Wiles The Anechoic Chamber

and Other Weird Tales
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78463-329-5
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 12, 176 Seiten

Reihe: Salt Modern Stories

'Funny, chilling, intriguing: each tale offers something different from the last, and the overall result is like listening to a perfectly made album.' -Mark Watson An anechoic chamber is a soundproofed room with no echo. The profound silence it produces is disturbing enough. But listen carefully and you'll hear something worse ... In this new collection of uncanny short stories, award-winning author Will Wiles finds sinister creatures and subtle nightmares in mundane modern environments and bureaucracy. A cursed NHS file brings doom to whoever handles it. A memory-foam mattress breaks down the walls of sleep. A marketing executive for a property developer turns to the occult. And horror seeps from the most unexpected places: eBay purchases, boxes of holiday photographs, and the hidden corners of the smart TV menu. While mostly modern in setting, this is a collection steeped in the tradition of the weird tale and the ghost story, and includes homages to the greats of the previous century: a doomed Edwardian antiquarian is drawn into a murderous plot involving a Roman mosaic, and river boatmen uncover eldritch terror in a deserted mining town. You'll never look at some things the same way again.

Will Wiles was born in India in 1978. He is the author of three literary novels, Care of Wooden Floors (Fourth Estate, 2012), The Way Inn (Fourth Estate, 2014), and Plume (Fourth Estate, 2019). Care of Wooden Floors was a Waterstones 11 pick and won a Betty Trask award. He is also the author of fantasy novel The Last Blade Priest, under the name WP Wiles, which was published by Angry Robot in July 2022.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wiles, Will

Leseproben

The Anechoic Chamber

‘Silence isn’t silent,’ Noor said. ‘What we think of as silence, anyway. Silence is loud. Take this room. Listen.’

Justin listened. It had been a long journey and he was ready to listen. The lab was an expensive facility to hire, and he wanted to be convinced.

They were in a small break-out space at one corner of the small complex. Three low tables, three plastic chairs per table, thick carpet on the floor. In a recess, a machine that made coffee from pods stood beside a sink. Behind lush expanses of triple glazing, the Kielder forest was being stirred by an autumn gale. Stripped of sound, the thrashing branches had a slow, submarine quality, like swaying kelp. As far as he knew, he and Noor were the only people in the building. The only people for miles.

Everything smelled new – the chemical bouquet of fresh carpet, and behind it the sharper scents of paint and cut wood. It was a quiet room, almost silent. But not quite. As Justin stilled himself, he found he could hear the fans of the ventilation system and the muted murmur of machinery.

‘There’s a refrigerator in here,’ he said.

Noor nodded. ‘Yes, behind one of the wall panels. You might be able to hear the water in the pipes, too. The air conditioning. Electronics make a sound as well, transformers and capacitors in particular, they kick up a real racket. But that’s nothing compared to us, Mr Immerman – we are very noisy creatures. Always wheezing and gurgling and creaking and rustling away.’

Even in black jeans and a plaid shirt, Noor looked neat and professional, and Justin found it hard to imagine she had ever made a noise she did not intend to make. ‘Not silent, then,’ he said.

‘Far from it,’ she said. ‘The human ear is not a precise instrument. What it perceives as silence is anything below twenty decibels.’

‘That sounds high.’

‘The language doesn’t help. We hear the word decibels, we think noise. Drills, aeroplanes, annoying neighbours. But the scale goes both ways, and it measures quiet as well. Anyway, twenty decibels certainly isn’t silence. Silence – true silence, real silence, scientific silence – is much more elusive.’

‘So how do we get to zero decibels?’

‘Zero!’ Noor said, with a smile. ‘I think we can do better than that. We can give you subzero decibels, Mr Immerman. The facility is rated to minus twelve decibels, at the edge of what is feasible. The world record is minus twenty. Think of it as a factory, the quietest factory anywhere. And we manufacture one thing: a cube of precision silence.’

Justin had the brochure with him, and he glanced down at the page it was open to – the cube, the room, halfway between the inside of a machine and a torture cell. ‘And you do it in this chamber.’

‘An anechoic chamber, yes,’ Noor said. ‘The chamber is soundproofed in all sorts of ways – heavily insulated, of course, built on dampening springs, all the electronics and systems are purpose-built and shielded, and of course we’re out here, one of the quietest places in the country, far from noisy town and cities. But it’s the chamber’s anechoic properties that make it perfect for testing sound. The walls, ceiling and floor are modulated to nullify all sound reflections. You only hear direct sound. No echoes, no reverberations.’

‘And that makes a big difference, does it?’ Justin asked. He had, of course, read about the anechoic chamber in the brochure, but he had not grasped what made it so different. Sound without echo. What was so special about it? He didn’t doubt that a lot of what he heard was echo and reverb, but surely that was only a tiny portion of the whole. Strip it out and what would change, really? He imagined that sound would be more tinny, or more monotonous, as if heard through an old transistor radio.

No, that’s not quite it, Noor told him on the phone when he called to ask. It’s hard to describe. You really have to experience it. And so he made the long drive to this lonely laboratory.

‘It makes all the difference,’ Noor said. ‘You can be certain that every sound picked up in the chamber is coming directly from the test subject, with no distortion or interference. You will be able to hear the sound it’s really making, for the first time. But, if you don’t mind me asking you a question, what is it that you’d like to test?’

Justin picked up the steel equipment case at his feet, placed it on the table, and flipped open the clasps. Inside, the prototype lay in a snug bed of shaped foam padding. He was under no illusions about its mundane nature, but he did love opening this case. It felt important and perhaps a little illicit, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, or the stolen embryos in Jurassic Park.

‘A new generation of air purifiers,’ he said. ‘As you might have read, air quality is a major consumer concern. Not out here in Kielder, sure, but … in the cities.’

Noor smiled. ‘Sure.’

‘This offers market-leading efficacy in a more compact unit,’ Justin went on. ‘But, more importantly, it’s silent, almost. People have them in their bedrooms, in their children’s bedrooms, next to their beds. Where they sleep. They have to be quiet, and most air purifiers are pretty quiet. But these – these are silent.’

‘Almost silent,’ Noor said, and for a moment Justin thought she might be making fun of him, until he realised she was repeating him. ‘And you want to know – how silent?’

‘Yes,’ Justin said. ‘We want something we can put in our marketing, something we can hold over our rivals.’

Noor nodded and, with a look to Justin for approval, picked up the prototype. It was about the size and shaped of a half-used roll of kitchen towel, with a near-featureless body of dark grey plastic. ‘Heavy,’ she said. ‘And it’s mains-powered? I see. This should be straightforward.’

Justin found himself looking at the dimpled interior of the equipment case. Its rippling black inner surface made him think of the anechoic chamber. ‘May I see the chamber?’ he asked. ‘Try it out?’

‘Of course,’ Noor said, but her tone was less than certain. ‘You didn’t come all this way … If you’re sure.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be sure?’

Noor grimaced slightly – a tightening in the muscles of her jaw, as if they had reached an uncomfortable but unavoidable truth. The bill, usually, but it was not that. ‘It can be a disturbing place. Even … there are some who find it intolerable.’

‘A very quiet room sounds pretty restful to me,’ Justin said.

The technician shook her head. ‘This is far beyond quiet, Mr Immerman. This is …’ She tapped the side of her head, just above her ear. ‘It gets in here.’

Something in her gesture, an undefinable quality connected to a deep and rooted chord, convinced Justin at once. ‘Show me,’ he said.

?

The room was not large – a master bedroom, at best. And its decoration made it feel smaller. Although, Justin reminded himself, this was not decoration. Everything was functional, and its function was silence.

The walls and ceiling were lined with panels covered in acute wedges of black foam, packed in tightly in an alternating checker-pattern, giving every surface a deep spiked waffle texture. The floor was a thin metal grille, suspended above another layer of the wedged black foam. Light came from deeply recessed but dazzling LED spots. In the middle of the chamber was a mounting for equipment, but other than that it was empty. The air was cool and tanged with the chemical signature of new materials. Justin could see why some people might be unnerved by the space. The sharp blades of the foam wedges, and their tactical matte black, gave the whole environment the spirit of a weapon.

Noor entered with him and shut the door, a complicated two-stage operation involving swinging it closed, then pulling it in so the foam panels that lined it joined with the rest of the wall.

The room was quiet, that was certain. Very, very quiet.

‘Wow,’ Justin said, and then frowned at his own voice. ‘Wow,’ he repeated, listening. ‘Wow.’

Noor smiled at him. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘It’s a bit freaky. No reflected sound. When we speak, we’re used to hearing our own words bounced back at us – and every other sound we hear. Sound doesn’t end at source, it hangs around a while, it has an afterlife. But not here. The shaped insulation absorbs it all, nothing can escape. And there are no other hard surfaces.’

Justin toed at the metal grille....