Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (17 page)

“Now wait a minute, young fella--” began Reggie.

“For what? What more do we need to do? If Agnes is really listening, what more could she possibly ask for?” Kenji shook his head. “You really believe this crap, Dylan?”

Dylan shrugged. “I mean, I saw people do it online. It worked for them...”

“Oh, right. Because everything you see online is real, right? You know, it's probably not working because we forgot to draw an upside-down pentagram on the floor in pig's blood, or chant 'Bloody Mary' into a mirror.” Kenji returned to his chair and sighed.

Reggie opened his mouth to reply, but the voice that entered the shack just then didn't come from his mouth. A breezy, slightly androgynous voice broke the tension and threw the room into a panic. It was only a single word:

“
YES
.”

Kenji, Dylan and Reggie froze in place, their eyes fixed to the radio. The unit continued its reverse auto-scan through the frequencies. Some burst of sound, like something at the tail-end of a radio advertisement sounded, then disappeared just as suddenly. They all knew what they'd heard, however. It'd been very clear, clearer than any dialogue through the old radio speaker should have been.

“Y-you guys heard that, right?” asked Dylan, panting. He grit his teeth, looking at the radio narrowly.

“Agnes, is that you?” chanced Reggie, reaching up and taking Kenji's arm. He pulled him back down to his spot on the floor.

Kenji didn't need guiding; he returned to his spot in front of the radio and listened closely.

In the next instant came a flicker of a reply. It was the same voice, a hoarse whisper this time. “
YES
.”

“Holy shit,” muttered Kenji. “Did we... did we really make contact?” He pondered the other possibilities. Was this just some voice they'd caught on the waves, some speaker being interviewed about current affairs or fashion trends on an AM radio talk show? He watched the display as the channels skipped by in reverse. Somehow, he didn't think it was just a coincidence.

“I think we did,” replied Dylan.

The three of them hovered near the radio on the floor of the old shack. And through the speaker there came a fourth participant in the conversation:

Agnes Pasztor.

TWENTY-FIVE

A long time passed before any of them found the nerve to speak again. Kenji put his skepticism on hold and stared at the radio in abject disbelief. Dylan or Reggie were messing with him, they had to be. It wasn't really possible to make contact with the dead this way, was it? Moreover, the fact that Agnes might be a spirit-- that their target in this search was a deceased woman, filled his blood with ice. Suddenly, prior events seemed less strange to him. The transmission Agnes had sent out, relaying the coordinates to the shack, was clearly something that only a powerful supernatural manifestation could explain. But for what purpose had the three of them been gathered there? Why had Agnes cast her net so wide to begin with?

Kenji ran a hand through his hair and spoke up. “Where are you, Agnes?” He looked at the other two, whose eyes betrayed disbelief. It'd been due to
their
urging that Kenji had participated in the séance at all, but they apparently hadn't expected to
actually
make contact in this way. Now that they'd encountered something, there was no smugness in their expressions, no pride or hints of “I told you so” as they looked back at Kenji. Only fear.

The radio crackled with a fresh wave of static as the channels passed one by one. A burst of noise broke the silence soon thereafter, but it was a muddled mess. If it was a reply from the other side, then it was too garbled to make out. The trio sat in silence for a time, each of them wondering whether they should ask again or simply turn the thing off.

“Agnes, are you still with us? Where are you?” asked Reggie, breaking the ponderous quiet. He brought the thermos to his lips with a trembling hand but did not drink. The steam rose from the inside of the vessel in a steamy tentacle, which teased the tip of his nose.

A burst of static prefaced the ghostly reply. It was only a single word, a command passed down by the croaking, androgynous voice. “
DIG
.”

A collective shudder passed through the room. “What do you think that's supposed to mean?” asked Dylan, his voice low. “Do you think... that this is even Agnes we're speaking to? It doesn't
sound
like her.”

Kenji shrugged weakly, keeping one eye on the radio all the while. “It's hard to say. Did it just tell us to
dig
? Why? And where?” He folded his arms and rocked from side to side. “And if it isn't Agnes, then who could it be, man?”

Reggie pointed a finger Kenji's way, bobbing his head. “You said something else there, earlier, didn't you? You reached out to someone else when we started all of this. The
Dark One
, ain't that right? Who's this
Dark One
?” He arched a brow.

“It was... it was something I read in that book, that's all. I was just fucking around, guys. It's not like we made contact with something...
else
. It has to be Agnes-- we asked just now and it told us it was Agnes. It wouldn't lie, would it?”

Dylan chuckled to himself. “I don't know about that. Some of the articles I read suggested that one should never
fully
trust the voices that come through. You never really know who you're talking to. You might've called up someone... or something... completely different.” He gulped. “We need to make sure this is Agnes somehow.”

Returning to the radio, Kenji spoke once more. “Agnes, is this really you? What do you mean, 'Dig'? Where do you want us to dig?”

The three of them were startled when the reply came furiously through the speaker. There seemed to be an echoing, muddy quality to the voice, as though the reply were issuing from some tightly enclosed space. The speaker repeated, “
DIG. DIG. DIG. DIG.
”

Even as Kenji and the others exchanged puzzled glances, the voice on the radio went on, becoming ever louder and more frenzied with each repetition.

DIG.

DIG.

DIG.

Losing his nerve, Reggie reached forward and shut the radio off. The shack was plunged into perfect quietude once again. “That's enough of that,” he said, panting. He struggled to stand. Sipping from his thermos, he clutched the handle till his arm shook. “We need to leave here. Never look back,” he declared.

“No, hold on a damn minute,” interrupted Dylan. He switched the radio back on, quickly setting the unit to auto-scan in reverse once again. “We didn't sign off. Whenever you have a conversation with a spirit you
have
to sign off-- cut the link-- otherwise the channel between our world and theirs remains open. You can't... you can't just shut this shit off and pretend it never happened, man!” Red in the face, Dylan cleared his throat. “Agnes, are you still there? Agnes?”

They waited several minutes, but their repeated requests for Agnes went ignored.

“Goddammit, we blew it,” said Dylan, yanking the power cord from the wall and shutting down the radio. He shoved it across the floor, beneath the desk, and fell into a heap. Balling himself up, he placed his head between his knees and gave a shuddering sigh. “We fucked up. Shouldn't have done that.”

“Come on, man,” said Kenji. “It's not that big of a deal, right? We got what we needed. We made contact.”

Dylan shook his head fervently however. “No, you don't get it! We were supposed to follow a certain procedure. We needed to sever the link. Now for all we know the spirit we were talking to is in the room with us; watching, listening...”

Reggie's lips quivered. “You don't really mean that, do ya? You're just telling stories now, right kid? I don't need you messing around like this after everything we heard on that radio, so cut the shit, you hear?”

Dylan looked up at him gravely. “I'm not messing around. We may have just shot ourselves in the foot.”

“Look,” interrupted Kenji, rising to his feet, “I'm pretty sure that was Agnes we made contact with, and her message was clear. She wants us to dig. Think about it. The two of you thought she might be a ghost, a murder victim. Well, everything's fallen into place now. I can picture it clearly. One day, about ten years ago, Agnes gets murdered by someone. The murderer brings her out here, buries her in this remote patch of land where no one will ever find her. In her final moments she uses whatever psychical energies she's got to reach out to the world of the living. She announces the coordinates of her final resting place in the hopes that someone will find her down the line and reveal what actually happened to her. Think about it! It all makes sense!”

Dylan nodded, but made no move to get up off of the floor. “Maybe so,” he said, “but we don't know where to dig. And beyond that, we still aren't sure
who
it was we were just speaking with because you just had to go and run your mouth in the beginning. What the fuck is the 'Dark One' and why did you think it was a good idea to name-drop him?”

“So maybe we were right about Agnes getting killed. I dunno about you fellas, but I don't think it's my job to go digging up bodies,” added Reggie, slumping against the wall. “We need to get the police involved.”

“Sure, and tell them that a ghost guided us to her own remains?” replied Kenji. “They'd laugh us out of town. Or maybe they'd consider us suspects. Anyway, we should hold off on contacting the authorities until we actually have a body to work with.”

“You're not suggesting that we actually start digging for Agnes, are you?” Dylan jumped up, steadying himself on the desk. “You want to go looking for her body? This is nuts. This is... this is beyond
anything
I ever agreed to do, Kenji.”

“We came all the way out here to get some answers. We were
led
here, the three of us, by her message. You want to back out now? You want to turn tail and run? Think about it, guys. If we're right about this, then we stand to solve a ten-year-old missing person's case. This is the end of the line. If we find Agnes' remains, then her spirit will finally be able to rest. Her transmission won't have been in vain!”

“Oh, Jesus,” muttered Dylan, massaging his temples. “I can't even believe you right now. How can we be so sure that she was really murdered? I mean, who killed her? One of her Hungarian buddies?”

“It's possible.” Taking everything he'd learned about Agnes into account over the course of their search, Kenji felt that the only people with a motive to murder Agnes were the other Hungarian immigrants living in the house that Reggie had visited. The tenants of that house had shunned her for being a witch; it wasn't a complete stretch to think that they'd want the witch dead. “Anyway, we just have to look. We need to start digging.”

“Where do you propose we dig?” asked Reggie. “She could be anywhere. Under this shack, for all we know.” He tapped the floorboards with his heel.

Kenji fell into thought. Where could Agnes be buried? Where had her murderer disposed of her remains? Were they under the shack? It wasn't out of the question, but at the same time he had trouble imagining a number of poor Hungarian Immigrants constructing a shack to cover up a grave. It strained credulity. Agnes had given out the coordinates to this very spot where they all stood, but it was possible that her body wasn't actually inside or underneath the shack. There was a good deal of land surrounding the edifice, and--

Suddenly, he had an idea.

Rushing for the door, Kenji stepped out into the cold night. His breath left his lips in large, white trails of mist as he pushed into the field. The grass, cold as ice and partially frozen, made his skin burn as he went. Looking out over his surroundings, Kenji attempted to recall just where he'd seen it.

There was one spot, he knew, where the grass was different.

Almost as if a large hole had been dug in that spot and had then been haphazardly covered over with a different species of grass.

Looking over the moonlit plain for the place where the grass didn't match, Kenji quickly zeroed in on it. “Here,” he muttered. Walking to the spot, he stood in the shorter grass, certain as he was of anything that he'd found Agnes' final resting place. “Guys, I found it.”

The other two peeked out at him from the doorway of the shack. “What the hell are you talking about?” asked Dylan. “What did you find?”

“The grass here is different,” replied Kenji, stamping on the ground with his foot. “This is the spot! This is where we need to dig!”

Reggie whistled, shaking his head. “I'm too old for this shit. You fellas are going to have to do it. It's the dead of winter out there, Kenji. Ground's going to be hard as hell.”

Undeterred, Kenji started for the Honda. “Let's go, guys. We need to get ahold of some shovels.”

TWENTY-SIX

The three of them were packed like sardines into Dylan's rickety Honda. Kenji and Dylan sat in the front seats while Reggie tried to contort his lengthy frame into the back. The car rattled on down the road as they passed into the nearest town. Not far from the highway entrance ramp they came upon a 24-hour chain store they knew to have a sizable hardware department. Dylan wheeled into the almost-empty parking lot and rolled to a stop beneath a bright, white streetlamp. He shut off the car but didn't jump out at once, even as Kenji appeared raring to go.

“Hold up,” said Dylan, grabbing Kenji's arm. “We need to talk this through first.” Glancing into the rearview, he nodded to Reggie. “All three of us. See, this is some serious shit. When I first helped you clean up the audio in that song, I never expected things to come to...
this
. Following the clues, we were led all the way out here, to a spot where there might be a fucking body buried. I don't want to go through with this, if we're being honest. I think it's a shitty idea. But if you're both invested in digging up ol' Agnes and solving this thing, then I'll do what I can. Promise me, though, that we'll call the cops when it's over. I want to bring in the cops the minute we discover a body. I mean, if there's really one to be found.” He sighed. “Kenji, man, I don't think we should be doing this. I had a terrible feeling about coming back to this place, and now I really wish that I hadn't.”