The Soundkeeper

The greatest storm in living memory had passed, and in it’s wake, Lowenna held only silence and a ruined tape. As Soundkeeper of Porthmorven, her entire purpose was to bind the village’s history to spools of reel-to-reel tape - its’ joys, its’ losses, and most of all, it’s’ storms. The official record of last night’s terror was a screech of distorted noise. But on a secondary reel, almost by accident, she had captured something else entirely: the fragile, hidden sounds of her community trying not to break.

She was a woman built for the nuance of silence, her world a landscape of sound. In the granite tower on the headland, her tools were parabolic dishes that heard the breath of the horizon and hydrophones that listened to the sea’s private grief. Her task had always been to find the pure sonic truth of an event; to isolate the storm’s roar from the human tremor beneath it. Last night, the perfect storm had not just spoken; it had unleashed its full voice. And in the bruised, dripping quiet of the dawn, she was no longer sure what truth she was meant to preserve.

She stood in the tower doorway, surveying the silence after the scream. The village below was a changed world. Slates lay scattered like playing cards across the lane. The old tamarisk tree at the bend was shattered, its white wood exposed. In the harbour, boats lay on their sides, a mess of splintered wood and tangled rope. The silence was thick with drip-water and shock, a physical weight after the night’s visceral menace.

Lowenna’s own ears still rang with the ghost of it. She had spent the night in the tower’s core, not as a woman, but as a conduit. Her array of microphones - the parabolic dish pointed seaward, the hydrophone in the zawn - had fed the storm’s voice directly into her: the booming, monolithic roar, the pure, terrifying scream of the wind. The primary reel on the vintage recorder had taken the brunt, the needle slamming into distortion long before the climax. The official archive of the perfect storm was a ruined strip of noise.

But it was the other tape that pulled at her now. The secondary reel. The one that had, almost of its own will, captured the smaller frequencies tangled in the blast.

She walked down the track into the village, the spool of that secondary recording a heavy weight in her coat pocket. People were emerging, moving slowly, speaking in husks of voices. They saw her, the keeper from the tower, and their eyes held a blank, unanswerable question.

In her mind, the tape was already playing. As she passed the row of cottages, she heard the fragile thread she’d captured: a family singing, a shaky, off-key rendition of Yellow Submarine, a father’s voice forcing cheer over his children’s whimpers. She had almost filtered it out, trained to seek the storm’s pure voice. But something in its defiant fragility had made her engage the second recorder.

Outside the community hall, now an impromptu shelter, she saw old Annie Trenance boiling a kettle on a camping stove. The memory of another frequency surfaced: the crackle of a fireplace on the old landline tap, and Annie’s calm, weathered voice saying to her sister, “Aye, it’s a bad one. But I’ve the stew on. You’ll come through when it’s passed. We’ll have a cup. Listen to the quiet.”

Listen to the quiet. The words had pierced Lowenna deeper than the storm’s scream. She had spent a lifetime listening to things, archiving events. She recorded storms to master them, to pin their fury to tape. But Annie was listening through the storm, to the life waiting on the other side.

The most painful frequency hissed in her memory. On the emergency VHF channel, young Finlay’s voice, shredded by static: “ …engine’s gone. Drifting toward the Bristows. I can see the light … ” before it was erased by a scream of electronic wind. She had recorded that, too. The sound of a voice fighting to be heard.

She entered the hall. A low murmur of exhaustion filled the space. Without a word, Lowenna set up her portable player and speakers. Annie Trenance gave her a slow, knowing nod.

She pressed play on the secondary reel.

What poured forth was not the storm they had endured. It was the life that had persisted within it.

First, the shaky singing from the cottages. A woman in the hall - the mother - gasped and pulled her children close, a sob of recognition breaking from her. Then, the crackle of Annie’s fire and her calm invitation for tea. A ripple of weak smiles passed through the room. Then, the raw, desperate transmission from Finlay’s boat. A cry went up. Finlay was safe, pulled from the water by the lifeboat just before dawn, but his family hadn’t known. His wife burst into tears of relief, hearing the proof of his fight.

Lowenna had woven these fragments with the softer edges of the gale: the hiss of wind now a backdrop, the lashing rain as mere percussion. She ended the playback with a long stretch of the new morning’s quiet, just the steady drip-drip from the hall’s eaves, and finally, the clear, distant sound of the first gull returning over the scarred harbour.

When the recording ended, the silence in the hall was different. It was no longer the silence of shock, but of shared understanding. Of a breath collectively released. Conversations began, soft and purposeful, not about loss, but about what to do next. The sound had given them back their own narrative.

An older fisherman, Alistair, clapped a heavy hand on Lowenna’s shoulder. “You got the good stuff, Keeper,” he said, his voice rough. “The ’72 tape, that’s just noise. This… this is us.”

Lowenna walked back to her tower as the pale sun finally broke through. The archive was incomplete. The master tape was a ruin. Future historians might call it a flaw.

She looked at the blank, silent reel on the machine. For the first time, she didn’t hear a gap. She heard a space. The space where the official record ended, and the human one began. The space where she had finally stopped recording the wind, and started listening to what the wind had tried to drown out

Back in the tower, the silence was no longer an absence, but a presence. It was the space where memory swelled. She thought of Catrin, not with the old, sharp pain of the storm that took her, but with the echo of a quieter sound she had never archived: the specific, soft cadence of her wife’s breathing as she slept, a sound that had been the baseline of their home. She had been so busy preserving Porthmorven’s grand sonic history that she had let her own most precious frequencies fade, unrecorded. The storm’s aftermath had taught her that the most vital listening is often to the quietest notes.

The secondary reel, now resting on the shelf, was more than a document. It was an act of community, a thread woven from disparate, frightened voices into a story of endurance. It proved that a person, or a village, was not defined by the destructive roar, but by the soft, stubborn hum of life that persisted beneath it. This was the true keeper’s duty: not to the noise of events, but to the sustaining sound of what remains.

She took a fresh tape. She labelled it not with the storm’s formal name, but simply: Porthmorven, After the Great Gale. The Quiet, and the Voices Within It.

Then, she sat at the quiet console, removed her technician’s headphones, and just listened. To the gulls, to the distant calls of repair, to the deep, slow sigh of a healing sea. She listened not to capture, but to connect. The truest archive, she understood now, was not stored on tape. It was held in the attentive silence between one heartbeat and the next, waiting, always, for the next note of life to break through.

The Soundkeeper is Inspired by my novel ‘The Listener’, a story about the profound connections we find when we truly hear the world and each other.