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A young audio producer moves to a fog-bound coastal town and hears a dead radio host calling her by name. With a retired radio officer’s strange glowing tube and a fisherman’s steady hand, she confronts a seductive entity that feeds on names, frees a trapped voice, and builds a new sign-on for the town.
The cannery had the kind of windows that remembered salt. Nina ran a cloth over the panes and watched her own reflection blur in the streaks, then steady as the evening cooled. Below, the harbor shouldered its way into the town, all ropes and gulls and the slap of water against pilings. She set her field recorder on the sill, clipped a windscreen to the mic, and watched the little green light blink. Out across the flats, a leaning radio tower blackened the sky like a string drawn tight. No lights. No warnings for birds. Just the thin suggestion of it in a lingering strip of cloud.
“You're the new tenant?” called a voice from the hallway. Nina stepped back from the window. The door was open, her boxes stacked like mini skyscrapers. A man stood in the doorway, hair damp from the mist, a jacket with reflective tape slung over one shoulder.
“That's me,” she said. “Nina.”
“Tomas,” he said, offering a palm that smelled faintly of diesel and fish. “Crab boats head out at two. If you hear engines in the night, don't worry. That's us.”
“I like noise,” Nina said, tapping the recorder. “I make a show about places that go quiet.”
He glanced at the window. “You won't lack material. KQLO used to be out there. Burned in the eighties. Some folks still hear it when the fog sits wrong.”
After Tomas left, she ate noodles from a paper cup and slid her laptop across a crate. A notepad lay open to the words: Grayhaven, KQLO 610 AM, Leonard Harrow, fire 1987, no survivors. Underlined twice was Dad? with a question mark that gouged the page. Her father's last letter, mailed a week before his car slid into an embankment, mentioned “Leon at midnight” and a promise to explain when he got here. He hadn't. The envelope still smelled like old coffee and rain.
She climbed to the roof with a blanket and a thermos and sat cross-legged near the vent. The town hummed in low notes. A bell buoy clonked. A ferry, a smear of lights, moved like a patient insect at the edge of the world. Nina pressed her headphones to her ears and let in the harbor, the breath of wet rope, the bats that zipped in angles you only half saw.
When the fog thickened, she heard it: a faint, steady tone that didn't belong to engines or insects. She turned the gain up and the tone resolved into something human—the tail of a jingle, the softened syllables of call letters. Her chest tightened. No station, no transmitter, yet her recorder drank it as if it were a polite guest at the door.
“Good evening, night owls,” a man's voice said, velvety and practiced. “This is Leon. If you're awake, you might be the one I need.”