It sat on the edge of the landfill where the grass grew up to and no further, for whatever residue or runoff killed it beyond there.
A dictaphone. Right next to the dictaphone was an empty rum bottle and small plastic bush.
The dictaphone sat there all afternoon every afternoon, as everything else did.
But sometime after midnight it would turn on like clock work.
A young man’s voice could be heard speaking into the dictaphone. Talking about things that had happened to him during the Iraq war.
The words came out slow and watery as if there were some harmful phantom somewhere inside the blue haze of methane lit up by the road lamps.
The dictaphone played for close to an hour.
A local bum named Darcy who would use the depot as a shelter in winter was the first to observe the strange effect of the dictaphone.
He was having his last drink on a bench a good hundred meters from where the dictaphone was. He heard a sound come on from the edge of the landfill at ten minutes to one am.
He casually walked out under the influence but not totally drunk his liver wasn’t destroyed and he had built a tolerance. He had spent a month there and it was the first night he actually heard the thing, as on the other nights he was either too out of it or fast asleep by the time the thing came on.
As he approached the landfill he started to feel exactly what quotient of his mind felt sober. Or in other words just how real the experience felt.
But the voice in fact stirred something in him. Until his shoes actually touched the trash he was sure it was someone who needed help. But as he got closer he could hear the haunting slowness of the voice. And thought it might be something completely different. His lazy mind did not go to anything supernatural until he had to turn a lantern light on to see where he was going realizing he was going toward the edge of the landfill where the pines were.
Everyone in the local town where he came from knew the stories of the infamous area next to the landfill called the pines.
He looked back toward the cozy lights of the depot and thought, well I could just ignore this weird voice and go get some sleep.
“The pines, the pines.” Darcy mumbled to himself. He felt like the pines were a separate person hired with the sole purpose of making him feel too scared to do something.
So as if in protest, completely irritated at that, he kept walking. But this time he could hear the voice clearly and it was slow, watery, sinister and seemed like it was talking directly to him.
Making matters worse a cold late autumn predawn breeze started bearing down on him reminding him he wasn’t wearing enough layers.
“You only see death around you. The ghosts of those who were taken without even realizing they were dead. And their vestiges lie around this wasteland I have been condemned to today…”
Darcy realized it must be a real ghost, a stream of hot urine shot down his leg and inconveniently into his left sock.
He turned his lantern off and slowly walked back toward the depot’s lights. He grabbed the jacket, he’d left there pulled up his trousers dried himself off.
The croak of the dictaphone clicked on again. Darcy, thinking it was the ghost, possibly aware of his presence accelerated. Changing into some spare socks and underwear putting on the same pants albeit pee smelling, then straight into a march back toward town. Holding his face down as if he’d been beaten and humiliated in a bar brawl only to have the patrons see him walk home ashamed.
He would never know it was purely a dictaphone. However one that had long lost its batteries.
