Segment Thirteen

Theo edited the Carrow Hill episode over three days at the desk in his spare room, and it was, by any measure he cared about, clean. That was the word he used to his producer, Nadia, on the phone — clean. No anomalies. He had listened to the full two hours of raw audio twice, once at normal speed and once slowed to half, the way he always did, hunting for the things listeners loved: a knock under his narration, a breath that wasn't his, a voice riding under the room hiss. Episode 111 had none of it. Just Theo, and the dead studio, and the true sad story of Owen Pell told well. He cut it to forty-two minutes, laid in his theme music, wrote the show notes, and scheduled it for the Thursday. He counted the segments as he built the episode, because that was how he worked — a cold open, then numbered segments, then a sign-off. Carrow Hill came together as twelve segments. He remembered that clearly afterward, remembered it the way you remember a number you have written down. Twelve segments and a sign-off. He exported the file. He uploaded it. He went to bed. Episode 111 went live on the Thursday, and on the Friday the messages started. The first one was from a listener called Bex, a regular, the kind who emailed about every episode. Theo almost didn't read past the first line. Then he read past the first line. That bit in segment 13 gave me actual chills, she wrote. When the DJ talks back to you. How did you even get that to sit so quiet in the mix?? Replaying it now. Theo read it three times. Out of Frequency episode 111 had twelve segments. He had counted them. He had built them. There was no segment 13, and there was no point anywhere in forty-two minutes where a DJ talked back to him, because the only voice in the entire episode, from cold open to sign-off, was his own. He told himself Bex had miscounted. People did; segment numbers were a structural thing, an editing thing, listeners didn't track them. Except Bex had not just given a number. She had described content. When the DJ talks back to you. The second message came an hour later, from someone he didn't know. Then a third. By Friday evening there were nine, and Theo had them open in nine tabs, and he had stopped being able to tell himself anything at all. They did not agree on much. But every single one of them mentioned a segment that came after Theo's twelfth, and every one of them described, in their own words, the same thing: a second voice on the episode. A man's voice, warm, unhurried, a radio voice. A voice that — and this was the phrase that recurred, in message after message, until Theo could not look at it any longer — did not narrate the story but answered it. That responded to Theo's questions about Owen Pell. That, two listeners said and one of them in capital letters, said Theo's name. He had the master file still on his drive. He opened it. He watched the editing software draw the waveform across the screen, the familiar blue mountains of his own two hours of work, and he scrolled to the end, past his sign-off, past the theme music, to where the file simply stopped, as files do, in a flat blue line of nothing. Forty-two minutes. Twelve segments. A sign-off. The file on Theo's own machine was exactly the episode he had made. He sat for a long moment in the glow of the screen. Then he did the thing he had been not-doing for an hour, the thing his whole body had been bracing against. He went to the podcast host, to the public feed, to the version of episode 111 that the entire world had been able to download since Thursday morning — and he looked at its length. Forty-nine minutes. Seven minutes longer than the file he had made. Seven minutes longer than the file still sitting, unchanged, on his own drive. Theo Marsh stared at the number, and the back of his neck went cold the way it had gone cold at the unlocked door on Carrow Hill, and somewhere underneath the fear a much older instinct, the reporter's instinct, the thing that had started the podcast in the first place, said very quietly: download it. Download the public version. Listen to segment thirteen.