The audio file on my desktop was forty-four minutes long. I had recorded it that morning during a solo walk through the park — birdsong, traffic in the distance, twenty minutes of nothing interesting. I know this because I was there. What I cannot explain is why, when I played it back, it ran for forty-four minutes and then kept going.
I sat at my desk and watched the timeline bar reach the end and pass it, and the counter ticked on to forty-five, forty-six, and the audio continued.
My name is Anna Voss. I record ambient sound as a hobby — parks, train stations, markets, coastlines. Nothing professional, nothing artistic in any deliberate way. I simply find the act of listening carefully to ordinary places more interesting than most things, and having a recording lets me listen again later, in the quiet of my flat, to sounds I missed the first time. I use a small digital recorder, the kind journalists carry, and I transfer the files to my laptop each evening and label them by location and date.
The file from that Tuesday was labelled Meridian Park, 07:40.
I had been walking for twenty-two minutes before I realised I had forgotten to press record, and for another two minutes before I found the recorder in my jacket pocket and started it. So the file should have contained approximately twenty minutes of audio, not forty-four. I had noticed the discrepancy when I transferred it — forty-four minutes was twice what I expected — and assumed I had pressed record earlier than I remembered. That happened sometimes. Memory of small physical actions was unreliable.
I pressed play. The first twenty minutes were what I expected: birdsong, my own footsteps on gravel, a dog barking somewhere to the east, the rhythmic sound of a cyclist passing. Normal and recognisable and mine.
Then the timeline bar reached the end of the file. And the audio continued.
The sound that came after the file’s marked endpoint was different in quality. Not degraded — sharper, if anything. Closer. As though the recorder had been placed on a surface rather than carried, pointing at something nearby. I leaned toward my speaker and listened.
Breathing. Slow and regular. Not mine — I was walking at the twenty-two minute mark, my own breath audible and slightly elevated. This was stationary. Patient. The breathing of someone sitting very still.
Then a sound I recognised after a moment: pages turning. A book, or a notebook, the soft sequential sound of paper. Deliberate, unhurried, one page at a time.
I stopped the playback and sat back in my chair and looked at the waveform on screen. The section after the forty-four minute marker was clearly distinct from the rest — a different amplitude pattern, the peaks and valleys of a recording made in a quieter environment, closer in. Whoever or whatever had been recorded in that second section had been near the microphone. Very near.
I had been alone in the park. I was certain of it.
I played the extra section again from the beginning, this time with headphones. The breathing was clearer. One person, I thought — a single rhythm, slow and deep. The page-turning continued for approximately eight minutes, then stopped. A pause. Then a sound I had to replay three times before I was sure of what I was hearing.
A voice. Low, close to the microphone, speaking quietly but distinctly.
It said my name.
Not the full name I use professionally, not the name on my lease or my bank account. The shortened version, the one that only people who know me well use. The one my mother uses. The one that appears in no public record I am aware of.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Leave a Reply