DEAD AIR

Harlow Hollow, West Virginia is dying the way a thousand small American towns are dying -- one closing at a time. The mine shut down years ago. The pharmacy is boarded up. The movie theater marquee is missing letters. The people who stayed have nothing left but stubbornness and each other.

Then the radios turn on.

Not to a station. To a voice. It calls itself Old Jack, and it knows things -- private things, secret things, the kind of things you only say in empty rooms when you think no one is listening. It knows about the sheriff's buried evidence. The pastor's lost faith. The boy genius no one bothered to teach. The old woman whose dead son just walked back up the porch steps looking exactly the way he did before the mine took him, except for the eyes, except for the smell, except for the way he stands in the hallway at 3 AM and watches her sleep.

Old Jack says it wants to help. It heals a dying girl. It exposes a violent man. It offers knowledge, power, and the return of everything this town has lost.

All it asks for in return is an audience.

Nora Caldwell came home to care for her dying father, not to investigate the impossible. But the voice on the radio knows her too -- knows why she was really blacklisted from journalism, knows what her father saw in the mine in 1971, knows that the thing beneath the mountain has been waiting fifty-three years for someone smart enough to listen and stubborn enough to say no.

The only question is whether Nora will say it before Old Jack finishes what it started.