Oliver Flynn

This assignment was really starting to give Oliver a headache. It just didn't make any sense to him. But he was determined to at least see it to some sort of conclusion. And of course it started with Cooke. These days it always seemed to involve Cooke in some way. Running his mouth about strange broadcasts and impossible things happening to people. The most recent tall tale was about a rogue sex toy that was attacking random people. He'd dismissed it as the ravings of a junkie who couldn't tell fact from fiction.

That is, until a young woman came to him with deep concern about the company she worked for. She claimed that the head of her company had been spying on her and her girlfriend and she wanted to know why before she tried to pursue further action. When she told him both the name of the company and the man she was accusing, for a moment it was like all of the air was sucked out of the room. Could Cooke's wild tales have some grain of truth to them?

At the very least, there was such a place as Kakos Industries and there was a man named Corin Deeth. Which is how Oliver ended up in a well appointed office of a powerful CEO. It had taken charm, flirting, outright lying, and a little old fashioned sneaking to get in there, but every other method had failed. The man himself was off doing god knows what, so Oliver took his time looking over the room. This place had to be a joke. A company that flaunted how evil it was? Not even the most vile corporations were ballsy enough to do that.

Oliver stood with his hands in his pockets, inspecting the plaque spoofing on the typical "See no evil" slogan. He was just over six feet tall, slender, sporting wild dark hair with silver at the temples. He had a dark blazer open over a rumpled white shirt, and dark slacks. He was a rather unassuming looking man, very out of place in the office.

Finding this guy was far from easy. Oliver gave up more than once, thinking it just the concocted fantasies of a junkie unable to cope with his friend's death. Try as he might, Oliver never seemed to catch the seemingly impossible broadcast. All of his research said nothing had ever been on that particular channel in the area, or even the region. Dead air between channels. But Cooke was always insistent about it, in that way that was always a little difficult to deny as truth, even from a junkie.

Then one night, Oliver heard it. He'd left the radio hissing in his office as he'd fallen into other work. And there it was. The fast-talking DJ with eclectic tastes. He was actually real. This gave him something to work with.

In the end it took multiple favors owed and cashed in to get something solid. And what he had seemed utterly ridiculous. A radio spirit. At least that's what it was referred to. Something that wasn't quite tangible. Unreachable. A friend of his was able to dig out and interpret some literature on it. To contact this guy required genuine magic. Even in a world of vampires, Oliver found that difficult to believe.

That was how he'd found himself in the middle of nowhere. Up in the hills where two roads intersected near the base of a radio tower. On the old, cracked pavement he'd used chalk to draw out the intricate pattern of symbols around the crude circle. From a bag at his side, he gingerly pulled out something sealed in plastic. A record more than eighty years old. This wasn't the first time he'd tried this little ritual, but this was the item he'd apparently been missing. The first time he'd tried an old iPod he'd picked up for cheap at a pawn shop, but it apparently didn't have the sentimental resonance required. The record certainly fit the bill.

The record had belonged to his father, Harvey, who'd died when Oliver was a kid. He'd barely played it since then, but it was something he knew well. He always knew he needed to do his best to cheer up his father when he heard the old, scratchy recording of the crooning voice. One of those voices that even under the poor recording quality, you could tell was rich and beautiful. It wasn't until he was an adult that he knew what it really meant. The man on the record was the one person his father truly loved. Completely and deeply with all of his heart. He still loved Oliver's mother, but in a different way. It was the 1930's. Times were different. Harvey and his love couldn't be together, but they did what they could. So the record was as sentimental as could be. It was a piece of his father.

Carefully, he removed the plastic disc and brittle paper sleeve from the plastic it had been stored in. "You'd better work," he muttered as he settled it in the center of the circle. He focused as best as he could, pushing doubt from his mind. He felt ridiculous, but at least he was alone. Taking a deep breath, he focused on what he wanted. He had nothing to visualize, but he could focus on the ideas and feelings involved.

As he uttered the necessary words, he drove a pin into the pad of his thumb. Activating the circle, it was apparently called. As he said the final words, he let a few drops fall onto the drawn symbols. And he braced himself for absolutely nothing to happen.