Chapter 5 The Tape Recorder

Gwen sat cross-legged on the living room floor, the tape recorder on the coffee table in front of her, a notepad spread open beside it, the same sequence of five tones scrawled in six different ways.

Low. High. Low. Low. High.

She'd written them as pitch marks, as musical notes (best guesses-her ear was average), as Morse code approximations, and even as soundwave shapes. None of it made sense.

The apartment was a mess now. Blankets balled up in corners. Unwashed dishes in the sink. Her coat draped over a lamp like a forgotten person. She barely noticed.

She rewound the tape again.

Click. Hiss.

"Gwen."

"You're close. Don't stop."

Tone. Tone. Tone. Tone. Tone.

She hit PAUSE, scribbled more notes, then REWIND.

Play.

Again.

The sounds looped in her head now-not just the voice, but the pattern. The pulse of it. It felt deliberate, structured. Not static. Not distortion. More like... a message. A lock, maybe. A key. Something reaching through, trying to connect the dots for her.

She tapped the rhythm on the table with her knuckles. Hummed it softly.

Low. High. Low. Low. High.

She flipped through an old phone manual, long out of date, its pages yellowed and curling. Nothing matched the tone pattern. Not busy signals. Not fax machine chirps. Not any test tones she could find.

She even checked the old modem sounds, out of desperation-the shrieking handshakes of dial-up. Still nothing.

On the floor beside her, her notebook pages had become an abstract mess-scribbles, arrows, timelines, and fragments of memory.

In one corner, she'd written:

"What if the message isn't what she's saying but how she's saying it?"

And below that, smaller:

"Or where it's coming from."

She hit PLAY again.

Let it run.

Let it crawl under her skin.

The apartment buzzed softly in its own language-the fridge, the heater, the distant groan of old pipes behind the wall. But none of it reached her.

She pressed her hands to her ears. Not to block the sound-just to trap it.

To keep it from leaking out.

She mouthed the words along with the tape. "Gwen. You're close. Don't stop."

Then: the tones.

They didn't sound random anymore.

They sounded like coordinates.

The first time Gwen said Lila's name aloud into the recorder, it felt stupid. Self-conscious. Like playacting a séance with no one else in the room.

She pressed RECORD anyway.

Held the mic close.

"Lila," she said.

Then again, louder: "Lila, can you hear me?"

She waited ten seconds.

Silence.

She rewound and hit play.

Her own voice filled the room, stripped of feeling in its repetition.

"Lila. Lila, can you hear me?"

Then-the faintest click.

Almost like someone shifting their weight near the microphone.

She played it again.

It was there.

A microsecond of movement. Subtle. Intentional.

That was all it took.

Gwen began setting up "tests."

She played the five-tone signal through her old portable speaker, looping it three times. She stood in the kitchen while it echoed from the living room like some forgotten radio station trying to reach shore.

She tried different questions.

"Where are you?"

"What do you want?"

"Are you Lila?"

Each one was recorded.

Each one played back.

At first, nothing. No voice. No clicks.

But then, during the third playback, she heard it.

Not words.

A breath.

Between the two loops of tones. Barely audible, but there.

Someone exhaling close to the mic.

Not her.

She rewound it five times to be sure.

Not a tape glitch. Not her own breathing.

Something else.

Gwen paced the apartment now with the recorder in hand, stopping in doorways and speaking Lila's name in different rooms. She paused near mirrors, by the kitchen sink, and in the hallway where light didn't quite reach.

The neighbors banged on the ceiling once-she had no idea what time it was-but she barely noticed.

Each time she played the recordings back, new layers emerged:

Faint tapping.

Distant tones.

A whisper just behind her words that sounded like it was thinking.

Once, she caught herself responding before the voice finished playing.

She hadn't meant to.

She didn't even realize what she'd said.

But on the tape, her voice overlapped with the one playing back.

Like she already knew what it was going to say.

The tape recorder sat on her nightstand, its red light like a lone eye in the dark.

Gwen lay on her side, staring at it, too tired to think but too wired to fall under. Her bedroom was quiet-unnaturally so. No passing cars. No distant sirens. Even the ticking of the clock felt too loud.

She had set the recorder to record just after midnight. Full battery. New tape. The plan was simple: leave it running while she slept. Let it capture whatever the apartment gave her.

If anything.

She lay there, blankets pulled up to her chin, body curled tight.

"Just noise," she whispered aloud to herself. "It's just noise."

She closed her eyes.

Sleep came in waves. Uneven. Shallow. She drifted, surfaced, and drifted again. A few dreams flickered across her mind-none she could remember. Only the feeling they left: like walking into a room and forgetting why you came.

And then-

She was awake.

Eyes wide.

No dream.

No sound.

Just a pressure in the room. Heavy. As if someone had just stood up beside the bed but hadn't moved yet.

The clock read 3:33 a.m.

Of course it did.

Gwen didn't sit up.

She just listened.

The red light still blinked on the recorder.

Steady.

Alive.

The longer she stayed awake, the more sure she became of two things:

One-there was no sound, not even the heater.

Two-something had been there. For a moment. And left.

She couldn't say how she knew.

Only that the air felt disturbed. Like breath on the back of her neck that had already evaporated.

She fell back asleep sometime before dawn. Not gently, not peacefully-more like collapsing under weight.

The morning was pale and damp. Gwen woke to light bleeding through the blinds like fog through cracked windows. Her eyes felt grainy. Her mouth was dry.

She turned toward the nightstand.

The recorder was still there.

Still recording.

Still warm.

She stared at the red light, blinking slowly-once every few seconds-like it had never stopped watching her. She reached for it, her hand slow and careful, like it might bite.

She pressed STOP.

The click echoed too loudly in the room.

Gwen sat up, unspooled her earbuds, and plugged them into the recorder. She didn't want the sound in the room. Not yet. It had to be private. Controlled.

She rewound.

Then hit PLAY.

For the first ten minutes: nothing. Just soft room tone. The faint rustle of sheets as she shifted in sleep. Once, a low sigh. Hers.

Then-at the seventeen-minute mark-it changed.

There was a pause in the sound.

Then breathing.

Two breathing patterns.

One soft and quick hers.

The other is slower. Deeper. Not right.

Gwen paused the tape. Her fingers were cold now.

She backed up. Played it again.

Yes.

It was there.

A second person, breathing next to her bed.

No movement. No footsteps. Just breathing.

Then-a sound so faint she almost missed it:

A finger brushing the microphone.

Soft, dry skin dragging lightly across the recorder's grill. Not an accident. Not background noise.

A presence.

Gwen covered her mouth.

Her eyes welled but didn't spill. Her stomach twisted in slow revolutions.

She played the last two minutes.

The breathing stayed. Constant. Steady.

And then, with the tape nearly out:

A voice.

Not Lila's.

Older. Strained.

A whisper, close enough to taste:

"Don't let her find me."

Click.

The tape ran out.

She sat still for a long time.

The recorder lay on the blanket beside her, silent now, but it might as well have been humming. It felt alive. Not in the poetic sense. Not metaphor. Alive.

Gwen reached out slowly and unplugged her earbuds.

She pressed her palms flat against her knees, grounding herself. The voice echoed in her mind-not the words, but the tone.

"Don't let her find me."

Not a threat.

A warning.

But from who? And about who?

She had assumed every message, every click and whisper, and every breathing pause came from Lila. From a version of her. A trace. A memory, maybe, echoing across whatever veil separated this world from wherever she'd gone.

But this voice?

This wasn't Lila.

It had weight. Roughness. Like it had been dragged through dirt before it reached her ears.

And it was afraid.

Not of Gwen.

Of Lila.

She glanced at the mirror hanging above the dresser-just a quick glance-but it was enough to see her reflection was still.

Too still.

Her own eyes were wide. Alert.

But behind them... something watched back.

She stood, yanked her blanket from the bed, and tossed it over the mirror in one motion, her pulse racing. The blanket slipped once-she caught it and pinned it in place with shaking fingers.

Then the apartment was quiet again.

Still.

Too still.

She looked down at the recorder. Her voice had spoken into it. Her breath had filled it.

But now she wasn't sure which parts were hers anymore.

Or whichever parts ever had been.

She reached for her journal and wrote in quick, tight strokes:

There's someone else here.

Not Lila. Someone is hiding.

Afraid of her.

Why would anyone be afraid of Lila?

She stared at the last line, then added:

Unless she's not the one reaching out.

Unless she's the one pulling me in.