Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (8 page)

Kenji pursed his lips, falling deep into thought. Something about that number, ten years, sent up a red flag for him. It didn't take him long to realize why.

“Wait a second...” Clearing the browser, Kenji typed something new into the search bar.
Dreams in Black Static
. That was the name of the album by Jackal Priest, which had included the voice of this woman in its opening track. Unless he was mistaken, it was also about ten years old. It was a tenuous link, but he was desperate for something, anything that might further his understanding of this matter.

Again, the three of them waited with held breath for the results to load. The information came
 
very, very slowly, and more than once the signal was lost. Kenji stood near the window, waving his phone in the air and trying to recapture the single bar he'd locked onto. Finally, when the results had popped up, he looked at his screen and began reading.

What he found there stunned him.

At a loss for words, he held the phone out for Reggie and Dylan to see, and when they failed to notice what'd so impressed him, he began to explain. “The dates... the album we found her voice on, as well as the documentary, were both released on the same day, ten years ago. Both came out on May 10
th
, 2006.”

Reggie broke out in nervous laughter, pacing away from the other two and clapping his hands. “You're kidding me, right? That's... that's a hell of a coincidence there.”

But they were well past the point of writing things off as mere coincidence. This detail was more proof that something was going on here. “No coincidence,” muttered Kenji, massaging his jaw and pocketing his phone. “We need to look into this connection a little deeper. Gotta find some place with better cell service or WiFi.”

“We passed a Tim Horton's on our way here,” began Dylan. “It was outside the last town, on the highway, I think. Wanna go there? You've got your laptop in the car, right?”

Kenji was already marching out the door by the time Dylan finished.

Reggie followed, smirking. “He's a little headstrong, ain't he?”

Dylan shook his head, closing the door to the shack behind them and heading for the Honda. “Headstrong ain't the word.
Obsessed
is more like it.”

TWELVE

Kenji and Dylan drove in the Honda, while Reggie followed in his LeSabre. The trio arrived at the empty Tim Horton's along the highway nearly forty minutes later. Upon arrival, Kenji had raced inside, laptop bag in tow, and had set up at the table nearest the shop's only visible power outlet. Meanwhile, Reggie and Dylan placed an order for coffee and donuts. Dylan picked up a pair of Double-Doubles for himself and Kenji, and carried over a half dozen mixed donuts to the large table where Kenji was now stationed and typing away furiously.

Reggie sauntered over with a coffee and bagel, dropping into the nearest booth and taking a noisy sip. “So, what're you finding over there?” he asked, nudging Kenji's leg with his foot.

Kenji scarcely looked up from his screen. He'd pulled up the album,
Dreams in Black Static,
in one tab, and the war documentary in the other. With lightning fast speed he scanned websites dedicated to both, scouring them for any other similarities aside from the date of their release. He looked first at the listings discussing the album, of which there were precious few. The band members were the only listed personnel involved in its production, and he knew all of them had died in a plane crash. Dead end.

Next, he turned his fevered attention to the official website of the documentary. There was a list of cast and crew to be found there, and he was overjoyed to find that there were photos of the cast posted alongside the credits. Finding the pale woman in the video would be a simple thing if she was at all involved with the making of the documentary.

That was a big “if”, though. A scan of the numerous faces on the page, and then another, failed to yield anyone who looked even remotely like the woman he sought. Apparently she wasn't involved with the documentary after all.

Sighing, Kenji snatched the big red cup Dylan had offered him and sucked in a few mouthfuls of sweetened coffee. “Dead end,” he muttered.

Dylan was on his third donut by that point, and his cheeks bulged out as though he were a rodent hoarding food. “What do you mean?” he asked around a bolus of fried dough. A blue sprinkle escaped his mouth, dropping down onto the tabletop. “Nothing?”

Kenji shook his head. The woman wasn't involved with the production of either the documentary or the album, as best he could tell. “Not a thing.”

Dylan frowned, choking down his food. “OK, what if it's something about the three of us... like, what if there's something that links all of us together and that's why we ended up meeting at this spot?” He turned to Reggie. “What's your story, Reggie?”

Drawing in a deep breath, Reggie shrugged. “Well, I dunno what you want me to say here. I've never seen that woman before watching the tape. I recorded that documentary because I wanted to see if my father's unit was featured in it-- he was a World War Two vet. I fought in Vietnam, myself. Retired now, living in St. Paul. Once upon a time I played around with HAM radios-- that was how I knew those letters and numbers she repeated were Maidenhead coordinates. And you two?”

Dylan went first while Kenji worked on his coffee. “I'm a chemistry major. Still have two years left before I graduate, same as Kenji. He studies linguistics, though. We both go to UW-Madison. We're roommates, in fact. He downloaded that album off of an illegal pirate website and brought it to my attention just last night. I was the one who suggested we follow the coordinates and come out here, though. Some guy in our dorm filled us in and explained the Maidenhead thing. At first, Kenji thought it was some sort of secret code.”

Discussing their lives any further was beyond pointless. He and Dylan were as different from this man as could be. “This is getting us nowhere,” interrupted Kenji. “I don't think this has anything to do with us, in particular. We were just the ones who noticed it. Around the same time, no less. Something... maybe this date, May 10
th
, has some significance, but...”

Reggie slurped up more coffee and meditated a moment. He was working over his bagel when something suddenly dawned on him. “Well, both these things came out the same day, right? Maybe look it up online. May 10
th
, 2006.”

“That's a long-shot. We're going to get a ton of hits,” replied Kenji, typing the date into the search bar and reluctantly tapping Enter. As expected, thousands of results were returned. He stifled a groan. He could sift through this mess for days and never stumble upon anything of use.

“Whatcha got?” asked Reggie, leaning in and looking at the screen.

Kenji read off the results in a dispirited monotone. “First three hits all deal with a comet that was passing by Earth on that day. I guess there was a big meteor shower afterward. Second link has something to do with people in South America acting weird afterward, but I'm not going to bother reading that. Oh, this one talks about some political assassination in Africa.” He scrolled further.

“You think anyone else will end up at that shack? Like, you think anyone else out there has picked up on this? What if more people get in on... whatever this is?” mused Dylan, cleaning his mouth off with a napkin. His glasses, usually so neat and clean, were marked up with frosted fingerprints. A red sprinkle clung to the white rims.

Kenji ignored him. It was possible that other people had heard the voice, however neither the album nor the documentary were especially well-known, and it occurred to him that only certain kinds of people would ever care enough about such a thing to investigate further. How many people out there would really bother to isolate certain sounds on an MP3 like he and Dylan had done? How many people out there would pay such close attention to a documentary that they'd zero in on the anomalous, mumbling woman in the background of a single scene? If
anything
united the three of them, it was a tendency towards neuroticism or OCD.

“Next one is a missing person's notice.” Kenji very nearly scrolled past it, but something he glimpsed in the preview made him pause. It was a new listing, led to a public social media group centered around missing person's cases in the State of Minnesota. “That's weird,” he said. “Think this could be something?” He pointed to the link, and both Dylan and Reggie glanced at it. “It looks like someone put out a missing person's report on this social media site, trying to find some old friend of theirs. They were last seen on May 10
th
, 2006.”

Reggie nodded. “Why not? Click on it.”

Kenji did so. This was a small social media site, not particularly popular, but he was familiar enough with it to navigate it with ease. He scrolled down the newer posts on the page and singled out the one that'd drew him there, posted just four days previously.

And then, the three of them loosed a collective gasp.

The listing was brief. A woman with the username MARA_ANTALL had made the post, and in it she wrote only the most salient details. She was seeking any information that might help her find her friend, a woman by the name of Agnes Pasztor, a fellow Hungarian immigrant, who'd last been seen on May 10
th
, 2006, in rural Minnesota. A contact phone number for user MARA_ANTALL was listed.

But it was not these details that shocked the three of them into a momentary silence.

Offered beneath these few lines of text was a photo of the missing woman, allegedly taken shortly before her disappearance ten years ago, and it was this that stunned the trio. Kenji stared at the photo long and hard. Suddenly his gums began to itch and he had to clench his jaw to ease them.

The woman staring back at the three of them in the photograph was the very same woman who'd been in the documentary.

Kenji whispered the name under his breath, trying it on for size. “
Agnes Pasztor
...”

Reggie loosed a shudder and sank back down into his seat at hearing it. “Ah, hell no,” he mumbled into his coffee cup.

THIRTEEN

The three of them had a name.

The woman whose voice Kenji had heard on the recording, the very same woman the three of them had seen on the tape, feeding them the coordinates to the remote shack, was Agnes Pasztor. She'd been missing for just over ten years and had last been seen in rural Minnesota.

This was a step forward, but all the same Kenji felt as though they'd taken two steps back in their investigation.

“Do you think she went missing at the shack?” asked Dylan, eyes wide. He ran a hand through his sandy hair and held his breath. “Holy shit, dude. This is getting weird.”

Reggie shook his head. “It's
been
weird, man. Now it's just getting weirder.”

Kenji tried to work through the tidal wave of questions that struck his mind. How and why had this woman appeared in two different pieces of media, each released on the day she'd apparently gone missing in rural Minnesota? And why had she cryptically disseminated the coordinates to an exact location in Akeley during these inexplicable appearances? Had something bad happened to her? Had she somehow known in advance that something was going to happen, and given out the coordinates in this way to try and let the world know where she was? But how was it possible to have appeared on the album and in the documentary to begin with? It simply
wasn't
possible, as far as Kenji was concerned; that was still the most unbelievable part of this entire thing.

“Goddamn,” said Kenji. “More questions than answers, as always. I can't get to the bottom of this. It just doesn't make sense. This is definitely the woman in the video, the woman whose voice I heard in the song, but knowing her name doesn't make this any easier. We've just hit a different dead end. What I really want to know is
how
she could have possibly ended up in both the audio recording and the documentary. That shouldn't be possible, especially since she had no part in making the two of them. But that's what happened.” He gnawed on the lip of his cup ans sighed so that the steam from his coffee washed over his face. “I'm lost here.”

“Well, keep looking for more info on this woman,” suggested Reggie. “Maybe there's something more on the web about her. Something that'll clear this up.”

Kenji half-heartedly began searching for information on this woman, Agnes Pasztor, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing else to be found. The digital trail was cold.

There was a single detail to which they could pin their hopes of further progress, however.

The user MARA_ANTALL had left a contact number in her posting. The web wouldn't yield any more clues for them, but this contact seemed a promising lead.

“So, that's it, huh?” Dylan loosed the evening's excitement in a single, drawn-out sight. “Kinda sucks, coming all this way only to turn up nothing online.”

“Yeah, but we have this friend's phone number. We can call her and follow up, you know?” Kenji was quick to add.

Dylan arched a brow, glancing at Reggie incredulously. “I dunno about all that, Kenji. You really think we need to descend any deeper into this rabbit hole? Calling up some random woman to ask about this chick on the tape... I mean, that's...” He paused, chewing on the rim of his paper cup. “What are you supposed to say when she picks up? '
Hullo, ma'am, I'm calling because your creepy missing friend lured me, my roommate and this random guy to a shack in the middle of nowhere. You know anything about that?
' It's stupid. Nonsensical. If anything, she'd think we were calling to mess with her.”

Reggie's expression softened a bit. He reached out and tapped Kenji's arm. “Your buddy here is right. I don't think there's much to be done, at this point. We
could
call, but if this woman hasn't seen Agnes in ten years, then she probably won't be any help.”

Feeling a bit betrayed by his fellows, Kenji shut the laptop and fumed for a moment. Looking out the window into the cool night, where a thin flurry of snow was beginning to fall, he stuffed a piece of donut into his mouth to chase the last, bitter dregs of coffee. The trail wasn't completely cold-- not so long as they had this MARA_ANTALL to speak with. But the other two were apparently uninterested in that. They'd come all this way, gone to a great deal of trouble to make it this far in their investigation, only to throw in the towel when a simple Google search failed to bring up anything concrete? It annoyed him to no end. “OK, so are you two giving up, then? No longer interested in this weird shit that brought us all out here in the first place? Because if you are still in the game, then this phone number is the only way forward that I can see.”