The Zoom chime sounds tinny through the hospital Wi-Fi, like a child’s bell rung under a blanket. Dawn lays a pale stripe across the curtain; the monitor paints green stutters onto my mother’s wall. I angle the laptop camera so Lydia’s face stays out of frame and the tray table fills the shot: recorder, notebook, the locket cooling against the aluminum like a patient coin.
“Good morning, Mara,” the square labeled Avery • Forensic Audio says. Their voice carries the warmed-over hum of a condenser mic in a quiet office. “Ruth on?”
I put my phone beside the keyboard and tap speaker. “Here,” Ruth says, voice hoarse with two hours’ sleep and coffee strong enough to dissolve a spoon. “We’re recording your consent.”
“You have it,” Avery says. “I’ll walk you through our prelims. Caveats first.”
Relief leans in my chair with me when they share screen. A spectrogram blooms—orange and violet strata like a storm cell. Underneath sits a waveform I know too well, knife-edged where the scream spikes.
“Short version?” I ask, knuckles white around a cheap pen.
“Short version: the roomprint matches a bell tower profile to a high degree,” Avery says. “Longer version: not purely native. We’re seeing splices.”
Heat climbs my neck like a slow siren. “Define splices.”
“We see edit seams at low amplitudes,” they say, and a red cursor draws a surgical line across the midnight of noise. “Micro-crossfades here, here, and here. Think ninety to one-twenty milliseconds, shaped like S-curves. Also, convolution reverb applied inconsistently.”
“Convolution reverb means you convolve dry audio with an impulse response,” I say, more for the recorder than for them. “Turn one room into another.”
“Exactly,” Avery says. “When a space is linear and time-invariant, its impulse response—an IR—encodes how it colors sound. You can capture an IR with a sine sweep or a balloon pop. Apply that IR to dry audio, and the result carries that space. We detect an IR consistent with a stone tower: long mid decay, flutter at two-eighty hertz, early reflections spaced like narrow masonry.”
“That’s the relief,” Ruth breathes. “Bell tower bones.”
The word relief lands like a pebble, then rolls toward the edge. “And the splices,” I say, pulling it back. “Show me the anomalies.”
Avery zooms. The spectrogram pixels into a quilt; within it, tiny stitches appear. “See the early reflection cluster? In a single take you’d expect energy symmetry around the transient. Here, energy dips at forty-eight milliseconds, then returns with a phase shift. The decay tails diverge by half a dB at around nine hundred hertz. That’s an edit.”
I swallow hospital air that tastes like saline and coffee, trying not to cough. “Could the locket mechanism cause a discontinuity? A hinge click, a skip?”
“We isolated the mechanical clicks,” Avery says, swiveling windows. “They’re there—beautiful, actually. One has a rope-on-wood signature baked into it. But the splices sit between impulse features, not on hardware noises. Someone compiled this.”
My locket vibrates against the tray when my phone buzzes with a message from the Facebook swap group: Praying for your mom! Also pls stop harassing Father Mikhail. I flip the screen face down and focus on the science. “So the scream could be real.”
“Yes,” Avery says. “The scream’s timbre and micro-instabilities feel live—throat, wind, mic overload—not overtone synthesis. But we’re leaning ‘composite.’ Dry sound placed into a real or convolved roomprint. Or multiple real takes stitched.”
“A cover,” I say, and the nurse walking past raises an eyebrow at the word. “Sophisticated enough that anyone who wants me wrong can point to edits.”
“Which they will,” Ruth says. “We have to get ahead of it.”
Micro-hook: A gull cries outside the loading dock and the HVAC drags it into the room, smeared by vent harmonics until it sounds like a bell arguing with a whistle. The lake is pushing this morning; a seiche will be rolling along the breakwater, shoving sound places it usually can’t reach. I imagine the tower swallowing that air and spitting it back with stone flavor.
“How certain are you about the IR match?” I ask. “Confidence level.”
“High,” Avery says. “We deconvolved your clip with a few candidate IRs, including a generic nave and a concrete stairwell. Only the tower-like IR yields a stable impulse recovery. Also: cyclic tremor from the bell rope housing leaks into the noise floor. That’s distinctive.”
I glance at the locket’s hairline scratches, the way tarnish holds in the engraving C.B. like soot. “So the room is right,” I say. “The timeline might not be.”
“That’s it,” Avery says. “We also found a micro-time-stretch in the lead-up: point-nine-nine-five rate for about two seconds, then back to normal. Subtle. Could be an alignment for crossfading.”
“Talk to me like I’m one bad coffee into understanding,” Ruth says.
“They slowed a tiny section to make reflections line up,” I translate. “Then they hid the seam.”
“Your enemies will call that manipulation,” Ruth says. “We call it evidence of tampering around truth.”
Avery nods. “I don’t judge the why. Only the what.”
I grip the tray edge until my ring finger finds the notch where a patient before us carved a crescent with a thumbnail. “I need a plan that survives a press release from a man with a donor wall,” I say. “What do I record to replicate this in the open?”
“Convolution works both ways,” Avery says. “Capture the tower’s IR yourself. Sine sweep, balloon pop, starter pistol—whatever you can legally and safely do. Then record your own dry screams and spoken counts, and convolve them. If your convolved copies generate the same anomalies when overlaid with the locket audio, you’ve got a path to explaining what’s original and what’s placement.”
“We also have rope clicks,” Ruth adds. “That safety bulletin photo with bruise spacing? The rope fibers you noted in the clapper bag? If the rope hiss is constant in the roomprint, we can time it.”
I nod. “And the lake,” I say. “A seiche surge shifts air density and carries sound further under certain wind. We need a night run and a day run.”
Avery smiles in that worn-in lab way I love—someone who prefers measurements to adjectives. “We’ll give you a protocol: mic height, signal chain, sweep length, and a template for deconvolution. Document chain-of-custody. You already did good work with hashes.”
The nurse slips in with a cuff and a kind smile; she reads the monitor without interrupting our call. The sleeves of her scrub top smell like powder and that church-basement coffee that powered every rummage sale Celia ever worked. Lydia blinks awake, finds my face, and drifts again with the machine’s hush.
“Show me the splice points once more,” I say to Avery. “I want them etched on my eyelids.”
They magnify the timeline. “Edit one at zero colon two five six seconds after the first transient. Edit two at zero colon seven zero three in the decay tail. Edit three is microscopic—ninety-three milliseconds—before the scream’s peak. See the spectral null at nine-oh-five hertz? That notch is not a room feature; it’s a crossfade artifact.”
“And the scream’s formants?” I ask. “Anything that says ‘human, not FX?’”
“Yes,” Avery says. “Jitter in F0 and aperiodic energy in the five to seven kilohertz band consistent with panic, not sampler. There’s saliva noise in the onset—mouth click frequencies around two kilohertz. No plug-in emulates that perfectly.”
Relief slides one inch back toward me. “So the throat is real, the room is right, the path is crooked.”
“That would be my headline,” Avery says.
“Unfortunately, so would Everett’s,” Ruth mutters. “Podcaster admits audio is edited.”
“I won’t give him that sentence,” I say. “I’ll give him: Composite created after the fact to preserve a witness recording in a consistent roomprint. Which might even be true, if someone stitched multiple takes from the tower.”
Micro-hook: A notification from the town swap group flashes again—Free couch, no stains, good family only—and I picture moderators measuring moral worth with throw pillows. The same group pinned a post last year praising the Crane scholarship fund. Currents pull favors; comments police taste. I mute the thread and press my fingers to the brass locket, grounding in weight that doesn’t care about reputation.
“Final question,” I say. “Could someone have recorded the room first—an impulse—and laid a clean scream into it later, never in the tower at all?”
“Yes,” Avery says. “But they would still need the tower IR. Which means access, or a high-quality capture by someone who did. Your donor wall points one way.”
I write ACCESS = MONEY = KEYS in my notebook and underline it until the paper bucks. “We’ll capture a fresh IR,” I say. “Then we’ll run a reenactment: counts, rope pulls, footsteps from tower to dock. We’ll document every setting. We’ll publish process before conclusions.”
Ruth clears her throat. “I’ll call the sexton. We’ll ask for after-hours. Public safety test.”
“Wear hearing protection,” Avery says. “Document temperature, humidity, and wind state. Seiche days will skew low-frequency decay.”
“It’s a seiche morning right now,” I say. The vent breath hisses in my mic. “The lake’s in a mood.”
“Then avoid testing today,” Avery says. “But record the noise floor around the tower; you’ll thank yourself later.”
The nurse lifts a corner of the blanket and checks Lydia’s toes with gentle taps. My mother flinches and gives a sleepy sigh that sounds like my name melting. The monitor keeps a steady green. I lower my voice. “Thank you,” I tell Avery. “Send the protocol. We’ll push a public log of what we do.”
“One last thing,” Avery says. “The copycat—that burner account? They might try to flood you with fake IRs or doctored sweeps. Post your raw files and hashes. Timestamp. Force them to match you.”
“I like a trap that uses truth,” Ruth says.
“Truth with checksum,” I say, and Avery’s camera shakes with a quick laugh.
We end the call. The Zoom goodbye sounds like a toy bell dropped in a sink. I close the laptop and lean my forehead to the cold aluminum tray, letting the metal pull heat and nerves from my skin. In the silence, I hear what I came for: not comfort, but clarity.
“Field run tonight?” Ruth asks from the phone, still on the tray, still listening like a partner with her hand on the rope.
“Not with the seiche this high,” I say. “Tomorrow night. We’ll start with balloon pops and a sweep. Then we walk the steps and count to three.”
“Copy,” she says. “I’ll get legal words that mean please don’t arrest us for scaring pigeons.”
“And I’ll write the preface for the episode,” I say. “No scream, no sexed-up cuts. Just the science and the reason we’re doing it. Stories save or stories exploit. We show our math.”
“We will,” she says. “How’s Lydia?”
I look at my mother. Her mouth is soft, the stubborn line smoothed into grace by sleep and IV hum. “Holding,” I say. “The bell’s not taking her.”
“I’ll swing by with earplugs at noon,” Ruth says. “Text me Avery’s protocol. Rest your eyes.”
The call drops. The room breathes. I open the laptop one more time and scrub the cursor to the last seam Avery flagged. The notch at nine-oh-five hertz winks, then disguises itself in the noise. I label it SEAM? and place a marker named COUNTDOWN beside it. I feel the locket’s edge against my sternum, a coin struck wrong that still buys bread.
Outside, the lake coughs a dull note through the vent. One off-time ring rides it, flat and distant, like a prank or a warning. I raise my headphones to one ear and listen, counting under my breath: “One. Two. Three.”
The waveform on my screen twitches in a spike I don’t expect.
I stop breathing and hit record.