by Tim Curran
Sadler felt a headache begin to build in the back of his skull.
He wanted to say: Turn that noise off . . . do you hear? Turn it off before . . . it’s . . . too . . . late . . .
But he said nothing.
He just listened and felt something inside him give with a dull popping sound. All he could hear was that transmission. Nothing else, nothing else.
He did not like it, but he listened.
He did not seem to have a choice.
It was almost a living, organic sound like having your ear pressed up against a birth sac and listening to something waking up in there, hearing the subtle beat of a heart. It was like that. The sound of potential, of awareness, of activity. He was imagining Callisto out there in that blank womb of space around Jupiter, held in stasis by the planet’s intense gravitational field like a metal filling trapped by the pull of a gigantic magnet. He was seeing that ancient moon in his mind . . . cratered and dark and crumbling like a prehistoric barrow pit . . . and hearing the hissing of its transmission as it grew louder and louder and made his thoughts scurry and fall over one another, crowd for room in his head as the droning and breathing rose up and dominated everything.
He was likening that noise to the sound a haunted house might make in the dead of night . . . or maybe what you would hear if you put a skull up against your ear like a conch shell. A hollow droning of nothingness just barely concealing the echoes of the distant past, the ghosts and crawling memories of antiquity that were beginning to stir, to awaken, oozing from the walls like malignant shadows.
“Carl . . .” Clark said, but got no farther than that.
Sadler tried to speak, but it was like he was trapped inside his own head, hiding in some creaking house as that droning wind rose higher and higher. He could do nothing but feel the drumming throb of that headache. He seemed beyond the reach of his somatic nervous system; incapable of voluntary action.
And not just him, but everyone in that room.
They stood around like statues, wide-eyed and tense, but absolutely motionless. Their lips did not speak and their eyes did not blink. Many had odd little tics in the corners of their mouths. And more than a few were sweating and drooling.
The droning noise and that weird susurration of breathing were so very loud now that you could not have screamed above them. It owned everyone in that room and it would not let them go.
Sadler managed one last lucid thought before his mind was overwhelmed: Dear God, it’s no message . . . it’s a signal sent to dominate and master, to break us down and own us . . .
He was right.
The signals had been beamed from the megalithic structure that had recently risen through the frozen crust of Callisto just as it had been programmed to do upon first contact countless eons before. It generated the signals, amplified them, then directed them across space with great intensity to that warm, blue world called Earth. And here those electromagnetic pulses found their receivers in hundreds of megaliths across the globe. The pulses were gathered, refined, not dampened, but stepped-up and purified and reflected into a white noise that unlocked ancient directives and drives implanted in the human brain.
It may have sounded like a mindless droning or a hissing respiration.
But it was much more than that.
It was the final siren call of the race and the end times were at hand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Curran lives in Michigan and is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, The Devil Next Door, and Biohazard, as well as the novella The Corpse King. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh & Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, and anthologies such as Shivers IV, High Seas Cthulhu, and Sick Things. Find him on the web at: www.corpseking.com.