Chapter Text
The house was too quiet. Not peaceful-quiet. The kind of quiet that pressed against your ribs and reminded you how empty a space could be once it stopped belonging to anyone but you.
Lucifer Magne sat at his kitchen table, staring into a mug of cold coffee like it might offer some kind of answer. The sunlight through the window stretched thin and colorless, bleaching the world in pale tones that matched him a little too well. His blond hair had grown long enough to curl at his collar, untrimmed; the stubble on his jaw was a week past acceptable. He was short, slight, almost delicate in frame — a man built for thought, not weight.
On the wall hung a half-finished painting: something abstract, too crimson at the center, fading to dull gray at the edges. He’d started it months ago, back when he still felt things like inspiration. Now it was just another reminder — like the unpaid bills on the counter, or the voicemail from his daughter he hadn’t returned yet.
Charlie.
He smiled faintly at the name, though it hurt to do so. His little girl was grown now — studying psychology, trying to help people the way her father never could help himself. He’d been proud when she told him, genuinely. Then she’d left for college, and pride curdled into the kind of silence that lingered long after she’d gone. The walls seemed closer these days. The air heavier. The paintings stared back at him like accusing eyes… Finally, he stood — too abruptly, chair legs scraping against aged hardwood— and muttered to himself, “I need to get out.”
He didn’t know where he meant to go, but his body took him there anyway. The city outside was damp and gray, no longer summer, but the leaves hadn’t fully turned yet; that strange in-between weather where the light never quite finds its footing. He walked with his hands in his coat pockets, eyes down, passing storefronts that gleamed with fluorescent indifference. Then he saw it — tucked between a pawn shop and a boarded-up café: a narrow antique store with peeling gold lettering that read “Yesterday’s Things.” He stepped inside.
The air was thick with dust and history, that particular scent of old wood and forgotten fabric. The lighting was dim, filtered through green lampshades and half-drawn curtains. Somewhere deep in the aisles, a ceiling fan creaked from above in slow, tired circles.
Lucifer drifted between shelves of relics — typewriters, cracked porcelain dolls, tarnished frames holding photographs of strangers whose eyes had gone ghost-white with age. He ran his fingers over them, drawn to the imperfections, the faint stories worn into every scratch. Then he saw it: the radio.
It stood alone on a side table — a cathedral-style model from the 1930s, dark walnut, its arched speaker grill carved like the ribs of some gothic chapel. The tuning dial was fogged with age, but the brass still caught the light like an eye opening. Lucifer couldn’t look away. Something in his chest tightened — a strange pull, not quite attraction, not quite dread. The hum of the store seemed to dim around it, the faint city noise outside slipping away until there was only the sound of his own breath.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The shopkeeper’s voice startled him — an older man with a face like crumpled paper and a wary smile. “It’s been sitting there a long while. Doesn’t work, mind you. Poor thing’s been dead for decades.”
Lucifer hesitated. “Dead?”
“Mm. Broken,” the man corrected quickly. “No sound. Just static. Most folks find it… unsettling.”
Lucifer looked back at the radio. It seemed to want him to touch it. “How much?”
The shopkeeper blinked. “You don’t want that one.”
“I do.”
A pause. The old man’s expression shifted — not surprise, exactly, but something like relief, as if a weight had just been lifted from his shoulders.
“Forty dollars,” he said quietly. “Cash is fine.”
Lucifer paid without thinking.
The radio sat in his passenger seat on the drive home, seatbelt looped awkwardly around it. The rain had started again, light and drumming, and for a moment he almost imagined the faintest whisper under the static of his car’s old speakers — like laughter, half-swallowed by the wind. When he carried it inside, the house felt different.
He set it on a table in his living room, where the afternoon light hit it in soft stripes. Dust motes drifted lazily around it like a halo. Lucifer crouched down, tracing the smooth curve of its frame, the cool brass of the dial. Then he plugged it in.
A low hum filled the air, followed by the crackle of static.
He turned the dial slowly — nothing. No stations. Just that endless hiss, like someone breathing too close to his ear. After an hour of fiddling, he sighed and pushed back from the table. “Well,” he said aloud to no one, “guess it’s a project for another day.” He left it where it sat and went to bed.
That night, the dreams came.
They were disjointed at first — flickers of light, the faint buzz of static leaking into silence. Then came the red — endless red, swirling like blood; arterial and venous, bright and deep. Flashes of teeth. Laughter like radio feedback. A voice, distorted and bright, whispering something he couldn’t understand. When he woke, his sheets were tangled, his chest slick with sweat.
Over the next week, the house began to change. Not in ways he could prove — small things, subtle things. The kitchen clock would be an hour slow. A mug he swore he’d washed would be sitting dirty in the sink. Shadows along the hallway seemed to twitch just as he turned his head. Once, while painting, he thought he saw someone standing behind him in the reflection of a window — tall, wrong, smiling. When he turned, no one was there.
He laughed about it at first. Told himself it was stress, isolation, maybe a little too much wine. But the laughter didn’t stick. The air in the house had grown heavy again, not empty this time, but occupied.
The night broke with a sound — not a bang, not a crash, but a buzz.
A low, rasping roar of static clawed its way through the quiet of the house, loud enough to rattle the thin glass panes in their frames. Lucifer jolted awake, heart pounding. For a moment, he thought it might be a dream — that same, endless hiss from the nightmares bleeding into waking. But no, the sound was real.
He sat up slowly, eyes darting toward the dark hallway. The noise was coming from from the direction of his workshop. He had been attempting to fix the radio again, but had made little to no progress. I didn’t leave it on, he thought, pulse beginning to climb. The last time he’d even touched the radio had been days ago — maybe a week. He wasn’t even sure it was plugged in. The static crackled louder, a deep, almost growling hum beneath it now and his throat went dry.
He swung his legs out of bed, the floorboards biting cold against his bare feet, and moved toward the door. The house was black as pitch, except for a faint, flickering glow — dim, shifting light, like candle flame. Each step felt heavier than the last. The air itself had changed, dense and electric, every hair on his arms standing on end. The hum in the air made his bones vibrate. He half expected to see someone — something — standing in the doorway waiting for him.
When he reached the workshop, his breath caught.
The radio was on.
It sat in the center of the room on his worktable, the tuning dial spinning slowly back and forth on its own. The speaker grille pulsed with life, the glow from within flickering like lightning behind storm clouds. The air around it shimmered, distorting faintly — and the shadows… the shadows were moving. They weren’t cast by anything; they moved independent of light. They crawled across the walls like tendrils, twisting, forming shapes that dissolved the moment his eyes tried to follow them.
Lucifer’s voice came out in a whisper. “What the hell…”
The radio gave a sharp crack, a burst of static that made him flinch. Then came the sound of laughter. It wasn’t human, not quite. It was too smooth, too bright — like someone imitating joy but getting the pitch all wrong. The static rose with it, harmonizing, until the sound filled the room like a living thing. The dial spun faster now, making impossible circles, until it stopped dead at 66.6 and the static shifted, underlaid with distorted… was that jazz?
Then the shadows converged.
Behind the radio, something began to take shape — not solid, but visible. A silhouette emerging from the darkness itself. It grew upward, unfolding, impossibly tall, its limbs too long, its outline shifting like smoke trying to remember how to be human. Lucifer’s breath hitched and he stumbled back, one hand gripping the edge of a table for balance.
The shape leaned forward slightly, its head tilting, and then — two points of light flared open where eyes should be.
Crimson. Burning. Intelligent.
Lucifer froze. The figure was watching him. Studying him.
The smile came next. Slow. Deliberate. Stretching wide across a face that shouldn’t have been able to smile that way. Its teeth glinted like shards of glass, impossibly sharp, gleaming in the red light spilling from within the shadow’s form. And then, in a voice smooth as silk, warm and venomous all at once, it spoke:
“So… do you scream often, or will this be a special occasion?”
Lucifer did scream.
The sound tore out of him raw and terrified, echoing through the narrow hallways as he bolted for the door. Behind him, the laughter followed — bright, delighted, and static-laced — chasing him all the way to his bedroom. He slammed the door, locked it, and stumbled toward his dresser, drawers clattering open. Somewhere, beneath old receipts and yellowed sketch paper, he found it — a small silver crucifix on a broken chain. He clutched it in both hands, heart hammering so hard it hurt. “God,” he whispered. “God, please—”
But there was no answer. Only faint, distant static seeping through the floorboards like a heartbeat.
Lucifer crawled into bed, dragging the covers over himself like a child hiding from monsters, clutching the cross until his fingers ached. He stayed that way until dawn crept pale and thin across the floorboards — sleepless, shaking, waiting for the next sound that never came.