"The Wendigo Frequency"

The Big Ear stood like a rusted monument to abandoned dreams, its massive dish pointed toward a sky that had never answered. Benjamin Margolis had been coming here for seven years, ever since his father walked into the woods and never came back. Seven years of static. Seven years of nothing.

Tonight, something answered.

The frequency meters spiked in patterns he'd never seen. Not the random noise of cosmic background radiation. Not the interference from passing satellites. Something intentional. Something that knew the equipment was listening.

Benji adjusted the dial with trembling fingers. The static resolved into something almost like words, spoken in frequencies no human vocal cord could produce. It knew his name. It knew his father's name. It promised answers if he would just let it in.

He yanked the headphones off, heart pounding. But the voice didn't stop. It had found a different frequency now, the one that ran directly through his skull.

The next morning, Abigail noticed it immediately. Benji's usual nervous energy had curdled into something darker. His eyes darted to corners of the room where nothing waited. His jokes came a half-second too late, his smile a mask stretched thin.

She'd seen something like this before, on Kai, the YouTuber from her first night in Nowhere. Faint electromagnetic traces, like aurora borealis compressed into a human-sized space. Around Kai, they'd faded after the hybrid creature's defeat. Around Benji, they clustered thick as storm clouds, concentrated around his head.

Something had gotten inside him.

At the Nakamura restaurant, the entire town seemed infected with the same malaise. Satoshi and Keiko served eggs to customers who'd barely slept, all of them whispering about dreams they couldn't shake. Dreams where voices told them their worst fears were true. That their spouses didn't love them. That their children resented them. That they were frauds, and everyone knew it.

Even Asher Drake and Sasha Black, usually so polished and confident, picked at their food with hollow eyes. Whatever was happening, it was happening to everyone.

Abigail found Benji at the Big Ear that night, standing before the controls like a man possessed. His father's research notes were spread across every surface. Diagrams of frequencies and dimensional wavelengths. Theories about fear as a form of energy. David Margolis had believed the Big Ear wasn't receiving signals from space. It was receiving them from somewhere else. Another dimension. A place where fear wasn't just an emotion but a force, a creature, a hunger.

Benji was convinced the voice could lead him to his father. Abigail could see the electromagnetic distortion pulsing around his skull. Something was attached to him, feeding on him, using his grief as bait.

She reached for the telescope controls, and the world shifted.

Vision flooded through her like ice water through veins. She saw the signal's source. Not a distant star, but something other. A shape that existed in dimensions the human eye couldn't process. Antlers made of shadow. Hunger made manifest. And caught in its gravity, a man she recognized from photographs. A man who looked like Benji, if Benji had spent seven years in hell.

David Margolis. Alive. Screaming.

And behind him, watching Abigail watch him, the Wendigo turned its attention to her.

The attack was psychological, not physical. The Wendigo didn't need claws when it had the truth.

It whispered to Benji that his father had left on purpose. That David Margolis had grown tired of his demanding son, his failed marriage, his dead-end research. That he'd walked into the woods as an escape and hadn't looked back.

It whispered to Abigail that her sensitivity to electronics wasn't a condition. It was a symptom. That she wasn't human enough to interface with human technology. That she was a monster wearing a woman's face, and the longer she stayed in Nowhere, the harder it would become to maintain the disguise.

They believed it. That was the worst part. They believed it because the Wendigo wasn't lying. It was simply weaponizing the fears they'd carried all along.

But Abigail had spent her whole life being different. Being other. Being the girl who couldn't touch a cell phone without breaking out in hives. And she'd survived by learning one crucial skill: the difference between truth and useful truth.

She grabbed Benji's hand, forcing him to meet her eyes. Maybe she wasn't entirely human. But she wasn't a monster either. She got to decide what she was. And Benji's father hadn't left him. The vision had shown her that much. David was trapped. Suffering. Waiting for someone to find him.

The Wendigo was afraid of them. That was why it needed to break them down. A thing that feeds on fear doesn't waste energy on people who've already surrendered. It was trying so hard to convince them they were worthless because it knew what they could become if they weren't.

Something shifted in Benji's expression. The electromagnetic distortion around his head flickered, destabilizing.

Together, they rewired the frequency outputs, using Abigail's sensitivity to pinpoint the exact wavelength of the Wendigo's broadcast. The creature had been using the Big Ear as an antenna, broadcasting fear into every mind in Nowhere. If they could disrupt the signal, they could stop the nightmares.

When they finally triggered the interference, something in the air screamed. A sound that existed more in the mind than in the ears. The Wendigo's broadcast shattered.

Across Nowhere, people woke from restless sleep, the voices finally silent.

But the Wendigo sent one final message through the dying static. This had been just a test. It wasn't trapped behind the signal. It was already here, in Nowhere, and it had been here longer than anyone knew. And now it knew exactly what they feared.

They walked back to town in silence, both processing what they'd learned. The Wendigo was real. It was ancient. And it had been manipulating Nowhere long before either of them arrived.

But they'd hurt it. Driven it back. Proved that fear, however powerful, could be resisted.

Benji wasn't okay, and he admitted as much. But he was better than he'd been. And now he knew his father was alive somewhere. That was something he could work with.

Behind them, unnoticed, the Big Ear's equipment hummed back to life. The dish adjusted itself, pointing toward coordinates that shouldn't exist.

A new signal came through. Not the Wendigo's ancient hunger, but something else entirely. Weak. Human. Desperate.

David Margolis was alive. He was somewhere else. And he was trying to come home.