Numbers at Night

I was a ham radio enthusiast back in the early two thousands. This was in Varunkirk, North Carolina - along the coast. 

I thought I had it made back then: I had a job as a manager at a grocery store and I’d found a rental house that was pretty cheap. It was an older house and small, but for someone who had just moved out of his parents’ place it was a palace.  

I’d always had an interest in radios so as soon as I scrounged up enough money I bought myself a radio set and a license. Long into the evening after my shift I would fiddle with that radio - it was like finding a whole other world.

I had conversations with people from near and far - there were even something like podcasts back then where people would discuss various subjects or put on their own show with obscure music. I still remember those actors putting on a modern version of Antigone. A few times I even picked up the police bands and other emergency services, and those were… interesting, to say the least. Periodically I even found myself talking to sailors off the coast who came from all over the world and usually had some stories to share. But all this paled in comparison to one fateful stormy night. 

It was evening, as the storm brewed outside. Lightning cast an eerie glow through the windows of my small rental as I fiddled with the dials. As I hit a particular frequency the static on the radio gave way to a faint, repetitive series of tones. I adjusted the knobs and fine-tuned the frequency, curious about this anomaly in the airwaves. 

Then I heard it.

At first, it was just a series of seemingly random numbers, spoken in a monotone voice that made my skin prickle in response. The male voice was cold, emotionless, and eerily clear despite the storm raging outside. I had read about these stations but never encountered one. They were relics of the Cold War, used by spies to transmit secret messages across the globe. 

To stumble upon one now, in the two-thousands, it felt like finding a ghost.

The sequence of numbers continued, broken only by a short string of a haunting melody that repeated after every set. I scribbled down the numbers, trying to find a pattern - a meaning. Before I could even begin to decipher the sequence, the message changed. This time, a name was mentioned. 

"Varunkirk," my sleepy coastal college town, followed by a date - just two months from the current. The message was cut off abruptly, replaced by a deafening static before the signal was lost entirely.

The mention of Varunkirk sent a chill through me. It was too specific, too close to home to be a mere coincidence. I spent the next two days in a growing state of paranoia, researching numbers stations, trying to crack the code I had written down everything, but nothing made sense. 

Who would be using a numbers station? 

Spies? 

Some secret military operation? 

The bases in our state were further away, we only had a coast guard station. Maybe smugglers? That seemed possible, we were a town by the sea. Or was it just someone playing a prank on the airwaves? I poured over the numbers but every cypher I tried failed to crack them open to my waiting eyes. 

I dialed through the airwaves with my other radio enthusiasts asking if anyone else had heard the broadcast, but no one else seemed to have heard it. I was the only one, except for whoever the message was intended for.  

The station never returned, no matter how many nights I spent scanning the frequencies. Eventually, life moved on, but the memory of that night lingered. I found myself looking over my shoulder every now and then, jumping at shadows as the unanswered questions gnawing at me.

The impact of that interrupted message rippled through my life in Varunkirk. Relationships strained under the weight of my obsession with finding answers. The grocery store, once a place of mundane routine, became a stage for my paranoia, every customer a potential messenger or spy. My radio, once a source of connection and joy, now sat silent, a reminder of the mystery that was consuming me.

After my initial inquiry I spoke to no one else about the numbers. After all, it was probably best not to reveal that I had heard them to anyone else. I could make myself a target. Working my job, certain numbers would stand out to me. Receipts, prices on the register, prices in the aisles. It was as if I was being taunted.  

When the date arrived I didn’t know what was going to happen. Would there be some sort of catastrophe? Was there going to be a heist or a terrorist attack? My concern was so great I even called in sick to work. I kept my radio scanning the emergency service frequencies, and my TV turned to the local channel. 

But the day wore on into night, and nothing happened. I should have been relieved but this only deepened the mystery. Had the message been a warning, a threat, or simply a coincidence? 

Soon afterward I left Varunkirk - driven out by the shadows that had crept into my life from that one, cut-off message. The numbers station, the voice, and the unfinished warning remained an unsolved puzzle, a spectral presence that refused to be silenced. It was a story I could never share without sounding mad - a secret that isolated me in a crowd, a ghost story where the ghost was a string of numbers that might have meant nothing—or everything.

Perhaps I was obsessing too much, maybe it was an overreaction. My whole life I suffered from some form of obsessive compulsiveness. Something like this, a question without an answer was the bane of my existence. I still remember the old ‘Raven like a writing desk’ riddle driving me mad. But that one I at least accepted the Poe answer to.    

The true terror of the numbers station wasn't in the message received, but in the endless possibilities of what was left unsaid. The human mind abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of a complete message, mine had filled the void with countless theories, each more fantastical and unnerving than the last. The not knowing became my curse, a specter that haunted me, whispering of dark secrets carried on the airwaves, secrets that were never meant for me but which I could never forget.