Transmission: A Supernatural Thriller (3 page)

Kenji shook his head. The more they discussed their isolation, the more unnerved he became. He didn't want to think about how alone they were. “I'm looking forward to classes starting back up,” he admitted.

Dylan scoffed. “What's this? You're out of your mind, man. We only just started break and you want to go back to that grind?”

It was all Kenji could do to ask for a distraction. Classwork and socializing could fill the gap as well as anything. At least, if his life returned to normal, he'd have no time to further fixate on this puzzling sequence of letters and numbers that presently dominated his consciousness and threatened to become an obsession.

“You really made out like a bandit, eh? Your parents sending you all of that money. They wanted to make sure that their star student eats well, huh?” Dylan crushed up another piece of ice, then burped. “My folks couldn't give any less of a damn. They sent me a bit, enough for some gas, food and laundry, but they only did it because they don't want me home over the holidays. Probably like it better with me all the way out here. I have to say I prefer it, too. When I graduate and get a job, I'm moving far away from them. They'll probably never see me again.” Dylan had always had a rough relationship with his parents. Even when things were going well between them their dealings were strained.

Not that Kenji was putting much thought into that. His eyes scanned the paper table mat, picking out certain letters and numbers along the way. Here was an 'E'... lower on the page, an 'N'. There was a '1', also. And a '7'. He shook his head. Everywhere he looked he was seeing that string of characters.

By the time their meal had run its course Kenji had scarcely touched his food and was in the throes of an intense agitation. He didn't want to return to the dormitory, but with precious few options available he and Dylan left the restaurant and began their silent walk back. Sensing that his roommate was preoccupied, Dylan didn't strike up any conversation on the way and simply whistled a tune that rang out in the night and echoed discordantly against the brick buildings they passed on campus. The wind was every bit as biting, and Kenji's stomach seized in protest, balling itself tightly around the little bit of food he'd managed to eat.

They arrived at their building and ascended the stairs. When they got to their room, Dylan sprawled out on his bed and patted his stomach. “Thanks for the meal, dude. I'm going to try and get some sleep. Maybe we can go see a movie tomorrow at the mall? My treat.”

“Sure,” replied Kenji without really hearing what'd been said. From the start he marched towards the notebook where he'd recorded the cryptic message.

With a sigh of resignation, Dylan took off his white-rimmed glasses and set them on his desk. Then he started playing games on his phone. “Whatever, man,” he muttered.

Kenji picked up the notebook and had another look at the string of characters, puzzling over what meaning they might hold, if any. It made little sense to him that the artist would have included this soundbite in the song arbitrarily; surely it had some kind of meaning. Perhaps it was just some weird quirk included in the song to lend it an added depth, like Dylan had supposed, but Kenji couldn't believe that. When listening to it, even beneath the wall of sound, he'd felt like the speaker was struggling to be heard, as though he himself were being addressed by the woman. Who was she, and what had she hoped to convey in this message? He felt like he could puzzle over this question for a hundred years and never draw nearer to an answer.

Kenji sat down at his desk and stared at the string of characters he'd jotted down. As he did so, something caught his eye.

The line of writing was circled.

Tonguing his molars and studying the message scrawled on the page, he ran his fingers around the circle that encapsulated them and searched in his memory for a time.

For some reason, he couldn't remember circling the message. He glanced at Dylan, finding him completely engrossed in his game.

You must've circled it before you left
, he told himself, flipping the page over and tossing the notebook aside. Perhaps it'd been the cold that had finally tired him out, however Kenji now felt himself capable of falling asleep.

FOUR

The ticking of the clock in the commons area swelled to a deafening height. To try and break up the silence, Kenji tapped his pencil against the tabletop, rapping out a clumsy beat.

It didn't help.

His sigh rustled the piece of crisp computer paper before him. On it, in large, neat characters of black ink, he'd copied the message he'd recorded in his notebook the night before. Next to it was that selfsame notebook, a once-clean page covered in crowded notes and attempts at code-breaking. Much of the writing was crossed out. He'd hit dead end after dead end in trying to make sense of the message.

For two hours he'd been sitting undisturbed in the common room while Dylan slept in. He'd awoken that morning without his usual grogginess, and after ambling out to the bathroom and taking a quick shower, he'd taken his phone and notebook with him to the common room to begin the task of cracking the code.

Because, unless Kenji was mistaken, the string of characters
had
to be a code of some sort.

This message had to have significance to someone out there; that it was utterly random didn't seem a possibility to him. He'd Googled a few things, considered writing the artist, Jackal Priest, but discovered that the members of the group had died in a plane crash some years previous. They were independent artists, so they didn't have a record label he could send inquiries to. Also, being something of a niche group, they didn't have much of a presence online, and websites dedicated to them were sparse on details and few in number.

The only avenue left to him if he was interested in figuring out the meaning of the code was to try and decipher it himself, then.

Kenji had never considered himself to be much of a code-breaker; puzzle games and things of that sort had always been thoroughly annoying to him. His learning in the field of linguistics however gave him a decent background for this sort of work. Having studied language for some time, especially Italian, he was used to translating foreign texts into English, and if he thought of this task as simply another translation job, it suddenly became easier for him.

The question was, what kind of language was he dealing with?

The cryptic line of text was a combination of letters and numbers, and no meaning or relationship could be found between them at a glance. Probably, then, this was a codified message. Thinking it a cipher, Kenji began to substitute the letters for numbers, dabbled in substituting the numbers for letters, and generally rearranged the characters to try and create something clear.

Two hours into his work, the only thing he'd gained was a slight headache.

Dylan walked in while Kenji had his head pressed to the tabletop and guffawed when he caught sight of the string of characters. “Man, you linguistics majors sure do get bored when classes are out of session, huh? You just never quit!” He was tugging on his jacket, and threw a thumb towards the doorway. “I'm going to catch a matinee. Wanna come with?”

Kenji shook his head. “No, thanks. Come here and have a look at this, please.”

Dylan sauntered to the table and sat on its edge, picking up the sheet of computer paper. “It's gibberish,” he said, without missing a beat. “Plain and simple. You think it's some secret message? Good luck making sense of it. I bet it's just crap.”

Kenji snatched the paper from his grasp and held it up so that they could both see it. “I think it's a coded message. The only thing is that I don't know how it was encoded. If I could just crack the code, I'd find something readable in it. No way the artist just tossed this into the song for no reason. It's too... unnatural-sounding.”

Dylan clapped, throwing his head back in callous laughter. “Listen to yourself. This fascination you have with a ridiculous song is what's unnatural. Come on, let's hit the movies. Some fresh air will help you come to your senses, I'll bet.”

At that moment, someone else walked into the commons room, startling them both. It was Mike. “What's up, guys?” he said, sticking his head through the doorway and blinking at the pair with his large, bespectacled eyes.

Mike was an incredibly awkward Geography major who lived in the private room four doors down from their own. He was the only other one still staying in the building that they'd seen since the winter break began, and both Kenji and Dylan did their best to avoid him whenever possible. It wasn't that Mike wasn't nice; rather, he was
too
nice. The guy never shut up, and his almost manic fashion of speaking was incredibly grating. The guy had no filter and couldn't seem to relate to other people very well. Dylan had theorized that he wasn't right in the head, or else suffered from near-debilitating social anxiety that he was hopeless to overcome. Kenji didn't usually have a whole lot of patience for him, and had been stopped in the hallway more than once to listen to some rambling anecdote or another. Mike wore entirely too much body spray, which cut through the air and assailed the nostrils of anyone unfortunate enough to walk past, and sometimes, very early in the morning, he'd blast show tunes from his stereo. His singing and dancing could be heard throughout the entire hall, much to the chagrin of the other students on the floor, who all hated him.

At the very sight of him, Kenji suddenly found the idea of taking in a film with Dylan rather palatable.

“N-not much,” muttered Kenji, collecting his papers and standing up. He pushed in the chair and made as if to leave, Dylan following close behind. But they weren't going to get off the hook so easily.

“Isn't it crazy how empty the dorms are, guys? I mean, usually there's all the noise, and... what are you guys up to today?” His chubby, red cheeks were thrust into an expectant smile.

Snickering, Dylan patted Kenji's shoulder with condescension. “Ol' Kenji here fancies himself a code-breaker.”

“Shut up,” muttered Kenji, trying to bypass Mike, who remained stationed in the doorway.

Mike got in his way, however. “What kind of codes?” He sometimes spit as he talked, and Kenji could feel a mist of spittle on his cheek as he tried to leave the room.

“Just, uhh... you know, puzzles and stuff.” Kenji lied and tried to maneuver past him. “Gotta go, Mike.”

Mike's hand came to rest on Kenji's shoulder. “Wait a minute now, I
love
brain teasers, Kenji. Will you let me have a look?” He glanced to Dylan and Kenji in turn, then tried to peek at the bundle of notes Kenji held to his breast.

Thoroughly annoyed at his lack of progress and now at the meddling of this buffoon, Kenji hesitantly flashed the sequence of characters. “It's just a little code. I... I dunno what it means. It's probably nothing.”

Mike craned his neck and hovered over the sheet of computer paper for some time, his expression narrowing all the while. He nodded to himself, then lowered the paper. “You know, I've seen this before.”

Dylan and Kenji both were taken aback. “W-wait, what? Seriously?” came Dylan. “Where?”

Mike, not used to having so much attention centered on himself, began to stammer. “W-well, I-I... It's not, y-you know, a code or anything like that. At least, n-not like what you're thinking, K-Kenji.”

Kenji took the paper back from him and peered at it afresh. “Right, so what the heck is it, then?”

“Well, they're Maidenhead Coordinates, I t-think.” He peered over at the characters again, then nodded with firmness. “Yeah, Maidenhead all right. We learned about Maidenhead coordinates during one of my geography classes this semester. Y-you have to use a grid map to use the coordinates, but it corresponds to a certain location. Y-you know, like longitude and latitude--”

“So, where does this lead?” demanded Kenji, tapping the paper impatiently.

Mike threw his hands up. “W-well, I'm not sure. But you can look it up online. If you search for a Maidenhead coordinate database, you can type it in, and--”

Kenji was darting down the hall towards the stairwell before Mike could even finish. Dylan wasn't far behind, giving some half-assed excuse for their sudden flight.

The racing of his pulse filled his temples. Kenji's scalp itched something awful; he felt himself growing warm and couldn't stay still. His fingers fiddled with the edges of the paper as he raced up the stairs and made a beeline for their room. It seemed a long-shot, but if these really were navigational coordinates of some kind, then he'd be one step closer to figuring out the riddle that'd so plagued him. Provided that Mike was correct and these were Maidenhead coordinates, where did they lead? And why had such a thing been inserted into a song?

Kenji threw open the door and nearly slammed it shut just as Dylan was trying to edge his way in.

“Dude, calm down,” urged Dylan, sitting down in his chair. “You know Mike's a weirdo. You really think he knows what he's talking about? Guy is into all kinds of conspiracy theories and junk. And he listens to show tunes. Here's a tip: Don't ever take advice from someone who wakes up in the morning and blasts the soundtrack to
The Sound Of Music
.”

Kenji was already stationed at his laptop, hammering the keys. “Uh-huh,” he replied, pulling up a Maidenhead coordinate database. Just as Mike had said, the thing could be found with a simple web search.

Sucking in a deep breath, he clicked on the search box and slowly typed in the string of characters he'd recorded the night before. He'd looked them over so many times in the past twenty-four hours that he had them memorized.

EN17DA43TU85

His finger hovered for an instant over the ENTER button.

It isn't too late to turn back
, he thought to himself.
No need to dive any deeper into this, you know
.

Kenji hit the enter button anyway, and the results slowly populated the page.

FIVE

I'll be damned,” said Dylan. “They really were coordinates, huh?” He crossed his arms and paced around the center of the room. “Guess even Mike knows what he's talking about some of the time.”