The Anechoic Chamber E-Book

Will Wiles

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Salt Modern Stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 219

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

An anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you'll hear something worse … In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy. A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu. While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town. You'll never look at some things the same way again.

Leseprobe

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for my parents

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Contents

Title PageDedicationThe Anechoic ChamberTesseraeThe Meat StreamA Private Square of SkyNotes on London’s Housing CrisisMothsDeedsA Report to the Imperial Customs OfficeThe AcknowledgementsAcknowledgementsAbout this BookAbout the AuthorAlso by Will WilesCopyright

1

The AnechoicChamber

‘Silence isn’t silent,’ Noor said. ‘What we think of as silence, anyway. Silence is loud. Take this room. Listen.’

Justin listened. It had been a long journey and he was ready to listen. The lab was an expensive facility to hire, and he wanted to be convinced.

They were in a small break-out space at one corner of the small complex. Three low tables, three plastic chairs per table, thick carpet on the floor. In a recess, a machine that made coffee from pods stood beside a sink. Behind lush expanses of triple glazing, the Kielder forest was being stirred by an autumn gale. Stripped of sound, the thrashing branches had a slow, submarine quality, like swaying kelp. As far as he knew, he and Noor were the only people in the building. The only people for miles.

Everything smelled new – the chemical bouquet of fresh carpet, and behind it the sharper scents of paint and cut wood. It was a quiet room, almost silent. But not quite. As Justin stilled himself, he found he could hear the fans of the ventilation system and the muted murmur of machinery.2

‘There’s a refrigerator in here,’ he said.

Noor nodded. ‘Yes, behind one of the wall panels. You might be able to hear the water in the pipes, too. The air conditioning. Electronics make a sound as well, transformers and capacitors in particular, they kick up a real racket. But that’s nothing compared to us, Mr Immerman – we are very noisy creatures. Always wheezing and gurgling and creaking and rustling away.’

Even in black jeans and a plaid shirt, Noor looked neat and professional, and Justin found it hard to imagine she had ever made a noise she did not intend to make. ‘Not silent, then,’ he said.

‘Far from it,’ she said. ‘The human ear is not a precise instrument. What it perceives as silence is anything below twenty decibels.’

‘That sounds high.’

‘The language doesn’t help. We hear the word decibels, we think noise. Drills, aeroplanes, annoying neighbours. But the scale goes both ways, and it measures quiet as well. Anyway, twenty decibels certainly isn’t silence. Silence – true silence, real silence, scientific silence – is much more elusive.’

‘So how do we get to zero decibels?’

‘Zero!’ Noor said, with a smile. ‘I think we can do better than that. We can give you subzero decibels, Mr Immerman. The facility is rated to minus twelve decibels, at the edge of what is feasible. The world record is minus twenty. Think of it as a factory, the quietest factory anywhere. And we manufacture one thing: a cube of precision silence.’

Justin had the brochure with him, and he glanced down 3at the page it was open to – the cube, the room, halfway between the inside of a machine and a torture cell. ‘And you do it in this chamber.’

‘An anechoic chamber, yes,’ Noor said. ‘The chamber is soundproofed in all sorts of ways – heavily insulated, of course, built on dampening springs, all the electronics and systems are purpose-built and shielded, and of course we’re out here, one of the quietest places in the country, far from noisy town and cities. But it’s the chamber’s anechoic properties that make it perfect for testing sound. The walls, ceiling and floor are modulated to nullify all sound reflections. You only hear direct sound. No echoes, no reverberations.’

‘And that makes a big difference, does it?’ Justin asked. He had, of course, read about the anechoic chamber in the brochure, but he had not grasped what made it so different. Sound without echo. What was so special about it? He didn’t doubt that a lot of what he heard was echo and reverb, but surely that was only a tiny portion of the whole. Strip it out and what would change, really? He imagined that sound would be more tinny, or more monotonous, as if heard through an old transistor radio.

No, that’s not quite it, Noor told him on the phone when he called to ask. It’s hard to describe. You really have to experience it. And so he made the long drive to this lonely laboratory.

‘It makes all the difference,’ Noor said. ‘You can be certain that every sound picked up in the chamber is coming directly from the test subject, with no distortion or interference. You will be able to hear the sound it’s really making, for the first time. But, if you don’t mind 4me asking you a question, what is it that you’d like to test?’

Justin picked up the steel equipment case at his feet, placed it on the table, and flipped open the clasps. Inside, the prototype lay in a snug bed of shaped foam padding. He was under no illusions about its mundane nature, but he did love opening this case. It felt important and perhaps a little illicit, like the briefcase in PulpFiction, or the stolen embryos in JurassicPark.

‘A new generation of air purifiers,’ he said. ‘As you might have read, air quality is a major consumer concern. Not out here in Kielder, sure, but … in the cities.’

Noor smiled. ‘Sure.’

‘This offers market-leading efficacy in a more compact unit,’ Justin went on. ‘But, more importantly, it’s silent, almost. People have them in their bedrooms, in their children’s bedrooms, next to their beds. Where they sleep. They have to be quiet, and most air purifiers are pretty quiet. But these – these are silent.’

‘Almostsilent,’ Noor said, and for a moment Justin thought she might be making fun of him, until he realised she was repeating him. ‘And you want to know – how silent?’

‘Yes,’ Justin said. ‘We want something we can put in our marketing, something we can hold over our rivals.’

Noor nodded and, with a look to Justin for approval, picked up the prototype. It was about the size and shaped of a half-used roll of kitchen towel, with a near-featureless body of dark grey plastic. ‘Heavy,’ she said. ‘And it’s mains-powered? I see. This should be straightforward.’

Justin found himself looking at the dimpled interior of the equipment case. Its rippling black inner surface made 5him think of the anechoic chamber. ‘May I see the chamber?’ he asked. ‘Try it out?’

‘Of course,’ Noor said, but her tone was less than certain. ‘You didn’t come all this way … If you’re sure.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be sure?’

Noor grimaced slightly – a tightening in the muscles of her jaw, as if they had reached an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth. The bill, usually, but it was not that. ‘It can be a disturbing place. Even … there are some who find it intolerable.’

‘A very quiet room sounds pretty restful to me,’ Justin said.

The technician shook her head. ‘This is far beyond quiet, Mr Immerman. This is …’ She tapped the side of her head, just above her ear. ‘It gets in here.’

Something in her gesture, an undefinable quality connected to a deep and rooted chord, convinced Justin at once. ‘Show me,’ he said.

◊

The room was not large – a master bedroom, at best. And its decoration made it feel smaller. Although, Justin reminded himself, this was not decoration. Everything was functional, and its function was silence.

The walls and ceiling were lined with panels covered in acute wedges of black foam, packed in tightly in an alternating checker-pattern, giving every surface a deep spiked waffle texture. The floor was a thin metal grille, suspended above another layer of the wedged black foam. Light came from deeply recessed but dazzling LED spots. In the middle 6of the chamber was a mounting for equipment, but other than that it was empty. The air was cool and tanged with the chemical signature of new materials. Justin could see why some people might be unnerved by the space. The sharp blades of the foam wedges, and their tactical matte black, gave the whole environment the spirit of a weapon.

Noor entered with him and shut the door, a complicated two-stage operation involving swinging it closed, then pulling it in so the foam panels that lined it joined with the rest of the wall.

The room was quiet, that was certain. Very, very quiet.

‘Wow,’ Justin said, and then frowned at his own voice. ‘Wow,’ he repeated, listening. ‘Wow.’

Noor smiled at him. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘It’s a bit freaky. No reflected sound. When we speak, we’re used to hearing our own words bounced back at us – and every other sound we hear. Sound doesn’t end at source, it hangs around a while, it has an afterlife. But not here. The shaped insulation absorbs it all, nothing can escape. And there are no other hard surfaces.’

Justin toed at the metal grille. ‘Apart from this.’

‘Actually, it’s near-transparent to sound,’ she said. ‘But you’re right, it does make a difference, so we retract it during tests.’

‘You’re not in here during tests?’

She looked appalled. ‘No. Not unless someone has to be. Like I said, Mr Immerman, we’re very noisy beasts. We’ll be in the booth. You really wouldn’t want to be in here during a test.’ She wrapped her arms around her, as if cold.

‘May I try it?’ he asked, and he tried to sound casual about it. ‘On my own.’7

‘If you like,’ Noor said, uncertainly. ‘For a minute. It’s perfectly safe, after all. The effect is … all in your head.’

‘Fine,’ he said with a smile.

‘For a minute.’ She operated the door, and it slid backwards and outwards. ‘If you want to come out for any reason, just wave your arms. I’ll be watching on the camera outside.’

As she exited, Justin was gripped by a strange impatience. Everything about her actions was too slow. The door was too slow. Once it had finally closed on her, and he was alone, he felt awash with relief.

He let the silence engulf him. It was beautiful, in a way, in its perfection.

‘Hello,’ he said, savouring the death of the word as it left him. Noor was watching on a monitor, he recalled, and he probably shouldn’t do anything strange.

‘Hello,’ he said again. Or did he? A curious trick of the dead air was that he could not be sure if he spoken at all. Sound has no afterlife in this space, Noor said. How much of life was being comforted by the echo of our sounds and actions, reminding us that we exist?

Instead of making noise, he tried being quiet, being really quiet, and he realised how loud he really was. His body was a roaring foundry of noise. Every breath rasped in his throat and whistled in his nose, and he could hear the thumping, squishing pump of his heart and the rush of blood pushing through the passages around his ears. His digestive system was as raucous and sinister as a rainforest night.

Still and calm. The breathing slowed and smoothed. Justin’s pulse dropped, and he realised that he had been 8excited. He became very conscious of his ears, and the fleshy gimcrack structures within. The imperfect mechanism by which he sensed sound. Those narrow little wormholes filled with tiny bones and quivering membranes. Miraculous organs, but hopelessly outmatched by the technology in this room.

A change, within. In the ears, where he had been focused. They popped and yawned, with a sudden rush of auditory hiss, as if he had been swimming earlier in the day and they had just emptied themselves of water. And, exactly as if he had been swimming, he felt the spreading warmth of the water rushing out. On cue, he smelled chlorine.

Struck by mild panic, he raised a hand to his ear, expecting it to be damp, or possibly even bloody. Could the rarefied atmosphere of the anechoic chamber have caused a rupture of some kind?

But the side of his head was dry, and he felt great, clear-headed, full of blood and pleasure.

The door was open, and Noor was standing there.

‘Was that really a minute?’ he said. ‘It felt like no time at all.’

◊

‘There’s noise in the chamber.’

‘The prototype?’

‘No. Something else.’

‘That’s not possible.’

The lab had been hired at the earliest opportunity. Justin returned to the Kielder forest, checked into a bed & 9breakfast, and set up the test sequence with Noor. They had begun with baselines, measuring the room empty and with the subject platform set up – the thin, padded pillar on which the prototype would sit while the test was running. Noor had reassured Justin that the room was operating at optimal test silence, far beneath the limit of human perception. Now the prototype was in place on its pillar, and it looked rather noble there, like a sacred idol. It seemed vulnerable, too, threatened by the sharp, angry blades of the chamber.

Of course, they could not see it directly – their view, inside the control booth, came via four CCTV monitors, each showing the output of a different camera. But that cluster was not the focus of the room, which was centred on three huge LCD screens showing the readings from the microphones and other sensors that studded the interior of the chamber. Mostly, they watched a central readout showing noise level in the room laid over the baseline of silence. There was a window, but it looked out, not in. Through three layers of tinted glass, the forest writhed, for the time being holding back from the laboratory that had dropped in its midst.

The test regime called the for prototype to run for eight hours, equivalent to a night’s sleep, to see if the noise output changed over time. Afterwards they would test it again, with dirty filters, and then some competitor models. It would be a long – and quiet – couple of weeks of work. Justin had brought books and magazines, ready for a long wait.

What he had not been ready for was the lack of interaction with the tests. When they had first sat down, he 10had asked for a pair of headphones, seeing them hanging on hooks on the wall. Noor had laughed at him – he was welcome to wear them if he wanted, but there was nothing to hear. And the pure data readouts which they watched were curiously underwhelming. He had pictured the control booth being something like a recording studio, looking into the soundproofed room in which the artists performed. But the anechoic chamber was windowless. Even the CCTV monitors were unnecessary. They didn’t have to see the prototype while the test was running, and Noor had offered to turn off both the cameras and the lights in the room, the better to limit any possible electronic interference. But Justin had balked at that. There was something disturbing about the cube of silence also being a cube of darkness. To listen into that nothingness, for the sound of breathing.

‘You don’t have to be here, if you don’t want to be,’ Noor said. ‘Go for a walk. I’m only sorry the weather isn’t better.’

But he wanted to be here, and to see: not to see the forest, or a minutely corrugated graph line. He wanted to see the anechoic chamber. The CCTV monitors might as well have been showing still images, but that didn’t stop him staring at them. After a time he had asked for the headphones, and been given them. That was then he heard the noise. It was faint, too faint to properly discern with the imperfection of the human ear, but it was there.

‘There’s something in the chamber.’ He glanced back at the CCTV monitor, which showed what they had always showed: the prototype on its pillar, in a maze of black blades.11

Noor gestured to the main bank of screens. ‘Only the prototype,’ she said. ‘Everything else is baseline.’

‘Something in the baseline, then.’

‘That’s far beneath human hearing.’ Noor scowled at the data screens, and for a moment at the CCTV cluster. ‘Interference on the output, maybe.’ She indicated to him that she wanted his headphones, and he handed them over. She held one side to her ear while stabbing and scrawling at the trackpad in front of her, staring intently at a secondary screen.

‘No interference,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to hear.’

‘I’d like to go into the chamber,’ Justin said.

Noor winced. ‘I’m telling you … Listen, pure silence isn’t natural. It’s artificial. It’s a form of sensory deprivation, basically, and just like sensory deprivation, it can affect you in funny ways. The brain’ – and she tapped her temple with a finger – ‘tries to fill it in. You’re not actually hearing anything.’

A foaming geyser of frustration abruptly welled up within Justin and threatened to spill over, but he pushed it back with a smile. ‘I’m sure you’re right, and I don’t mean to tell you your job. But, please, indulge a client. I’m sure once I’m in there, I’ll be reassured. You can keep the prototype running. We don’t have to interrupt the test.’

He felt bare without the headphones. Again, he glanced at the screens. ‘Please,’ he said.

◊

The door eased back into place behind him, becoming invisible as it joined the rest of the thickly textured wall. 12He had asked to be alone. For a few seconds he stood by the threshold, listening, waiting for a secret to reveal itself. The chamber was silent.

Justin approached the prototype on its pedestal, listening to the hollow clatter of his feet against the metal floor. The prototype sat in a dim pool of blue light, showing it was switched on. But that was the only sign of life it displayed: as designed, as manufactured, not a whisper of noise emerged from it. He leaned in to listen. Close up, perhaps there was a hint of something, and he could sense the air moving around the device. Behind that, the smell of new and warm electronics, and a hint of chlorine, perhaps from a cleaning product.

He stopped, and listened. The chamber was silent, beneath silent, though he could still feel the slight movement of the air as it crossed the freshly shaved skin of his face. But he was not hearing everything – his ears felt bunged up, or somehow still polluted with residual noise from outside the chamber. Nevertheless, entering the chamber had not dispelled his suspicions – they had only intensified. It was not the silent place he had been promised.

‘Noor, can you hear me?’

An electronic click emitted from a concealed speaker. ‘Yes, go ahead.’

‘Could you shut off power to the prototype? I want to listen without it.’

A pause. Click. ‘Sure thing, Justin.’

The ring of blue light under the air purifier died. There was, for a fraction of a moment, a noise – the falling whine of an electric motor coming to rest. In any other environment, he would not have been able to hear it.13

Silence. But, not quite. Now he was alone, now the prototype was quieted, he could focus on what had caught his attention. And it was there: the faintest hiss or whisper, suggestive in its sibilance of an aged, leaky tap at the other end of an old house.

‘Noor, are you picking that up?’

Click. ‘I’m reading your breathing and heartbeat, Justin. They’re both quite high, are you OK?’

‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’

But he was breathing heavily, and every breath was a hurricane of noise. Every beat of his heart was a hammer of solid blood on an anvil of muscle. Sweat prickled across his skin, and he was certain he heard it, a rustle like soft rain falling on long grass. He closed his eyes. The silence razored down within him, opening him up, exposing every hidden murmur of flesh and liquid and gas within his body. He was a cacophony, and he hated it.

‘Who’s the king of the castle?’ he asked himself. He took a deep, long breath in and tried to release it slowly and quietly. The second time, the air bore a distinct scent of chlorine. No echo in the air, no afterlife.

His ears popped. A rhythmic pain throbbed in the side of his head.

Who’sthekingofthecastle, he asked himself again, without speaking. Listening for the answer.

◊

‘It’s there again. A noise in the chamber.’

Noor’s jawline tightened, and she gave him an anxious kind of look, but didn’t say anything. She was wearing a 14pink plaid shirt. The day before it had been green, and when they met it had been blue. The black jeans and plaid shirt combination was pretty much her uniform, he realised, but he wondered how many colour variants she owned.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sure.’

She tapped the screen in front of her. ‘Don’t listen on the headphones. Look at the data. Trust the data.’

‘I need to be sure,’ he said, feeling obscurely pathetic, as if he was a child again.

But she relented without argument and minutes later Justin was back in the anechoic chamber, standing by the test platform, listening.

He had read about communities plagued by low-intensity noise, hums and whines that could persist for years without being traced or identified. Those stories always had a sinister edge, suggesting military experiments, government black sites, secret psychological weapons. At the heart of those stories would be a place like this, he figured, a room in which something unnatural had been made to occur.

To test the air, he cleared his throat and listened into the emptiness that came back, that did not come back. He waited to tune into the untuned orchestra of his body, and tried to calm it down.

This time he was closer. His head, his ears, felt clearer. He had not slept well, but it didn’t seem to matter, it hadn’t impaired him. On the contrary. He could really listen. But still his breathing was a problem. He pulled in a deep lungful of air and held it. And exhaled.

‘Who’s the king of the castle,’ he said, nothing coming 15back. The words came with sharp tapping impacts to the side of the head. They just went together. One came with the other. And they cracked open the inside.

Who’s the king of the castle? He was standing chest-deep in the cold water of the municipal pool, a Victorian building arched in iron like a little railway station, long since demolished. They had been practising turns, flipping the body round under water like a seabird, quick and smooth.

But he had been neither quick nor smooth, he had gone too early, or too late, or had fudged the movement, and come up coughing and spluttering. Half the pool was taken with another lesson, younger kids, and they were a rowdy, boundless group.

‘They’re distracting me,’ he complained, the third or four time he fouled the turn. His father, who had been scowling from the bench, had risen and was crouching at the poolside while the coach watched his team-mates. ‘I can’t concentrate.’

‘You’ve got to shut them out,’ his father said. ‘There’ll always be distractions. When you compete, there’ll be crowds. You need to be clear – up here.’ And he tapped the side of his skull.

‘It’s hard,’ Justin said.

‘You can’t control them, but you can control you,’ his father said. Tap, tap. ‘Who’s the king of the castle?’

‘I’m the king of the castle.’

‘Get it clear, up here,’ his father said, and this time he tapped the side of Justin’s head. ‘Who’s the king of the castle?’ The taps, with combined index and middle finger, increased in force, they came in hard, blows against the side 16of the head, hot and sharp through the cold wetness of his scalp. ‘Who’s the king of the castle?’

Who’s the king of the castle, Justin thought to himself, in the silence of the anechoic chamber. You quiet everything within, and you focus, and you listen to what’s there. You shut out the pain in the side of the head, you shut out the dissatisfied and thwarted eyes watching from the side of the pool, and you burrow down, and you listen to what’s inside. Nothing else mattered, only what was within the battlements of the skull. And if you were very quiet, you’d get an answer. But you had to listen, and it was so hard to listen, there were so many distractions. Not here, though.

◊

‘I’m sorry,’ Justin said. ‘I’m sorry – it’s there again. I’m sure of it.’

Day three of the tests, and day three of Justin’s interruptions. Noor, who had seemed so imperturbable early in the week, did not disguise her annoyance.

‘It really isn’t,’ she said, with a roll of the eyes. ‘This whole facility is built to measure one thing: the level of noise in that chamber. Everything we have says that the chamber is silent. I am certain of that.’

‘We can reset the tests,’ Justin said, eyes closed, marching over her objections. ‘I’ll pay for the extra time – the company will. I just have to be sure. I need to go into the chamber.’

‘You said you didn’t hear anything the first time, or the second time,’ Noor said. ‘What makes you think you’ll hear something this time? What guarantee do we have 17that there won’t be a fourth time? Last time you were in there more than twenty minutes.’

That long? It didn’t sound right – it had seemed far less. He shook his head. ‘There won’t be another time,’ he said. ‘I just need to be certain.’

◊

In the middle of the anechoic chamber, he stooped to examine the prototype. Purified air moved around the bristles on his chin.

‘Noor, could you kill power to the test?’ he asked.

No reply came over the intercom, but the blue light died.

He was close. For the first time since his youth, he might be able to get to the depth he needed, and to listen. He hadn’t slept at all and all his senses were on a scalpel-edge. But he only needed one of those senses.

‘Your head’s not in it,’ his father had said. ‘Your body’s fine, it’s your head. You’ve got to get in there and dig it up.’