The Silent Ward

Chapter 8 - Under The Red Earth

Under the Red Earth

The rain had stopped by the time Siya returned home, but the sky still hung low with bruised clouds. Her coat dripped onto the wooden floor of her apartment as she stepped inside, flanked by Marks, who hadn’t said a word since they left Groote Schuur.

She dropped the plastic evidence bag onto the kitchen table. Inside it was the object that had unsettled them both more than Elias Moyo’s vanishing act: a battered old cassette tape. The label had been worn away, smudged fingerprints, water damage, a trace of something that looked like blood.

“This was under his mattress,” Marks said. “Nurse found it when they were sanitizing the room. No player. Just the tape.”

Siya removed the cassette and turned it over in her hands. It felt heavier than it should, as though something clung to it. The plastic was scratched, the magnetic reel inside twitching like a captured insect.

“We need to hear it,” she said, already moving toward the ancient tape deck she kept in storage, one of her father’s old relics. She connected it to her laptop for waveform analysis, then loaded the cassette.

Marks remained standing, arms crossed, staring at the machine like it might bite.

The tape rolled and for a moment, there was only static, a flat wall of white noise that filled the room with dissonance, but then, deeper in the background, something began to emerge. A sound not made by any normal mouth. Layers of low hums, rising and falling in unnatural cadence, mechanical pulses and distorted tones that climbed just high enough to make Siya’s ears ache.

Then something else. A whisper, it was not words, not even a language. Just a rhythm. Like breath exhaled through a tunnel. Like wind moving through teeth.

“Pause it,” Marks said, voice low. “That doesn’t sound like any kind of medical note. Not even psych eval rambling.”

Siya stopped the tape and opened her laptop. “We need someone who can dig deeper.”

She scrolled through her contacts and found the name: Dr. Sipho Khumalo. Computational linguist, cryptographer, and audio analyst with a taste for the esoteric. They hadn’t spoken in over a year, but Khumalo owed her more than one favor. She hit call.

Three hours later, they were on a video call with Khumalo, who appeared onscreen with wild eyes and a cluttered office in the background. Books, cables, and monitors formed a digital nest around him.

Siya uploaded a compressed version of the tape’s audio. Khumalo listened once, then twice, his expression darkening.

“This isn’t just noise,” he muttered. “This is constructed.”

He pulled up spectral analysis software and displayed the waveform. It looked wrong. Not random. Too symmetrical.

“There’s structure buried in here. See this? This isn’t static, it’s a lattice. Someone embedded information into the frequency layers.”

Marks leaned forward. “So, what are we looking at? Morse code? An old cipher?”

“Worse,” Khumalo said. “This is multi-layered, a blend of phonemes and frequency shifts. Some are outside the range of normal human speech.”

As they watched, Khumalo isolated a section of the waveform and ran it through a phonetic recognition tool. What appeared onscreen chilled them: a sequence of syllables in no recognizable language. But Khumalo’s face lit up.

“This one, this resembles Old Akkadian. And this cluster, proto-Sumerian. There are fragments of Avestan here too. These are dead languages, Siya. Forgotten for thousands of years.”

Siya swallowed. “What the hell is it saying?”

“I’m still piecing that together,” he said. “But here’s where it gets truly strange.”

He brought up a new screen, overlaying part of the waveform with a geographic grid. “This pulse here, it encodes a series of coordinates. Southern Africa. Deep in the Namib Desert. Near an old archaeological dig site.”

Marks’s brows furrowed. “Someone embedded a location inside a psychiatric patient’s tape? That’s not random.”

“Exactly,” Khumalo said. “Someone or something wants to be found.”

He clicked a new segment, isolating another part of the recording. The tone of the audio shifted, almost melodic, but unnerving. Then, translated from fragments of the dead languages, a voice emerged. Not through words, but meaning.

Three phrases appeared on screen:

“Under the red earth.”

“Follow the silent sun.”

“Where names are buried.”

Siya stared at the text. The words held a cold, ceremonial weight, like a prayer spoken backward. Or a spell.

“It’s not a warning,” she said softly. “It’s an invitation.”

Khumalo leaned closer. “The more I listen, the more I’m convinced this wasn’t made by a human mind. At least not one grounded in our time or place.”

Marks turned to Siya. “We need to go to that site.”

Siya didn’t answer right away. Her eyes were still locked on the waveform, where new segments of the tape were being slowly decrypted, like a digital voice from the grave, bleeding through space and memory.

Somewhere out in the red dust of the Namib, something waited and it had started calling.

The desert wind howled through the open window of the hired SUV as it tore down a narrow, uneven road in southern Namibia. Red sand swept across the windshield, painting it with streaks of ochre dust. Siya clutched the GPS tracker on her lap, eyes fixed on the slow blink of the device. Each pulse aligned with the coordinates Khumalo had pulled from the tape.

Marks squinted at the road ahead. “Still think this is some kind of weird psychiatric prank?”

Siya didn’t answer. Her thoughts were spiraling, tracing the spiral Elias had drawn. The more she studied it, the more she was convinced it wasn’t just a symbol, it was a map. A gateway. Maybe even a language of its own.

They were thirty kilometers from the nearest town, headed toward an area long marked by geologists as “geologically unstable.” But for centuries before that, local tribes called the region Nam-Ghus. The Place That Hears. A name that now rang with unsettling clarity.

The terrain grew rougher. Jagged rocks jutted from the earth like broken teeth, and ancient termite mounds lined the horizon like silent sentinels. Finally, the GPS let out a chime.

"We’re here,” Siya said.

They parked the car and stepped out into silence. No birds. No wind. Just the crunch of their boots on gravel.

In front of them stood the remains of a long-abandoned research station. The paint had long since peeled from its walls, and rust devoured the metal skeleton. Siya scanned the structure, eyes narrowing. Someone had been here recently,"fresh tire marks, discarded cigarette butts, and a makeshift trail leading into the dunes.

Inside the structure, remnants of equipment lay strewn across the floor: data cassettes, charred papers, a corroded reel-to-reel recorder. Marks lifted a stack of papers and frowned. “These are hospital forms… Groote Schuur, from the seventies.”

“Project Threnody,” Siya muttered. “They had a presence here.”

Marks pulled out a logbook. “Listen to this entry: Subject 002 responded to the second frequency. Manifestation was incomplete. Locals instructed to evacuate due to seismic interference.”

He looked at Siya. “They were running tests out here. Broadcasting something.”

She nodded grimly. “The same signal that was buried in Elias’s tape.”

They continued deeper into the station until they reached a sealed steel hatch in the ground, partially hidden beneath sand and debris. Siya brushed it clean. There was an engraving carved into the metal in a language neither of them could immediately read. But beneath it, scrawled in black ink, was a single word:

“Spiral.”

Marks grunted. “Of course.”

They pried the hatch open and descended into a narrow stairwell that spiraled downward, no lights, only the dim glow of their flashlights cutting the darkness. The temperature dropped the further they went, the air growing colder and heavier.

At the bottom was a chamber lined with old sound equipment and a large parabolic dish embedded into the floor, pointing not skyward, but down. Wires snaked from the dish to a rusted generator. Something beneath the floor buzzed faintly, still alive after all these years.

A voice played suddenly, distorted, bleeding through the room’s old speakers. Words echoed in broken fragments, stitched together from the tape’s phrases.

“Under… red… earth…”

“Follow… silent… sun…”

Then, a new voice. A recording never heard before.

“We opened the threshold, but it never closed. It watches. It remembers.”

Marks’s flashlight trembled. “What the hell does that mean?”

Siya crouched beside the dish, hand brushing a small metallic cylinder embedded in its center. A resonance pulsed up her fingers, not a sound, but a feeling. Ancient. Hungering.

Then her flashlight flickered, and everything went dark and a low vibration shook the floor. Not an earthquake, not thunder. It was something waking up.