The Echo Eater

The Echo Eater

by

Martha M.C. Jenkins

The air in Jonah Calloway’s basement studio was a carefully engineered void. Triple-paned windows, acoustic panels, and a precisely calibrated HVAC system kept the outside world at bay, leaving only the hum of his equipment and the soft thrum of his own blood in his ears. Here, in the sanctum of perfect sound, he sought order in chaos, clarity in static. It was a compulsion that had once made him brilliant, then disgraced.

His only companion was Bowie, a geriatric terrier mix whose floppy ears twitched to no sound at all. Bowie slept curled on a worn carpet square, a silent, furry anchor in Jonah’s meticulously controlled world.

The job arrived in an unmarked armored van, three heavy boxes sealed with a corporate logo Jonah didn't recognize. The accompanying contract was sparse: "Audio Restoration – Project Tenebris." The fee, however, was astronomical, enough to make even Jonah, with his lingering resentment for the system that cast him out, agree without question. The material: a dozen reel-to-reel tapes from a long-lost arctic research outpost. Insurance claim, the anonymous email stated. Standard procedure.

Jonah, ever the meticulous professional, donned his white gloves. The tapes, though ancient, were in surprisingly good condition, their ferric oxide gleaming dully. He loaded the first reel onto his meticulously maintained Studer A80, threaded the tape, and adjusted the bias. A hiss, then a crackle, the warm analog breath of a forgotten past.

His first week was unremarkable. Static, the groan of ice, the distant growl of a snowcat. Then, it happened. He was cleaning a particularly noisy section, isolating a faint voice, when he encountered it: a digital zero on an analog tape. A momentary, impossible pocket of perfect silence. Not a drop-out, not a fault in the recording, but an absence. It lasted only a flicker, a microsecond, but it was there, a perfect void where sound should have been.

His fingers stilled on the console. A phantom signal, they had called it last time. A breakdown. But he knew what he heard. He rewound the tape, played it again. There. Just at the edge of comprehension. A quiet hum, too low to register on most equipment, subtly fading into that impossible silence, then slowly returning. Jonah felt a thrill of old obsession, a cold dread he hadn't known since his dismissal. He knew this feeling. He was hearing things again.

He worked faster, driven by a renewed, almost manic energy. Weeks blurred into nights, the glow of the console his only company. Bowie, usually placid, began to occasionally lift his head, staring at empty corners of the studio with an unsettling intensity, his deaf ears swiveling. Jonah dismissed it as old dog habits, but an uneasy feeling began to settle in his gut.

Finally, a voice, clear and strong, cut through the arctic white noise.

AUDIO LOG 01.10.22 – COMMANDER DR. ARIS THORNE

[Sound of light static, a distant hum]

Thorne: This is Dr. Aris Thorne, Tenebris Station, log entry one. Initial atmospheric and seismic readings are nominal. Crew morale is… high, considering the isolation. My primary research team, Dr. Anya Sharma and Dr. Ben Carter, are currently deploying the deep-ice probes. We’ve been experiencing some minor equipment anomalies. Occasional audio drop-outs on communications, nothing critical. Just… peculiar. Almost like the environment is absorbing the sound. Laughable, I know. Will investigate further.

Jonah paused the tape, feeling a strange connection to Thorne. Her voice was calm, professional, even a little clinical. He pushed play.

AUDIO LOG 01.15.22 – COMMANDER DR. ARIS THORNE

[Sound of a low, resonant hum, slightly fluctuating]

Thorne: The atmospheric hum has become more pronounced inside the station. It’s not mechanical; our sensors can’t pinpoint a source. Carter says it’s “the ghosts of the wind,” but Anya’s more concerned. She claims to have heard her name whispered when no one else was present. I’ve dismissed it, of course. Auditory pareidolia. The mind playing tricks in a secluded environment. Still, I’ve instructed everyone to maintain their sensory logs. For science.

Jonah leaned forward, his headphones pressing tight against his ears. He could hear it now, that hum. A subtle, almost sub-sonic presence within the recording itself. He’d filtered it out automatically, assuming it was ambient noise. Now, knowing it was there, he realized it had been in almost every audio log, a low, persistent thrum beneath the words.

A week later, the hum in Jonah’s own home began to vanish. First, the low, steady fan of his refrigerator. He’d stood in the kitchen, opening and closing the door, puzzled by the sudden, unnatural silence. Then, the rhythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock in his hallway. It simply… stopped, without a mechanical hiccup. The most unnerving was the subtle, ever-present drone of the city outside – the distant rush of traffic, the faint wail of a siren – all muffled, then gone, replaced by a deep, resonant hush.

Bowie, who rarely moved from his carpet square without prompting, now spent hours by the kitchen door, head cocked, occasionally emitting a low, guttural growl that Jonah rarely heard. His deaf dog was reacting to something Jonah couldn't yet fully grasp.

He tried to rationalize it. Power fluctuations. Age of the house. Still, the missing sounds gnawed at him. He found himself pausing conversations, straining to hear the background noise of a room, only to find a peculiar, flat quiet.

The tapes from Tenebris Station grew darker.

AUDIO LOG 01.28.22 – COMMANDER DR. ARIS THORNE

[Thorne’s voice is tighter, less composed. Static is more pronounced.]

Thorne: Anya… Anya is gone. Not physically, but… she’s just sitting there. Staring. She hasn’t spoken in two days. She doesn’t respond. We caught it on recording, a full five-minute stretch where her voice simply… vanished. Even mid-sentence. We tried to make her speak, to… stimulate her. Nothing. Carter called it “The Absence.” He said it eats sound. I’m starting to believe him. The hum… it’s louder now. And sometimes, between heartbeats, it feels like the air itself is empty. A vacuum of sound.

Jonah’s hands trembled as he worked the console. He was a conduit to a dying world. Thorne’s terror was becoming his own. He heard it in the quiet thrum of his own studio, felt it in the peculiar lack of reverberation in rooms that should echo.

Then came the mimicry. A faint whisper of his own name, "Jonah," seemed to rise from his speakers, even when they were off, their power lights dark. He spun around, clutching his headphones, convinced he was finally breaking. He checked connections, ran diagnostics. Nothing.

Later, as he ascended the stairs, a voice, clear as day, echoed from the hallway. "Jonah? Help me." It was Dr. Thorne. Not from the speakers, not from the tapes, but from the empty hallway of his own house. His blood ran cold. The Echo Eater was here. It had latched on.

He began to hear other voices. His old supervisor, accusing him of delusion. His ex-wife, her voice laced with disappointment. Fragments of conversations, arguments, moments of intense grief from his past, all whispered from the shadows of his unnaturally silent home. They were designed to make him speak, to engage, to feed the insatiable void.

He knew what was coming. The final tapes confirmed his terror.

AUDIO LOG 02.05.22 – COMMANDER DR. ARIS THORNE

[A cacophony of sound: screams, distorted echoes of voices, the low hum now a piercing whine, mixed with what sounds like ripping fabric and breaking glass.]

Thorne: (barely audible through the noise, voice hoarse, broken) It’s learned… it mim… ics… Ben… oh god, it’s Ben’s voice… trying to make me… speak… it’s inside… my head now… the thoughts… it’s… eating… the thoughts… I can’t… think…

[The cacophony abruptly cuts to perfect, dead silence. For several agonizing seconds, there is nothing. Then, a series of rhythmic, sharp clicks, like a Morse code, begins. Three long, two short, one long. It continues for almost a minute, a desperate, non-verbal plea, before abruptly ending in a final, all-consuming silence.]

Jonah tore off his headphones, gasping for breath. The clicks. Thorne's last stand. A language the Echo Eater couldn't consume, couldn't mimic, because it wasn't words, wasn't thought. It was pure, unadulterated sound.

He stumbled back into his studio, locking the heavy sound-dampened door behind him. The air was thick with the absence of sound, the oppressive weight of the Echo Eater’s presence. The hum was everywhere and nowhere, a vibration in his bones.

"Jonah," his mother's voice, soft and mournful, came from behind his console. "Why didn't you listen?"

His supervisor's voice, sharper, cut in from the speaker array. "You're a madman, Calloway. Lost your mind."

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his hands over his ears, but it was useless. The voices were internal now, rising from the deepest recesses of his memory, amplified by the Echo Eater. It was trying to make him think, to engage, to speak.

He had to fight it. Thorne’s clicks. That was the key. He grabbed a fresh reel of blank tape, loaded it onto a secondary deck. His plan was forming, desperate and terrifying. He would fight sound with sound. Or, more accurately, with the absence of the Echo Eater's preferred food.

He started playing the final log again, isolating Thorne's rhythmic clicks. Three long, two short, one long. He focused, his mind a battlefield.

"Just say something, Jonah," his ex-wife's voice cooed from the ceiling. "Anything. A single word."

His own voice, younger, full of self-doubt. "I was wrong. I was always wrong."

He fought to clear his mind, to push away the invading thoughts. Silence. Don't think. Don't speak. He had to decipher the code. Thorne was sending him a message, a last lesson from the grave.

He began to tap out the pattern on the console, converting the rhythmic clicks into a known alphabet, a desperate, one-sided conversation with a dead woman. The voices grew louder, more insistent, attacking his thoughts, trying to steal his consciousness.

"Jonah, we miss you. Come on, just a sound, a murmur, a whisper..."

He pressed his lips together, his jaw aching. His fingers, however, moved with a frantic urgency, translating Thorne's final, defiant message. The Echo Eater pulsed around him, a presence so vast, so hungry, it felt like the very air was being devoured.

The clicks resolved into letters on his screen.

F-E-E-D-I-T-S-I-L-E-N-C-E.

The words appeared, stark against the glowing green display. Feed it silence. Thorne's ultimate discovery. Not chaotic noise, not an attempt to drown it out. But to starve it. To become a void yourself.

He stared at the message, a cold understanding blooming in his chest. And as the voices of his past, of Thorne, of the nameless crew, swirled in his mind, demanding his thought, his voice, his very being, Jonah Calloway, the man who heard everything, made the most terrifying decision of his life.

He closed his eyes, and with every last fiber of his will, he simply… stopped. He didn't speak. He didn't think thoughts. He became an empty vessel, a perfect, unyielding silence. He held his breath, he stilled his mind, feeling the pressure, the immense hunger of the Echo Eater as it probed, searched, and found nothing. No sound, no voice, no internal monologue left to consume. Just a perfect, terrifying, conscious void.

The voices flickered, then died out, starved of their sustenance. The oppressive hum receded. The room, for the first time in weeks, was truly, utterly silent. The battle was won.

But at what cost? Jonah opened his eyes. He felt nothing. He heard nothing. His mind, once a tempest of obsessive thought and acute listening, was now a serene, terrifying blankness. He knew he was alive, because he could see the screen, the message. But the man who was Jonah Calloway, the man who thought, who felt, who heard… he was gone, swallowed by the silence he had embraced.

Bowie, roused by the sudden, profound quiet, lifted his head from his carpet square. He tilted it, his old, deaf eyes fixed on Jonah, a silent question in their depths. But Jonah no longer knew how to answer. He sat, perfectly still, a hollow shell in his perfectly soundproofed room, forever feeding the Echo Eater an endless, boundless silence.