The telephone rang from the office at the end of the corridor.
Its sound had the flat, metallic attack of an old desk instrument, but the intervals were wrong. Four rings. Three. A pause. Four again.
I kept the blank card clenched in my left hand and held the tone generator against my chest with the other. The paper had cooled. A damp crescent marked my palm where the ink from the card had transferred to my skin, though the card itself remained blank.
Rachel reached the corridor behind me. Declan followed with one hand pressed to his ear.
“Where is it?” she asked.
I pointed toward the office.
The telephone rang again. Its sound travelled through the walls before reaching us, as if the instrument stood in several rooms at once.
Declan looked back at the workshop entrance. The concrete floor beyond it had begun to ripple. Water moved beneath the surface in long, dark lines, gathering around the drains and running uphill toward the corridor.
“We leave,” he said.
“We need to know where the line goes.”
“We know where it goes. Away from here.”
The office door stood open. A green-shaded lamp burned on the desk beside the telephone. The rest of the room was empty except for a filing cabinet, a wall clock, and a second handset mounted beneath the window. Both instruments rang together.
I approached the desk and set the tone generator beside the telephone. Its display remained dark. The casing vibrated with a narrow, fast oscillation that I could feel in my fingertips.
Rachel caught my sleeve. “You said choosing where it hears you was the point.”
“I chose the depot.”
“And now?”
I looked at the receiver. The bell struck again. Beneath the audible ring, the line carried a repeating sequence of lower tones. I recognized the spacing from the stone circle, though the frequencies had shifted beyond the range of the generator’s damaged speaker. The route had found another junction. The telephone was only its audible edge.
“I need one sample,” I said.
Declan laughed once, without humour. “You’ve had samples.”
“This could tell us whether the call is coming from the depot or going somewhere else.”
Rachel’s grip tightened. “Then take it from the wire.”
The wall-mounted handset had a cable disappearing into plaster. I pulled the cover from its terminal box and exposed four cloth-wrapped conductors. They were wet. A thin stream ran from the red wire and collected on the floor beneath it.
Next
Mark is driving toward Carrigan with the route book showing villages beyond it, while the Shepherd has begun speaking through the van before they even arrive.
I connected the generator’s input lead to the wire.
The ring stopped.
For a moment, the office held only the ticking clock and the movement of water in the walls. Then the tone generator’s speaker produced a burst of static. Wind. A vehicle passing over loose gravel. Someone breathing close to a mouthpiece.
A woman spoke.
“County road service.”
Her voice was ordinary and tired. The words carried the room tone of a small office: paper shifting, a fluorescent tube buzzing overhead, a radiator knocking somewhere behind her.
“Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me?”
I glanced at Rachel. She mouthed, Don’t answer.
The line clicked. A second voice entered beneath the woman’s, perfectly timed and pitched several semitones lower.
“County road service.”
It was my voice.
I felt the sound in my jaw before I heard it through the speaker. The route had retained more than my purpose. It was placing my voice beside hers, testing the connection between the depot and the place on the other end.
The woman said, “Is this about the bridge closure?”
A file drawer slid open behind me.
Inside lay a stack of typed forms, all damp along their upper edges. The top sheet bore a map grid and a name I did not recognize: CARRIGAN, WEST PARISH. Beneath it, in red pencil, someone had written VISITOR EXPECTED.
Rachel saw the page over my shoulder. “Mark.”
“I know.”
The tone generator gave a hard electrical pop. The woman on the line gasped.
“Who is this?” she asked.
Her voice had moved closer. I could hear the intake of her breath through the instrument, along with a chair leg scraping across a floor.
I picked up the receiver.
The plastic was warm from use.
“Don’t give your name,” Rachel said.
I held the handset to my ear. The line carried no dial tone. It carried wind moving through grass and, underneath it, the distant compression of many voices repeating the four-three pattern.
“County depot,” I said.
The woman answered immediately. “We’ve been trying to reach you.”
She sounded relieved.
Behind her, a man asked, “Has the driver come back?”
“No,” she said. “I told you, the road is empty.”
The question passed through the line and returned in Declan’s voice.
“Has the driver come back?”
Declan took a step away from the desk. His face had gone grey.
The woman said, “There’s a car outside the parish office. It’s been running since dusk.”
The route fed the sentence into the office loudspeaker above us. The depot repeated it in Rachel’s voice, then mine.
There’s a car outside the parish office.
Water burst through the wall behind the filing cabinet. The pipe struck the plaster from within, once, twice, then settled into a steady knocking. Four. Three.
I lowered the receiver. “How far is Carrigan?”
Rachel stared at me. “You’re asking it?”
“I’m asking her.”
The woman on the line said, “Who is this?”
I kept my mouth closed.
The receiver filled with a low rush. The woman’s room tone stretched until individual sounds separated: the radiator, the fluorescent ballast, the chair, her breathing. Then I heard a fourth sound beneath them. A vehicle idling outside. Its engine note rose and fell in a slow cycle, as if someone were pressing the accelerator without moving the car.
The Shepherd had reached Carrigan through the telephone. It had given the village a waiting vehicle and the office a reason to call the depot. The named destination was already functioning as a lure.
Rachel pulled the receiver from my hand and slammed it onto the cradle.
The ringing resumed at once.
She struck the instrument again. The bell stopped, but the sound continued from the tone generator, which had begun reproducing the woman’s voice.
“Who is this?” it said.
The blank card heated in my fist.
I opened my fingers. New marks had appeared on its surface—not ink, but impressions pressed into the fibres from the underside. Letters rose as pale ridges.
CARRIGAN.
Below it, a second line formed.
VISITOR EXPECTED.
Declan pushed past us toward the workshop. “I’m getting out.”
The corridor lights went dark behind him. The depot’s main doors rolled upward with a grinding shudder, exposing the yard and the road beyond. Fog poured through the opening, carrying the smell of wet earth and hot engine oil.
A vehicle waited beside the fuel island.
It was an old county van with no markings, its headlights on and its driver’s door open. The engine idled. Water streamed from its roof though no rain fell in the yard.
Declan stopped.
The van’s radio clicked on.
“Declan Sloane,” it said in the woman’s voice. “County road service.”
He looked at me. “It knows my name.”
“It already had it.”
“That’s meant to make me feel better?”
Rachel moved between him and the van. “We take the road on foot.”
The yard beyond the gate had changed. The fence continued farther than the depot grounds allowed, running along a road that had not been there when we arrived. A white sign stood at its edge. The lettering was blurred by fog, but the final word was clear.
CARRIGAN.
The road pointed east.
The blank card flexed in my hand. I could hear a faint crackling from its fibres, like a tiny recording being erased and made again.
“We can’t go that way,” I said.
Declan stared at the sign. “Then where?”
Behind us, the office telephone began ringing again. This time the pattern had changed. Four rings. Three. A pause. Then a fourth ring that came from outside the depot, from the waiting van, from the road sign, and from somewhere beneath our feet.
I looked at the tone generator. Its damaged speaker was still carrying the distant woman’s breathing. Its battery indicator had climbed from empty to full.
The route had used my interference as a bridge.
I picked up the generator and walked toward the van.
Rachel caught my arm. “What are you doing?”
“Giving it a different road.”
The driver’s seat was empty. On the dashboard lay a county route book, open to a page marked with a red thumbprint. The printed map showed Black Hallow, the depot, and Carrigan. A line connected all three.
I set the tone generator beneath the steering wheel and turned its dial past the point where the casing began to shake. The van’s headlights flared. The engine dropped into a deeper idle.
Then I pulled open the passenger door.
“Get in,” I said.
Rachel looked toward the office. Declan looked toward the sign.
The telephone rang again, and from the receiver came my own voice, speaking a destination I had never named.
“Carrigan parish office.”
Rachel climbed into the van. Declan followed after her.
I took the driver’s seat and wrapped my fingers around the wheel. The route book’s red line had already been drawn across the next page, continuing beyond Carrigan toward a cluster of villages without names.
I started the van.
The road east opened through the fog, and the depot doors closed behind us.