Transcription by Ike Hamill

upcoming chance at parole. After that, they were much more careful about who they let out.”
    I could tell that Jeremy was beginning to come over to my side. He still needed a bit more convincing.
    “This is mostly observation. What’s your theory?”
    “I try to remain objective until I’ve collected all the evidence, but if I had to go out on a limb…”
    I paused. I don’t believe in ghosts, or possession. Sometimes it seems like the world is an easier place to navigate for the people who do. When they run across something they don’t understand, they can just wave their hands and blame it on God. Or, they can blame it on Satan. With people like me and Jeremy, it’s much harder to encounter something we truly don’t understand. My brain wants to classify everything, which doesn’t lead to the type of flexibility required to contain a phenomenon like evil.
    “What if it’s a virus?” I ask. “Or, maybe it’s a fungus. There’s a fungus in South America that takes eight years to mature and produce spores. What if there’s something like that present in this cell, and when you inhale the spores, it makes you into a psychopath?”
    “So we should be able to correlate against meteorological conditions,” he said. He was looking off towards the ceiling. I knew he was hooked.
    “Perhaps,” I said. “Or maybe it’s some kind of magnetic field produced by the earth and somehow amplified by the local geography.”
    “So we’re looking for low-frequency environmental conditions?”
    “Maybe,” I said. Or demons, or leprechauns, or ghosts, but I don’t believe in those things.
    Now that I’m in the cell, waiting to see what phenomenon will come, those dry conversations with Jeremy feel like they’re a million miles away. If I really had believed my own theory, would I have dared to come here tonight? Would I have risked my own sanity by staying in the cell that I theorized might be the spawn of evil?
    I have one distinct advantage over The Big Four—I know what I’m up against. Ancient people were driven mad by the sight of an eclipse. Armed with the knowledge of celestial mechanics, modern viewers make sport of watching the moon pass in front of the sun. And, I have to admit, out in the real world it was difficult to fully believe my own theory. I needed to come here tonight, just to feel the place.  
    Looking across the aisle to the cell across the way, as the last light from the sun begins to fade, anything seems possible.  
    The sound from that cell is still there. I’m beginning to feel like I understand it a little more. To stick with the chalk analogy, as the sun goes down, it seems like the chalk is slowing. I’m hearing the subtle chatter of the piece of chalk scraping across the surface of the board. The sound isn’t entirely fluid. It stops and starts. It almost seems like there’s Morse code in there—little bursts of information encoded in that noise. If so, it seems like it’s not something I want to hear.
    I’m humming to myself as I write. My subconscious brain wants to make enough noise to drown out the sound. I flip back through my notebook to see if I can find the reference. I knew it was there—on the night that Hopkins changed, his neighbors complained about the sound. They said he was singing to himself all night. Maybe that fact just got stuck in my brain, and that’s why I’m humming. I don’t think so. It seems more like I’m distracting myself so I won’t listen to the words.
    I’m beginning to think I should yell for Fradeux. In a few hours, I could be back at home. My wife, Judith, and my beautiful boy, James, are back there, engrossed in our perfectly normal life. I should be there too. Any job that stands between me and the people I love should not be tolerated. At this moment, it seems like such an obvious truth. I can’t believe that I didn’t see it before.
    I realize that the sun is gone. It’s below the horizon. I’ve got almost twelve hours until