The One Who Listens

Cam has been gone six days. On the seventh, his roommate Eric knocks on his door, and then opens it.

Cam left notebooks, a flash drive, three labeled microcassettes and a letter addressed to Eric. I don’t think I’m in danger, it says. That would be easier to explain.

Cam was methodical, and he had been logging something in Grand Rapids. Moments when the sound drops out of a downtown street and the street empties. A run of disappearances that comes back every nine years. Witnesses who describe a woman on the riverbank, the one people call the Crow Lady, who tells them to leave.

Eric once told Cam it wasn’t a normal river. Now he has Cam’s archive and half an hour of his own he can’t account for, and the letter ends with a warning. If you decide to keep going, be careful about why.