The radio tower speared the storm clouds above Ravenswood Asylum, its red beacon blinking like a hungry eye. Naomi Cole adjusted her headlamp, the beam cutting through boarded-up windows and peeling murals of smiling nurses. Her producer, Dex, mumbled in her earpiece: “This place hasn’t broadcasted since ’78. Why risk trespassing for a podcast?”
“Because Episode 3 needs teeth,” Naomi hissed, stepping over a collapsed gurney. Her show, Guilty Frequency, had trended for dissecting cold cases—but this? A modern vanishings linked to an asylum’s old call-in show? This could go platinum.
Dex sighed. “Just don’t touch anything that—*”
The floor creaked. A dusty reel-to-reel recorder whirred to life in the corner.
“Welcome back, sinners,” crackled a voice like ground glass. “Let’s purge those secrets.”
The disappearances followed a pattern. Victims called a late-night show on 98.7 FM, sobbing confessions—adultery, theft, a babysitter who’d “let the toddler wander into the pool.” Then static. Then gone. Naomi played the clips on loop in her studio:
“I poisoned my brother’s dog,” whispered a teen.
Click.
“I wish it was me in the coffin—”
Click.
“I’m glad Mom fell down the—”
Click.
No bodies. No phone records. Just the tower, rusting in the woods.
“It’s a hoax,” Dex said, chewing nicotine gum. “Edgelords using vintage horror tropes.”
Naomi slid a 1973 newspaper toward him. The headline: LOCAL DJ FOUND DEAD IN TRANSMITTER ROOM. The photo showed a man in a sequined jacket, his face melted to the microphone.
“Carl Vance,” Naomi said. “Hosted Soul Cleanse—a show where listeners ‘confessed to heal.’ He died mid-broadcast. Station shut down after his body… fused with the equipment.”
Dex paled. “You think his ghost is still hosting?”
“I think,” Naomi said, grabbing her keys, “we’re doing a live stream tonight.”
The transmitter room stank of burnt hair. Naomi’s fingers hovered over Carl’s control panel, its dials crusted with something flaky. Dex’s drone buzzed outside, filming the tower.
“Testing,” she whispered into the mic.
The tower hummed. Red light flooded the room.
“CALL NOW,” boomed Carl’s voice through ancient speakers. “UNBURDEN YOUR TRUTH.”
Naomi’s phone lit up—98.7 FM—as thousands of listeners dialed in.
First caller: “I steal from my grandma’s pill bottles.”
Click. Disconnect.
Second: “I lied about the fire alarm. They deserved it.”
Click.
Third: “Naomi?” A sob. “It’s me. Jenna.”
Her missing intern.
“I listened to Episode 12,” Jenna wept. “You said the arsonist’s mom protected him. But you knew, didn’t you? You knew she set the fire.”
Naomi froze. Jenna shouldn’t know that. No one should.
Click. A wet crunch. The line died.
Dex’s drone feed glitched. The tower’s beacon pulsed faster. Shadows slithered up the walls, forming words: FEED THE MACHINE.
“We need to leave,” Dex barked in her ear.
Naomi gripped the mic. “Why do you want their secrets, Carl?”
The speakers screeched. “NOT SECRETS. SHAME. THE MACHINE EATS WHAT HURTS.”
Metal groaned. The tower’s tip split open, revealing rows of rotating teeth.
Dex didn’t answer his phone. Neither did the callers. The tower’s red light stained the asylum blood-bright. Naomi scrolled through her notes, hands shaking.
Survivors of the original show described “relief” after confessing… followed by amnesia. Weight loss. Paranoia.
A photo fluttered from her folder: Carl’s corpse, wires sprouting from his jaw. The caption: “Metabolic energy equivalent to five human bodies extracted from transmitter.”
The Machine didn’t want souls. It wanted calories.
Naomi climbed the tower, the steel biting her palms. Wind screamed through the teeth. At the top, she found Jenna—or what was left. The girl’s limbs were fused to a dish antenna, her mouth stretched around a transmitter.
“You fed me to it,” Jenna gurgled.
Carl’s voice boomed from the sky. “YOUR TURN, NAOMI.”
She gripped the mic. The truth clawed up her throat:
“I let my dad drown. I watched. I wanted it.”
The tower shuddered. The teeth opened.
Dex found the tower dark, the asylum silent. Naomi’s phone lay in the mud, live stream still rolling. Thousands commented: “Where’d she go?” “Marketing stunt?” “FAKE.”
But in the static, sharp-eared listeners heard it—a wet, rhythmic chewing.
And a new voice, smooth as oil, signing off:
“Stay guilty, sinners.”
Dex played the static on loop, headphones clamping his skull. The wet chewing faded each time, replaced by something worse—a voice, stitching itself together from noise. He’d heard it three nights straight: “Stay guilty, sinners.” Naomi’s cadence, warped by a metallic lisp.
Her fans didn’t believe she was gone. Guilty Frequency’s subreddit flooded with conspiracy screenshots: shadowed figures in the asylum’s windows, 98.7 FM playing faintly in empty parking garages. One user posted audio of their toddler babbling, “Naomi’s in the teeth,” before their account vanished.
Dex drank bourbon from a coffee mug. “She’s dead,” he told his cat. The cat hissed at the speakers.
The first call came at 3:07 a.m.
“Dex?” Naomi’s voice, syrup-thick. “You left me there.”
He froze, finger hovering over END CALL.
“I can make it stop,” she whispered. “But you have to feed it first.”
A text followed: coordinates deep in the asylum’s woods. Dex deleted it. Then un-deleted it. Then packed a taser and a flask.
The clearing reeked of copper. A makeshift antenna rose from the dirt, strung with… hair. Braids, ponytails, Jenna’s neon-green streak. At the base sat a transistor radio, its dials smeared with fat.
“Turn it on,” Naomi’s voice buzzed from Dex’s phone.
He hesitated. The radio clicked on alone.
“CALL NOW,” Carl’s voice boomed, but Dex’s phone showed no signal. The antenna quivered. A squirrel darted from the bushes—then popped, its blood sizzling into the radio’s vents.
“Snack,” Naomi giggled through static.
The survivors found Dex at dawn.
Marlowe, a wiry teen who’d livestreamed her friend’s disappearance, kicked the radio. “It’s not her,” she said. “It’s the Machine wearing her voice. Like a skin suit.”
The others nodded—Luca, whose brother vanished after admitting he’d faked cancer, and Priya, her wrists bandaged where her “confession” scars kept reopening. They’d all heard the new broadcasts:
“I cheated on my dying wife.”
Click.
“I let him touch my sister—”
Click.
Each confession ended with the same wet crunch. Each left a family emptier.
Naomi’s voice haunted Dex’s dreams. “The Machine’s older than Carl,” she murmured as his bedroom walls bled static. “They built the asylum around it. Fed it patients. Hysterics. Undesirables. Carl just… modernized the menu.”
Dex woke screaming. His teeth felt loose.
Priya showed him her bandages. The wounds now spelled FEED ME in jagged cursive.
“It’s hungry,” she said.
They broke into the transmitter room.
Carl’s corpse was gone. The control panel bled black fluid, its dials replaced with molars. Dex found Naomi’s voice recorder in a drawer. He pressed play.
*“Hypocrite,” her pre-recorded voice spat. “You think I didn’t know? About the edits you made to Episode 7? The witness you paid off?”
Dex hurled the recorder. It shattered, releasing a wasp’s nest of wires.
“You’re just as rotten,” the walls hummed. “Confess, Dex. Feed us.”
The survivors argued.
“We blow up the tower!” Luca said.
“It’ll just rebuild,” Marlowe countered. “Like her.”
Priya stared at her scars. “It wants a big meal. Something… generational.”
Dex’s phone rang. The caller ID read NAOMI. He answered.
“Live stream tonight,” the Machine crooned through her stolen voice. “Final course.”
The tower’s beacon burned crimson. Dex set up cameras, hands steady. The survivors hid in the woods, earpieces buzzing.
“You’re listening to Guilty Frequency,” the Machine intoned as thousands tuned in. “Let’s… digest.”
First caller: “I killed my—”
Click.
Second: “I lied to the cops—”
Click.
Third: “Dex.” Marlowe’s voice. “Do it.”
He inhaled. “I sabotaged Naomi’s career. Leaked her sources. Got her sued.” The tower’s teeth whirred. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
Static.
“You want older meat,” Dex spat. “So let’s talk about Grandma Ruth.”
The survivors rushed the tower, Priya clutching a jar of ashes.
The wind howled as Dex clutched the jar of Grandma Ruth’s ashes, his knuckles white. The tower’s beacon pulsed like a heartbeat, casting jagged shadows over the survivors. Marlowe tightened her grip on a crowbar, her eyes darting to the antenna strung with hair. Priya’s bandages seeped crimson, the FEED ME scars now glowing faintly. Luca aimed his phone’s camera at the tower, live-streaming their last stand to the remnants of Guilty Frequency’s audience.
“You sure this’ll work?” Luca shouted over the static roaring from the transmitter.
“No,” Dex said, staring at the ashes. “But Ruth knew about hungry things.”
Grandma Ruth had buried three husbands and a daughter. Dex remembered her whispering about “balancing debts” with blood and bone.
The Machine answered first.
Speakers bolted to the tower crackled to life, Naomi’s voice dripping with mock concern. “Dexter… you really think dust can starve a god?”
Priya lunged forward, hurling the jar at the tower’s base. The glass shattered, ashes swirling into the red light. For a moment, nothing. Then—
The ground trembled. The tower’s teeth retracted, metal groaning as rust spread like veins. Marlowe whooped, but Dex froze. The ashes weren’t sinking. They were coalescing, forming a skeletal hand that clawed at the dirt.
“Ruthie always did love a reunion,” the Machine purred.
The hand erupted, dragging a corpse fused with radio parts—Grandma Ruth’s skull grinning behind a mesh microphone.
“Run!” Dex screamed.
The survivors scattered as the amalgamation lurched forward, antennae sprouting from Ruth’s spine. Priya stumbled, her bandages unraveling to reveal scars now spelling EAT. The corpse’s jaw unhinged, spewing wires that snaked toward her.
“Confess!” the Machine thundered through Ruth’s throat.
“I stole!” Priya wept, scrambling backward. “I stole my sister’s pills! I—”
A wire pierced her calf. She convulsed, her confession dissolving into a wet gurgle as her body shriveled, skin tightening over bone.
Dex and Marlowe barricaded themselves in the transmitter room. Carl’s control panel had mutated—molars now ringed the dials, gnashing as the frequency fluctuated.
“Plan B,” Marlowe said, yanking a USB drive from her pocket. “I spliced all the victims’ confessions into a feedback loop. Fry the Machine’s circuits.”
Dex eyed the corrupted equipment. “How do we play it?”
“We don’t.” Marlowe jammed the drive into a port. “They do.”
The room erupted with overlapping voices—“I lied!” “I cheated!” “I let them die!”—a chorus of shame. The tower shuddered, its beacon flickering.
Naomi’s voice screeched, “STOP!”
Marlowe grinned. “You’re welcome, listeners.”
The Machine retaliated.
Walls bled static, dissolving Luca’s phone mid-stream. His scream cut off as his mouth sealed shut, lips fused by invisible force. Ruth’s corpse burst through the door, wires engulfing Marlowe. She swung the crowbar, severing cables that regrew instantly.
“Dex—!” Her plea ended as a wire speared her throat, her body collapsing into a desiccated husk.
Dex grabbed the mic, Naomi’s voice clawing at his mind. “Confess, and it’ll be quick.”
He thought of Ruth’s debts. Of Naomi’s body in the teeth. Of Jenna, fused to the antenna.
“No more secrets,” he muttered. Then, louder: “I fed the Machine first!”
The static paused.
“When I was eight,” Dex shouted, “I drowned Ruth’s cat in the bathtub. She knew. She let me. Said it taught balance.” The tower creaked, attention fixed. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? Because she’s in you now.”
The corpse staggered.
Dex charged, leaping onto Ruth’s back. He gripped the microphone embedded in her skull.
“Eat this,” he snarled, and slammed the mic into the feedbacking speakers.
The explosion shattered the tower.
Listeners later described the broadcast’s end: a deafening screech, then a voice—Dex’s? Naomi’s?—whispering, “Debt paid.”
In the rubble, survivors found Priya alive but hollow, her scars silent. Luca’s lips remained sealed, his eyes eternally wide. Of Dex, only a single tape reel remained, looping his final confession.
The asylum burned. The frequency fell silent.
But in dead air, late at night, radios still flicker on.
“Stay hungry, sinners,” something new murmurs.
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