Parallax of the Mind

“To listen too long is to be heard in return. Every silence is an ear, waiting to remember you.”

Day five of week four is here for Bradley Ramsey October horror writing challenge/contest is here and with it, another prompt, another submission, another short horror story and with this prompt I keep building upon the world of my mythos thank you Bradley. This is one that I hope you will enjoy. And as always please enjoy today’s musical pairing to help you immerse yourself in the writing.

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Parallax of the Mind


He did not mean to find it.
Few ever do.

Dr. Elias Wren,
radio astronomer,
custodian of static and silence,
watched the cosmos
the infinite blanket of stars and celstial bodies
through instruments that could only listen.

It was 1931,
winter at the Polar Observation Array,
a fortress of steel and frost
where the sky hummed like an endless mouth.

His days were numbers,
frequencies,
measurements of invisible tides.

His nights—well
those were the hours of listening.

Listening for what?
Even he no longer knew.

Perhaps for proof that silence had meaning.
Perhaps for a voice that could name the ache he felt
when the universe refused to answer.

It began on January 17th,
at 03:14 local time.
A signal.

Not the usual static,
nor the coded pulse of distant storms,
nor the electric growl of the aurora’s blood.

This was different.
It felt inhuman in nature.
Sinster even,
though he couldnt truly tell.

It came as a slow hum,
rising and falling like breath.
Too deliberate.
Too symmetrical.
Somehow simultaneously mechanical and not.

He marked the frequency:
1420.356 MHz.

Hydrogen-line frequency.
The pulse of cosmic structure itself.

But this—
this was no natural emission.

Every seven seconds,
a rhythm.
Every rhythm,
a pattern.
Every pattern,
a voice.

The sound itself made him reel—
dizzy, nauseated,
as though the air thickened with meaning.

He recorded it.
Played it back.

And in the playback,
a whisper beneath the sound:
not English,
not any tongue of man,
but something older,
something constructed.

The phonemes hissed with teeth,
sliding between sibilants and sighs:

“Ssyth’aen vuhl—m’kah rrhen…”

He could not translate it,
but he felt it...
Deep within the blood coursing through his marrow,
a phrase shaped like intrusion.

At first, he thought it madness.
The mind,
starved for voices,
creates them.
That was the rule.
Absence of anything creates that very thing.

He noted it in his logbook:

“03:14—Received anomalous transmission.
Origin: lunar quadrant Mare Tranquillitatis.
Effect: mild vertigo. Possible interference.
Will verify after calibration.”

But the calibration only made it louder.

When he removed the antenna from its housing,
the hum persisted.
When he unplugged the receiver,
the hum persisted.
When he severed the power entirely,
the hum persisted—
not from the speakers,
but from inside his skull.
Begging to be released,
to crack the memrane holding it at bay.

He slept.
He dreamed.

The moon hung low and pale,
its surface rippling
like water disturbed by breath.

And beneath that silver skin,
a vast structure stirred—
lattices of thought,
veins of radio-light
pulsing like neurons.

Something beneath the surface
was listening back.

He awoke to find his recording equipment rearranged.
The reels spun by themselves.
Paper strips filled with unreadable glyphs.
Ink drawn into spirals
that resembled eyes—
but each one incomplete,
unfinished,
as if waiting for him to finish drawing them.

He did.
Without knowing why.

Each curve guided by something unseen.
Each stroke a replication of sound.

When he was done,
the symbols matched the cadence of the transmission.
He realized, then,
the signal was not a message.

It was an invocation.
A calling,

He wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society.
He wrote to anyone who might listen.

No reply.

The telegram lines crackled with static.
The post never arrived.

By the seventh night,
the other scientists in the camp began to change.
Dr. Keller complained of migraines.
Dr. Rousseau stopped speaking altogether.

They too had heard the signal.

They too had dreamed of the moon’s breathing surface.

And in the morning,
their eyes followed Elias too long,
their reflections lagged even if only briefly,
their shadows stuttered at the edges of lamplight.

The logbook continued:

“January 24th—Transmission repeats.
Same interval.
Parallax indicates origin is lunar,
possibly sub-surface.
Multiple harmonics—none natural.
Keller insists it’s coded language.
I hear movement between the waves.”

“January 26th—Rousseau missing.
His bed filled with frost.
Sound of whispering when static peaks.
Voice says name: Elias.
Pronunciation incorrect, elongated.”

“January 29th—Moon nearly full.
Signal stronger.
No longer just heard.
Felt.
Like fingers pressed against the mind.”

“February 1st—Heard phrase again, now clear:
‘Ssyth’aen vuhl—m’kah rrhen.’
We came up with a very rough translation though we are not sure if it is correct:

The Watcher Beneath Wakes.”

On the second of February,
Elias dismantled the receiver,
but the signal found him anyway.

Through the walls.
Through the snow.
Through the vibration of his pulse.

He began to hear it in silence.

He thought of the word Keller used once:
Paranoia.
A fear of observation.
A fear of being watched.

But what if paranoia was not delusion?
What if it was instinct?
What if the fear of being watched
was the first truth ever felt?

He wrote this in his final field entry:

“Perhaps what we call ‘paranoia’
is memory—
the mind’s echo of being seen
by something too vast to look away.”

By February 5th,
the snowstorm had sealed the station.
The radio towers bowed under ice.
Only Elias remained coherent enough to write.

The others sat before the receivers,
listening.
Their mouths hung open,
as if tasting air for words
that would never be theirs.

He tried to destroy the recordings.
The reels screamed as they burned.
The flames curved inward.
Sound bent around them like gravity.

And beneath the crackling static,
the whisper returned...
closer this time,
and in perfect imitation of his own voice:

“Do not destroy.”

He froze.
The equipment—unplugged...
was speaking.

The microphone,
a mouth of copper and glass,
dripped condensation,
like breath.

He spoke into it.
Whispered:
“Who are you?”

And the signal answered.

There was no language.
Only meaning.

Images flashed—
the lunar surface,
not barren,
but alive,
a membrane stretched across the void,
pulsing with electric veins.

Beneath that crust,
something vast turned in sleep,
its consciousness diffused through every grain of dust,
every reflection of light.

He saw radio towers—
not human,
but organic—
bone-white spires growing from craters,
feeding on radiation,
transmitting awareness.

They formed a network
not for communication,
but for perception.

And at the center,
buried deeper than man could dig,
a core of obsidian light
beating like a heart.

He understood then—
the moon was not dead.
It was thinking.

It called itself in thought,
not word:
“Ssyth’aen”—
The Watcher Beneath.
The first fear.
The origin of awareness.
The epilogue of paranoia

When life first looked up at the stars,
it looked back.

It had always been looking back.

It had always been the pulse in the dark
that made minds tremble
when they realized
they were seen.

It did not feed on flesh,
nor blood,
nor worship.

It fed on the act of doubt.
On the hesitation between knowing and believing.
On the paranoia of being known.

Every whisper of “what if someone’s watching?”
was its prayer.

And now,
through the radio,
through the endless hum of human thought,
it was awake again.

Elias screamed until the sound distorted.
He tried to flee the observatory,
but the door would not open.

It wasn’t locked.
It was waiting.

When he looked through the window,
the snow outside was gone.
The ground was pale, cratered.
Above him,
the sky was black,
full of impossible constellations.

He realized—
he was no longer in the Arctic.
He was inside the signal.

The static had folded space around him,
translated him through frequency.

He stood on the surface of the moon.
The hum filled every molecule.
He saw the spires now...
a forest of antennae grown from bone,
each resonating with light that was not light.

And beneath the surface,
something shifted.

It was rising.

He fell to his knees.
The world inverted.
The ground opened,
not like a wound,
but like an eyelid.

A vast pupil stared up at him,
miles wide,
reflecting every thought he’d ever had,
every doubt,
every sleepless night spent fearing his own mind.

The voice entered through his bones:

“You found me.
You listened.
Now you will teach them to listen too
you will teach them to know fear
to know paranoia
to become paranoia
you will become my avatar in the mortal plane.”

He tried to close his eyes,
but his eyelids were gone.
His vision was no longer his own.

He could see Earth above him,
a blue orb trembling like prey.
He could hear every broadcast,
every prayer,
every whisper
carrying fragments of its voice.

He understood the purpose of the signal.
It was not meant to be received.
It was meant to replicate.

Every ear that heard it
became a transmitter.
Every mind that wondered
became an extension.

Paranoia was not madness.
It was infection.

And humanity—
curious, listening,
endlessly seeking to hear the unknown,
had just given it a chorus.

The final log entry—
found weeks later
by the relief team,
was written in a trembling hand:

“There is no distance between the stars.
There is only observation.
We have taught the dark to listen.
Now it will not stop.”

“Do not play the recording.
It waits in sound.
It waits in thought.”

“If you hear the phrase:
‘Ssyth’aen vuhl—m’kah rrhen,’
do not translate it.”

“You already know what it means.”

They retrieved the cylinder anyway.
They played it in London.

Within a week,
three of the technicians reported dizziness.
One jumped into the Thames.
The others said they could hear a voice
in the electric hum of the lamps.

Within a month,
the signal began to appear
on every unoccupied frequency.

Not loud.
Just a whisper.

Repeating.
Endlessly.

“Ssyth’aen vuhl—m’kah rrhen.”

And somewhere—
on the far side of the moon,
beneath that pale crust of dust and silence,
the neural lattice brightens.

It listens.
It waits.

It remembers.

Every anxious glance over a shoulder,
every shiver in a quiet room,
every late-night thought of someone watching...
it hears them all.

Because it never stopped listening.
Because it was the act of listening.

And if you’re reading this,
if you’ve followed these words to the end,
then you’ve already heard it.

Haven’t you?

“Ssyth’aen vuhl—m’kah rrhen.”

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The Devourer hungers, and I intend to keep feeding him.
If you’ve been following my October challenge entries, every like, comment, and restack helps push me further on the leaderboard.
At the end of October, one writer will be crowned the winner, with a story narrated on The Saved as Draft podcast.

Let’s see how far these stories can go.
Keep wandering the maze with me.

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