OUR LADY OF THE DEAD FREQUENCY

The cathedral had been built around a radio antenna, not an altar. Its stained-glass windows depicted storms and interference patterns. Every pew held a wooden receiver instead of a hymnbook.

My mother had kept the station alive until she died. For years I refused to return, then one October night her name appeared in the maintenance ledger beneath a transmission scheduled for 3:33 a.m.

The keeper of the place, an elderly woman named Miren, let me inside without asking why. She carried a lantern that made no light until she opened a radio and placed it beside her.

"Don't call them ghosts," she warned. "That makes it sound as though they belonged to a single past. These voices come from roads the world didn't take."

Somewhere in the tower, a bell rang on a frequency too low to hear with the ears.