I had not intended to begin another volume of my journals so soon. The last one, a thick leather-bound ledger filled with over two hundred pages of scribbles, diagrams, and coffee stains, had only been completed a fortnight ago. My intention was to take a brief respite, perhaps even indulge in the sort of aimless idleness one imagines scientists enjoy between great discoveries.
But the universe, in its ever-ironic fashion, seems to delight in disrupting one's plans.
It began three nights ago, on the first morning in weeks when the fog rolled in from the ocean and clung to the cliffs with an almost possessive grip. My home, perched high above the jagged shoreline of Eddington Bay, is an odd structure — part observatory, part laboratory, part workshop, and entirely inconvenient for anyone not accustomed to climbing seventy-two narrow stone steps just to reach the front door.
I awoke early, around four-thirty, to the distant, mournful moan of the lighthouse horn. There was something about that sound that morning — a dissonant echo, as though another note were being played just beneath it, faint and erratic, like the sigh of an unseen flute.
It took me exactly thirteen minutes to find the source.
The tone wasn't coming from the lighthouse at all. It was coming from my own receiver array — a collection of dish antennas and copper coils mounted on the north side of the roof, primarily used for deep-sky listening experiments. I had been searching for signs of naturally occurring fast radio bursts in the hydrogen line frequencies. What I received instead was… well, I still don't know what to call it.
It was a pattern. Not the random hiss of cosmic noise, nor the simple pulses of a quasar, but a deliberate sequence: five long tones, three short, then five again. It repeated every six minutes, exactly.
At first, I suspected interference from the shipping lanes. Some overzealous amateur might be bouncing maritime signals off the fog bank. But when I adjusted the tuning, I realized the signal wasn't coming from the sea at all. It was descending from overhead — a narrow beam from somewhere far above the atmosphere.
That was enough to pull me out of my pre-dawn sluggishness. I made tea, switched on the main lab lights, and began logging the data.
By eight o'clock, I had three full cycles of the signal recorded on magnetic tape. By nine, I had ruled out known satellites, orbital debris, and the occasional prankster with a ham radio. The signal was far too clean, too mathematically precise.
It was at this point that Mrs. Brogan appeared.
Mrs. Brogan has been my housekeeper for seven years, though I suspect she sees herself more as a reluctant warden. She entered without knocking, carrying the day's groceries in one arm and a suspicious glare in the other.
"Doctor Maxwell," she began (she never calls me plain 'Maxwell'), "you've left your breakfast untouched again. And the kitchen smells like you've been boiling old batteries."
"That," I replied, gesturing at the teapot, "is lapsang souchong, not a battery. I am in the midst of a potentially historic discovery, and I can't be expected to think about eggs when the heavens are trying to talk to me."
She glanced toward the oscillograph, where the signal's waveform pulsed serenely across the green phosphor.
"Well, I hope they say something worth all this trouble," she muttered, and shuffled off to bang cupboards in the kitchen.
By late afternoon, I had isolated the exact frequency: 1.643 gigahertz, remarkably close to the natural hydrogen line — the sort of frequency one might use if one were deliberately trying to be noticed by someone conducting radio astronomy.
It was during my attempts to map the signal's origin that the second anomaly occurred.
At precisely 15:12 hours, my seismograph — an instrument entirely unrelated to the radio apparatus — recorded a faint tremor. Nothing that would be felt underfoot, but strong enough to leave a neat blip on the chart. Curious, I checked the tide gauge, the barometer, and the magnetometer. All three showed slight but simultaneous fluctuations.
It was as if the signal had not merely arrived, but somehow touched the Earth on its descent.
I am aware of how that sounds. I am not yet suggesting extraterrestrial intent. But I have learned in my career never to dismiss the improbable without first exhausting the possible.
I stayed awake until well past midnight, headphones clamped to my ears, listening. The pattern repeated without deviation, almost comforting in its consistency. And then, at 00:47 hours, it stopped.
No fading, no distortion. Just silence.
I waited another six hours. Nothing.
Now, as I write this, the fog has returned, thicker than before. I can see nothing beyond the glass but a wall of grey. The receiver array is silent. The instruments are still. And yet, I have the peculiar feeling of being watched — not in the paranoid sense, but in the way one knows the eyes of a predator are fixed upon them from the shadows of the forest.
Tomorrow, I will attempt a triangulation using the portable dish. If I can determine the exact coordinates of the signal's origin, I may be able to… well, I'm not entirely sure yet. But something tells me the universe has just placed a thread in my hand, and it would be folly not to follow it.
For now, I will close this entry. If nothing else, it will stand as a record that I, Maxwell, heard the first whisper before the storm.