Strange stories

The numbers station

I have found myself in a truly dire and miserable situation. Stomps from something large grow louder outside of my door, and the blood from my family drips from its arms. Recording the events of my life in this book, is the only way I can provide any explanation for what might have caused this. May God have mercy on those still alive, for his kindness towards me has surely run dry.

Ever since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by the radio. A wondrous box that allows communication over vast distances with no visible medium for the radio waves to travel through. It seemed like magic. While all the other kids were busy with their new phones that could flip open, and their video games, I was playing with the radio in my fathers car. For my 10th birthday, my family had come together to buy me a proper radio set, one of the expensive ones with dials and meters and and speakers. It was the brightest part of my day to come home from school and rush straight to my room to play with that radio, listening to all of the chatter on the air, be it between truck drivers or disc jockeys. I had even gotten in trouble once for accidentally tuning into and listening in on the police's internal broadcasts. I will never forget the look on my mother's face when a squad car showed up in front of our house. I remember the policeman saying to my nervous, sniffling mother "Don't worry Miss Degenaar, Paul is not in serious trouble. I doubt he was doing it on purpose. Just tell him not to tune into that frequency again, ok?". I even had a book, just a little notepad, of my favorite frequencies to tune into that I had collected over the span of 3 years.

One day, when I was in the 6th grade, I was tuning through all of the stations at my disposal looking for something new to explore, when amidst the sea of static I heard, for a split second, a distorted robotic voice mumble something incoherent. I stopped tuning dead in my tracks, and delicately tuned around the frequency I had heard the voice at. I fiddled with the tuning knob for a long while before I heard the robotic voice again, much clearer this time around. It was a robotic voice, made to sound like a man, saying what appeared to be random numbers. The signal seemed to fade over time, becoming more and more staticky and distorted, but it was easily fixed by tuning the frequency a bit, which was strange as signals tended to stay on the same frequency. I could feel myself getting excited again. This signal was moving! In a uniform speed across my hertz dial, I turned the knob to match the pace of the signal. It was like I was a detective monitoring some new mystery. But what could the numbers mean? I wrote them down in my notebook as I heard them.

"4c 65 6e 61 20 6f 78 66 6f 72 64 2c 20 30 37 2c 31 31 2c 31 39 39 38 2c 20 31 33 3a 34 33 2c 20 4e 65 63 6b 20 62 72 6f 6b 65 6e"

This string of numbers and letters repeated indefinitely, which made me quickly lose interest, as a child does, so I turned off my radio and went about my homework. But the idea of the code remained in my mind, stuck like a fly in a glue trap.

The rest of the school year was rather uneventful, children bullied each other, teachers lazily went about giving their lessons. The big event of the year, would be our grade 6 leadership training camp, that led into grade 7. A training camp to prepare the children for the responsibilities and leadership roles they would have to fulfil in their grade 7 year. All the other children would talk about was what the trip would be like, because the teachers specifically kept it vague. All we knew was where the camp would be, what we had to take with us, the departure date and the return date. The day of the camp came quickly, and the camp was a blast, that is, until we were prematurely sent home because of a casualty.

All of the students were divided into groups of 6 to partake in tasks,  3 girls and 3 boys. My group consisted of, apart from me, two meat-headed jocks, and three of the popular girls among which was Lena Oxford. A short, blonde girl who spoke too much. My group was hiking down one of the trails between the activities our group had to complete, when the popular boys and girls wanted to fraternize a bit, and our march ground to a halt. I checked my watch, because I did not want to be late for the next activity, and get an earful from the teachers because of it. The boys started chatting up the girls, and Lena decided that she wanted to impress the boys. So she did the only thing that came to her and she started climbing the tallest, thickest tree she could find all the while yelling at everyone to look at her go. The girls were scared for her, as the tree was easily 10 meters tall, but the jocks thought it was the funniest thing ever, and encouraged her all the way to the top. Lena struggled for what felt like ages, but eventually, she shakily stood at the top of the tree, and waved to everyone. Checking my watch I noticed that the time had gotten away from us, and that we were at least 10 minutes late. My watch read 13:43. At this point, I started to walk towards our next activity on my own. I had not even taken 10 steps when I heard a branch snap, and the girls scream.