The Hum

Most people in the world have never heard it. The ones who have cannot make it stop. You’re tuned to G Z S, one ninety-seven point seven, and this is Transmissions from the Fringe.

It goes by the name of whatever town gets famous for it. The Taos Hum, in New Mexico. The Bristol Hum, in England. Windsor, in Ontario. Same complaint, over and over, from people who have never met. A low sound. A drone, down at the bottom of hearing, like a truck idling two streets over that never drives away. Like a speaker thudding in a neighbor’s house, under everything, except there is no truck and no neighbor and no source anyone can find.

Only a small slice of any town hears it. Most people standing in the same room hear nothing at all, which is the first cruelty of the thing. The ones who do hear it hear it worse indoors, worse at night, worse when everything else has gone quiet, which is exactly when a person is least able to argue themselves out of it. They lose sleep. They go hunting for the machine that has to be causing it. Some towns bring in investigators with real equipment, microphones that catch sounds the ear can barely register. Sometimes the gear finds a faint low tone in the air. More often it finds nothing, and the person swears the sound is still there, filling the house.

Nobody has pinned it down. Industrial machinery far away, carried on the ground. The deep groan of ocean waves against a distant coast, turned into a vibration that travels through rock. Something inside the listener’s own ear, a body humming to itself. Maybe it is different answers in different towns. Maybe it is all of them. There is no single thing you can point at and say, there, that is the Hum, I have turned it off.

Think about what that does to a person. You hear a sound. It is real to you, every waking hour. The people you love stand next to you and hear silence. There is no dial to turn, no plug to pull, no door to close. The world has a noise in it that was apparently put there for you alone, and your only proof that you are not imagining it is that, three towns over, a stranger you will never meet is lying awake describing your sound in your words.

So here is a small mercy from a radio station. If you hear it, you are not the only one. There is a quiet club of people all over the Earth, awake right now, listening to the same low note nobody else will admit is playing.

This has been Transmissions from the Fringe. The dial stays warm. G Z S.