The Voice Beneath the Floor

Daniel hosted the midnight programme at WCR 88.4, a station so old the walls hummed when it rained. At 2:06 on Monday morning, during a quiet song, he heard another voice beneath his headphones. A woman read a missing-person report for a boy named Tobi Salako, age nine.

No such report existed. Daniel assumed another frequency had crossed theirs. The next evening, Tobi disappeared from a market twelve kilometres away.

On Tuesday the voice named a university student, Chika Nwosu. Daniel recorded it and called police, but they accused him of wasting time. Chika vanished the following afternoon.

The signal came at 2:06 each night, exactly twenty-four hours before the disappearance. Engineers checked every transmitter and found nothing. Daniel noticed the voice grew louder when he placed his ear against the studio floor.

Beneath the carpet was a metal hatch sealed by screws. The station manager ordered him to leave it alone. Daniel opened it after everyone went home.

A staircase descended into a wartime broadcast bunker absent from the building plans. Dust covered the equipment, but one reel-to-reel machine was turning. Its tape carried tomorrow’s date.

The voice announced the next missing person: Daniel Okoye, radio presenter, age thirty-four. He had until 2:06 the following morning.

The broadcast was always right, and always one day too early.

Daniel took the tape to Inspector Bako, whose daughter had been Chika’s roommate. Together they traced the previous victims. Each had recently called the station during Daniel’s show. Somebody was using listener information to select them.

The manager, Mr Kalu, had access to call records and the bunker. He claimed the tapes predicted events, and he merely obeyed them. “When I tried to save the first person,” he said, “the tape named my wife.” She died the next day.

Daniel did not believe him until the reel began playing by itself. The voice described Bako shooting Daniel inside the bunker.

At 2:05, footsteps entered above. Bako raised his weapon as the tape predicted. Kalu lunged for the controls. Daniel realised the recording was not prophecy; a hidden microphone captured their words and an editing system rearranged them into future-tense reports. Kalu created the illusion to control everyone.

The missing victims were locked in an unused transmitter room. Kalu had planned to kill them once his experiment proved people could be guided by fear.

Bako arrested him at 2:06. Daniel freed Tobi and Chika. The tape machine stopped.

Weeks later, the bunker was emptied. On Daniel’s first night back, his headphones crackled at 2:06. The same woman’s voice announced a missing person.

This time she named Mr Kalu. At the prison, guards opened his cell and found it empty. On the wall, written in magnetic tape, were four words: NOT ALL VOICES LIE.