Whispers in the Static: Part 1

Part 1 – The Ritual of Static

Arthur had long ago given up on silence.
It was too heavy, too complete, a blanket that smothered instead of comforted. In silence, the house creaked in strange ways, pipes sighed like dying men, and his own thoughts grew too loud, rattling around in the skull until sleep refused to come.

So, he kept the radio.

It sat on his nightstand, an old square thing with a cracked black casing, its dial glowing faint red in the dark. The stations were unreliable in his part of town — a scatter of voices, half-songs cut short by static, the fading echoes of far-off broadcasts that dissolved into nothing. For years, Arthur had stopped trying to find music. He turned the knob past all the voices until only the gentle roar of static filled the room.

That was his lullaby.

Each night, he would stretch out on the bed, the sheets cool against his skin, and let the sound wash over him. It was a kind of ocean, endless and ceaseless, a tide of white noise that pulled him into the gray edge between waking and sleep. Through the thin curtains, moonlight would spill across the floorboards, painting the room in pale rectangles. The air smelled faintly of dust, the old radiator ticking softly as if it, too, were listening.

Sometimes, in that fragile space before dreams claimed him, Arthur thought he heard more than static. Faint textures beneath the sound — not voices, exactly, but the suggestion of something shaped like words. As if the static was only a veil, and something just beyond it was pressing close, trying to bleed through.

He always dismissed it. A trick of the mind. The way a tired brain bends shadows into shapes that aren’t there.

Still, every night, when the static rose and fell like a tide, Arthur found himself straining at the edges of hearing, wondering if he’d catch something beneath the noise. And though he would not admit it — not even to himself — he wondered what might happen if one night, the static spoke.

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(To be continued in Part 2 – A Name in the Noise)