Signal To Noise
“What do you mean, ‘you’re almost there’?” Ralf’s voice was barely audible through the prattle of the nightly downpour.
“Past the exit sign.” I leaned closer to the phone holder. “I’ll be there in 20 minutes. 30 at most.”
I tried to come up with a quick estimate how long it would take to unload the hodgepodge of furniture and crates from the estate sale, but Ralf cut me off.
“It’s Friday, Frank.” A pause, then: “We said Saturday.”
Stumped, I just stared at the phone for a moment. “Seriously?” My schedule had been somewhat chaotic lately, and I was more annoyed than surprised that I had mixed things up.
“Yes, seriously,” Ralf said through the rain and what sounded like chatter on his side. “I told you I’d be out of town until Saturday afternoon. My in-laws’ anniversary, remember? I’m sitting here with my brothers-in-law, and Marla is taking the kids to bed in the guest room.”
“What am I supposed to do with my haul then?” Before my inner eye, I saw myself curled up on the passenger seat all night while the water level outside steadily rose. “Have you seen the weather reports? I’d only make it back to Fort Redding tonight if I traded the truck for a goddamn cargo ship!”
“Calm down, Frank. And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.” Ralf sounded much too unfazed for my taste, but then, he wasn’t the one who’d have to spend the night in a truck. “Don’t worry about the haul. We’ll unload together tomorrow. There’s a spare key wedged behind the sign by the delivery entrance. It’s not ideal, but there are plenty of sofas in the warehouse. And you’ll have the coffee machine in my office. There should be some-” He broke off, then it sounded like he covered the phone while talking to whoever had interrupted him. “I have to go. The kids won’t stay in bed. We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll be there around noon.”
It took me almost an hour to get to the warehouse, thanks to my usual shortcut being flooded, but what did it matter? Had the damn storm not surprised me, I’d already have been on my way home by the time I poked around behind the sign with a pencil to unwedge the key.
I felt like a burglar when I entered, soaked and frustrated, and felt around for a light switch. By day, the warehouse was easy to navigate, jammed with junk as it was. Now, in the evening, and with the storm raging outside, no light came in through the industrial windows just beneath the ceiling. I cursed under my breath when the first switch I found did nothing. The second one mercifully worked, but the caged lamps it turned on barely illuminated the maze of overcrowded shelves and old furniture.
Using my phone as a flashlight, I made my way to Ralf’s office, a tiny cubicle next to the front entrance of the warehouse. The old banker lamp and the heavy antique desk always made the room feel like a relic from another time. The old apothecary cabinet with missing drawers fit right in with them. The heavy duty industrial shelf that held the decidedly modern coffee machine, and the large plastic plant in its gaudy pot were a mismatch. For some reason Ralf really loved that plastic palm though. Livens the place up, he said when I remarked upon it, years ago.
I was more interested in livening up myself and my phone. The battery was awfully low for a night in a dark warehouse full of tripping hazards. I put it on the charger on Ralf’s desk, then went to get water for my coffee from the tiny adjacent bathroom. The caged lamp in there didn’t work, which was probably why I found a flashlight on the tray under the mirror. Good. Now I could let the phone charge over night. I’d just have to remember to put the flashlight back in the morning.
While the coffee was brewing, I looked around outside the cubicle, in the corner where Ralf stored hauls from recent yard sales that had yet to be categorized. Cushions and blankets were high on my mental wishlist, but I was also hoping to find books, magazines, maybe a deck of cards. Although it felt like the dead of the night, it was only evening. At home, I’d have put on a movie by now, or maybe headed over to the bar for a round of pool. Here, I had to keep myself entertained with more humble means until I got tired enough to crash on a couch. From past deliveries, I knew those were farther back in the warehouse, near the wall units and wardrobes. There’d be a wide selection to pick from, so I wasn’t worried about that. I’ve seen perfectly good kitchens, desks, kids furniture, and garden sets thrown out, but there’s just something special about couches. No matter how worn or outdated, people always seem to think somebody else wants to buy them. As a result, every second hand furniture store is drowning in them.
My search hadn’t been too fruitful by the time my coffee was done. All I had found was a stack of home design magazines. Better than nothing. I flipped through them while I sat at Ralf’s desk, sipped the coffee, and wondered whether I had it in me to go get my lunchbox from the truck. The security glass of the small cubicle window blurred the world outside, but I still had the heavy patter on the flat roof and the howling wind to sway my decision. The sandwiches had probably gone soggy by now anyway.
After finishing the coffee, I continued my search for cushions, blankets, and entertainment in the maze outside the office. God-fearing and good-natured as Ralf was, the man never had the slightest sense of order. Only he – and perhaps the Lord – knew why desks were stored next to nightstands, but office chairs were all the way over with cribs, strollers, and playpens. There was no guarantee that he kept living room accessories anywhere near living room furniture, but I had to start somewhere. Since I had seen coffee tables across from the entrance, I decided to try my luck there.
I was only mildly surprised to find the shelves filled with kitchen appliances instead. Toasters, blenders, waffle irons, rice cookers, and all sorts of novelty items no self-respecting cook had ever used. The next section contained cat trees, dog houses, and several baskets of food bowls and pet toys. I made a mental note that there were some dog beds that looked rather comfy, should I really come up empty on cushions.
Venturing deeper into Ralf’s cabinet of curiosities, I slowly began to grasp the full extent of his arbitrary inventory system. When I delivered my hauls from estate sales and storage auctions, I usually had a random mishmash of items myself. It never struck me as odd when we carried things to different sections all across the warehouse. However, I had never tried to find something specific in this world of clutter. The longer I looked around, the more I came to believe that it was straight up impossible. I found everything except what I was looking for.
An entire shelf of gaudy cuckoo clocks. A birdhouse made to look like a tiny church that would probably be the showstopper at Ralf’s next charity auction. Several boxes of assorted car magazines from the 80s. An antique sewing machine that might actually be worth something to collectors. An almost man-height cross with a much too detailed statue of Jesus. When a flash of lightning illuminated the warehouse – and his pallid wooden visage – it looked like the damn thing was weeping for a split second. Startled by that and the rolling thunder, I retreated to a different aisle.
Still no cushions or blankets, but the first thing the beam of my flashlight fell on was a crate of vinyls. That sure made up for the scare. A good part of my record collection came from forgotten treasure chests like this, and Ralf was always happy to trade for some nick-nacks.
“I’m not running a record store,” he once told me. “I don’t catalog these. I’d sell them wholesale anyway. Whether you take some or not, it’s 20 bucks for the whole box.”
Excited, I knelt down to flip through them in hopes of a rare piece I was still missing. At first glance, the records were in great shape. No dog-eared corners. Some even had wrappers that pointed to the previous owner being a collector as well. The covers looked right up my alley – jazz, dixieland, bluegrass. However, I had never even heard about any of the artists. I didn’t find a single familiar name, and certainly none of the rare classics I had hoped for.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the covers had one strange detail in common. All of them depicted the artists, which wasn’t unusual by itself, but each and every one of them lacked a facial feature. Some didn’t have eyes, others no ears or noses. One even showed a man playing a trumpet, but the instrument’s mouthpiece pointed toward a smooth piece of skin instead of a mouth. Must have been some obscure fad, I thought as I got up, somewhat disappointed, although not too surprised. After all, one had to dig through a lot of coarse gravel to find any gems.
The next aisle was blocked off by a stack of what I assumed were desks for kids. At least they seemed too small for adults, and some had stickers plastered all over them. I carefully made my way around the obstacle since I had a vague memory of Ralf storing bedspreads somewhere around here. The passage between the desks and the heavy industrial shelves was narrower than expected. I had to lift my arms to squeeze through which made the murky beam of my flashlight go straight up for a moment.
I had to do a double-take at what I saw. The desks were stacked impractically high, almost up to the ceiling, like a jenga tower. How had Ralf even accomplished that? And why? There was plenty of space in the aisle. The rose-colored desk right in front of me was also assembled the wrong way. The hutch faced the back, and the drawers were upside down. Still in disbelief, I let my flashlight beam wander up the tower again for a closer look. Several of the desks had obvious flaws in their construction from what I could tell. Maybe Ralf had stacked them like that because he couldn’t sell them in this state anyway.
There were no bedspreads in this aisle. Where I had hoped they’d be, I found an array of the weirdest oil paintings I have ever seen. Huge, ornate frames made of wood so dark that it looked like carved charcoal. I’m far from an expert, but they struck me as genuine antiques. Something just felt ancient and profound about them although I couldn’t even tell what they depicted. Primordial landscapes, maybe? Alien planets? It was probably just the erratic light of my flashlight, but a few times I thought I saw movement on a canvas. As if something was alive in the oil and sneaking from frame to frame, just to stay perfectly still when I fixed my eyes on its hideout. It had to be some kind of optical illusion. Since it also gave me a bit of a headache, I abandoned the paintings and continued my search.
The deeper I delved into the warehouse, the more I wondered who the hell would ever buy this junk. It had been a while since I had come across anything that looked useful or even usable. If I hadn’t known that the only alcohol that ever touched Ralf’s lips was mass wine, I’d have assumed he bought this stuff in a drunken state. Incorrectly assembled furniture, heaps of unidentifiable clutter that looked like spare parts, but I couldn’t say for what. I’d go as far as saying that most of it served no apparent purpose, not even a decorative one. The aisles were filled with contraptions that looked like somebody who had never seen furniture before tried to build some from scratch. The works of an especially gifted chimp or a caveman; somebody with no concept of form or function.
My mind tried to come up with something, anything, these objects could be used for, but to no avail. Who in the world needed an ‘end table’ that was just a slanted round plate with two legs? Without the support of the shelf it leaned against, it couldn’t even stand upright. Or the thing that resembled a wardrobe in size and shape, but had only a single drawer on the top left side instead of doors? How about a ‘novelty bar stool’? Easily twice my height, but where the seat would normally have been, there was a laundry basket. A laundry basket that opened sideways.
None of these items made sense, and my question shifted from ‘Who the hell would buy this?’ to ‘Who the hell makes these things in the first place?’ Most looked professionally made and were in great condition – as far as second hand furniture condition goes anyway. Just none of it was really furniture.
The one exception, kind of, were the religious items. At least that’s what I thought they were. They were scattered across different shelves, yet stood out between the bland gizmos with rich colors and intricate ornamentation. I had no idea what exactly they might be used for either, but their religious nature seemed obvious. Maybe some obscure denomination displayed these things in their churches. Or they were just ‘religious art’ and sought after by staunchly devout collectors.
When I spotted the first one, I took a closer look because it seemed strange that Ralf would have left something like this on a random shelf. It was a round polished gemstone, almost like a fortune teller’s crystal ball, encased in a web-like metal fixture on a weirdly iridescent black stone slab. There was writing engraved in both the metal and the stone, but I couldn’t even make a guess what script it might be. Something about it made me uncomfortable though. It felt as if being close to it was sacrilegious somehow, so I quickly put it back. When I moved on, I kept a distance whenever I spotted a similar item.
By the time I decided to make my way to the sofas, I hadn’t seen anything I could identify with certainty for a while. Chairs with another set of four legs protruding from the backrest. Random arrangements of drawers without any casing. Dog houses with three gabled roofs stacked on top and way too many holders for bowls, but no opening. The list of absurd contraptions went on and on.
To be frank, it was quite unsettling to wander around in what felt like an alien art installation. I had long given up on blankets and cushions, but I slowly began to worry if I’d ever find a sofa to crash on. In the past, I had delivered plenty of sofas to Ralf and helped him carry them in. I was pretty sure I knew where they were stored, but nothing on my way there looked familiar. I should have passed through the appliances section already. Fridges, tumblers, washing machines; bulky, typically white, hard to overlook even in the dark. Yet I hadn’t seen any of it. Maybe it was the eerie atmosphere, but I got the sneaking suspicion that the warehouse was much larger than I had thought. It certainly felt like I should have been able to see the far end, but when I pointed my flashlight forward, there was no wall, only murky darkness.
I can’t describe the relief I felt when I finally spotted a sofa a short distance ahead. Between the tall shelves, the junction almost looked like a clearing. A reprieve of relative familiarity in a forest of uncanny absurdities. The sofa wasn’t quite right – the legs were askew, raising the left side higher than the right one – but it was close enough to a normal, functional piece of furniture. It had seen better days for sure. The pale-blue upholstery was worn out and faded, the once golden threads of the damask pattern stuck up like weeds in some spots. When I sat down, the antique springs creaked and groaned, and I knew it wouldn’t be a comfortable night by any means. The cushions were stiff and had little give, as is the case with so many old sofas. Still, it was better than the alternative: venturing farther into the thicket of useless junk on the off chance that the sofa section was still somewhere in the back.
So I made myself comfortable, as much as one could on that creaky old thing. With the steady rhythm of the rain on the roof, I had lost all sense of time. I figured I must have wandered around for much longer than seemed possible in the warehouse. At least my feet felt as if I had walked for hours when I sat down. Once the weather calmed down, or at least daylight fell through the windows in the morning, those notions would seem silly to me, I assumed. For the moment, I was just glad to have found a spot for the night though.
I put my flashlight on the table-like thing in front of the sofa, intending to stretch out and try to get some sleep. However, in doing so, I pointed the light cone at something I hadn’t noticed before: a tape player. Nothing ambiguous or weirdly misshapen about it, just old and bulky like electronics in the 80s used to be.
To this day, I’m not sure why I pressed the ‘Play’ button that night. Maybe I didn’t have a reason beyond ‘well, that’s just what one does with tape players’. I just know that I immediately regretted it. Decades old and covered in dust, nothing about the tape player looked like it might still be functional, but it was. As soon as the reels began to move under the plastic cover, the speaker unleashed the most unsettling cacophony I have ever heard.
A scrunching, as if TV static was made of coarse sand, mixed with screeching and growling that seemed to come from above. Something that sounded like the flapping of a thousand leathery wings in the storm outside. Distant voices whispering in a strange language. It barely sounded like anything human mouths could produce; guttural, gargling, yet with the cadence of a conversation.
And it just wouldn’t stop. No, the maddening noise grew louder and louder as I frantically pressed the tape player’s buttons. The whispers swelled, became chants and shrill screams, and one voice cut through it all in a tone that made me think of a general barking orders to his soldiers. The flapping and rushing sounded closer, and I even thought to hear footsteps between the shelves; lots of them, marching in step. Hell, it felt like the concrete floor vibrated under the boots of an otherworldly army as it headed toward my position from the darkest depths of the night.
In my panic, I tried every button, again and again, to no avail. I turned the player upside down, initially to tear out the power cord, but found only a crusty battery compartment on the underside. Although the apparent leak made it unlikely that the batteries still powered the player, I pried the compartment open and reamed the rusty remains out of it. And yet the agonizing noise wouldn’t stop. The gargled voices wouldn’t shut up, the stomping steps drew ever closer. And the goddamn, forsaken scrunching could as well have been the sound of my sanity crumbling away.
Not knowing what to do, I smashed the damn tape player onto the floor and stomped on it. The cursed noise kept coming, undeterred. As a last resort, I kicked the damaged player as hard as I could. I heard it crash against a shelf or a wall, but again, to no avail. The cacophony of terror continued.
I couldn’t see the player – or what was left of it – anymore, but that was the least of my worries. Even if I retrieved the remains, what could I possibly do to it that I hadn’t tried? No, I had to get away from the source of the sounds. Away from whatever was coming for me from the darkness. As absurd as it may sound, I was sure the fabric of reality was corroding somewhere in the darkness between the shelves. That a portal or breach to another, more sinister dimension had opened and allowed some unholy force to pour into the world.
Filled with a primal fear, I didn’t think clearly. To me, it seemed obvious that these unseen, otherworldly beings were attracted to the sound. Or that they had somehow been summoned by it. If I couldn’t make it stop, I had to get as far from it as possible if I wanted to get out alive. And so I turned around and staggered away from the dreadful sounds, laser-focussed on putting as much distance between the player and me.
When I woke up, I was confused and had no idea where I was. It took me a moment to recognize Ralf’s warehouse. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when I sat up and looked around. I was in the sofa section. Daylight came in through the windows, and last night’s ambience of wind and rain was gone. I even remembered the sofa I had slept on from a delivery last month. The only oddity was the fact that I found myself clutching a flashlight. Apparently I hadn’t bothered to switch it off since the batteries were completely drained. It jogged my memory in its dead state though.
The bizarre gizmos, the sky-high towers of stacked whatevers, the nagging feeling that I had gotten lost between the shelves, the bizarre nightmare. It had been a while since my mind had cooked up something this strange, but in my drowsy state, I figured the droll accommodations were to blame. It’s not like I frequently slept in warehouses or storage units, or anywhere other than my bed, for that matter.
A good cup of coffee. That’s what I really needed after this uncanny dream, and luckily I remembered there was still some left in Ralf’s office from last night. I got up and made my way through the sofas, thinking I should probably give him a call to check when he’d be here as well. After my ordeal on the stormy road, followed by the most horrifying nightmare of my life, I just wanted to get over with this delivery and go home.
Just before I reached the main aisle, I caught sight of something that stopped me dead in my tracks. A bulky, antique sofa in faded blue and gold. The exact same sofa I had seen in my dream. And in front of it stood a coffee table, not strange or unusual in itself, but the old tape player on it made me shudder. It was the same accursed thing I had seen – and smashed to pieces – in my dream. Everything in me recoiled at the memory of what it had unleashed. Had it really been a dream? I appraisingly surveyed my surroundings.
Along the wall to my left, I saw fridges, washing machines, dryers, and other large appliances. Not one of them made me wonder about its function. To my right, there were desks, planter tables, and large watering cans. That sure looked like Ralf’s doing, but one of the desks gave me pause. When I went closer, I recognized it as the wrongly assembled kids desk from last night. The hutch was indeed facing the wrong way, but it wasn’t fixed to the surface either. Looking around, I realized that none of the hutches were. Some were stored under the desks. Ralf had probably not screwed them on to make transport easier for customers with smaller cars.
Still, seeing another item from my dream made me queasy. It had to be a bizarre coincidence, right? My sleepy brain had just spun some crazy yarn from things I had seen on previous visits. That had to be it. What other logical explanation was there? None I could think of, but that wasn’t enough to convince me.
Instead of going to the office and calling Ralf, I inspected the nearest aisles. Just to make sure none of the strange contraptions were there. To my great relief, I didn’t find anything I couldn’t identify. Useless plunder, yes, but only useless to me. Antique globes, china sets with more soup tureens than I cared to count, tacky bookends – I was never one for home decor, but I knew somebody, somewhere would probably put this stuff in their home.
I did not find the paintings in the charcoal frames, nor did I come across a jenga tower made of desks. What I did find was the box of vinyls. First creepy Jesus to the left, and straight on ’til morning. When I flipped through the records, there was nothing strange about the covers though. I still didn’t know any of the titles or artists, but all of them had their facial features.
My discoveries – or lack thereof – settled it. Nothing otherworldly had happened last night. It had been a nightmare. One that had really rattled me, but just a dream nonetheless. I had seen enough to be certain of that, so I turned around to finally get my coffee and call Ralf.
I could already see the fridges and dishwashers ahead when I accidentally knocked a gaudy plastic owl off a shelf. It rolled behind me, so I turned around and picked it up. That’s when I saw it. The footprints. Black, dusty footprints. The aisle looked like the entire workforce of a coal mine had marched through it after a shift. For a long moment, I just stared at the prints while a thousand thoughts raced through my mind. Had it been like this the night before? I hadn’t paid attention to the floor. It had been too dark to tell anyway. I didn’t even know if I had been in this particular aisle.
After placing the owl back on the shelf, my eyes were drawn to the footprints again. Was there any rational explanation? Maybe there had really been a group of coal miners looking for some new furniture the day before. I wanted to believe that, but I didn’t.
In the end, my morbid curiosity won. I went back to the faded blue sofa. To the tape player. And after some hesitation, I pressed the Play button with the same vigor and enthusiasm a kid would display when poking a dead animal with a stick.
I heard a click when the button snapped in. I could see the reels move through the milky plastic, but the speakers remained silent. No hellish cacophony, no ominous whispers or chants, no uncanny screeching or grinding. Relieved, I looked closer and realized there was no tape in the player. The reels were slowly turning in an empty compartment. When I pressed the Stop button, it obeyed.
Coal miners. It had to be a merry band of coal miners on a shopping trip.
I kept trying to convince myself of that when I got my coffee and called Ralf. I still tried to believe it when he showed up about an hour later – with breakfast, god bless him. We unloaded my truck together, carried furniture and other estate sale treasures inside, discussed prices, chatted about business and life in general. In the back of my mind, the nightmare – or whatever it was – lingered. I just couldn’t let it go unaddressed, but I also didn’t know where to even begin.
We took a break at some point, I had an idea. I strolled around under the guise of looking for records for my collection. The real plan was to go back to the stained aisle and proclaim: “Wow, what happened here?” Either Ralf would have an explanation, or I’d have – hopefully – an easier time to explain what I had seen at night. It didn’t come to that though. The floor in the aisle didn’t look any different than anywhere else in the warehouse. No black dust, no footprints, only the gaudy owl to confirm I was in the right aisle.
Confused, I returned from my ‘search for vinyls’ and only said there hadn’t been any worthwhile records in the box I found when Ralf asked.
We continued our work, but my mind raced. How could that be? I had seen the footprints in broad daylight! I twisted and turned every thought, every possibility, but none of the half-baked conclusions I came up with satisfied me. As much as I wanted to believe it, I couldn’t brush off the footprints as a product of my imagination. I knew I had really seen them. I knew something had happened that night. And I also knew nobody would ever believe me.
When we carried a set of living chairs into the warehouse – the last items I had in my truck – we inevitably passed the antique sofa and the player. I couldn’t just leave it here. Ralf might test it at some point and end up unleashing the same otherworldly horrors I had encountered. I wouldn’t wish that upon my worst enemy, and certainly not an old friend.
“Hey, I found that player last night,” I said as casually as I could muster. “Figured I’d try to fix it up to pass time, but with the battery leak, it’s probably beyond repair.” Get rid of the devilish machine, I wanted to add, but speaking of the devil typically didn’t go over well with Ralf.
He paused and looked around, then shrugged when his eyes found the player. “Bet you got it from the box by the door.” I nodded. “That’s my haul from last weekend. I didn’t get around to checking anything yet, but you know how it goes. Flea market electronics are always a gamble.”
“I’ll drive by the landfill on my way home anyway,” I said and nodded in the direction of the electronics section where we had discovered a damaged fridge earlier. “If you want, I can get rid of the broken stuff. I owe you one for not letting me sleep in the truck.”
“Much appreciated!” Ralf wiped the sweat from his forehead, then signaled me to heave up the heavy upholstered chair we were carrying again. “Oh, and next time if there’s a storm warning in the forecast, give me a call before you hit the road, will you?”
“You bet I will. I’ll check my planner double and triple from now on.”
We laughed, put the chair where it belonged, then loaded my truck with the items for the landfill. I made my stop there on the way home, but I didn’t give the tape player to the landfill worker. It just didn’t feel right to just leave the thing in the hands of an unwitting stranger, even if he’d probably throw it into an industrial trash compactor right away.
Instead, I made a small detour to a roadside diner that had gone out of business years ago. The construction of a newer, larger road in the area had deprived it of its last handful of regular patrons – one of which had been me. Now it was so out of the way that not even vagrants went there anymore. Behind the abandoned building, I smashed the damn player to the ground, stomped on it, then gathered up the remains and put them in the diner’s dumpster. Maybe I was just paranoid, but I knew I’d rest easier knowing that nobody would stumble upon this damned thing again.