Bagas massaged his throbbing temples. The wall clock on his desk showed 2:15 a.m. As an independent audio restoration technician, his work demanded extra patience. Tonight, he was cleaning the “noise” from a magnetic cassette tape more than three decades old—an archive of a 1994 police investigation that had nearly rotted away in an old records storage room.
The cassette belonged to a detective named Ardi, who had investigated the mysterious death of a girl in an old apartment building on the outskirts of the city. On his computer monitor, the audio waveform rose and fell steadily, accompanied by ear-splitting static hiss.
Bagas used the “spectral noise reduction” feature to dampen the hiss. Slowly, the sounds of wind and creaking wooden floors began to filter out. What remained now was the sound of heavy breathing and the rustling of fabric from a journalist’s microphone in the past.
Suddenly, the waveform on the screen showed an anomaly. There was a low frequency in the background that had previously been buried beneath the noise. Bagas increased the audio gain and pressed his headphones tighter against his ears.
“Please... let me go...” a middle-aged woman’s voice whispered through the headphones. Her voice was hoarse and trembling, sounding incredibly close, as though the microphone were right in front of her lips.
Bagas frowned. The voice didn’t sound like an ordinary archival recording. There was such a palpable tremor of emotion in it.
However, it wasn’t the woman’s voice that suddenly froze Bagas’s blood. The next second, the woman continued in a soft tone:
“Bagas... help me... Apartment 402, Jalan Kenanga.”
Bagas froze. His heart suddenly began pounding. He looked around his room. The apartment where he was currently sitting, which he had only rented the week before, was Apartment 402, Jalan Kenanga.
*How could that be?* he thought. The cassette had been recorded in 1994, long before he was born, and he had only moved to this city a week ago. His mind immediately suspected that someone was playing a prank on him. He examined the recording more carefully, trying to find out whether the file had just been edited. There was no new metadata. The file was authentic, transferred from an old magnetic tape.
The temperature in the room suddenly dropped drastically. Bagas’s breath formed a thin mist in the air.
He tried to convince himself that it was only fatigue-induced suggestion. However, when he played that section of the audio a second time, strange things began happening around him. His desk lamp flickered wildly. In the corner of the room, the framed photo on top of the cabinet shifted several inches on its own, making a soft, creaking sound as the wood rubbed against the surface.
Bagas turned toward the large mirror hanging on the wall across from his desk. His reflection in the mirror appeared to be sitting still, while his real body had just risen from the chair.
Panic seized him. Bagas stepped backward, but the reflection in the mirror didn’t move with him. It remained seated in the desk chair, staring straight at him with empty eyes, then slowly turned toward the computer, which was still on.
From the computer speakers, the cassette’s hiss grew louder again, transforming into a long, ear-splitting scream. The computer monitor suddenly displayed a waveform that formed a flat, straight line—a sign that the recording had reached its end.
At that exact moment, the room plunged into darkness. The main light went out completely.
In the thick darkness, the sound of fingernails tapping began to come from behind the mirror’s glass. *Tap... tap... tap...*
Bagas wanted to run toward the exit, but his feet felt nailed to the floor. From within the mirror’s reflection, now illuminated by moonlight shining through the window, a pale hand began pushing through the glass, groping at the cold air of the real world.
The woman’s voice from the cassette whispered in Bagas’s ear again, right behind his neck, icy cold and filled with despair:
“Thank you for opening the way for me... Now it’s your turn to listen.”