16 Sep Smoke Signal

I don’t tell people I hunt monsters for a living. I tell them I read fire—arrows of soot, scalloped char, footprints that point back to origin. I’m paid to stand in the ashes and translate.

The Wexler place sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, with its oversized lot and boxy geometry. It was the kind of house a man builds when he can pay cash and doesn’t like neighbors. When I arrived, the roofline was a ragged silhouette, and the yard glittered with shards of broken glass. The heat was gone. The odor wasn’t. I recognized the all-too-familiar scent of resin and varnish, along with the mineral bite that clings to brick after a structural fire.

I walked the perimeter with my camera and notebook in hand. Porch collapse noted. Siding ripple on the B-side photographed. Vent paths traced where the living room had breathed through broken panes. The kitchen read like a flashover, where everything had ignited simultaneously after a certain point. In the entry hall, blistered latex paint curled into scales. In my world, that isn’t just evidence; it’s poetry.

Downstairs, the stairs held. I eased weight on each tread while my partner, Dwayne, kept a hand on the rail and muttered that the place gave arson vibes. He wasn’t wrong. The char along the east wall was too even for a basement that should have smothered early. Vertical streaks ran like someone had held a torch steady.

Open space replaced a rec room. Joists overhead were gashed and brittle. The carpet was gone. Where it had once been, badly damaged padding remained, a tan ghost on the slab. My light caught a clean rectangle behind scorched insulation—a seam in the concrete, edges crisp, a soot outline where a door had once met the wall.

“Is that what I think it is? A… a hidden room?” Dwayne asked.

“I’ll take a look.”

The door lay twisted on the floor. I peeled fiberglass back and stepped into a space that hadn’t been on any floor plan the city sent me.

It was concrete on three sides. The fourth had been blown open. In the center, bolted to the slab, stood a metal frame about the size of a minivan. It wasn’t a generator or HVAC; it looked like a gate—steel struts, triangulated cross-members, a ring assembly that had twisted under heat until bearings seized and scored the metal.

I documented everything. I began with wide shots, then focused on details: melted harnesses that once were cables; bubbled electronics; a panel faceplate slumped and frozen. Whoever built it wanted redundancy and isolation; I could see that in the stacked breakers and a pale ceramic liner I didn’t recognize. On the back, where heat had peeled a cover away, I found etching that didn’t look like a maker’s mark. It wasn’t in English. For a moment, I thought it might be serial numbers, but eventually ruled that out. They looked more like reminders engraved in a private shorthand.

I logged it as unknown equipment and made a note to pull permits. While Dwayne measured spalling near the stairwell, I worked the south wall. There, half-embedded where the concrete had popped, I found a warped lockbox. The clasp had sprung. Inside, under a crust of ash, lay pages fused at the edges.

I teased a corner up with a pair of pliers and read by flashlight—block letters, engineer-neat. Between paragraphs, there were small diagrams of rings and coils and a rectangle with arrows marked in and out. Words and phrases stood out: Containment. Threshold. Phase Error. Breach.

We finished scouring the basement. There were no pour patterns or splash arcs, and nothing that indicated gasoline had been used as an accelerant. The fire had traveled in ways that didn’t map to a single origin point. But you don’t say that on-site. You say it later, in a report, after you’ve slept and had a second look.

On the way up, Dwayne asked what I thought. I told him Wexler allegedly liked secrets and heavy metal, and that someone had poured time and money into something the city would never have approved. He said neighbors told patrol that Wexler worked in “applied physics” from home—suburban code for “we saw pallets delivered and didn’t ask questions.”

Outside, by my tailgate, I looked back at the seam the fire had revealed. In this line of work, you learn to accept ugly gifts.

Back at the office, after I logged evidence and washed the ash off, I laid the salvaged pages under a forensic light. Enough ink remained to put at least a portion of a narrative together. The writer wasn’t a hobbyist. He wrote like a man building a dam to guard against a flood. He detailed ring alignment and input phases that had to be matched, “or the window will stutter,” then underlined, “If the field fails, do not remain near the aperture.” A later note used a phrase I don’t often see in lab logs: Containment compromised—burn to function.

Fire as a fix isn’t a comforting thought when you’re paid to reverse-engineer what it does. I told myself I’d sleep on it, call a physicist in the morning, and let it be until it wasn’t my job anymore.

That’s when my phone buzzed. The message came from an unknown local number and contained just one line of text:

I made it out. The machine worked. I need your help to get back.

I stared at the screen. Another message arrived before I decided whether I believed the first:

You were in the basement. You touched the pages. Please respond.

I didn’t answer that first night. The message sat in my inbox like a live wire. Plenty of times, I’d had grieving relatives track me down—people who wanted someone to blame for what fire took from them. But those people usually led with names, condolences, sometimes rage. This was different. This was personal, inside knowledge I hadn’t shared with anyone but Dwayne.

I told myself it was a prank, pulled by some neighbor who saw me carry the half-burned journal out. But when I woke the next morning, there were five more messages, each one worse than the last:

Don’t ignore me.
I know what you saw down there.
It isn’t safe to leave it broken.
You’re the only one who can fix it.
They’ll listen to you, not to me.

I didn’t reply. I drove to the office, sorted case files, and filed the Wexler house prelim under “Pending Cause.” Then I tried to focus on a kitchen fire in a duplex down in Southview, but when I pulled the photos off my camera card, I found something that shouldn’t have been there. Tucked between the basement shots was an image I hadn’t taken. It showed the frame—the machine—before the fire. In the photo, the machine was whole and intact, humming with pale light. It was taken from the same angle I’d shot the ruin from. Only, no one could have taken that picture. The room had been sealed behind concrete until the blaze tore it open. And yet, there it was, as if my camera had reached backward in time, or worse—forward.

* * * * * *

That night, I dug out the journal pages and tried to line them up. Edges were fused, words half-gone. What I managed to reconstruct better resembled prayers than technical records:

The breach is contained by fire.
The threshold can be crossed, but not reversed.
Do not trust the voice when it calls back.

The hairs on my arms lifted when I read that last line.

That’s when the emails began.

This time, they weren’t texts. They came from an account with the name martin.wexler—the homeowner whose body had never been recovered. His obituary ran three days prior. Official cause of death? Presumed, in the fire.

The first email was brief:

It worked. I escaped. The fire didn’t take me. I’m trapped in between. The conduit is broken. You found the notes—please finish the repair.

The second email came with attachments. Scans of the very pages I had salvaged, only whole, unburned, crisp. Ink as dark as the day it was written. Some diagrams were new, ones I hadn’t seen in the charred copy. Included in the records were instructions for recalibrating coils and synchronizing a phase sequence. He—or whatever was writing—was feeding me the missing pieces.

* * * * * *

I drove back out to the ruins under the pretense of producing follow-up documentation. The site was cordoned but unguarded; the county had bigger fires to fight than babysitting a wrecked mansion.

When I reached the basement, I circled the machine again. This time, I crouched low, brushing ash from the floor. I traced grooves where the bolts had anchored it, deeper than they had to be. It was as if the thing had strained against its moorings.

I ran my glove over the melted control panel. The casing wasn’t aluminum or steel. It gave under my touch, brittle but light, almost like ceramic fired too hot. It was not a material I’d seen used in any electrical equipment.

I set my hand on the frame—just steel, warped and useless. That’s what I told myself anyway.

And then the air in the chamber shifted, and a hush fell over everything. My ears popped like I was driving into a higher elevation. And beneath it all, I detected the faintest voice, so quiet I could have sworn it came from inside my own head:

You can help me. Please. Don’t leave me here.

I staggered back, nearly tripping over rubble, and bolted up the stairs two steps at a time until I found myself in sunlight again.

Dwayne called me a day later, saying he’d been going over the photos too, and that his hard drive had corrupted when he opened the Wexler folder. In it, he’d found static, inverted images, including one frame that looked like a person standing where no one had stood. I told him to shut the case and let it go, but the truth was, I couldn’t.

That night, another email landed in my inbox. There was no text this time, just a sound file. I shouldn’t have opened it, but I did.

The clip began with white noise, like a detuned radio. Then came the voice—wet and distorted—words trailing like echoes down a tunnel:

You saw the breach. You know it works. Help me get back. Please help me.

I sat there in the dark, the glow of my monitor turning my reflection into a ghost on the glass, listening to a dead man beg.

And for the first time, I seriously considered it.

* * * * * *

I told myself I wouldn’t open another message, that the smartest thing I could do was hand everything—journal, photos, emails—to the county, and let them chalk it up to fraud or grief hallucination.

But I didn’t.

The next morning, I found a new folder on my desktop. I didn’t put it there. The label read simply: HELP_ME. Inside were a dozen images. At first, they looked like corrupted files—blocks of static, pixel storms—but when I clicked through, details sharpened: A hallway lined with doors that weren’t square, more like leaning trapezoids. A staircase that twisted, not spiraled but bent at angles impossible to build. Colors saturated wrong—bruised purples and greens, like oil in water.

The last photo stopped me cold. It was of me, standing in Wexler’s basement, bent over the frame of the machine. And in that image, just over my shoulder, a man stood watching. He was blurred at the edges, like the lens didn’t want to catch him.

The caption under the photo read: You can see me now.

That night I dreamed in static. I woke to find my radio alarm hissing white noise instead of music. When I slapped the dial, the voice slipped out between frequencies:

Don’t be afraid. It’s me. It’s Martin.

I killed the power and yanked the plug. Despite my efforts, I still heard it, faint but there, like tinnitus.

By then, my wife had noticed something was wrong. She asked why I kept bringing work home, why I smelled like soot weeks after the Wexler fire. I told her half-truths: “strange equipment,” “unusual paperwork.” Not about the voice. Not about the photographs. I didn’t want her to look at me the way Dwayne had started to—like I’d crossed a line no sane investigator should ever cross.

The next email arrived while she slept:

If you repair it, I can show you. I can show you what’s between. I just need a little more power. Please. I’m alone here.

Attached was an audio file. I hesitated, then played it through headphones.

At first, it was just Martin’s voice, pleading, distorted but recognizable. Then, under it, I detected something else: a second voice, speaking with him, a half-second out of sync. It spoke in an unfamiliar language, scraping at my memory, digging at my skull.

I ripped the headphones off and sat in silence, heart thumping like I’d run up a flight of stairs. When I looked back at the waveform, the visual showed two distinct tracks blended into one. It wasn’t just Martin talking. Something else’s voice overlaid his.

I should have deleted everything then and burned the notes. I should have reported my laptop stolen and tossed it into the river. Instead, I started sketching. I spread the salvaged diagrams across my desk and began filling the gaps with the pieces Martin—or the thing wearing his name—had sent me. Circuits, coils, resonators. None of it should have made sense, and yet in a way it did, like the logic was waiting for me, nested under what I already knew about heat patterns, flow, and venting. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t stop.

The next time the voice came, it was through the handheld thermal imager I used at every site. In shock, I dropped the device. It powered off on its own upon impact, screen black, but I swear I heard him sigh as if we’d just made eye contact. That was when I knew: whatever I was dealing with wasn’t confined to burned walls and melted circuits. It was leaking through every wire I touched. And it wanted badly to communicate.

* * * * * *

By the end of that week, I wasn’t sleeping. The voice found me in every hum of electricity—the fridge cycling on, the streetlight outside my office window, the faint buzz of fluorescent tubes in the county lab. I’d catch it murmuring my name, promising that if I just finished what he started, Martin could come home.

I stopped telling my wife anything. She thought I was pulling double shifts. In truth, I was sitting in the wreckage of Wexler’s house with a flashlight clipped to my collar, sketching coil diagrams on the back of arson forms.

The machine looked dead. Melted harnesses, warped steel, brittle control board. But the bones were there, enough to rebuild if someone knew what they were doing. I wasn’t that someone, but the diagrams filled the gaps, like a voice whispering the answers during an exam.

I stripped copper from breaker boxes, spliced salvaged wiring, and rerouted current from a portable generator I’d hauled in under tarps. When I threw the first switch, nothing happened. The second time, the frame groaned. Cold bled into the room so sharply my teeth hurt. The air shimmered like heat ripples, but in reverse, pulling light inward instead of pushing it out.

That’s when Dwayne showed up.

He must’ve tailed me. Or maybe my wife had called him, worried about where I was spending nights. He came down the stairs with his flashlight beam cutting through dust and called my name.

“Peter! What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

I tried to explain. That Martin was alive, trapped, begging for help. That we had the instructions. That it could work.

Dwayne didn’t buy it. He walked right up to the generator, yanked the main feed loose, and told me I needed medical attention more than this wreck needed fixing.

I don’t know what possessed me—fear, anger, maybe just the compulsion that had been eating at me for days—but I shoved the cable back in before he could drag me out.

The machine screamed. Metal twisted as if it had lungs. Sparks burst from the coils, strobing the basement in seizure-white light. And for one frozen instant, a rift tore open inside the ring. Not black, not light, but both—folds of geometry that didn’t belong here. And in the middle, a hand groped outward.

Dwayne was closest. He had time to shout once before the thing latched onto him. His body jerked like a marionette, spine arched, face contorted in terror. Then he was yanked into the aperture with a sound like tearing fabric.

Gone.

Dwayne vanished without a trace.

There was no blood, no body. Just a snap of air collapsing where he had stood.

The light died. The frame sagged. Silence pressed so heavily that it rang in my ears.

I staggered to the spot where he’d been, and found nothing but scuffed concrete.

Then the voice came, clear and triumphant, echoing not from wires or machines but directly inside my head.

You see? It works. Bring me the rest. Finish it, and he can return. I promise you.

I stayed there on the basement floor until dawn, shaking, ash smudged across my face, trying to convince myself I hadn’t just gotten my best friend killed.

But the machine had worked. For one terrible moment, it had worked.

* * * * * *

I didn’t go back to the office. I couldn’t. Instead, I sat in my truck outside the ruin until my phone buzzed with another message. The subject line was blank. The body just said:

You’ve proven it works. One last adjustment, and I can come home.

Attached was another schematic, this one showing stabilizers I hadn’t seen before, curves drawn not in pencil but in some metallic ink that shimmered even on a screen. I stared at it until my eyes watered.

When I finally tore them away, I pulled the surviving pages of Wexler’s journal from the evidence bag. I hadn’t looked at them in days, not since the machine swallowed Dwayne. The edges had flaked into black crumbs, but the words that remained were clearer than I remembered:

Fire contains. Fire cleans. Fire severs the conduit.
The machine does not free. It cages. If the voice calls back, it is not me.

I flipped through and realized something sickening. The notes I’d been given by email—those “missing pages”—were fabrications. The tone was all wrong. The real entries weren’t blueprints for transit; they were warnings. Wexler hadn’t been building an escape hatch. He’d been patching a breach.

I read until the words blurred together. The last entry chilled me worse than the night in that basement:

The fire must not fail. The gate must die with me inside.
Containment is my grave and must remain so.
Should it open, the world will disintegrate.

I sat back, shaking, journal fragments spread across my lap like evidence in a trial. Martin Wexler hadn’t escaped. He hadn’t made it to some limbo realm waiting for my help. He’d burned his own house down because it was the only way to destroy what he’d built. And if he’d stepped through that machine during the blaze, it hadn’t been to save himself. It had been to hold the door closed from the other side.

The next email shattered any lingering hope. Gone was the polite pleading, the desperate proclamations about being “alone” or “trapped.” It contained just a single line:

You will finish this. You belong to me now.

Below it, there appeared a string of symbols I recognized from the etchings on the machine, only now I could read them, as if the meaning had bloomed in my mind overnight. The words were not in English, nor in any language I’d ever seen, and yet I understood them anyway. Commands. Threats. Promises.

I deleted the message, only for it to reappear in my inbox seconds later. I deleted it again, and as before, it was back within the minute. The subject line began to change each time:

You saw me. You heard me. You opened the way.

I shut the laptop and pulled the battery. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The words kept repeating in my head long after the machine went dark.

I went back through the official file—the fire’s origin point, heat maps, burn patterns. And now I saw it clearly: Martin hadn’t been careless with wiring or playing amateur chemist. He’d lit the match himself. He hadn’t cared about insurance or revenge. He had been trying to imprison something that refused to stay buried.

I closed the file and pressed my hands against my eyes until colors sparked behind my lids. All I could see was Dwayne’s face when the hand came through, mouth open in that last impossible scream before he was yanked into oblivion.

The thing that had taken him was no lost homeowner. It had worn Martin’s voice, worn his words, worn him like a mask, pleading for release.

* * * * * *

I didn’t answer the next message or the dozen after it. I shut off my phone, unplugged the router, and killed the breaker to the house. My wife thought I’d finally come to my senses. But the silence didn’t last—because the voice didn’t need wires anymore. It breathed from the crackle of the fireplace, curled in the whisper of traffic outside. Even in the dark of my own head, it found me:

Finish it, it said. Let me through. Bring him back.

Every word scraped like nails down the interior of my skull. Every promise dangled Dwayne’s freedom before me, as if he were waiting on the other side, just out of reach. I wanted to believe. God help me, I wanted to. But the journal was clear. Wexler’s last act hadn’t been cowardice. It had been sacrifice. He’d burned himself alive to contain the breach.

If I finished what the voice wanted, I wouldn’t be saving anyone. I’d be opening the door Wexler died to close.

I drove back to the ruin with a jerrycan in the passenger seat. In the basement, the machine stood half-dead, like I remembered it—but not dead enough. I soaked what remained—steel, ceramics, even the scattered schematics I’d been piecing together—and struck a flare, then tossed it onto the wreckage.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then something howled, like an animal realizing it was trapped. Flame roared through the basement, devouring every last trace of what had nearly become a functioning gate. And all the while, the voice shrieked with it, the sound collapsing into static, into a thousand syllables that clawed at the walls, begging for mercy.

And then there was silence.

* * * * * *

I filed my report later, labeled the cause of the blaze as “undetermined,” and tucked the photographs away where no one would ever find them. Officially, Wexler’s house succumbed to the same factors many houses do: wood, wiring, and time.

But when I lie awake at night, I still hear him. In the hiss of the radiator. In the scratch of my own pulse in my ears.

Not Wexler.

Not Dwayne.

It.

And it’s telling me the fire only bought time, that it will find another way through.

And when it does, it swears, I won’t see it coming.