The Intruders. Michael Marshall

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СКАЧАТЬ Them a year before. He still wasn’t sure who They were. He’d managed to fix the damage they’d tried to cause before it became insuperable, but still felt he had to leave town. He’d kept moving ever since, leaving behind a job on a small local newspaper and the few people he had called friends. Joining the undertow. It was better that way.

      Jones didn’t know about this, of course. He was referring instead to the fact that every email you send, every message you post, every file you download, is logged on a server somewhere. Machines see nothing, understand less; but their memories are perfect. There is no anonymity on the internet, and sooner or later a lot of solid citizens were going to discover emails to lovers were not private, nor hours spent bathed in the light of other people’s nakedness. That people were watching you, all the time. That the web was not some huge sandpit. It was quicksand. It could swallow you up.

      ‘So how come Hanley?’ the man asked, looking around. A couple in the next booth were conducting a vague, whispered fight, bitter sentences that bore no relevance to what the other had just said. ‘I know Wisconsin, some. Never even heard of this town.’

      ‘It’s where I am right now,’ Oz said. ‘That’s all. How did you get my email address?’

      ‘Heard your podcast. Made us want to talk to you. Did a little digging, took a chance. No big deal.’

      Oz nodded. Once upon a time he had a little late night radio show, back east. That stopped when he left town, of course. But in the last couple of months he’d started recording snippets onto his laptop, uploading them onto the web, started spreading the word again. There were others like him, doing the same thing. ‘It concerns me that you were able to find my email address.’

      ‘Should worry you even more if I couldn’t. Otherwise I’d just be an amateur, right?’

      ‘And what did you want to say to me?’

      ‘You first,’ Jones said. ‘What you said in the ’cast was pretty oblique. I threw you a couple bones in my email, hinted what we know. Let’s hear you talk now.’

      Oz had thought about ways of communicating the bottom line while remaining circumspect. He took a sip of his beer, then set it back on the table and looked the man in the eye.

      ‘The Neanderthals had flutes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

      ‘To play tunes,’ the man shrugged.

      ‘That just rephrases the question. Why did they believe it important to be able to replicate certain sounds, when just getting enough to eat was hard labour?’

      ‘Why indeed.’

      ‘Because sound is important in ways we’ve forgotten. For millions of years it couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks – how come we need thousands of words?’

      ‘Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.’

      ‘But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.’

      ‘Which was?’

      ‘Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.’

      The man had begun to smile faintly.

      ‘Also why, when you look at European stone age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. Newgrange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself – the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.’

      ‘Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?’

      ‘Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalogue of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why – if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now centre on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?’

      ‘Tell me,’ Jones said, quietly.

      ‘Because the walls of Jericho story is not about sound breaking down literal walls, but figurative ones,’ Oz said. ‘The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things too.’

      The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. ‘I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.’

      Oz sat back. ‘That enough?’

      ‘For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?’

      ‘Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.’

      ‘WeirdCon?’

      ‘Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We emailed once in a while, I shared my research on pre-historical parallels with him. Then nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.’

      ‘Probably he’s fine,’ the man said. ‘People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?’

      ‘Hell no. Always private.’

      ‘You never email anyone else about it yourself?’

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘Never know when They might be listening, right?’

      This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Amongst people trying to find the truth, the concept of ‘Them’ was complicated. You knew they were out there, of course – it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world – but you understood that talking about Them made you sound like a kook. So you put inverted commas around it. Someone said Them with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however … chances were the guy was okay.

      ‘Isn’t that the truth,’ Oz said, playing along. ‘You just never know. Even if They don’t actually exist.’

      The man smiled. ‘I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.’

      ‘Me too,’ Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.

      ‘We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,’ Jones said, and left.

      Oz watched the man get back in his car, drive out of the lot and take the turn towards the freeway. Then he slowly finished his beer. He did not hurry, for once. He was feeling almost as if he was just sitting in a bar, rather than hiding there. СКАЧАТЬ