We listened to The Number of The Beast, Iron Maiden's best album according to Ash and second best according to Nip, right behind Powerslave. They sang along with all the words, even the ones I couldn't make out, and tossed around the neck-length hair neither of them had. The speakers above poured sound down from every angle, thudding drums and screaming guitars and vocals part angel and part demon. When all the tracks finished playing through, twice, Judas Priest hit the stage with You've Got Another Thing Comin' and Breakin' The Law and Turbo Lover, and oh man, that last one, that was a driving song if there ever was one. From there we moved on to Metallica, Ash stomping her way back and forth across the loft, Nip shredding at the all but muted electric guitar. What a sight they were, skinny and pale and sweating, one hundred percent energy and zero percent restraint. Wolves beneath a moon. Junkies on a high. After Metallica came Black Sabbath and after Black Sabbath came more Black Sabbath. Ash kept yelling something at me. "The founders!" Or, "The fathers!" My ears were ringing, and I couldn't tell, didn't care much anyway. I sat underneath the window, completely still, this feeling like I had finally found the volume dial on the world. Or in myself.

Sometime after six her parents banged on the ceiling for quiet. Ash shut off the stereo and climbed downstairs. She returned with a large plate of pastrami sandwiches, which lasted all of a minute. Nip went down to get his book from his bag, and for a while we all lay around in silence, only it wasn't silence, not really. Anyone who's ever been to a good concert knows the music doesn't stop when the band packs up their instruments. It lingers in you, like the buzz after a few beers.

I was riding that buzz back down into the loft, stretched out in the carpet, when I caught myself staring at Ash. When she caught me staring at her.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing."

I looked away. I looked back again. Her arms were crossed, same as the boy's in the picture downstairs. I thought of the first time I had heard her voice, and how I hadn't been able to find her in the back of the class. How she had been invisible to me. "Ghost Girl."

Ash dropped her eyes from the ceiling.

"That kid in English," I said. "He called you Ghost Girl."

"Yeah."

I didn't need to ask. But I asked anyway. "Why?"

"Because ghosts are real."

I blinked. "Oh."

"They are."

"Okay."

Ash rose from the beanbag. "I'll prove it."

♫

Outside the loft, the sun dunked into a pool of blood. That sunset was a strange occurrence for these parts, and I would know. I had spent most of my summer in a bed by a window and had never seen one so colorful, so raw. Looking back on it now I can't help but wonder if fate—or something else—was gazing upon Honaw that night. Marking the town with a wounded eye. Marking us all.

The stereo stood bathed in red, and so did Ash, her thin body silhouetted darkly against its face. "You'll see," she said. "Just wait."

Nip gave me a look that said, Now you've done it, and went back to reading his novel.

I pushed myself upright with a wince, the ache already returning to my legs. Ash turned the volume back down from the stratosphere before hitting the stereo's power button and switching it to radio. The speakers overhead woke up to a report on the mine, and that was no surprise. Every news station in Northern California was talking about the mine.". . . still unclear exactly what led to the detonation, but certainly tragic in either case. Nor is it known what caused the fire that sprang up outside the mine during the confusion, though sources report several men smoking near a patch of dry brush at the time of the blast. What we have been told—all we have been told—with any real certainty is that the two thought to be dead from Blackstone are in fact alive, although in critical condition, while three more have been taken to the hospital with injuries ranging from moderate to severe. Their names, along with the name of the one man still missing, have yet to be released. The . . ."

Ash nodded. "See? See? One man missing. Just like last time. Just like Leonard Higgins in 1974."

"So somebody is missing at the mine. What does that have to do with ghosts?"

"I'm getting there, be patient. But first you need to come over here, so you can see."

"Otherwise it won't make sense," Nip said dryly.

"Stuff it," Ash snapped.

I went to her, first sliding down the wall onto my side and then walking onto my stomach with my hands. As I dragged myself across the carpet, the sun cast its bloody spotlight over me and I saw a deer torn open and steaming in the road. I saw a bear crawling down the double-yellow line.

The closer I got to the stereo, the taller it grew.

"This baby has more juice than any other out there," Ash said, on her knees like she was at a shrine. "This baby could tune straight down into Hell."

I pulled my legs beneath me and sat on them beside her.

"See this?" She pointed at the radio part of the stereo. "This is a multi-band shortwave receiver."

"You don't even know what that means," said Nip.

"Yes I do." She spun on him before turning stiffly back to me. "It means that this radio can pick up on frequencies outside the normal range. Higher and lower and stuff. Well, higher at least. I don't mess around with lower too much. It's boring down there." Her finger moved over to the screen, where a four digit number was displayed. "Right now we're tuned to AM. AM signals travel far, like Washington D.C. far. Flick this"—she clicked a switch and the reporter's voice melted into a country song—"and we get to FM. All the music stations in the country live between 88 and 108 Megahertz. But if you climb past that . . ."

She twisted the dial, and the number on the screen rolled up through the nineties into the hundreds.

". . . if you climb past that . . ."

"Tell him about the line-of-sight thing," said Nip, "or you'll just have to start all over in a little while."

"Oh, right," she said. "Line of sight. You pretty much have to be within line of sight or really close to the source to pick up something through FM. So, being that we're up in the mountains, we don't get too many FM broadcasts even within the established range, and we get next to nothing outside it."

"How did you learn all this?"

I expected her to come back with another: Because I read, dumbass.

"My brother."

"Your brother?"

"This was his radio," she said, and moved on quickly. "Like I was saying, we pretty much have to be sitting right on top of the signal to pick something up in FM. Especially if you go higher than 108 Megahertz." Which we were well past now, her hand continuing to turn the dial as she talked. Static crackled every time she paused. She began to slow in the 150s. "Here. We're getting close."

"Close to what?"

"You'll see."

"Don't get your hopes up," said Nip, still reading or pretending to. "I tell her and I tell her, all this stuff is in books. And it's better there, because you don't have to make it up. Someone's already done it for you."

Ash leaned in closer to the radio, turning its dial like a safecracker, listening to each little internal click inside the machine. 152.4. 152.5. 152.6. Static whispered from the speakers. 153.2. 153.3. She twisted the dial one more millimeter to the right and then silence, dead silence, a black island in the sea of white noise.

"Here." She let go. "153.4. This is it."

"This is what?"

"Wait." Ash got up and paced to the window. All that remained of the sun was its bloody glow spilled over the woods. "Almost," she said. "Almost." I became aware of a soft, creeping movement around me. The red was washing out of the loft, like a tide pulled toward the moon. Shadows crawled down from the speakers. Nip's face dimmed over his book.

"Nothing's going to happen," he said, a tremor in his voice. "Nothing's going to—"

From the dark above my head came a low, moaning breath. A single word dripped down, thick and wet, like melting candle wax. "Hurthhhh." There was a beat of silence. "Oh Jethuth, Jethuth, it hurrrrrthhhh."

Ash spoke in a whisper, "It only comes through at night, when the sun's not around to mess with the signal."

"Pleathhh, pleathhh."

"He's been saying the same things, over and over, since I found the station last year. And who knows how long before that."

"That's because it's a loop," said Nip.

"But it's not a loop. It's not. You would know that if you listened to my recordings. He never says things quite the same way, or in quite the same order."

"It's a long loop. So long you could never tell."

"But who would set up something like that? And who would keep it running nonstop? And why?"

The voice was growing clearer. The moaning man might have been sitting right next to me, his lips to my ear. "Make it thtop, pleathh make it thhhtooooop."

"As a joke," said Nip.

"A joke on who?"

"Somebody. Anybody."

"And the lisp? That's just a coincidence?"

"Plenty of people have lisps."

"It's him, and you know it. You just don't want to admit it because you're scared."

"I'm not scared. I'm just not stupid."

". . . hellllpp. I can't theeeeee." Whimpering. "It hurthhhh. It hurthhhhh."

"They never found his body," Ash said. "He went down into the mine with that dynamite, and the papers all wrote about him. They all talked about his life, his character. They even mentioned his lisp. Leonard Higgins. Don't you get it? He's still down there. His bones are still down there, buried in the dark, and his voice is trapped—"

"So what?" I said.

I felt their heads turn to me.

"So what? So what?" I sat in front of the stereo, my jaws tight, my neck strung out in cords. "So what if it hurts?" I clenched my legs. "So what? So what?" The dead man moaned on the radio, and I went on squeezing my thighs, digging my nails into the throbbing meat. "So what? So what? So what?"

____ ____

Author's Note:

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