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Psychic Hotline
[fiction]
Do you remember a late-night radio show called Psychic Hotline? Long time insomniac here. It was on at some depressing hour of the night like twenty years ago.
The hosts called themselves Jack and Jill. Both claimed to be powerful psychics that could read minds, predict world events, and talk to the dead. It had this creepy jingle – ‘call Psychic Hotline, thanking you, 1-800 222’ – and they would always start each episode with a hex. Sometimes they analysed books or mystic objects. It was all very ambient and nocturnal.
Often it was just a rambling discussion about ‘the other side’, along with insights into astral projection, ESP, wormhole travel, the void, and what lies beyond.
Man, this show was killer! You could learn how to build a Ouija board or induce a lucid dream. Jill would play pop records backwards in search of satanic messaging, while Jack did his kooky Nostradamus routine, predicting imminent world destruction by end of the year. Members of the public would call in with different vibes and queries. Things like psychic pets or next week’s lottery numbers.
The show ended long before the world did, and Jack and Jill drifted into obscurity. In fact, they simply disappeared. The whole radio channel just turned to white noise one night and they never came back on air – right in the middle of another excellent episode of Psychic Hotline!
This was a real shame because I found Jack and Jill very entertaining in those days. Maybe they’re still broadcasting from some corner of the universe we don’t know about yet. Possibly they managed to reach ‘the other side’? Whatever, man! This show occupies cult status in my life.
Oh man, my life has been a disgrace. As a young kid I dreamt of being a filmmaker, but I never got round to making a film. I was a lazy goddamn alcoholic. I never created anything.
So I thought I’d travel the world. But my drinking got me into trouble. Everything fell apart in Thailand. I started gambling and lost it all in a card game on the Khao San Road. When I couldn’t come up with the money I was forced into hiding. I slipped out of Bangkok like a street dog and fled along the coast, grew a beard and changed my name.
I found work at a hotel on the edge of the jungle. They put me up in a beach hut and paid me in cash. I slept on the sand and lived like a goddamn crab.
My job was to keep the hallways clean and mop the function rooms after the guests had gone to bed. In the afternoons I would scuttle to the bar for five or ten glasses of Scotch to get me through the day.
I was so full of drink one night, I decided to rob the hotel reception, steal a truck, and split for the border. For once in my life, something went to plan, and I sped out of that dump with enough cash in my pocket to start again.
I took the road to Cambodia through a thunderous monsoon. At the border crossing, the guards flicked their cigarettes in the mud and cocked their guns. I gained entry with a last-minute bribe. Everything I had, including the truck. Goddamit.
After the robbery, I figured I couldn’t fly, so my plan was to make five thousand dollars and get back to the States on a fishing vessel.
I got a crummy job as a night watchman at a backpacking hostel in Phnom Penh called Mr Sok’s. Kids from privilege came and went, visiting temples, taking pictures, having the time of their lives. I recognised in those shitty kids the hope I once had for the future.
At night I spent many idle hours browsing local news sites on Mr Sok’s solitary computer. There was heat on me back in Thailand. The headlines said I’d stuck the hotel up at gunpoint for a tonne of money. But that was bullshit - I emptied that goddamn register when nobody was watching. Another site reported I was dead and that nobody was looking for me.
Years passed in this way. I was dead to the world – a goddamn ghost. But I grew to loathe my transient life in Cambodia. Every time I made enough money to sail, I was thwarted. Either by a crooked fisherman, or my inability to avoid the bottle and the card table. I became a recluse, rarely going out during the day, and losing myself on the computer all night, listening to old radio shows for hours and hours.
It was during this period that I recollected Psychic Hotline. Maybe I could listen to a few episodes, I thought. But digging them out proved difficult. There was almost nothing on the internet about Jack and Jill. All traces of this freaky duo had been deleted or redacted.
On the advice of a blog article by some asshole called BrainFroth96, I familiarised myself with ‘the deep web’. Here you could buy a suitcase of heroin if you wanted, or a contract killing as a last resort. I became interested in a high security government archive known as The Moebius Strip. I fell through a backdoor in the code and discovered over 600 recordings of Psychic Hotline.
But the files were protected by an intricate layer of malware. Extracting them took months of painstaking work and research. The hostel was now a bulk storage centre for my growing collection of textbooks.
Oh man, Mr Sok sure was vexed when I ordered that monster hard drive for the night desk. But by this point I had accrued so much cryptocurrency on the deep web that I was paying him sizable amounts of bitcoin to reside there in peace.
Soon I became an expert in complex data reconstruction and perfected what is known as an ‘impervious transfer’. But despite my newfound abilities, I lost many episodes of Psychic Hotline to the digital ether.
In the end I recovered 404 episodes, including, to my delight, the final abandoned broadcast. I hooked up an old phone with these precious recordings and poured myself a stiff drink.
It was stupid really, the countless hours I devoted to this crusade. I had made enough bitcoin to return home and live a comfortable life, but the spiritual part of me craved psychic nourishment. The pursuit of Jack and Jill had become an obsession. And for what? Renewal, I guess…
Throughout all of this, some flickering fire inside me had been rekindled. I felt able to go outside into the sunshine again, I had confidence in myself once more. And so began a series of long walks into the Cambodian wilderness, listening to the pulp radio recordings I had so diligently preserved.
At first I would get up early and take small loops around Phnom Penh, before it got too hot in the afternoons. Years of night work and rampant beard growth meant I didn’t look like your typical western tourist anymore.
I walked the city unnoticed, consuming the Jack and Jill tapes in a goddamn trance. I was nearly run over several times. My brain bristled with knowledge of ‘the other side’. I grew tired of the crowds and the dust. My walks soon turned into week-long excursions through the rainforest and the mountains.
It was on one such trek that I reached the final episode of Psychic Hotline. I was psyched to hear Jack and Jill focusing on a regular topic of discussion: ‘The Gateway.’
They were locked in a heated argument.
“The temple you speak of does not exist, Jack!”
“Oh yes it does.”
“Not Cambodia again. Pathetic.”
“Jill is referring to one of my favourite temporal temples. The temple of Than King, in Cambodia. Locals say if you walk in there, you don’t come back out. I’ve always said we should go. The Gateway is there. I know it’s there!”
“Wait a minute, we have a caller.”
“Good evening caller. I feel a strong psychic connection to you. Where are you tonight?”
The receiver crackled and hummed. The voice was slurred.
“I’m in Cambodia.”
Reader, the voice was mine. I froze where I stood. This was recorded was twenty years ago. Long before I had even thought about leaving the States and hitting the road. Could I have been drunk one night and called in? It was possible.
“Hi caller, Jill here. Cambodia, you say. A fine coincidence, considering we have just been talking about Cambodian temples. But we’ll go with it. What are you doing over there in Cambodia?”
Distortion, echo, crackle.
“I’m at The Gateway. You have to help me.”
“OK wise guy. Call back tomorrow.”
“When you’re sober…” added Jack.
“Oh man, no, wait!”
Then roaring white noise. Deafening. I stopped the tape and tried to rewind it, but the file was corrupted. My clothes were soaking. A furious rainstorm now battered the jungle.
There was no way I would make it back to my camp before nightfall. Stunned by the deluge, I was forced through a dangerous mountain pass. I took shelter in a cave hollowed into the mountainside.
Fumbling for a match, I managed to light a fire. The blaze revealed a vast interior space, at the centre of which stood a stone sarcophagus. A series of wall paintings depicted a man descending into a subterranean pool. This was not a cave. It was a goddamn tomb.
You don’t need to be a psychic to figure out that I had stumbled upon the temple of Than King. Perhaps it was always going to turn out this way. As the storm raged outside, a great stone slab fell behind me, sealing the entrance.
I shifted open the lid of the central sarcophagus to find a glimmering, bubbling fountain. Was this ‘The Gateway’?
As I contemplated its murky depths, water began to cascade over the sides of the goddamn thing and round my ankles. Before long the fountain had become a torrent, threatening to engulf the entire chamber.
I drained my hipflask into my throat. 3 percent battery. By this point the water was up to my neck. I realised this was my moment – ‘the other side’ was here, in this room, and anything was possible. I dialled the number for Psychic Hotline.
“I’m at The Gateway. You have to help me.”
“OK wise guy. Call back tomorrow.”
“When you’re sober…”
“Oh man, no, wait!”
The End
Thanks for reading. Hungry for more? Here’s a video.