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The Last Recording of Station Nineteen · The Midnight Archives

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  Speaker 1: The Midnight Archives. Season 1. Episode 3. File 003. The
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  Speaker 1: last recording of Station 19. Every file has a story.
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  Speaker 1: Some should have remained closed. The rule about the telephone
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  Speaker 1: has exactly one exception, and this file is the reason
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  Speaker 1: for it. I am allowed to call the numbers written
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  Speaker 1: in the files. I am not allowed to call any
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  Speaker 1: number twice. Arthur made the rule. Arthur broke it exactly once,
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  Speaker 1: 11 years ago, three nights before he vanished. The number
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  Speaker 1: he called twice belonged to a Coast Guard relay hut
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  Speaker 1: on Grey Widow Point. The hut is file 003. Station
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  Speaker 1: 19 was never a grand place. In the single stone room,
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  Speaker 1: a mast, a diesel generator in, on a relay set
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  Speaker 1: that repeated shipping weather up and down the coast. Two keepers.
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  Speaker 1: staffed it in rotation. The last keeper on the roster
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  Speaker 1: was a man named Elias Dove. No relation. I checked twice.
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  Speaker 1: The way you check a thing, you already know. The
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  Speaker 1: station closed in the autumn of 1974, when the regional
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  Speaker 1: service consolidated everything onto the headland array. Officially, the decommissioning
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  Speaker 1: was routine. The logbook says so. The logbook lies the
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  Speaker 1: way all tidy paperwork lies. by leaving out the weather?
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  Speaker 1: Because for 11 nights before the closure, Station 19 broadcast
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  Speaker 1: something that was not shipping weather. The archive holds a
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  Speaker 1: reel-to-reel copy transferred from the original tapes by persons unknown.
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  Speaker 1: Seven minutes and 40 seconds. I have listened to it
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  Speaker 1: nine times. I keep the count exact the way Arthur
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  Speaker 1: taught me because exactness is the only courtesy the files ask.
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  Speaker 1: The recording begins with the keeper's voice. Elias Dove reading
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  Speaker 1: the midnight synopsis the way keepers read everything. Flat and
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  Speaker 1: bored and half asleep, wind behind him, the generator humming. Then,
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  Speaker 1: at four minutes past the hour, he stops mid-sentence and
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  Speaker 1: says a name. Her name. Margaret Hale. Margaret Hale would
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  Speaker 1: not be born for another nine years. I know what
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  Speaker 1: the skeptics' file says. I wrote half of it. Coincidence
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  Speaker 1: of names. Audio pareidolia. A tired man mumbling into a
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  Speaker 1: microphone at midnight. I've read every one of those explanations
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  Speaker 1: in Arthur's handwriting. In the margins. Each one crossed out
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  Speaker 1: harder than the last. The final margin note is dated
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  Speaker 1: three days before he disappeared. It says, he called her
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  Speaker 1: by name twice. Count the times yourself. Dove says the
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  Speaker 1: name twice. Then silence, full and salted, for almost a minute.
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  Speaker 1: Then a second voice answers. Not Dove's. A woman's voice. Young.
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  Speaker 1: Reading numbers. Latitude and longitude. I plotted them. They mark
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  Speaker 1: a point 40 miles north of Bellwether, on empty coastline.
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  Speaker 1: at the exact position where the survey map in file
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  Speaker 1: 002 shows nothing at all, where Dunmara should be. I
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  Speaker 1: sat with that for a long time. The archive has
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  Speaker 1: a particular silence for moments like this. Not empty. Occupied.
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  Speaker 1: The shelves lean closer to hear what you will do next.
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  Speaker 1: What I did next was check the reel against the
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  Speaker 1: station log. The log for that night records a routine broadcast.
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  Speaker 1: Midnight synopsis. No anomalies. Signed E. Dove. The handwriting matches
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  Speaker 1: every other page. Either the keeper falsified his own log
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  Speaker 1: within the hour, or someone else wrote the log for him.
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  Speaker 1: The ink tells me nothing. Ink never does. Ink is
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  Speaker 1: the most obedient liar in any archive. There is more
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  Speaker 1: on the reel. After the coordinates, The woman's voice reads
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  Speaker 1: a list, six names. I recognized three of them from
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  Speaker 1: the resident list in the Dunmara census ledger, the one
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  Speaker 1: with 40 pages torn out. The fourth name was Elias Dove.
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  Speaker 1: The fifth was Arthur Bell. The sixth was mine, spelled
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  Speaker 1: out letter by letter in a voice like someone reading
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  Speaker 1: headstones in order. I turned the machine off and sat
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  Speaker 1: in the dark until the tubes cooled. Then I did
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  Speaker 1: the thing Arthur forbade. I called Gray Widow Point. The
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  Speaker 1: number has been disconnected for 50 years. Everyone knows this.
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  Speaker 1: The Exchange knows this. I dialed it anyway, because the
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  Speaker 1: files had stopped being polite, and politeness was the only
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  Speaker 1: rule holding me back. It rang twice. Then a woman's
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  Speaker 1: voice said my name. Once. Then the line went dead,
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  Speaker 1: the way disconnected lines go dead, with the flat, toneless
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  Speaker 1: finality of withdrawn permission. I have not called it again.
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  Speaker 1: The rule about the telephone holds, one call per number.
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  Speaker 1: That was mine, it is spent. Arthur's file note ends
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  Speaker 1: with a single line, underlined twice. He writes, The station
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  Speaker 1: is still broadcasting. We only stopped listening. I keep the
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  Speaker 1: reel in the cabinet beside the Margaret Hale recordings. Some
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  Speaker 1: nights I hear the machine hung through the cabinet door,
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  Speaker 1: though it is unplugged, though the reels are still. I
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  Speaker 1: log these incidents the way Arthur taught me. Date, time, duration.
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  Speaker 1: No conclusions. Conclusions are for people with fewer files. The
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  Speaker 1: file is closed. The listening continues. Find the Midnight Archives
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  Speaker 1: wherever podcasts are heard. The next file opens soon. Until then,
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  Speaker 1: keep your radio tuned to the quiet between stations. That
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  Speaker 1: is where the archive lives. That is where I will be.