I Work at a Television Station that closed in 1999. We Have 5 STRANGE Rules.

I work four nights a week at a television station, but it's been off the air since 1999. Whenever I tell people that, they assume the building was turned into offices, or that I spend my nights transferring old tapes onto hard drives. That was what I assumed when I took the job. The truth is that Channel 8 still broadcasts every night, and my real job is making sure none of its programs reach anyone outside the building. The station sits a few miles outside Martin, Ohio, at the end of a service road most people no longer use. The old sign was removed years ago, but its pale outline is still visible on the brick beside the entrance. Weeds have pushed through the parking lot, and the transmission tower is dark during the day. From the road, the place looks empty. At 11:58 every night, a red light comes on at the top of that tower. Two minutes later, five programs begin playing on equipment that should not have power. I found the job after the audio-visual company I worked for lost its biggest contract. The listing described the position as overnight archive monitoring for a private media preservation company. The pay was $38 an hour, which was far more than anyone would normally offer to watch old television tapes. I sent in my resume expecting the listing to be fake. The following afternoon, a woman named Ruth Bailey called and asked if I could come to the station that evening. Ruth was in her early 50s and had the tired, practical manner of someone who had spent too long solving problems nobody else believed were real. She'd worked at Channel 8 when she was young and had stayed after everyone else left. During my interview, she walked me through the building without trying to make it sound less abandoned that it was. The news room still had faded weather maps pinned to the walls. The employee lounge contained vending machines with prices written in quarters. Studio A held the remains of a brightly painted children's set, while Studio B contained two game show doors, one red and one yellow, standing beneath a row of dead stage lights. The only part of the station that seemed maintained was master control. The floor had been swept, the console lights worked, and six old television monitors sat above a bank of switches. A newer computer handled payroll and incident reports, but everything related to the nightly broadcast still ran through the original equipment. "At midnight, five programs will play in the same order," she told me. "You don't start them, and you don't stop them unless one of the rules tells you to. Most nights, nothing goes wrong. When something does, you follow the list exactly. Don't improvise because you think you understand what you're watching. These stopped being recordings a long time ago." She handed me a laminated sheet with five numbered lines. None of them looked like technical instructions. I thought they were a joke, but Ruth did not wait for me to laugh. She showed me how to lock the reinforced control room door, how to cut the audio without interrupting the picture, and how to switch the feed away from a program. She also pointed out the talkback microphone, which had once allowed the control room operator to speak to people inside the studios. Well, my first shift began that night. At 11:58, the tower light came on. At midnight, the monitors brightened and displayed the old Channel 8 logo. There was no tape inside any machine. The main transmitter had supposedly been disconnected from the tower, yet its power meter climbed as the first program began. For almost 3 weeks, the rules seemed ridiculous. The same programs played every night and nothing changed. I learned where the pictures rolled, where the hosts stumbled over their lines, and which commercials had been recorded at a volume twice as loud as everything around him. By the end of my second week, I could recite most of the schedule without looking at the monitors. That familiarity made the first change worse. I knew exactly what was supposed to happen when Benny walked onto the set. And I knew he was not supposed to be carrying an axe. The hours between programs gave me plenty of time to explore. Channel 8 had been abandoned too quickly for anyone to clean it out properly. Coffee cups still sat inside desk drawers. A cork board in the newsroom held the staff schedule for the station's final week. The archive shelves were packed with labeled tapes, but there were also gaps where entire years of recordings had been removed. Ruth told me never to bring an old tape home, even if the company marked it for disposal. Anything recorded inside Channel 8 belonged inside Channel 8. Benny's Playhouse had been Channel 8's main children's program in the early 1990s. Benny was a large purple character with round eyes, a wide smile, and a green bow tie. He normally entered holding a yellow balloon, then spent 20 minutes teaching a simple lesson about sharing or kindness. The set had a painted blue house, a cardboard tree, and a short white fence. The first rule on my sheet read, "If Benny appears with an axe, lock the control room and don't look outside until his show ends." That night, the episode started with an empty set. The painted sun rose behind the cardboard tree, but none of the children came through the blue house. Benny entered alone. Instead of a yellow balloon, he carried a full-sized axe with a dark metal head and a red handle. He stopped in the middle of the set and looked directly into the camera. >> Hello, kids. Tonight, we're going to play a new game. Nobody gets to leave until I say the game's over. And remember, we're friends forever. >> I locked the control room door. I remember feeling foolish when I did it, because Benny was still only an image on a TV. And then the security monitor covering studio A came on by itself. The real studio had been empty when I passed it 20 minutes earlier. Now Benny was standing beneath the dead stage lights with the axe resting against his shoulder. The security picture showed the same painted house and the cardboard tree that appeared in the program, but everything was colorless beneath the work lights. Benny crossed the studio, stepped behind the scenery, and opened the door leading into the hallway. On the program monitor, the children set remained empty. The camera did not follow him. A cheerful blue title appeared at the bottom of the picture. Benny will be right back. The hallway camera showed him moving toward master control. He didn't hurry. He stopped at each closed office, tried the handle, and struck the door once with the axe before continuing. I stayed at the console and watched the program as the rule instructed. I could see the control room window to my right, but I kept my chair turned away from it. The first blow against my door shook the metal frame. Two more followed several seconds apart. The handle lowered and remained there while pressure pushed from the other side. I kept watching the empty television set. The cardboard tree moved slightly, even though Benny was no longer near it. Another blow split the wood facing around the lock. I wanted to look through the window, if only to make sure the thing outside was the same one I'd seen on the security monitor. The rule did not say I had to keep watching the program. It only said not to look outside. Even so, I understood that the window was exactly where Benny wanted my attention. The show continued as though nothing had happened. A cartoon bee moved across the empty set and reminded the audience to be kind. The blue house opened and closed by itself. Every few seconds, the axe hit the control room door again. The impacts were slow and patient. Benny did not seem to be trying to break through quickly. He had nearly 15 minutes left in his program, and he appeared willing to use all of them. With 2 minutes remaining, the blow stopped. Benny walked back onto the televised set carrying his yellow balloon. He stood beside the cardboard tree and faced the camera. We're friends forever. The credits rolled. I waited until the final Channel 8 logo vanished before I unlocked the door. There were 11 axe marks along the hallway. Three office doors had been split badly enough that I could see into the rooms behind them. My door had held, but a section of its wooden facing hung loose beside the lock. Several strands of bright purple fabric were caught in the broken wood. They felt warm when I touched them. Ruth arrived before sunrise and examined the damage without surprise. She told me the man who played Benny was named Frank Bell. During Channel 8's final broadcast, Frank went into Studio A to perform one last farewell segment. The other employees heard him talking on set, but when they entered, the costume was sitting upright in the middle of the floor. Frank was gone and the zipper on the back of the costume was still closed from the inside. The security recording from my shift made the situation even harder to dismiss. It showed Benny leaving Studio A and walking down the hall, but the cameras nearest master control never captured him. Those monitors displayed an empty hallway while the axe was striking my door. When the program ended, the picture skipped forward and the damage simply appeared. Whatever had been outside the control room was real enough split wood, but it had stopped being visible as soon as it reached the part of the station where I might have looked directly at it. "Nobody knows whether that's Frank walking around in there." Ruth began. "I don't think it is. Frank never carried an axe and he never tried to get into master control. Whatever Benny is now, it knows the episode gives it 24 minutes exactly. If the show ends while you're behind a locked door, it goes back. If you look at it directly, it stops following the program." She replaced the damaged facing that afternoon. I noticed older cuts beneath the section she removed, some of them filled with layers of paint. Benny had reached that door many times before I started working there. The second rule concerned the Channel 8 evening news. The broadcast had been recorded on the night before Channel 8 closed and was hosted by Paula Vain, a woman with short brown hair and a habit of keeping both hands folded on the desk. Most of the stories were harmless. A water main break had closed two streets downtown. A high school basketball team had won a holiday tournament. Channel 8's owners had announced that the station would leave the air the following night. The second rule read, "If the news anchor begins reading your obituary, cut the audio before she says your full name." The obituary began on my fifth week. Paula finished the basketball story, placed one page beneath another, and looked into the camera. "We end tonight with the death of a member of the Channel 8 family. He was 33 years old and had recently joined our overnight staff after working in audio-visual installation. He lived alone on Willow Street and was last seen entering this building shortly before 11. His body will be discovered in master control at 2:16 tomorrow morning." A photograph appeared over her shoulder. It showed me sitting at the console in the gray shirt I was wearing that night. The angle was from directly above the monitor where no camera had ever been installed. In the picture, my head was lowered and one arm hung beside the chair. Paula continued with details that had never appeared in my resume. She mentioned the name of my landlord, the college I'd attended for 1 year, and an operation I had when I was 14. She said the control room door would be locked from the inside and that there would be no sign anyone else had entered the station. I reached for the audio switch, but didn't touch it yet. The rules said to cut the sound before she said my full name. I needed to know whether she was truly talking about me or whether the similarities were meant to frighten whoever happened to be working. Paula looked down at the page one last time. Funeral arrangements for Daniel. I cut the audio. Her lips continued moving. The lower third of the screen displayed my first name, but the space beside it remained empty. The clock on the newsroom wall read 2:16. The clock above my console read 2:01. The control room door locked with a hard metallic click. I tried it once and stopped. The lights above me went out one row at a time, leaving only the monitors and the small lamps built into the console. The station telephone lit up with my home number, even though no call came through. In the silent broadcast, Paula finished the obituary and turned to another camera. The picture over her shoulder changed. It now showed the control room as it looked in that moment, with me standing beside the locked door. When I moved back to the desk, the version of me on the news screen did the same thing a second later. At 2:11, the temperature of the console display began falling. At 2:13, a sheet of paper slid from the station printer. I left it where it landed. Paula remained behind the desk watching the clock. She'd finished speaking, but the program did not cut to a commercial. At 2:15, the image of me over her shoulder lowered its head. I stayed upright. The picture waited as though expecting me to match it. I held onto at edge of the console and watch the second-hand cross the final minute. At 2:16, every monitor went black except the news feed. Paula looked down at the papers in front of her, then set them aside. The photograph of me disappeared. A commercial for a used car dealership began and the control room lights returned. The lock released at the same moment. The paper from the printer was a full obituary. Every detail Paula had read was printed on it, including the time and place of my death. The heading at the top said Daniel, followed by a long blank space where my surname should have been. One detail disturbed me even more than the rest. Near the bottom, the obituary said I was survived by no children and no spouse, which was true. Beneath that, it thanked Ruth Bailey for discovering me and notifying my family. Paula had not read that section before I cut the sound. The broadcast had already decided what Ruth would do after finding my body. Preventing my last name from being spoken had not merely saved me. It had erased an entire chain of events the station had prepared for everyone around me. Ruth showed me another obituary when she came in. It'd been printed in the same room in 2004. The employee's name was Alan Pierce and both his first and last name appeared at the top. Ruth found him dead at the console at the exact time the news had reported. There had been no injury and no clear medical cause. His obituary had simply become a fact. The picture isn't what completes it, Ruth began. The name does. You can let her read every other word if you have to, but she cannot finish identifying you. Once she does, the station treats the report as something that has already happened. I kept the paper with a blank surname in my locker. Part of me wanted to throw it away, but I learned by then that getting rid of something did not mean Channel 8 had forgotten it. The third program was called Two Doors to Fortune. It had been filmed in Studio B, where the original set still stood. Contestants answered simple questions, then chose between a red door and a yellow one. One door held a prize, usually a refrigerator or a vacation package. The other held something intentionally disappointing, like a sack of potatoes. The host, Warren Pike, treated every choice as though the future of the world depended on it. The third rule read, "The game show only has two doors. If a third appears, close it before anything gets through." I asked Ruth how I was supposed to close a door inside a television program. Instead of answering, she took me into Studio B and showed me a steel bar mounted beneath the edge of the stage. It looked newer than anything around it. She told me that if a third door appeared on the monitor, it would also appear on the physical set. I had to enter the studio, pull the third door shut, and drop the steel bar across it. "You may see something on the other side," she began. "Don't waste time deciding what it is. The wider the door opens, the harder it becomes to close." The third door appeared on a night when Ruth was working in the archive room. The contestant on the screen had already rejected the red door and was considering the yellow one when Warren raised a hand toward the center of the set. I'm Warren Peck and before you decide, we have a special third option for you tonight. A tall black door stood between the other two. It had no handle, no frame, and no visible hinges. I called Ruth and ran to studio B. The stage lights came on as we entered. The red and yellow doors stood where they always had, but the black door had appeared between them. It was already open several inches. There was no backstage area beyond it. The opening looked onto a vast place beneath an unfamiliar sky. Dark water covered the ground and enormous shapes moved far beyond the doorway. At first, the distance made them difficult to understand and then one of them shifted and I realized the shapes were not mountains. They were living things. Several massive tentacles moved across the water. One rose toward the opening and filled most of the view. Beyond it, another vast silhouette lifted from the darkness. I never saw either creature completely. The small portion visible through the doorway was enough to make the game show studio feel like a toy set placed beside an ocean. Ruth grabbed the edge of the door while I pulled the steel bar from beneath the stage. Before we could close it, the first tentacle pushed into the studio. It swept the television camera from its stand and dragged the machine through the opening as easily as if it were empty cardboard. Another tentacle curled around the scenery. The black door widened several more inches. We pulled together. The door moved, but something on the other side pressed against it. A third tentacle slid across the floor and wrapped around Ruth's waist. It tightened and pulled her feet out from under her. I caught her beneath the arms before she reached the doorway. For several seconds, the three of us remained fixed in place, Ruth between me and the creature, the open doorway showing those enormous shapes moving closer through the black water. Then the tentacle loosened enough for Ruth to twist free. We forced the door inward and dropped the steel bar into its brackets. The impact of the closing door shook the set. Tentacles struck the other side. One narrow end remained trapped beneath the door. It pulled free as the entire doorway faded, taking the steel bar with it. The stage lights went out. The red and yellow game show doors remained exactly where they'd always been. The black one was gone. Ruth sat against the stage until she could stand. Dark circular marks had formed across her coat and around one wrist. The studio floor was covered with several inches of dark water, but it began draining into the carpets without leaving it wet. The camera the creature had taken never returned. For a few seconds after the doorway vanished, the red and yellow doors rattled inside their frames. Something struck the wall behind the set hard enough to shake dust from the stage lights, even though the real wall opened onto a narrow storage room. We checked that room later and found it empty. The force had come from the other side of a passage that no longer existed. The television in the corner continued playing two doors to fortune. Warren Pike congratulated the contestant for choosing the yellow door. Nobody on the program acknowledged the missing camera or the opening that had almost let something enormous into our world. Back in master control, Ruth showed me security footage from 2007. A night technician named Martin Cole had been alone when the black door appeared. By the time he reached the set, it had opened halfway. The recording showed a tentacle wrap around him and pull him through. Martin disappeared with the door and nothing belonging to him was ever recovered. Ruth did not know where the doorway led or what the creatures were. She only knew that they had learned to channel eight open the path into our world for several minutes at a time. If the black door ever opened completely, the steel bar would no longer hold it. We closed it while the creatures still had to reach through one tentacle at a time. But something much larger had been approaching behind them. After the game show incident, I stopped thinking of the rules as protections for the people inside the station. They protected the building itself. Benny wanted to move through it. Pollock could make a death happen inside it. The black door could connect it to a world full of things large enough to tear the place apart without noticing. I started wondering what would happen if there were no one in master control when the programs began. Ruth avoided that question whenever I raised it. She told me to concentrate on the next program, tomorrow's weather with Marion Holt. Marion had been Channel 8's weather woman for almost 20 years. Her segment was filmed in the newsroom in front of a blue map covered with magnetic suns, clouds, and snowflakes. Her forecast never changed. She predicted a cold and partly cloudy morning, a light dusting of snow in the northern part of the county, and clearer skies by evening. The fourth rule read, "If Marion starts predicting the end times, cut away immediately." And that rule seemed almost funny the first time I read it. Ruth assured me it was not. She showed me the cutaway switch, then made me practice changing the feed to a recorded [music] commercial without stopping the station's internal transmission. The distinction mattered. Turning off the whole system allowed the program to search for another screen. Cutting away kept the signal inside Channel 8 while removing Marion from the air. By that point, I knew more about Marion than I knew about most living people. Channel 8 had used her in dozens of promotional clips. In one of them, she introduced viewers to her goldfish Bubbles, who lived in a round bowl on the corner of her desk. Marion claimed Bubbles became restless whenever a storm was coming. The fish appeared in holiday cards, charity announcements, and even one advertisement for a pet store. A framed photograph of Bubbles still sat on the abandoned weather desk. She loved that fish. The first unusual forecast began normally. Marion pointed to a line of clouds moving across the state and predicted rain after midnight. Then she moved a blue flood marker over the county. That had never been part of the segment. The rain will begin shortly after midnight, but it will not stop in the morning. The river will overflow before 1:00, and every road leading out of town will be underwater before 2:00. The lower houses will disappear first. By dawn, the water will reach the courthouse roof. >> I placed my hands on the cutaway switch. The rules said to use it if Marion began predicting the end times. Flooding was serious, but it was still weather, and I didn't know where Ruth drew the line. While I hesitated, more blue markers spread across the map until they covered the entire state. Water crept beneath the control room door. It was only a thin line at first. I touched it with the edge of my shoe, and I found it cold enough to make my foot ache through the leather. The security monitors showed water spreading through the hallways and collecting around the legs of the studio equipment. Marion removed the ordinary cloud markers and replaced them with a dark cloud that covered three counties. >> The locust will arrive with the flood. There will be enough of them to hide the moon, and they will settle on every field, every road, and every house from here to the state line. Whatever the water leaves standing, they will strip bare. Do not bother closing your windows because they'll already be inside. >> Small impacts began tapping against the control room glass. Within seconds, hundreds of locust covered the window. More struck the exterior cameras and collected across the parking lot. The tower light vanished behind the moving cloud. I pushed the cutaway switch, but nothing happened. The commercial cartridge beside the console started spinning, But Marion remained on every screen. She pushed the flood and locust markers aside and unfolded a second map. This one showed the entire world. Red lines crossed the oceans. Dark openings appeared over the mountains. Marion was no longer glancing at the notes on her desk. She leaned toward the map, moving her hands across it as though the destruction were unfolding under her fingers. The oceans will begin to boil before morning. The mountains will split from their foundations and everything buried beneath them will rise. The cities will burn from the ground upward. The clouds will open over every nation. The sky will rain fire. And Marion. I called into the talkback microphone. Relax. I remembered the old promotional clip and the little bowl in the corner of her desk. Yes. Yes. Calm down. I continued. Remember your goldfish, Bubbles. Marion lowered the page. She looked toward the framed photograph beside her weather maps and smiled. Oh, yes. Bubbles. I'd forgotten about Bubbles. She returned to her normal self then and straightened the papers in front of her. >> [clears throat] >> Everything is fine. Tomorrow will be partly cloudy. The floodwater dropped at once. It didn't flow out of the control room. It simply lowered until the carpet beneath my shoes was dry. The locust vanished from the windows, revealing a normal black sky and the steady red tower light. the orange glow above studio A disappeared. On the program, Marion placed a magnetic cloud over the county, smiled toward the camera, and finished her ordinary forecast. I stood behind the console with my pants wet to my knees. I started laughing. Wasn't because the situation was harmless. I had been seconds away from watching a local weather segment tear the world apart. And apparently the only thing holding Marion back was concern for a goldfish. One dead locust remained on the console. Its body was longer than my thumb with red streaks along its folded wings. I sealed it in an evidence bag before Ruth arrived. When I told her how I'd stopped the forecast, she sat down and covered her face for several seconds. Then she looked at the photograph of Bubbles I'd taken from the weather desk. "Keep that beside the cutaway switch. I'm adding it to the emergency procedure." she said. And that was when Ruth finally told me what had happened on the night channel 8 closed. The station had been failing for years. Advertising revenue was down, the equipment was old, and the owners had decided it'd be cheaper to sell the property than keep broadcasting. The staff planned a farewell night made up of their best known local programs. Benny's Playhouse, the evening news, Two Doors to Fortune, Tomorrow's Weather, and Danny Doodles Cartoon Club were scheduled to air one last time before the station signed off. The problems began shortly after midnight. Benny left his set. Paula read the obituary of a camera operator who died before she finished the report. The third door appeared during the game show and took one of the stage hands. Mary and abandoned her normal forecast and began describing floods, locust, and fire. Ruth was a junior control room operator then. She cut away from Mary and before the final prediction, but several feet of water had already filled the station's lower floor. The remaining employees shut down the transmitter. For 9 minutes, every screen inside Channel 8 went dark. Then calls began reaching the station from people in town. The five programs had appeared on televisions throughout Marden, even in houses where the sets were turned off. Benny walked out of one family screen and left axe marks in their living room. A man watching the news heard Paula begin his obituary. Two children told their parents that Danny Doodle had asked them to volunteer. Ruth restored the internal broadcast loop and the outside signals stopped. The programs returned to the station as if they'd been pulled back by a rope. Channel 8 officially closed that morning. The owners blamed an electrical failure and the company's financial problems. Ruth and two other employees stayed behind to keep the nightly loop contained. Over the years, one died, one disappeared, and the responsibility passed through a small group of people hired under the cover of archive work. We don't know why the signal moves outside when nobody is here to hold it. Ruth began. Maybe the programs need viewers. Maybe they need somewhere to exist. All I know is that if we keep them running inside this building and follow the rules, then the people out there are safe. The fifth program began at 3:00 in the morning. Danny Doodle's Cartoon Club was a cheap animated show built around a boy with blue overalls and a red crayon tucked behind one ear. Danny lived in a place called Doodle Town where the houses leaned at odd angles and every tree was a different color. At the end of each episode, he stood beside a blue door and asked if anyone at home wanted to the cartoon and help with the next adventure. The fifth rule read, "Never volunteer to enter Danny Doodle's Cartoon. Anyone who does will be trapped inside forever." Unlike the other rules, there was no switch to press and no door to close. Ruth said I only had to keep quiet. That seemed simple until I started noticing the man in the background. He appeared near the crayon bakery during my first week, but I'd mistaken him for an unusually tall cartoon character. Later episodes placed him closer to the foreground. He wore a blue shirt with a white rectangle over the pocket. His arms and legs were drawn with uneven black lines and his face changed slightly each time he moved. He never joined Danny's games. He stood at the edge of the picture and watched the camera. I recognized him from an employee photograph in the archive. His name was Eddie Moss and he'd worked my shift several years earlier. His locker was still in the employee room with a coat hanging inside. Ruth had originally told me Eddie quit without collecting his things. The more carefully I watched, the more trapped people I noticed. A woman in a Channel 8 blazer appeared beyond the crayon post office. A camera operator stood beneath a purple tree holding a camera that had been drawn far too small for him. They performed the same limited movements whenever the episode repeated, but their eyes followed things that were not part of the animation. Sometimes one of them reached the edge of the screen and pressed a hand against it until Danny entered the scene. Then they returned to their assigned places as if the cartoon had pulled them backward. After the incident with Marion, she showed me the recording of Eddie's final night. He'd been alone in the master control when Danny asked for a volunteer. Eddie laughed, raised his hand toward the monitor, and said, "Sure, Danny, I volunteer." The security picture lost him for less than a second. His chair didn't move, and the door never opened. One frame showed Eddie sitting at the console. The next showed the chair empty. On the program monitor, a crude cartoon version of Eddie stepped through the blue door into Doodletown. "We've tried talking to him through the program," Ruth began, "but he can't see us. He can't cross the edge of the picture. He doesn't age. None of them do. As far as I can tell, there is no end to an episode once you're inside it." The next time Danny Doodle aired, Eddie was waiting beside the blue door before the opening title finished. More figures stood behind him. Some wore clothing from the 1990s. Others had Channel 8 badges drawn onto their shirts. I recognized Frank Bell, the man who'd performed inside the Benny costume, even though his cartoon face had been reduced to a few rough lines, whatever now walked around as Benny was not Frank. Frank had been trapped here all along. Danny ignored the adventure scheduled for that night. He walked past the crayon houses and stopped in front of the screen. >> We saved a place for you, Daniel. All you have to do is volunteer, and you'll never have to work another night. You can stay with us for every adventure. Once you come inside, you'll be our friend forever. >> Eddie shook his head. He pressed both hands against the invisible edge of the picture and tried to form words, but nothing came through the monitor. Behind him, the other trapped employees did the same thing. I kept my mouth closed. Danny stepped aside and showed me a cartoon version of the control room. It was warm and bright with a yellow desk and a window looking over Doodletown. The cartoon version of me sat in the chair eating from a plate that never became empty. Danny explained that there would be no more night shifts, no locked doors, and no reason to be afraid. I only had to say that I wanted to join. The edge of the main console turned black. Color spread across its surface in broad crayon strokes. The knobs flattened into circles drawn on yellow paper, and the telephone became a red outline. When I lifted my hands, heavy black lines had formed around my fingers. Danny asked whether I was tired. He asked whether I wanted to leave Channel 8. He asked whether I wanted Eddie to come home. Every question was designed to make a simple yes sound harmless. I looked at Eddie instead. He had scratched two words into the wall of the cartoon bakery. No trade. The control room door flattened against the wall and turned bright blue. Beyond its drawn window, I could see Doodle Town instead of the station hallway. The trapped employees gathered on the other side. They were close enough that I could see the rough crayon marks making up their faces. Danny held out one hand. Eddie can leave if you take his place. One friend comes out and one friend comes in. You only have to volunteer. The station telephone rang then. Ruth's name appeared on its small display, but I didn't answer. I didn't know whether telling her I was all right would be enough for Danny to claim I had accepted something. I pulled the notepad toward me and wrote I will not speak in large letters then held it toward the security camera. The cartoon continued spreading. The television monitors became painted squares. The floor beneath my chair turned white then filled with green crayon grass. When I looked toward my hands again, the black outlines had reached my wrist. Danny began a countdown to the credits. He didn't count quickly. Between each number, he described another thing waiting for me in Doodle Town. I would have a house that never needed repairs. Every day would be a new adventure. Nothing in the cartoon could kill me and I would never grow old. Eddie pointed to himself and then to the words he'd scratched into the wall. He had received the same promises. He'd been wearing that blue shirt for years, repeating the same 26-minute day while the outside world moved on without him. I folded my arms across my chest and waited. When Danny reached one, the credits began rolling over the control room. Names appeared across the wall, the console, and my clothes. Eddie Moss was listed as friend number six. Frank Bell was listed as friend number two. At the bottom of the blue door, new letters formed beneath the words "new friend". Daniel Harper. The letters reached the middle of my last name and stopped. The black lines around my hands loosened. Daniel Har smeared across the door as though someone had dragged a wet cloth through it. Danny looked at the unfinished name. "That's okay. We'll ask again tomorrow." The program ended. The control room returned piece by piece. The console regained its depth, the grass vanished from the floor, and the exit became a real metal door. The only mark left on me was a thin black line around my right thumbnail. It remained there for nearly a month. Ruth entered as soon as the credits finished. She'd watched the entire incident from the archive monitor and understood why I had not answered her call. Eddie was still inside the cartoon standing beside Danny as the final Channel 8 logo faded. I finished the shift, placed my keys on the console, and told Ruth I was done. She didn't try to stop me. She said she had left Channel 8 many times herself, especially during the first few years. She always came back before the next broadcast because she knew what happened when nobody was there. I drove away shortly before sunrise. Martin was beginning to wake up as I passed through town. Lights were on inside the hospital. A woman was opening the blinds at an all-night diner. Delivery trucks were stopping behind the grocery store and porch lights marked the rows of houses beyond it. None of those people knew that an old television station just outside town had nearly filled their streets with flood water and locust. They didn't know that something larger than a building had pressed against a door less than 5 miles from their homes. I stopped at the diner and I sat in my car while the sky brightened. If Ruth ever became too old to continue and no one replaced me, Benny would eventually walk into someone's living room. Paula would read a new obituary. The black door would open without anyone nearby to close it. Mary-Ann would finish her forecast. Danny would find volunteers who had never seen our rules. Ruth had spent most of her adult life protecting people who would never even know her name. She hadn't stayed because Channel 8 forced her. She stayed because someone had to be sitting at the console when the old logo appeared. I called her that afternoon and asked whether she'd given my key to someone else. She had not. And I returned before 11:00 that night. My key was still on the console. The axe marks were still on the hallway and the space where the missing game show camera had stood was still empty. The photograph of Bubbles was waiting beside the cutaway switch. At midnight, the tower light came on. Benny entered holding his yellow balloon and the night began normally. That was more than 2 years ago. I still work four nights a week at Channel 8, and Ruth covers the other three. Between us, the station is never left alone when the broadcast begins. Most shifts are quiet. Benny stays inside his program. Paula reads the news from 1999. The game show uses only two doors. Marion predicts ordinary clouds, and Danny asks for volunteers who know better than to answer. Ruth and I reinforced the control room door, installed a second cutaway switch, and placed another steel bar beneath the game show stage. We keep written logs because recordings are unreliable inside Channel 8. Some mornings, a tape shows a normal episode and leaves us as the only people who remember what nearly came through. I do not stay because I am trapped. I stay because the people outside this building deserve normal weather and locked doors between their world and the things waiting beyond ours. They deserve to turn on a television without seeing their own obituary or being invited into a place that they can never leave. I keep the five rules beside the console. Next to them is the photograph of Marion's goldfish. If she starts moving those flood markers again, I [music] will hit the cutaway switch. If that fails, I will remind her about Bubbles. The people of Marden believe Channel 8 has been dead for decades. Ruth and I will make sure it stays that way. >> [music] [music] >> Mhm.