Chapter 59: Static Interference
Patti stood at the edge of the bar nursing a ginger ale that Don had poured without asking — he knew she was Bob's sister and had made an executive decision about what she'd be drinking tonight.
She watched the dance floor. More specifically, she watched Henry Creel standing at the edge of it.
He was doing the thing he always did in crowds — positioning himself close enough to the wall that he had the option of disappearing into it. Sleeves of his white shirt rolled to the elbows, pale forearms, the general posture of someone who had come to a social event and was already working out his exit.
"I thought you couldn't dance," Patti said, keeping her voice low enough that the music could have swallowed it if it wanted to. She wasn't teasing him. She was genuinely curious.
Henry startled slightly — that small animal flinch he had when sound reached him unexpectedly — and then settled. He looked down at his shoes.
"My mother taught me a little. Waltzing, mostly." He said it the way you said things about your parents that were true and complicated at the same time. "Three-beat. I can probably manage not to injure you."
The song changed — something slower, a steady rhythm underneath a melody that didn't demand anything from you.
Patti watched the side of his face as they moved. In the rotating bar light, the silver in his eyes came and went.
"How did you do it?" she asked.
Henry glanced at her. "The waltz is a box step, you just—"
"No." She dropped her voice another notch. "The auditorium. The lights. Was that you?"
He was quiet for a moment. She felt his hand shift slightly in hers — not pulling away, just recalibrating.
"I've done real things before," he said finally. "Not just dream stuff. But it doesn't — I can't always predict what direction it goes."
"Okay." Patti watched his face. "Do you think you could use it to find my mother?"
He didn't answer right away. He looked past her shoulder toward the crowded center of the bar — the cluster of drama kids doing something complicated with a pool cue, Hopper talking to a guy from the football team with the focused expression of someone gathering information — and then brought his gaze back to her, like a door closing on everything else.
"I don't know," he said. The honesty in it was heavy enough to be its own kind of answer. "It's hard to steer."
"Why?"
"It just—" He stopped. Tried again. "I need more time with it. Time where I'm not scared of it."
Patti didn't let go of his hand. "Tomorrow," she said. "My dad has parent-teacher conferences. He'll be at the school until at least five. I can come to your place."
Henry's jaw tightened. "That's not a good idea. The house is—" He shook his head. "If my mom's home—"
"Hey, Patti."
Walter Henderson materialized out of the crowd with a bottle of Pabst that was clearly not his first of the night. He had the specific confidence of someone who'd been building toward a conversation for the last forty-five minutes.
"Come on, dance with me. The night's still young."
"No thanks, Walter."
Walter's eyes slid to Henry with the slow focus of someone whose filter had gone offline. "Seriously, come on. You don't have to keep playing good girl."
"I'm not playing anything," Patti said flatly. "I'm having a conversation. Go find someone else."
"I'm just saying what everybody's thinking." Walter's voice went up slightly. "You and that—"
He didn't finish it because Claudia appeared from his left and took his arm with the quiet authority of someone who had been managing her brother for seventeen years.
"Walter." Her voice was even and final. "Come on."
"I'm talking—"
"I know. We're going now."
She steered him toward the other end of the bar without ceremony. As she went, she looked back once at Patti and Henry — a glance that carried several things at once: an apology, a recognition, and something that might have been a warning.
Henry was still watching the direction Walter had gone. Patti could feel the tension in his hand, the fine tremor that had nothing to do with the cold.
"He's not worth it," she said.
Henry turned back to her. In the dim light his expression was difficult to read, but his eyes weren't.
"What would you do?" he asked quietly. "If you actually found her?"
Patti thought about it. Her thumb moved across the back of his hand without her deciding to do it.
"I'd ask her why," she said. "Why she left. Why I wasn't enough reason to stay." Her voice was steady but something underneath it wasn't. "My dad can barely stand to be in the same room as me, so maybe there's just something about me. Something that makes people go. I want to know what it is."
She stopped, swallowed. "I just want to know why I wasn't enough."
The words sat between them, taking up space.
The music had shifted again to something faster, but the corner they were standing in felt cut off from it, like a room inside the room.
Henry looked at her. At the particular combination of toughness and openness in her face — the way she could say the hardest thing and still keep looking at you.
He thought about his mother's hands pressing pills into his palm. The voice in his ear in the dark: You'll hurt someone, Henry. You'll become something terrible. The years of being managed, contained, apologized for.
Patti had called it a miracle. In a church bathroom, covered in cold sweat, she had looked at what he was and called it a miracle.
"Okay," he heard himself say. "I'll try."
Her face changed completely. "Really?"
"I said try." He said it quickly. "I'm not making promises about what happens."
"Obviously." She was already smiling.
He noticed, belatedly, that she was still holding his hand. She noticed him noticing, and a faint color came up in her face, but she didn't let go.
"So tomorrow afternoon," she said. "I'll come find you."
He hesitated, then nodded. "If it starts feeling wrong — if I feel like I can't keep it where it needs to be — we stop. Right away. You have to promise me that."
"I promise." The smile didn't dim. "And if it doesn't work at all, it's fine." She tilted her head. "It'll just be a date."
Henry blinked. "A date."
"Yeah."
"Like a—" He seemed to be working out the word. "Like an actual date? Or more like just—"
"An actual date." She said it clearly and without any apparent embarrassment. "The regular kind. Where two people go somewhere on purpose."
Henry processed this. Something shifted in his expression — something younger and less guarded working its way to the surface.
Patti pulled him toward the quieter end of the bar, a row of worn vinyl sofas back against the wall where the speakers were further away and the light from the neon Budweiser sign barely reached. They sat. The springs in the sofa creaked. She didn't let go of his hand so much as renegotiate where it was, settling it in the space between them.
The bar noise became background from here. Something you were aware of without having to participate in.
She could smell the detergent on his shirt — clean and plain, the kind that came in the orange box.
"You know what, Henry," she said. She let her head rest against his shoulder, just slightly, the way you tested ice before you put your full weight on it. "You're not what I expected."
She felt his body's first instinct — the stiffening, the preparation for something to go wrong — and then the slow release of it, muscle by muscle, until the shoulder under her head was just a shoulder.
"What did you expect?" he asked.
"I don't know. Something worse, I think." She looked up at him. His face in profile, the clean angle of his jaw, the way the neon light caught the edge of his cheekbone. "You're actually just a person. A weird person. But a person."
He looked down at her. His gaze moved the way eyes moved when they were paying attention to something they didn't want to startle — from her eyes to her mouth and back, careful and deliberate.
His breathing had changed. She could feel it in his chest, the slight quickness of it.
She was pretty sure hers had too.
The space between them had been shrinking for a while, doing it so gradually that neither of them had made a decision about it. Time had gone elastic, every second full of detail — the flutter of his lashes, the slight parting of her lips, the warmth of his breath crossing the last inch of air between them—
Every light in the bar went out.
Not a flicker. A full cutout, half a second of complete darkness, and then everything came back on brighter than before, a single hard pulse of light across the whole room.
"Hey!" Don's voice cut through the music from behind the bar, ragged and annoyed. "What did I say? Take it outside if you're going to be like that! This is a family place!"
They pulled apart fast. Patti smoothed her skirt. Henry retreated to his corner of the sofa with the posture of someone who had just touched a hot stove, hands on his knees, fingers laced together tight enough that his knuckles went pale.
Joyce materialized through the crowd and leveled a look at Don that could have etched glass. "Don, nobody asked you. Leave them alone."
She turned, gave them both a quick wink, and vanished back into the crowd.
Patti let out a breath that was trying very hard to be a laugh. "We should probably—"
"Yeah," Henry agreed, already standing.
She walked him to the back exit, the one that opened onto the alley behind the building where it was quiet and smelled like cold air and old brick.
"Tomorrow," she said.
He nodded. He looked at her for a moment longer than the situation required, and then turned and headed off down the alley at a pace that was just slightly faster than a walk, hands in his pockets, disappearing into the dark.
Joyce found Bob on a sofa near the jukebox, a Coke in front of him that he hadn't touched. She dropped down beside him.
"Sorry," she said, which for Joyce was fairly close to a formal apology. "About Patti. I didn't think about the fact that you'd be sitting here watching all of that."
Bob looked up from wherever he'd been. He pushed his glasses up. "It's fine, actually."
"It's fine?"
"Henry's strange," Bob said, with the measured tone of someone being genuinely fair, "but Patti looks happy. Really happy. Not performing-it happy. Actually happy." He paused. "I figure everybody deserves to find their person."
Joyce looked at him with an expression she didn't often have, which was surprise.
"Bob Newby," she said. "You're a complete softie."
Bob's face went slightly red, which the dim light mostly covered. "I prefer 'someone who appreciates good casting,'" he said.
He turned toward her, with the specific gathering of energy that happened when someone was working up to saying something. "Joyce, I've been—"
Hopper appeared from the direction of the pool tables, slightly out of breath, like he'd moved fast to get here.
"Bob. I've been looking for you for twenty minutes."
Bob's expression went from interrupted to concerned in about a second. He knew Hopper's faces. This one was the real-thing face. "What happened?"
Hopper sat down, glanced around them, and dropped his voice. "The Hargrove kid's dog. Found it dead last night. Same as the others — same method. But there's something new." He pulled a small notebook from his back pocket. "Right before he found it, his radio went to static. Just — white noise, out of nowhere, lasted about two minutes. Then his dog started whimpering in the yard. By the time he got outside it was already gone."
Bob sat up straight. "Static. What kind?"
"He said it was white noise but with something inside it. Not random. He said it was like there was a pattern in there — like Morse code but not quite."
He looked at Bob. "You track radio signals. You've got all that equipment in the AV room. Did you pick up anything last night? Around ten?"
Bob was already thinking. He could feel something connecting — things that had been sitting separately in his brain for the last week clicking toward each other. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, I did. I wrote it down."
Hopper pushed the notebook across the cushion toward him. Bob took it and read through the dates and times. His lips moved slightly.
His expression went through curiosity, focus, and then something that was scientific excitement with an anxious edge underneath it. He held the notebook close, cross-referencing something in his head.
Joyce, who had been watching the two of them with increasing curiosity, missed where the conversation went because her attention had gone somewhere else. She was watching Hopper — the focus in his eyes, the slightly disheveled hair from running across the bar, the way he leaned forward over the notebook like someone who hadn't stopped thinking about this all day.
"Hopper," she said suddenly.
He looked up.
"I want to be straightforward with you." Her voice had the particular tone of someone who was being gracious about an awkward situation. "I've really enjoyed having you in the production. Truly. The energy you bring is — it's real. But I think it's probably better for everyone if we keep things professional." She paused delicately. "So — thank you, but no thank you."
Hopper stared at her. "I'm sorry, what?"
"You don't have to explain yourself," Joyce said warmly. "It happens in theater. The intensity, the emotional intimacy of the work—"
"Joyce." Hopper set the notebook down. "I'm showing you dead animal evidence. What are you talking about?"
"It's okay," Joyce continued, with the magnanimous expression of someone letting someone else off the hook. "It's very common. The shared experience of creative work—"
"Did you think I joined the drama club to make a move on you?"
Joyce's expression didn't change, but something behind it did.
"I joined because of the money," Hopper said. "Claudia's reward. I'm tracking whoever killed her cat. That's it."
Joyce was very quiet for a moment.
"The bounty," she said.
"The hundred dollars, yes."
Another pause. Then Joyce straightened up, cleared her throat, and said with great dignity: "I knew that."
"You absolutely did not know that."
"Hopper—"
"For the record," Hopper said, in a tone that was enjoying this slightly more than was polite, "you're great. Very talented. But—" he paused and gave her the same gracious expression back — "no thank you."
"No thank you," Joyce repeated, with ice in her voice.
"Exactly."
"Okay," Bob said loudly, with the energy of a man redirecting a conversation before casualties were sustained. "The static. The dates match. All of them." He turned the notebook so they could both see it, pointing. "Look — every single incident with a dead animal has a corresponding radio interference event. Within a thirty-minute window."
Hopper shifted focus immediately, the Joyce situation shelved. "So the sound and the deaths are connected."
"It's more than connected," Bob said. He pulled his own notebook from his backpack and started flipping pages. "There's a theory — and it's based on actual documented research, not just— anyway. The idea is that certain sound frequencies can interfere with biological systems. The autonomic nervous system. Cardiac rhythm. At high enough power and the right frequency band, theoretically—"
"Theoretically what?" Hopper asked.
"Organ failure," Bob said. "The government was looking into this in the early fifties. Sonic weapon research. Trying to determine if you could incapacitate an enemy without conventional arms."
Hopper looked at him. "Where did you hear about government sonic weapons research, Bob?"
Bob's chin went up slightly. "Issue 603 of—"
"Is it a comic book?"
"It's based on—"
"It's a comic book," Joyce said.
"It's based on documented Cold War research," Bob said, with as much dignity as a person could muster. "The science in that issue was checked by—actually, that's not the point. The point is the pattern is real, the interference is real, and something is generating a specific signal that correlates with these deaths." He looked between them. "We should take this to your father."
"Absolutely not," Hopper said, without hesitation.
"Hopper—"
"No evidence. No physical device. Just a pattern in a notebook and a comic book theory. My dad will tear the drama club apart looking for something and find nothing, and Joyce's play dies, and I lose any shot at the reward money." He shook his head. "We handle it ourselves until we have something real."
Joyce, who had been holding her grudge from the earlier exchange with the controlled patience of someone waiting for the right moment, turned to him. "So your plan is to continue playing detective for a hundred dollars?"
"My plan," Hopper said, "is to find the signal source before anything else gets killed." He looked at Bob. "Can you build something that tracks it? A way to get a direction on the interference?"
Bob looked at the question the way he looked at any engineering problem — as something with a solution that just needed finding. The corner of his mouth moved upward.
"You're asking me," he said, "if I can build a portable radio direction-finder that detects ultrasonic interference and triangulates its source using modified consumer equipment."
"Yes."
"Using stuff I can actually get my hands on."
"Yes."
Bob was already opening to a blank page. "I'll need a second-hand scanner — there's a surplus electronics place out on Route 9 that'll have one. A directional antenna, probably modified from an old UHF television aerial. And a microphone array that can pick up above the normal hearing range." He was already sketching. "Give me twenty-four hours."
Hopper watched him draw for a moment, then reached across and shook his hand.
"Twenty-four hours," he said.
[Reader Support Milestones]
500 Power Stones → +1 Chapter
10 Reviews → +1 Chapter
Enjoyed the read? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger