atmosphere for the purpose of mind control.”
Clarissa looked at Valentina, who met her veiled give-me-a-break expression with similar conviction. Dennis, however, didn’t seem to notice.
“Some people have even theorized these experiments could potentially reverse the poles of the Earth. Now tell me that wouldn’t create some noise.”
Dennis’s wife was mortified. She stared at her plate then reached demurely for her orange juice but didn’t drink it. His daughter, who looked to be five years old, was far too young and far too engaged with her chocolate chip pancakes to notice the cynical stares directed at her father.
“Sir?” said a woman eating alone.
Clarissa recognized her immediately. It was Agatha Nikson, the head librarian at Pastora’s city library. An employee of the library for as long as Clarissa could remember, Agatha long held the distinction of looking most like the stereotype of the profession in which she worked. The saying “never judge a book by its cover” was typically sage advice, but it held true in her case; her tight-wrapped hair, no-nonsense spectacles, and monochrome outfits she habitually wore reduced the field of her likely career significantly.
Dennis wrenched around with effort to look at her. “Yes?”
Agatha dabbed the corners of her mouth with a folded napkin. “I find your comments to be not only irresponsible but also complete and utter hogwash.”
Dennis’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Excuse me?”
“People are genuinely concerned about what they heard this morning, and it serves no purpose to begin lobbing conspiracy theories to rile them up.”
Dennis tried to puff out his chest assuredly, but the desired effect fell flat.
“How do you know they’re conspiracy theories?”
“Because I read. The only bits about H.A.A.R.P. you got right were the name and the location. Your accusations as to its purpose are laughable. The array, which took fifteen years to construct, mind you, was built expressly for the purpose of exploring radio wave frequencies, specifically, how they behaved when focused on and bounced off the ionosphere, so I suppose you were right about that part as well.” Agatha turned and addressed the others who listened to her. “One of H.A.A.R.P.’s aims, among others, was to pulse radio waves into the ionosphere and use it as a sort of antennae. The ionosphere would then deflect the signal back down to earth as a low-frequency radio wave. This deflection would be especially advantageous for submarines, which must currently use shallow-depth technology to receive communication signals due to the ocean’s propensity to absorb high-frequency radio waves. By converting to low-frequency waves via the ionosphere, submarines would be allowed to go deeper without the crutch of sub-surface signal retrieval technology.”
Valentina leaned over to Clarissa. “I have no idea what she just said.”
Clarissa shook her head and panned over the vacant stares of those listening. But Agatha wasn’t finished.
“There’s also the implication of what could be achieved by bouncing radio signals along the curvature of earth’s atmosphere. Since radio waves travel in a straight line, this sort of technology would also be highly advantageous, and could rule out the need for satellites to accomplish the same task.”
Dennis’s mouth hung open. He closed it and cleared his throat.
“Maybe. But are you telling me you don’t think there’s any weather manipulation going on? There’re loads of reports to suggest they’ve been pumping radio waves into the atmosphere to study its effects.”
“Of course, as they have claimed they would do all along.”
“But what about the increase in violent weather? Look at tornadoes. There’s been a significant increase in the number of them over the past ten years. They’ve almost doubled. You don’t think screwing around with the atmosphere has something to do with it?”
“I really couldn’t say,” Agatha said, as she reached for her coffee cup. “I’m not a meteorologist. But I would venture to guess that greenhouse gasses and global warming have more to do with the increase in violent weather than radio wave experimentation. The average number of hurricanes has also seen a steady rise, but this trend can be traced back over a hundred years, long before H.A.A.R.P. was even a thought in anyone’s mind.”
Agatha took a sip of coffee, but it was too brief for Dennis to interject.
“But even if what you allege were true—that the scientists and researchers had found a way to control the weather through radio waves—I would find it very unlikely they would have been able to do it in such a way that the entire world could hear it.”
“Yes, but other theories claim the—”
Agatha held up a hand, the universal sign for “enough.” The abrupt gesture was one she had undoubtedly used countless times during after-school reading programs when children became unruly. And much like they had probably done, Dennis stopped talking.
“I don’t mean to be so direct,” she began, “but aside from my belief that the events of the sort we heard this morning require even-keeled thinking free from hysteria and wild speculation, you have overlooked one crucial fact in your assertion. And that is that the government shuttered H.A.A.R.P. in the summer of 2014.”
Clarissa thought she could see the blood leave Dennis’s face.
“It doesn’t mean other organizations haven’t or won’t lease it to conduct further experiments. Perhaps they have already. But the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology, and engineering so much as told Congress they had done all they could do with the program and were, in fact, moving on to other methods of testing the ionosphere.”
A light sparked in Dennis’s eyes.
“If that’s true, then they could be building something even bigger, stronger. Something that would be fully capable of creating the sound we heard. Heck, maybe they already have.”
Agatha stared at Dennis with stone-faced incredulity. She looked past him to his wife and said, “I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Please enjoy the rest of your breakfast.”
Dennis’s wife offered a tight-lipped smile and pretended to attend to her daughter, who didn’t appear to need any attending.
Valentina stepped forward and topped off Hubert’s coffee even though Clarissa had just done it only minutes ago. “Well, whatever it was,” she said, “it sure freaked me the hell out.”
Hubert hoisted his mug and gave a wink and a nod. “That much I’ll agree with.”
Clarissa grinned and knocked the brim of his Old Milwaukee ball cap with a knuckle when the sight of a man crossing the room toward her caught her attention. Her grin morphed into a puzzled expression.
Was it third Thursday already?
She glanced at the counter below the pass-through. As expected, a tied plastic bag was waiting to be picked up. She didn’t have to look at the ticket stapled to the outside to know the to-go box contained the Heavy Hitter, which consisted of a generous portion of biscuits smothered in sausage gravy, two scrambled eggs, honey ham, and toast—it was what Andrew always ordered.
Snatching up the bag in anticipation of his arrival, Clarissa met him by the cash register. Typically, servers didn’t ring up customers, but she had been given the green light a few years back to step in when the situation merited it. With her boss, Maxwell, busy trying to help the kitchen keep up with the unusually high volume, it seemed like a no-brainer to help out. Besides, she liked Andrew.
He made a beeline for the register from the front door, his distaste for the number of people in the restaurant evident in every down-sloped crease of his forehead
. Clarissa had heard he didn’t particularly care for the company of others, so much so that he lived alone up in the mountains somewhere. At least that was the rumor. If it were true, then today must be his worst nightmare. She often wondered why he stopped in so infrequently, but always on the third Thursday of the month. Were the drop-ins attempts to cling to civility? To maintain a connection, however small, to the people who—if gossip served—he wanted to avoid? Whatever the reason, his visits ran like clockwork.
At first, his occasional appearances seemed strange, but after so many months and years of sticking to this schedule, Clarissa not only expected to see him, she almost found herself looking forward to it, though she couldn’t begin to explain why.
Andrew wasn’t much of a conversationalist. In fact, most of their interactions were perfunctory, a simple exchange of cash for goods. But there had always been something in his eyes that compelled her to want to interact with him, a hint of sadness that he couldn’t quite suppress. She supposed her untapped—and aching—maternal side wanted to learn what that was. He had a warm smile, and on the few rare occasions when he did speak, Clarissa felt he had wanted to open up but ultimately chose not to. She wondered if a day would ever come when he felt comfortable enough to confide in her.
“Good morning, Andrew.”
“Good morning,” he said at the tail end of a bemused smile. He regarded the people that crowded the entrance and packed the dining room. “Kind of busy today.”
Clarissa punched his total into the register.
“Yeah, well, strange noises in the sky have a tendency to make folks want to talk about it. And what better place than Aunt Mae’s over breakfast? I’m assuming you heard it too?”
“Of course.”
“Any thoughts? There’re lots of theories floating around here.” She leaned forward, placed the back of her hand to the side of her mouth, and lowered her voice. “And more than just a few that could warrant a call to the funny farm, if you catch my drift.”
Andrew’s forced smile broadened into a real one. “I can only imagine.”
“If you’d like, I could probably find you a place at the bar if you wanted to stay and take part in the discussion.”