A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String by Joanne Harris

Author:Joanne Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448126897
Publisher: Transworld

Ghosts in the Machine

I wrote this story for my daughter, a great lover of Phantom of the Opera, who always believed that Christine Daaé ended up with the wrong man …

HE ALWAYS TAKES the graveyard shift. He likes the dark and the solitude. The glow of the screen and a few LEDs are enough to mark his passing, and besides, he could do the work blindfold. He has been working here fifteen years, ever since he could patch a cable, and now he knows every inch of the place, every file in the archives. This man has nursed the studio from analog to digital. He is far more than an engineer, far more than a sound technician. To all intents and purposes, the man is Phantom Radio. He knows every secret, hears every word spoken on or off the airwaves. Every piece of equipment here has passed between his fingers.

But to most of the day people, he is just the man who keeps the machine alive. Some know his voice from the sound box; few have ever seen his face. At night, there’s even less chance of that; the station runs on a skeleton staff, and the late shows are merely recordings, broadcast to give the illusion of life while the day people sleep at home in their beds and he can have the place to himself.

This is when he is happiest. When he can be completely alone. In the lobby, there’s just one security guard; but he never pays attention to him, and from midnight to five in the morning, Phantom Radio whispers and hums with the seashell voices of ghosts, speaking from headphones in the dark, sending their message of fake goodwill to the sleepless and the desperate.

One such sleepless listener is sitting at her computer right now. She calls herself Lady of Shalott; her real name is much more prosaic. She too is nocturnal – perhaps by choice – and she likes to hear the radio – the cheery, familiar voices, the music, the songs – as they clatter and chatter and chime against the giant screen of night.

It’s true that things sound different at night. Even silence has a different tone; a resonance unheard by day. Her fingers on the pad beside her move with amazing precision, summoning sounds and images. Her face – almost close enough for her forehead to touch the screen – is bathed in a subaquatic glow. She is beautiful – though she does not know it; with the pallor of one who barely goes out by day; eyes blinking with electric stars. This is her favourite radio show; pre-recorded and broadcast between midnight and three every morning. It is nothing particularly special – just three hours of oldies strung together with late-night monologue – but sometimes, for her, there is something else. Something no one else knows about. At least, she presumes that no one knows. Who else listens, anyway? It’s only a local station.

She sends in a request for a track.

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