The Hollow Hour

TThe Trailways bus came down off the ridge into Coalbank a little after five, with its lights on and its wipers going against a fog that had come up off the river while the sun was still out. Mara watched the town arrive in pieces: a tipple standing over the railroad yard like a black barn on stilts, a row of company houses with their porch lights on, an Exxon station, two churches, a five-and-ten with a hand-lettered sign in the window that said FREE THE HOSTAGES. Then Depot Street, and at the bottom of it, where the street met the river, the Lilliard Hotel.

It was four stories of dark brick with a stone cornice and a name cut over the door in letters a foot high. Half the upper windows were dark. On the roof, small against the evening, stood a short steel mast with a red light on top, and painted along the side of the building in fading white were the words WCVF 1340 — THE VOICE OF THE VALLEY.

The lobby smelled of floor wax and radiator heat. There was a staircase with a red runner worn pink in the middle, and behind the front desk a small, straight-backed woman of about seventy in a cardigan, with a radio at her elbow playing a Conway Twitty record low. She looked at Mara's suitcase, and then at Mara.

"You'll be the new night one," she said. "Mrs. Varney's upstairs. Mezzanine. Mind the fourth step, it talks."

The fourth step did talk. Mrs. Lavada Varney met Mara at the top of it: a tall woman in her sixties in a camel coat she had not taken off, with reading glasses on a chain and the quick, sorting look of somebody who had been paying bills for a long time.

"You found us," she said, and shook hands hard. "Good. I'll show you the room and then I'm going home, because I've been here since six this morning and Delbert will be here at five-thirty tomorrow and that's the only way this place runs."

The mezzanine ran round three sides of the lobby, behind a wooden rail. There was a front office with a typewriter under a cover, a record library with shelves to the ceiling, a closet where a Teletype machine chattered to itself under a plastic hood, and at the far end, two doors side by side. One had a small window and a sign: STUDIO B. The other had no window, and a deadbolt, and nothing on it at all.

"What's in there?" Mara asked.

"Studio A." Mrs. Varney did not slow down. "That was the main room, once. When my husband and his brother put this station on the air in 'forty-eight, they built two, so one man could run the board while another read the news across the glass. Big doings. Live music on Saturday nights." She found the key for Studio B on a ring with a great many others. "In 'seventy-two we went to one man on the air at a time, like everybody else did, and there was no sense heating two rooms. So we closed it."

"Just closed it?"

"Locked it, and painted the window." She glanced back at the bare door, briefly, as if it had said something. "There's nothing in there but old equipment. Delbert's been meaning to clear it out for seven years. Now he'll have to, won't he, with the move."

Studio B was smaller than Mara had expected and warmer, a box of acoustic tile and brown carpet with one lamp, and every inch of it was for one person sitting in one chair. The console filled the desk: a long gray board with a row of black rotary knobs and a pair of meters with needles at rest. Two turntables sat on either side of it, three cart machines were stacked at the right, and a reel-to-reel deck stood at the left with its covers off. A microphone hung on a boom arm in front of the chair. Over the right shoulder, as you sat, was a round electric clock with a sweep second hand. At the left hand was the telephone, a heavy black set with a row of clear plastic buttons along the bottom, two of them labeled in ballpoint: 1 REQ and 2. Over the door a glass box said ON AIR in letters that were not lit.

And straight ahead, past the microphone, where another room should have been, there was a window as wide as the console, and it was black.

Not dark. Black. Somebody had painted it from the far side, thick and even, and the lamp in Studio B lay on it like light on deep water. Mara could see the whole booth in it, and a small pale figure in the doorway with auburn hair, looking back.

"You get used to it," Mrs. Varney said. "Everybody does."

She showed Mara the log sheets, the transmitter panel, the request book, the switch for the network news, and the number to call if the transmitter went off the air in the night, which was Delbert's and was not, she said, to be called for anything less. Then she buttoned her coat to the chin and went down the talking stairs, and Mara heard the street door close below.

At eleven fifty-nine Mara sat down in the chair. The evening man had shaken hands on his way out and said only, "Don't let it spook you." At midnight the clock's long hand came up to the twelve, and Mara opened the microphone. The glass box over the door came on red, and a faint red edge showed at the rim of the black window, like a coal at the bottom of a stove.

"Good morning, Coalbank," Mara said, in a voice that did not sound like her own yet. "It's twelve o'clock. This is WCVF, and this is the overnight."