第1章 第1節 無音
Dead Air
Nora Hale had spent twelve years teaching dead sound how to breathe again.
Her small sat above a quiet street, full of machines and silence.
Tapes like these have almost vanished from the world, yet people still send them.
The old recordings are cleaned, copied, and stored before anyone hears them again.
She had learned to love the work because it asked nothing of her heart.
A voice on a damaged tape could not leave her, and it could not lie.
That morning a package was left at her door without a name or note.
The box was brown, at the corners, and tied with rough string.
Strange deliveries had reached her before, so she felt no fear at first.
Inside, wrapped in grey cloth, lay a row of cassette tapes in careful order.
Most of them had been labelled in the same neat, old-fashioned .
Nora set them on her desk, where the afternoon light touched the plastic.
She began to them, as she has catalogued thousands of tapes before.
Each carried a date, a place, and a short line of description.
The work was slow and calm, and for a while the world disappeared.
Then her fingers stopped on a single tape that did not match the rest.
Its was written in a different hand, hurried and pressed too hard.
There was no place and no description, only a date in blue ink.
She read the date once, and then she read it again, more slowly.
It was the year her mother had drowned, when Nora was only twelve.
But the day written there came three days after the had ended.
For a moment the warm felt colder than it had before.
Sound can be copied, moved, and dated by mistake, she told herself.
Yet her hands had gone still, and the tape felt heavy in her .
She has kept the past safely behind glass for twenty years.
Now something had reached through the glass, and she was afraid.