The Man Who Collected Other People's Voices

He collected voices.

Not famous ones, necessarily. He had little interest in actors reciting lines or singers performing songs. He preferred the ordinary voices people left behind: a father explaining how to repair a tap, a woman laughing during an old radio interview, a child spelling her name into a cassette recorder, strangers leaving messages on answering machines that no one had bothered to erase.

He believed a voice carried something a photograph could not. A photograph preserved the face someone had chosen to show the world. A voice preserved the person who existed when they forgot they were being remembered.

His apartment was full of them. Hundreds of cassettes occupied wooden shelves. Thousands of digital recordings filled carefully labelled folders. He cleaned the audio, removed the static, and gave every file a name whenever he could discover one.

One afternoon, he found a recording that had no name.

It was buried inside a folder of digitised tapes donated by an old community radio station. The file contained eleven seconds of silence, followed by the sound of someone shifting in a chair.

Then a woman spoke.

“Can you hear me?”

There was a pause.

“I don't know why I'm asking. Nobody ever answers.”

The recording ended.

He listened again. Her voice was clear, close to the microphone, with a faint tremor beneath the words. There was no music, no background conversation, nothing that might reveal where the recording had been made.

He checked the metadata. The file had none. He examined the original tape, but its label had been torn away. The radio station's donation records offered no clues.

He saved it under Unknown Woman — 01.

That evening, he played it through his headphones while sorting another collection. When the woman asked whether he could hear her, he instinctively answered, “Yes.”

He removed the headphones.

The room was silent.

He almost laughed at himself. It was an old recording, perhaps decades old. The woman had been speaking to someone else, or to no one at all. His answer had meant nothing.

Still, he played it once more before going to bed.

Over the next few days, he returned to the file whenever he had a spare moment. He tried different audio software, examined the waveform, and separated the voice from the faint room noise. Nothing unusual appeared. No hidden words. No second speaker. No evidence of editing.

On his thirty-first listen, he noticed a sound after the woman's final sentence.

A soft click.

He increased the volume and listened again. The click was followed by something that might have been a breath, though it was too faint to identify.

He opened the original recording and checked the final seconds. The sound was there, buried beneath the noise floor. He cleaned the audio and exported a clearer version.

Then he heard the woman again.

“Why do you keep listening to me?”

He froze.

He rewound the file. The words were gone. He listened at half speed, then at normal speed. There was only the original question, the pause, and the final sentence.

He told himself he had mistaken the sound. His work depended on hearing patterns in noise; sometimes the mind supplied what the recording did not contain.

He deleted the cleaned version and returned to the original.

Before closing the folder, he noticed something written in pencil on the inside of the cassette case. The handwriting was faded and uneven.

He stared at the words for a long time. Then he counted his listens.

Forty-seven.

He shut down the computer, took the cassette from its case, and placed it on the table. He could break it, burn it, or simply throw it away. It was only a piece of magnetic tape. Whatever he had heard could be explained, even if he could not explain it yet.

He reached for the cassette.

His computer made a small notification sound.

A new file had appeared in his archive. No import had been running. No device was connected. The file sat at the top of his recently modified list, its name a string of characters he did not recognise.

He opened it.

His own voice came through the speakers.

Not a recording he remembered making. Not a sentence assembled from one of his old interviews. It was unmistakably him: the slight roughness at the end of certain words, the quiet breath before he spoke.

“I found her,” the voice said.

There was a pause. Then it continued.

“I think she was waiting for me.”

He closed the file.

He had never said those words. He was certain of that. Yet the voice sounded so natural that he could almost remember the moment of speaking them.

He checked the file properties. No source. No creation history he could make sense of. No explanation.

On the table, the cassette remained untouched.

He looked at it, then at the shelves around him. Every recording was a small piece of a life, preserved after the person who made it had moved on, grown older, or disappeared. He had always thought he was the one keeping those voices alive.

Now he wondered whether listening was another way of opening a door.

He reached for the power cable.

Before he could unplug the computer, the speakers crackled.

The woman's voice emerged from the silent room, quiet and perfectly clear.

“You heard me.”

He did not move.

“That's all I wanted.”

The recording stopped.

He sat there until the silence became ordinary again. Then he opened his archive, found the file, and hovered over the delete button.

He could not bring himself to press it.

Somewhere in the apartment, a cassette clicked softly inside its case.

He turned towards the shelves.

Every label faced outward. Every recording had a name, a date, or at least a number.

Except one.

On the lowest shelf, behind a row of old radio interviews, sat a cassette he had never seen before. Its label was blank. Its plastic case was clean, without a scratch or a trace of dust.

He did not pick it up.

For the first time in his life, he was afraid of hearing a voice.