Blasts from the Past: Excerpts.
From "Dead Air - Radio From Beyond the Grave"
Introduction
It was, I believe, March of 2005 when I decided to take a drive and explore the nearby town of Leeds. As dusk slid into night, I got into my car, hooked up the iPod, and drove north, towards Leeds and Williamsburg. At some point I took a left off of Route 9 and found myself on a narrow road in deep, dark woods. I reached to shut the music off, when suddenly the tape adapter ejected on its own.
I pushed the tape back in, but it ejected once more. Then I heard...well, it's hard to describe what I heard. The glowing green radio dial read 87.1 which is, I think, not even actually on the FM band. There was a low, resonant voice. It was sort of...welcoming. It said things as I drove. I don't think I believed what the voice told me. And I know I'd never do what the voice asked of me. And yet, it was hard to stop listening. And at length I caught myself nodding--and answering, yes...I will...talking back to the radio in my car at night. Madness.
A cursory Internet search did turn up a livejournal page, however: (http://benstockton.livejournal.com/). It appeared to consist of transcripts of the station's features, along with unsettling pictures. It must be happenstance that the very first entry coincided with the exact point my front tires crossed over the town line and into Leeds--the very moment the tape adapter ejected itself. How I came to be the sole editor and writer for the site is, well, complicated--sometimes I wonder: am I Ben? Is Ben me? Have I been occupied, like some seedy motel room of flesh, blood, and ganglia? And how dangerous is the dark nature of my tenant?
At any rate, when I got home, I looked long and hard in the mirror. Suddenly I felt a cold sensation on my cheek, and saw a thin trickle of blood run down my face and into the sink. I thought I smelled sour apples, and that's the last thing I remembered until the following morning.
What follows in these pages is not altogether fiction, but I can't quite bring myself to call it nonfiction. You could call it...rumors. Like the rumor of the man who'd been born with his brain attached to the outside of his head. I heard he roams the woods around Look Park near Leeds. I heard that he killed a bear with his hands and teeth. I heard him crying one October day at dusk as I was hurrying along a path that was rumored to lead to a secret transmitter in the woods.
I heard it on WXXT.
Matthew M. Bartlett, March 2008
From the Forward: "Black Magic," he told me: 13 Ways to Begin an Essay About WXXT, the last Radio Station on Earth" by Tom Breen
1. No one was shocked by Matt Bartlett's disappearance. In a way it was a relief, as awful as that sounds. We had become used to the shocking things he said in casual conversation now, but even the most hardened among us was unnerved by the folded scraps of paper he would bring out with trembling hands, the notes he had taken from the previous night's broadcast. When the police found his car, the doors flung open on the banks of the Connecticut and the seats covered with moss, none of us even asked what the radio was playing. I remember thinking it would have been better if he had just drowned, but knowing better.
2. WXXT is not a radio station. It does not exist. Agents of the state and federal governments have devoted a significant amount of resources over a period of years to investigating these persistent rumors. After all, the airwaves are owned by the people, and the people's agent is the government. A radio station has to pay fees, pass tests, maintain paperwork. There are licenses and renewals and quotas and goals. A radio station operating without any of these would be illegal. Unseemly. There have been reports compiled. They exist in file cabinets in Springfield and Boston and Washington, D.C. The public is not permitted to see them.
10. Old fabric, mostly. Crinoline and tulle and taffeta, and I don't know what else. Brown from mold, gray from age, black from it's better not to know. Makes you think of corsets and high starched collars. Victorian mourning jewelry, too - lots of things with locks of hair, and elaborate frames for pictures of dead infants, stiffly posed in formal clothes. Some ugly furniture. Bottles of powders and unguents and things of that nature. A few oddly shaped jugs, something that might have been a child's doll, a post card showing an innocuous street scene and the words "I waitet, but you never came." And - umbrellas. Piles and piles of umbrellas, mostly black. Enough umbrellas for an army. How often does it rain here?, you think.
12. I see him all the time in diners. Just outside my peripheral vision, wearing his suit. I don't even look anymore, because I know he'll disappear. It's okay; I'll see him again, at the liquor store or the gas station or the soft verge on the road off Route 9 where they found the farmer's kid, blue and raving. I'll see him in that room in my apartment where I haven't dared to go since that last awful night with her. I'll see him in the woods across the street, waiting for me, as I wait for him. It won't be long before I hear the soft crunch of boots on gravel outside my apartment and then, at last, I'll have all my questions answered. Before they stopped talking to me, my friends said I should move away. From what?, I asked. To what?
Introduction
It was, I believe, March of 2005 when I decided to take a drive and explore the nearby town of Leeds. As dusk slid into night, I got into my car, hooked up the iPod, and drove north, towards Leeds and Williamsburg. At some point I took a left off of Route 9 and found myself on a narrow road in deep, dark woods. I reached to shut the music off, when suddenly the tape adapter ejected on its own.
I pushed the tape back in, but it ejected once more. Then I heard...well, it's hard to describe what I heard. The glowing green radio dial read 87.1 which is, I think, not even actually on the FM band. There was a low, resonant voice. It was sort of...welcoming. It said things as I drove. I don't think I believed what the voice told me. And I know I'd never do what the voice asked of me. And yet, it was hard to stop listening. And at length I caught myself nodding--and answering, yes...I will...talking back to the radio in my car at night. Madness.
A cursory Internet search did turn up a livejournal page, however: (http://benstockton.livejournal.com/). It appeared to consist of transcripts of the station's features, along with unsettling pictures. It must be happenstance that the very first entry coincided with the exact point my front tires crossed over the town line and into Leeds--the very moment the tape adapter ejected itself. How I came to be the sole editor and writer for the site is, well, complicated--sometimes I wonder: am I Ben? Is Ben me? Have I been occupied, like some seedy motel room of flesh, blood, and ganglia? And how dangerous is the dark nature of my tenant?
At any rate, when I got home, I looked long and hard in the mirror. Suddenly I felt a cold sensation on my cheek, and saw a thin trickle of blood run down my face and into the sink. I thought I smelled sour apples, and that's the last thing I remembered until the following morning.
What follows in these pages is not altogether fiction, but I can't quite bring myself to call it nonfiction. You could call it...rumors. Like the rumor of the man who'd been born with his brain attached to the outside of his head. I heard he roams the woods around Look Park near Leeds. I heard that he killed a bear with his hands and teeth. I heard him crying one October day at dusk as I was hurrying along a path that was rumored to lead to a secret transmitter in the woods.
I heard it on WXXT.
Matthew M. Bartlett, March 2008
From the Forward: "Black Magic," he told me: 13 Ways to Begin an Essay About WXXT, the last Radio Station on Earth" by Tom Breen
1. No one was shocked by Matt Bartlett's disappearance. In a way it was a relief, as awful as that sounds. We had become used to the shocking things he said in casual conversation now, but even the most hardened among us was unnerved by the folded scraps of paper he would bring out with trembling hands, the notes he had taken from the previous night's broadcast. When the police found his car, the doors flung open on the banks of the Connecticut and the seats covered with moss, none of us even asked what the radio was playing. I remember thinking it would have been better if he had just drowned, but knowing better.
2. WXXT is not a radio station. It does not exist. Agents of the state and federal governments have devoted a significant amount of resources over a period of years to investigating these persistent rumors. After all, the airwaves are owned by the people, and the people's agent is the government. A radio station has to pay fees, pass tests, maintain paperwork. There are licenses and renewals and quotas and goals. A radio station operating without any of these would be illegal. Unseemly. There have been reports compiled. They exist in file cabinets in Springfield and Boston and Washington, D.C. The public is not permitted to see them.
10. Old fabric, mostly. Crinoline and tulle and taffeta, and I don't know what else. Brown from mold, gray from age, black from it's better not to know. Makes you think of corsets and high starched collars. Victorian mourning jewelry, too - lots of things with locks of hair, and elaborate frames for pictures of dead infants, stiffly posed in formal clothes. Some ugly furniture. Bottles of powders and unguents and things of that nature. A few oddly shaped jugs, something that might have been a child's doll, a post card showing an innocuous street scene and the words "I waitet, but you never came." And - umbrellas. Piles and piles of umbrellas, mostly black. Enough umbrellas for an army. How often does it rain here?, you think.
12. I see him all the time in diners. Just outside my peripheral vision, wearing his suit. I don't even look anymore, because I know he'll disappear. It's okay; I'll see him again, at the liquor store or the gas station or the soft verge on the road off Route 9 where they found the farmer's kid, blue and raving. I'll see him in that room in my apartment where I haven't dared to go since that last awful night with her. I'll see him in the woods across the street, waiting for me, as I wait for him. It won't be long before I hear the soft crunch of boots on gravel outside my apartment and then, at last, I'll have all my questions answered. Before they stopped talking to me, my friends said I should move away. From what?, I asked. To what?