When it first happened, Abel did not notice. He wasn’t in the room when the call came, and nearly ignored it when he saw later. He’d left the cell phone lying unattended on the small rolltop handed down from his mother’s father, whom he’d never met, serving as a fragile connection across the centuries. It had been put on silent and so no one downstairs noticed when it began to vibrate quietly, evenly. Abel himself was outside in one of the far fields and wouldn’t be back to the house for hours.
The display read, simply: “Unknown”.
When he was finished with the list of chores his father had left for the day, Abel showered, dressed, then eagerly picked the phone up as if it were a recovered treasure. The chill had not yet left his hands, he cupped them together and blew into them twice. It didn’t help. He swiped a blue-tipped thumb across the screen to turn it back on, not registering the generous amount of dirt still clinging beneath the nail. His father held deep beliefs about the value of hard work and on a farm there was work to be done every day. Enough work for everyone, but Abel was beginning to wonder if his share had now become larger than his father’s even.
The phone had been a gift for his fourteenth birthday, and though part of his strategy had been to mention it only once in passing, the idea had caused more than one heated exchange within these walls. A close second to the value of a good day’s labor was Cameron Saltsman’s firm stance on his family being independent from the rest of the world. But at the mention of wanting a cell phone to talk to his friends outside of school, Abel’s mother had shone through, in her kind and unassuming way, reaching across the dinner table to touch his chin gently, tilting her head and winking.
“Why is he like that?” Abel had asked her, after the table had been cleared and the rest had moved into the living room, TV humming and flickering across the wall.
“Abel,” she replied, without looking up from the dishwater, left hand scrubbing furiously. “Your father is a man of…conviction.”
“You mean he’s stubborn.” Abel retorted, though carefully monitoring his volume.
“Now, that’s just not true.” She defended, her scrubbing hand switching directions swiftly enough to pelt soapy water across the window behind the sink. “He cares deeply about all of us, and he’s trying to provide the best way he knows how.”
“But, that’s not really the point, Ma. I know he puts food on the table, but I need to have a life too.” Without meaning to he had emphasized the word as though it were obscene, something to be uttered beneath the breath only. He shot a glance around the corner into the other room. Cameron coughed by made no indication he had heard anything in the kitchen.
“Now, that’s just not fair.” Her only response, barely different than the previous one. She was slipping into a state of denial, a predictable pattern, and Abel knew he would not be able to push her much further. He wouldn’t win anything else here. He resigned himself to another lost exchange and his shoulders slumped forward a bit. He was turning to leave the room when she waved a white flag. “I’ll talk to him about it.”
Whatever she had said behind a closed door had worked, and Abel had been given his new phone just a few days ago. The first day he’d been so excited he nearly dropped it twice, at which his father immediately scoffed. But, he’d soon noticed that the phone had no reception inside their house. He had tried moving around, first in his room, then the upstairs hall, decided it wasn’t worth trying from his younger twin sisters’ room. Next from each room on the ground floor, finally moving outside into the bitterly cold night air that pierced all exposed skin like angry beestings. It was mid-February and winter had arrived brusquely, as if trying to make up for lost time. Wandered around the back yard, frozen ground crunching like glass underfoot, toward the barn and fields, before realizing that the front of the house may be more fertile ground for a signal. Abel had become so entranced waiting for the bars to fill in at the top corner of the display that he didn’t realize how close he was to wandering into the runoff ditch which was all that separated their yard from State Route 35. The busy four-lane artery ran east to Chillicothe and west back to I-71, where it turned north to Columbus or Cleveland, or south toward Cincinnati. The two highways conspired to connect the major cities of Ohio like the crosshairs of rifle scope, with Abel’s home seemingly deadshot.
Through all those trials, the phone gave no ground. There was never a signal. That complete lack of cell service was strange to Abel, who had never considered his house to be that remote. After all, it was only a few miles to I-71, just past the big new outlet mall where people seemed to mill endlessly like ants in the dirt, half of them carrying paper shopping bags adorned with designer clothing labels, the other half likely wishing they were carrying some too. And from there a mere 30 minutes south to Mason, recently voted the seventh best place to live in the country. He knew that because he’d often heard from his friends about how easy it was to get to King’s Island amusement park. Abel had never been himself and wasn’t quite sure if he’d enjoy riding roller coasters, his stomach had proven to be unreliable at times, but he clearly remembered hearing how someone’s older brother had once made the trip in just under twenty minutes, from stepping off a ride to stepping onto their driveway. It was a fairly exciting proposition, even if he didn’t quite believe that timeframe possible.
Once he’d determined that his slick new phone had no connection to the outside world (leaving it nothing more than a slick, impotent piece of black plastic married to glass), Abel had felt quite deflated. If not for that, he would have thought nothing of the missed call he found now. But, when he saw the word “Unknown” displayed prominently on the screen, all of his initial curiosity and Christmas-morning excitement flushed back in. He felt almost feverish heat wash over his face, banishing the remnants of the winter air that still lingered, like stubborn puffs of smoke. At first he only stared at the screen, focusing and un-focusing his pupils in disbelief.
Someone had called him. Someone had.
His excitement then lost the upper hand to curiosity. Who had called? And how? “Unknown” had called. What does that mean? He checked the service bars at the top of the phone’s face. All blank, vacant as corpse eyes, as they’d been since he first plugged it in to charge. He held the phone just above eye level and peered at the empty bars, pacing around the room with desperation. He never found a signal. That only brought more questions. He tapped the screen, directly on the word “Unknown” to see if the phone would share any other pieces of its secret. Some further glimpse into the elusive world of electrical impulses and invisible transmissions, a strange and somewhat unsettling frontier for someone accustomed to such a technologically-neglected bubble, nestled in the frigid gray landscape of wintered-Ohio farmland.
Nothing happened, no more data available. He couldn’t even tell how long ago the call had come, how many times it had rung, if “Unknown” had left a mes–.
But they had, the phone chimed indicatively. “Unknown” suddenly replaced by “New voicemail from ‘Unknown’”. Well, shit, Abel thought, feeling instant guilt even though the word was heard by none. How do I listen to that? He tapped his index finger on the word “Voicemail” and was surprised when it seemed to work. The display changed to show a long white bar that was slowly filling in green, from left to right. Beneath was a timer, on the far right of the bar it showed that the message was forty-eight seconds in length. Abel missed the first few seconds of the message, too enchanted by the fact that someone had even left him one, let alone one of that length. It was just unprecedented. As of only a week ago, he had never spoken with any of his friends outside the confines of their school and now he could listed to his first voicemail message. His mind scurried in a hundred directions, like a cache of rats shocked into movement at once, as the sieve of possible message contents emptied, carrying him away with reckless glee. Except that it was eight seconds in and he hadn’t been listening.
He slapped the phone to his ear so quickly that it made a sound, like a rock skipping on stagnant water. He heard nothing. “Unknown” seemed to not have much to say. Waited a few seconds longer, though it felt relatively like an hour, then held the phone out again. The counter was up to twenty-six seconds, more than halfway through and “Unknown” had yet to speak. There was nothing but a strange scraping sound, metallic at times and muffled at others, as if someone were shuffling spare change into the dirt. Abel started to wonder if he had been pocket-dialed, before remembering that he hadn’t even found a chance to give anyone his number yet. That’s when the voice came through first. It was a female voice, a girl’s, maybe around his age, maybe a few years younger. He moved the phone quickly back to his ear.
It was barely audible, the speech broken and hard to decipher. The first word he could grasp was “find”. It repeated, “find”. More silence, punctuated by light static like the flowing river of sound located between radio stations. Then the metallic scraping again. The voice returned with a few more staggered words. “hands”, or maybe “can’t”? Another might have been “mine” or “time”. The ones he was certain of were “where”, and “stop”. That last one stood out the furthest, sounded the most insistent. It sounded desperate, fearful.
At the end, there was a second voice, even more difficult to hone in on, louder but further back like the man speaking were in another room and projecting through a half-closed door. There was cadence enough for a full sentence, perhaps two, but all Abel could separate was one word, though he was not sure of it either. “barn”, or “farm”? The recording ended with another metal scraping sound, slower this time as if whatever motion causing it had become more indifferent, distracted. Silence.
He listened to it again, held the phone slightly out from his ear, listened again. To the other ear, again. By the fifth iteration he acknowledged that the few words he could grasp did not combine to form anything meaningful.
His attention dog-legged then, perhaps too baffled by the lack of coherence in the message, and he wondered how the call had even been able to come through. The phone had yet to find a signal, and certainly not for his lack of trying. Abel was an adept student, had made it into an advanced-placement physics class this year (another announcement his father had merely scoffed at, then began ignoring). He understood a little about how the cell phone sent and received signals, especially considering his overall lack of exposure to technology. Take away all the bells and whistles and apps and games, it was really not much more than a very compact two-way radio, with an antenna converting sounds into electrical impulses then transmitting them to a tower nearby. It was a basic understanding, but it certainly made sense to him that way. What did not make sense was how it could receive impulses from nowhere, with no signal, and convert them into sound (disjointed and staccato as that sound was). The term left on the display was quite apt.
Abel could find only one logical explanation: he simply hadn’t tried hard enough to find a signal. There had to be some type of electrical impulses leaking their way into his room, he just needed to find where they were coming from. Simple, logical, scientific. There was no way he could know how profoundly that logic was about to be challenged.
He walked outside again (ignoring the fact that the phone had received a call while inside), deciding that his chances of success were better unhindered by walls or other barriers. The open air was his best shot. He walked northeast, away from the rear of the house and toward his father’s barn, standing skeletal and lilting, halfway to the edge of their property where it butted against their nearest neighbor’s.
That neighbor, Kim Reickert, in addition to being the pastor at the nearby “Tower of Strength” church, also happened to be his father’s only existing friend. They spent considerable time together, which Abel’s mother had only recently stopped protesting aloud, though her continued opposition was not well hidden. She had complained for years and the only resulting change was that Cameron now spent more time at Kim’s house than his own as the two men seemed to become closer and more elusive, as if drawn together by some terrible secret or shared deviance. Abel didn’t mind though, he was guiltily relieved to be seeing less of each. Kim Reickert made his skin crawl, and he fully endorsed his mother’s belief that the man was bad company to keep. She had long since pulled her children away from his so-called church and it’s godless, unorthodox practices.
As Abel approached the barn, some five hundred feet from the house, his focus was divided in two equal directions: monitoring the phone’s display for changes, and turning over the disjointed words from the voicemail. He had effectively memorized it and was now shifting the parts around like pixels on a screen, hoping they would form a pattern.
scrape…scrape, “find”, “find”, scrape…scrape, “hands/can’t?”, “where”, “mine/time?”, scrape, “Stop”, then the man’s voice “barn/farm?”, scrape…scrape.
He stopped just short of the barn’s massive front door, it’s gray and rotting wood frame looming over him like a bulky yet lithe predator. It seemed to cast a shadow over him even with the fading sunlight falling perpendicularly. He remembered how he’d feared that barn as a child, due partly to its unearthly façade and state of disrepair. In childhood’s winters, as now, it stood as a chilling monolith amidst the gray, bleak and harvested landscape. Abel wondered if it would draw the gaze of passersby on the road, guiding their attention and piquing strange, unwelcome curiosities toward the savage things lying just beneath the surface of any unknown land. Over the last few years, he had become even more afraid as his father grew strangely protective and insistent that no one enter the barn, ever. Cameron tried laxly to convince his family that their safety was his concern, that the barn was unsound, but it was obvious to all he had other reasons for keeping them out, they simply didn’t care to find out what those reasons could be.
No more than ten feet from the barn, Abel stood holding the phone above eye level and peering greedily. One bar filled in. He was so excited that he almost dropped it. Took a few quick steps backward, moving away from the barn with subconscious intention. The bar immediately blinked out. One tentative step toward the barn, not closing his eyes even once. It was there again. Another, larger, step toward and placed his hand on the door handle, a second bar appeared. Whereas the first one had brought unhindered excitement, the appearance of this second bar caused the hairs to raise on the back of his neck and the skin to prickle defensively, a warning. Abel’s heart thudded in his ears and he suddenly questioned how badly he wanted to acquire that signal. Then apprehension faded toward the sky like rising smoke and he rallied, using his weight to pull the sliding barn door to the right, carefully cupping the phone in one hand.
The door screamed as it opened, wood and metal long at rest and rudely awakened now protesting through each inch with progressive volume and insistence. He noticed the smell immediately, drawing on his experience to find something comparable. A mix of feces, rotting meat, some chemical he couldn’t place.
The phone now had three bars filled in.
That was when Abel realized what was happening. Something was leading him. “Unknown” had drawn him outside and into the barn. His thoughts reeled at what that could mean, how it was possible. At what he might find. There were terrifying forces at work and he had no way of comprehending the events he now found himself a part of. Trying desperately to reapply the logic that had first brought him back outside, like a drowning man clutching at his own throat for breath that would never come, his brain fell into a pattern of repeating one single word. Impulses…impulses…impulses…impulses.
The phone began to ring.
Abel could only stare, holding the phone at arms length, simultaneously afraid of it and of dropping it. Incoming call from “Unknown”.
A small sound escaped his mouth, like bats flitting out a cave’s mouth. The signal bars were all blank again, but still the phone rang. The rotting smell swarmed around him and the ringing phone was the only sound in the world. It rang a fourth time, fifth. Abel remembered to breath and gasped sharply. The phone continued to ring and Abel stared without blinking. Twelve times, thirteen. He exhaled for the first time in nearly a minute. Eighteen rings, nineteen.
A few hundred feet away, the back door of the house slammed shut and Cameron Saltsman began walking determinedly toward the barn, his eyes seething toward the open door.
By the twenty-fifth ring, Abel had regained enough logic to realize that “Unknown” was not going to give up. He answered the call and held the phone to his ear, the hand trembling violently. He did not speak, only listened. At first there was nothing, then the loop started. That terribly familiar sound of metal scraping on metal and the series of a disconnected handful of words, only now they could be heard more clearly and were joined by others. Abel felt an invisible weight pushing him down as he realized that he recognized one of the voices. The man’s voice, at the end.
scrape…scrape, “find me”, “someone”, “will find”, scrape…scrape, “hands”, “where are”, “those”, “mine”, scrape, “stop, please”, then the man’s voice “told you”, “close”, “barn.” scrape…scrape, the girl screamed.
Halfway through the playback, Abel had taken two steps forward. Had stumbled forward, more accurately, under the pressure of that invisible weight. And as he did, the voices became louder, the words more perceptible. He was still being led. Now the smell permeated everything around him, it settled onto him as silently as putrid snow. The loop restarted. Without full comprehension, Abel took three more steps forward, a small part of him pulling the timid rest toward the far end of the barn, wanting to hear the full message. The plastic casing of the phone had become warm to the touch, his face sweating unnoticed against the screen.
As it began to play a third time, he stood just before the back corner of the barn. There was no doubt that the source of the rotting meat odor was very close, nor any doubt of what it was. It was the body of a young girl, the one whose voice he was listening to. Abel listened more intently than ever before, wholly aware that logic no longer applied. His shiny new phone was receiving impulses that lingered from the last moments of the girl’s short life. Without the presence of a normal cellular signal to block it, her residual cry for help had leaked into the phone, bringing him here.
Abel noticed a large metal drum, the kind his father used to store food for the livestock, shoved completely into the corner of the barn. Flies lit and left its surface in turn, no less than a dozen. He walked toward it as the phone recited its final, complete version of the events that occurred here, probably in the exact place he now stood.
scrape…scrape, the girl’s voice “they’ll find me, someone will…find me.”, an audible sob, scrape…scrape, “hurts my hands”, “where are we”, footsteps in the background “no, no those are mine”, scrape, “stop, please”, then the man’s voice, it was him, it was Kim Reickert’s voice “I told you, close the fucking barn” barn door sliding closed rapidly, scrape…scrape, the girl screamed.
The phone burned in his hand like a branding iron. He reached for the lid of the drum, feet sliding minutely against the dry dirt of the barn’s floor. The phone fell, landing face up to his right. He forced back the clasp that held the lid on and the phone rang out once, a distinct clarion of relief, then there was only silence.
Abel had not noticed the two figures now standing in the barn’s open doorway, their silhouettes carved from failing winter sunlight.
The drum came open, lid clamoring mutely into the dirt at his feet, smell of death hitting him in waves. He wretched, stomach muscles seizing, knees buckling, fell prone. From down near the floor, he looked forward and noticed a pile of chains lying behind the barrel and suddenly understood the metallic scraping sound.
Only a split second he’d looked into that barrel, and it was an image that would never leave. Her body was not intact, not possible for limbs attached in their natural places to find the pattern he had seen. The parts were yellowed, floating in some unknown liquid with an odor of mixed chemicals. He had seen a glimmer of metal surrounding one of her small wrists, handcuffs, the skin beneath covered with a few deep cuts surrounded by smaller abrasions. He’d seen her face in there, one eye wide open, its sorrow piercing a veneer of discoloration inches below the liquid’s surface, her skin pickled and wrinkling. He thought briefly of the fetal pig he’d helped to dissect in biology last month and vomited forcefully, his eyes swimming with white spots that turned the ceiling and floor sideways.
He recognized her, this teenage-girl-turned-fetal-pig-meat in his father’s barn. That was the worst part. Had seen her face on TV just a few days ago, couldn’t recall the name, but recognized her as being reported missing from King’s Island, just thirty minutes south of his home.
“Oh…oh god. Jesus.” Abel muttered, not expecting any reply.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen, you know.” Cameron said from behind him. He was close, only a handful of feet away from Abel.
Abel wheeled around, coming back to his feet like a boxer trying to recover. “D-dad?” was all he could articulate. The white spots continued swirling in his eyes while the walls and floor switched places back and forth.
“She wasn’t supposed to die.” He turned back to the door as Kim was pulling it closed. It clacked shut like the barred door of a prison cell. The barn’s interior was tomb-silent for a few seconds.
“Listen, Abel, we-” Cam started.
“Cam,” Kim interrupted, “just shut up before you say something stupid.”
But Cameron appeared to be in as much shock as Abel. He kept talking, as Kim began walking toward them, covering the distance in a few large strides.
“It…that doesn’t do us any good, you see?” He waited briefly for a response, then continued explaining, his body language stilted and uncomfortable. “We don’t get paid for dead girls.”
“Cameron.” Kim said insistently. “Stop. Talking. Right now.”
Cameron looked at Abel, something resembling shame danced around his face like the cloud of flies on the drum lid. But it never quite landed. To Abel, that was almost as disarming as the horrid content of that drum, seeing his father that way. He had never shown so much as a shadow of that emotion before. It was clear that Cameron had never expected to have to explain what happened in this barn.
“I..I don’t” Abel tried, then changed to “But, why?”
“Now listen, son. There’s some things you need to understand first.”
“No,” Abel protested, taking a stumbling step back toward the barrel. “No, don’t.”
“Just, just hear me out now.”
“Cameron, you need to shut up already.” Kim reached a hand behind his back, hoping neither of the others would notice. Cam did not, but Abel did. He noticed, but couldn’t bring himself to break focus from his father’s face. “We talked about this, I told you this might happen.”
“Some things’ve changed, you see.” Cameron pressed on. “I got responsibilities,” he stepped sideways, leaving the three men spread out in a tense triangle. “Responsibilities, okay? I got to take care of you and your sisters. And, and farming ain’t enough anymore. Not after that drought last season.”
Abel had stopped listening. Nothing he heard would matter, that was clear. What little awareness he had recovered or maintained since opening the drum was now spent on reasoning out what came next. How life would go on. He turned away, facing the barrel again. From here he could see only the surface of discolored liquid that rose to within an inch of the upper lip. He didn’t want to see any more than that, but his memory was quick to provide more detail. He saw that one pale eye, her fine hair settled around the sides of her face.
“I’m just doing what I need to do, son. Kim and I…”
“Cam!” Kim cut him off more abruptly this time. “Not another word. We need to figure out what to do here before things get out of control. Understand?” His hand rested near his belt, behind his back.
“Just, just let me talk to him, alright?” Cam pleaded. “Let me explain things, then he’ll be able to help us.”
“He’s not going to help us, you dumb shit!” Kim yelled. “Isn’t that why you came to get me first? You know how this ends, Cam.”
“Yes, yes he will. He’ll see it, see it all. He’s a good boy, aren’t you Abel?”
Abel gave no reply, he only stared at the barrel from the side, as if seeing straight through the metal. A few seconds passed, the three of them breathing in hurried unison.
“Abel?” Cam prodded. “We need your help here, son. It may not make sense now, but some day you’ll see why this is…” He searched for the right word, “is necessary.”
Abel began to recall other, similar news stories. This wasn’t the first abduction from King’s Island he remembered. Also, coverage last year at the outlet mall, when a pair of young boys had disappeared. A girl from his class had stopped showing up to school six months ago, he had heard she ran away to live with her sister out west. The County Sheriff had conducted an investigation at “Tower of Strength” just before his mother had pulled them out.
“How many others?” he asked, without moving.
“What?” Cam replied, stalling.
Abel said nothing further.
“Well, this is the first one. I told you, she wasn’t supposed to-”
“Not what I’m asking.” Abel interrupted, his voice near-robotic.
“Now, listen, son. You don’t understand.”
“Cameron, don’t you say another word.” Kim had pulled the hand from behind his back, holding a large revolver to his side. Its tarnished silver caught a bit of the sunlight still falling in through the open barn door, giving the appearance of motion like a snake whipping itself at a rodent. He raised it toward Cameron, whose breath caught. Then he trained the gun on Abel, aiming for his chest.
“Kim, don’t.” Cameron said.
“Too late, we need to get this under control.”
Abel only leaned forward, looking into the barrel once more through a thick fog of tears. His eyes met the dead girl’s. The phone made a loud, strange clicking noise from the dirt beside him.
Kim Reickert raised his gun slightly, his hand steady. Cameron looked away and said nothing more.
A car sped past, moving west on 35 toward the fading sun, traveling just under the speed limit. From that distance the shot was less than the snap of a twig.