The ping snaps me upright before the clock finishes switching to 12:03. My phone face-down on the mixing desk becomes a lighthouse in miniature, flashing its white square through my studio’s amber lamp. My chair wheels click two teeth toward the screen. I breathe once, mouth full of old coffee and lake damp.
The DM preview is a wave icon and a single hashtag: #SecondLie.
“No,” I say to the empty room, which is only brave because nobody answers. I thumb the message open anyway.
The account name is noise—consonants that don’t cooperate—created today, zero followers, zero posts. The profile picture is a bell, but not St. Brigid’s bell, just clip art polished by a free vector site into virtue. The message contains an audio file, eight seconds. The caption reads: for your next episode, MARA.
My name in uppercase drains the room of air. I reach for the headphones automatically, the way I would reach for a railing on the tower stairs. I let the pads swallow my ears. My thumb hovers over the triangle.
Outside, the lake flexes, a small seiche bumping the dock rope so lightly it clicks the cleat. The sound finds the open window and sits with me. I press play.
“Ma—” the voice begins, and then the scream eats it, a thin ribbon of metal ripping in my head. But this scream isn’t mine. It’s not Celia’s, either; it’s from the locket, surgically lifted. I hear the bell’s decay riding on its back, but the overtones have been stretched and glued wrong, like a hymn hummed through a fan. The voice resumes at the tail: “—ra.”
My name, spliced around a bell and a girl. The room tilts and rights itself. I restart the file, count frames in my skull. Four seconds of bell bloom, one second of scream, a smear, a breath, my name. There’s a little click after, the kind of digital stitch that hides only if you want to be fooled.
“Okay,” I say, to the desk, to the dim. “Okay.”
The smell of wet rope follows a draft across the floor and I stand up to close the window, because tonight I don’t want sound traveling in the wrong direction. When the latch seats, I watch my reflection climb onto the glass and pretend to be taller. The bell on my shelf—the flea-market one that only rings sweet on its second try—sits in the light like a dare.
I don’t call sponsors. I call Ruth.
She answers on the third ring with her voice already awake. “You didn’t sleep either,” she says, which is our version of hello.
“I got a DM,” I say. “Burner account. Eight seconds. It uses the locket scream, and my name. Hashtag Second Lie.”
Her breath scuffs the receiver, a quick audit. “You listen on speakers or cans?”
“Headphones. Closed-back. No speakers, no windows.”
“Good. Don’t forward it,” she says. “Don’t upload it. Screenshots first, airplane mode second. We’re going to preserve without distributing. You know the drill, but I’m going to say it so we can both sleep later.”
“Say it,” I tell her, and I slide to the desk and start moving with her cadence.
“Screenshot the DM thread with the header bar showing the handle, time, battery, carrier. Get the profile page. Get the account creation date if the platform shows it. Then screen record the phone as you scroll, but don’t tap the audio file yet.” Her voice is low and dry, the Pine Street fluorescents somehow in it, the cheap coffee they drink in rooms where nobody’s grief gets sugar.
I obey. The phone shakes a little in my hand, so I brace my elbows on the desk gutter. “Profile captured,” I say. “Thread captured.”
“Now download the audio to a clean folder,” she says. “Don’t rename it. Note the exact time. Write the hash to your notebook after. You still have that external SSD that looks like a candy bar?”
I glance at the matte-black drive near the recorder. “I do.”
“Good. When it’s saved, make two copies: one to the SSD, one to your cloud with versioning. Then turn on your laptop and grab the headers from the platform’s web interface if you can. Sometimes they’re stingy. Either way, write a contemporaneous chain-of-custody note—ink, date, time, what you did, what you didn’t do. Paper makes lawyers sit down.”
“Paper makes me breathe,” I say. The pen in my hand agrees. The nib scratches like small rain.
“And Mara?” Ruth says, softer now. “Don’t post it. Not one second. Not one spectrogram. That’s what they want. You feed the stray cat once, it moves in.”
I swallow. The urge to blast the clip, to crowdsource the menace into something crowd-manageable, sizzles behind my ribs. The Facebook swap groups would shred the taste of it for sport and call it moral. Sponsors would pretend to worry and secretly smile at the engagement. My show would sprout metrics I could spend in apologies later.
“I won’t post the audio,” I say. “I’ll post something measured. A line that says I’m not intimidated and also not irresponsible.”
“Make it boring,” she says, and I can hear her smile without the part of her face that used to smile easily. “Boring is a shield. We’ll ask the platform to preserve logs. We’ll log this with the Annex in the morning, even if it only buys us a manila folder and a raised eyebrow.”
I open a new text file and type the chain entry like a confession:
00:14 a.m. Received DM from account @cr4— (full handle in screenshots). Audio file 00:08. Downloaded at 00:16 to /SecondLives/Case_Brighton/Incoming/ with no rename. SHA-256: [blank to be filled]. Saved redundant copies. No distribution. No edits.
“I’m going to play it once more to get a clean spectro image,” I say. “Not to share. For my ears.”
“Do it on the offline machine,” Ruth says. “Blue light off, Wi-Fi off, camera taped. Then sleep.”
“You sleep,” I say.
“I’ll sleep when the sun shames me,” she says, and hangs up before I can thank her, because she knows that thanks feels like using.
I pull the offline laptop from its case and wake it like a careful parent. No network. No sync. I drag the file across with my drive like it’s contagious—and it is. The spectrogram populates in blues and oranges, the harmonics painting their ladder. The bell’s partials look familiar until they don’t; the third and fifth bloom too neatly, then wobble with a tremolo that wasn’t in St. Brigid’s. There’s an edit at 00:04 that cuts a room tail I know like my own voice.
“You’re watching me,” I say to the clip, which has the decency not to answer. I zoom into the front edge where the voice starts—Ma—and I see the envelope jump. Whoever sent this dragged a syllable to the edge like a chair scraping a floor. I hear a room underneath the room: not church wood, not tower stone. Carpet. The hiss of an HVAC vent. The faintest ghost of a notification I almost recognize and then don’t.
Micro-hook: I print the spectro image to a PDF and add it to the folder with a name that won’t embarrass me in court later. Do not name files like curses, I tell my hands.
I run the hash, write the long, ugly number in my notebook. The ink blot flares when my hand hesitates on the last byte. I copy it to the Post-it that will ride the SSD into a bag I only carry when I’m trying to look like a person with a plan. I label the bag too, because future me forgets what present me knew.
Outside, the dock light skitters across the water again, the seiche lifting. I can smell diesel from a late tow past the breakwater, cloves from someone’s porch smoke, and the flat metal breath of wet brass from the locket I left face-down on felt, like it doesn’t want to watch.
I open my show account and draft the response. My fingers want to be dramatic; Everett’s voice in the club wants me to be careful; Lydia’s album wants me to be worthy.
“Make it boring,” I whisper, and I type:
Statement: We’ve received a manipulated audio message from an anonymous account attempting to mimic evidence in an ongoing inquiry. We are preserving materials and will not amplify harassment. If you have firsthand information relevant to events near St. Brigid’s in 2008, please use the tipline on our site or contact the Pine Street Annex. We remain committed to careful reporting.
I add nothing more. No hashtags. No winks. I schedule it to post at 08:00 so it lands when people are still kind. I set a platform request to preserve logs. I report the burner account not because I think it will vanish, but because paper likes stamps.
My phone vibrates against the console a second time.
I don’t touch it. Not yet. I flip to my notebook and add a line: 00:48 a.m. Second notification received; unopened pending capture.
I talk to the room because it’s the only witness I trust. “They wanted me awake,” I say. “So I’m awake.” My voice sounds like I borrowed it from a woman who doesn’t leave dishes in the sink.
I capture the lock screen, then the notification shade, then the world as it is before I open messages and let it be otherwise. The second DM is just text: you’re editing a dead girl. you like that?
I breathe once, slow, until the air thickens with last-day-of-festival coffee and seat foam from church pews and a bell rope’s hemp, a scent Ruth taught me to hear with my nose. I take screenshots. I don’t answer.
The third ping tugs my attention like a hook. The burner posts publicly for the first time, tagging my show. The caption reads: listen or be counted and a single number: 3. The audio clip is the same eight seconds, slapped onto a blank video with a clip-art bell fade-in. The hashtag #SecondLie hangs there like string, waiting for hands.
I text Ruth: They posted it. Public tag. “3.”
Her reply comes fast. Then we keep counting our steps, not theirs. Don’t share it. 08:00 stands. Lock your windows. Leave one lamp on. Sleep next to your recorder if you have to.
“Copy,” I say, and I put the recorder on the nightstand like a security blanket made of red light. I check the window latch again, knowing latches are polite lies that make people feel safe.
I shut off the desk lamp. The studio folds into a softer black, the Power LED constellations pinning themselves in place. The tower’s silhouette is a suggestion in the glass. Pigeons will be sleeping in their triangular beds behind the clock face. I picture the bell rope downstairs, looped and resting, baptized by too many palms to remember which ones meant it.
Micro-hook: a sound threads the night and unthreads me. One bell strike rolls across the water and reaches my closed window late, a slow coin tossed on felt. The seiche catches the tail and carries it farther than usual, then hands it back, and for a second I hear my name in it where there isn’t one.
I lie down without undressing and tap the locket once with one finger, a knock on a door that doesn’t open. “We’re not feeding you,” I tell the dark. “We’re following you.”
The phone vibrates again. I don’t look. I write the time in my notebook with the tip of my pen just touching the page so later I can decode my own refusal. I breathe through my nose until diesel thins to cold.
The lake slaps once, hard, and the room answers with my lamp’s faint hum.
I don’t know whose hands spliced that scream around my name. I do know they’re listening. I set the recorder to catch the silence, because silence here is never empty. It holds breath. It holds footsteps that aren’t stepping. It holds a number waiting to decide if it climbs.
I close my eyes and let the red light of the recorder paint my lids. I whisper the boring sentence Ruth asked for until it turns into armor. Then I listen to the house hold itself together, and to the town outside practicing, in the dark, the sound it makes when it wants me quiet.