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墨書 Inktalez
I knew I couldn't keep singing like this, like a mechanized beast, performing the same song repeatedly in front of the children until my throat became inflamed and my vocal cords tore. I needed to understand what I was singing, why I was singing it, and for whom.
If this was just an illness, I had to find its cause. If it wasn't—then I had to prove that it wasn't.
So I began to document everything.
The number of times I sang each night, the speed, my breathing, Emily's responses, and—what I least wanted to admit—the column labeled "Did a second voice appear?"
On some nights, I did hear it. Those voices were faint and small, like a child mimicking from behind a distant door, but their tone was too perfect, as if they were imitating me or eavesdropping on me.
I even recorded timestamps for every moment Emily asked me to "sing again." Then I marked these timestamps in my notebook and connected them—somehow, the points formed an arc, something resembling a celestial orbit.
At first, I thought it was just an illusion. Until one night, when I input these timestamps into pitch nodes and used simple music production software to recreate the melody, I discovered it was almost identical to Emily's humming.
I wasn't teaching her to sing.
I was being trained by her.
Even more bizarre was when I tried to arrange the number of times I sang each night according to Emily's "satisfaction points"—the moments she said "that's enough singing"—I was astonished to find a strange continuity among those numbers.
Initially, I thought it was merely coincidence. Until that day when I couldn't help but input the sequence into an online mathematical database. The system displayed: "Highly correlated: Fibonacci Deformation Sequence (starting from a non-natural number)."
I stared at the screen for several minutes.
It wasn't just a simple 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... but an extended form starting from a non-natural number, like some version corrected based on musical frequency. This sequence wasn't naturally occurring; it was—designed.
Who designed it?
Emily? The child behind the wall? Or perhaps—a more terrifying possibility—that this melody itself was some ancient "command language," and I was inadvertently singing out some kind of... code?
My fingers trembled as I pulled out the sketchbook from the drawer and flipped through pages filled with dense markings. At first, I thought they were just random notes drawn by a child, but now it seemed like some kind of... blueprint.
Not belonging to any system found in music textbooks.
More like the architectural plans of an invisible world.
That night, I dreamt again, envisioning a vast expanse of black earth.
The sky was thick like oil, filled with countless floating sound wave patterns gently drifting through the air. I stood in a city constructed of musical notes, each building humming softly, and at the center of the city was a colossal pillar—it resembled a tuning fork, yet also human vocal cords, elongated and twisted, anchored deep into the ground.
The entire city seemed to be built upon some melodic spatial structure. Music was no longer an art form; it had become a language—perhaps even a physical law.
I approached the tuning fork, and suddenly heard Emily's voice emanating from the pillar. She wasn't speaking English or any human language; instead, it was a fragmented hum—a melody that was just one syllable away from the song I sang, "You Are My Sunshine."
That syllable felt like a key.
In my dream, I suddenly understood: what we sang was not merely a song; it was the password to open a door.
I awoke in a cold sweat, still hearing the lingering hum from the pillar vibrating in my ears.
Outside, dawn had yet to break, but Emily's room was filled with humming once more.
This time, however, she was not singing alone.
I couldn't tell how many voices there were—five? Ten?—their sounds intertwined perfectly, the melody resonating like an echo calculated from a mathematical equation, with no one out of tune.
I sat on the edge of my bed, trembling as I scribbled in my notebook:
"Why are all these voices harmonizing a song I've never learned?"
"Why do I feel increasingly familiar with it as I sing?"
"Why do I begin to... remember the ending of that song? I've never sung the ending."
I sought out a professor of acoustics.
His name was Marvin Graves, an expert in wave engineering and psychoacoustics before his retirement. There wasn't much information about him online, but in an outdated underground music forum, someone mentioned that he had decoded a segment of "non-verbal spectral signals" back in the eighties. That signal later reappeared in a recording of missing children—though no one dared to speak of it again.
I wrote him an email. He did not reply.
Three days later, I received a postcard printed in block letters with only one sentence written on it:
"If that melody repeats in your dreams more than three times, don't sing it again."
There was no signature, no return address.
That night, I couldn't sleep. Emily didn't sing; she just stood by the wall, facing away from me, motionless like a statue waiting for the curtain to rise.
I asked her, "Why aren't you singing today?"
She didn't turn her head; she simply said, "They are going to try to teach others to sing tonight."
"Who?"
"Other fathers."
The next day, I found the place where Graves lived.
It was on the outskirts of the city, a half-collapsed factory that had been marked as a dangerous building. I knocked on the front door for a long time before he finally opened it. His face was pale, eyes bloodshot, as if he hadn't slept for years.
He stared at my chest and whispered, "You brought the voice."
I didn't respond. He turned and walked inside as if he had known I would come.
The factory was filled with sound spectrum analyzers, cables, analog recorders, and outdated sound testing equipment. He pointed to an old sound wave display and activated it so I could play the recording of Emily humming.
As soon as the sound emerged, his expression changed instantly.
"This is not a nursery rhyme," he said softly, almost to himself.
"I know."
"This is—"
He stopped abruptly, as if he had suddenly recalled something he shouldn't say. He turned and pulled out a yellowed score paper from a drawer. Instead of musical notation, it was filled with strange markings made up of geometry, sequences, direction lines, and geometric nodes.
He said, "This is called the Melodic Guiding Structure. It is used in ancient rituals to arrange the positions of sound entities... What your daughter hums is a kind of main melody that opens the structure."
"What does it open?"
He didn't answer me; instead, he looked up at me, his gaze resembling that of a survivor from a fire.
"Do you know why you dream of that city? It's because you have already participated in its construction. Every singer is a part of the material—every beat, every pitch, is a key to some door in that city."
"Who created all this?" I asked.
He sighed and whispered, "It's not who; it's what. They are neither our gods nor demons. They are... the Voice Itself."
When I left the factory that day, the sky was dim, as if it would never brighten again.
The phrase echoed in my mind: "the Voice Itself."
How could sound possibly exist? How could it "teach" Emily to sing? How could it wait to be completed?
I returned home to find Emily waiting for me.
She stood in the living room, her hands covered in crayon marks, and her shirt front was filled with freshly drawn geometric lines. Her face was expressionless, her eyes heavy in a way that didn't seem childlike.
"Did you meet him?"
I was taken aback.
"How do you know—"
"He is also a failed conductor. He thought he could contain the sound and make those children quiet. But he just hid it away. If he doesn't sing, he can only listen."
"Emily, who exactly are you...?"
She smiled slightly, a smile that sent chills down my spine.
"I'm not anyone special; I'm just the first one to complete the prelude. It's your turn for the next part."
That night, she didn't ask me to sing again. She simply lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, while the sounds coming from the walls transformed from humming into a countdown.
743
742
741...
As I wrote all of this down, it was three forty-seven in the morning. Cracks began to appear on the wall, like traces of some kind of breathing.
I heard a voice.
No longer was it a child's voice; it was something deeper, rougher, larger, and older—like the earth itself whispering. Like the entire world, summoned by a melody at some pivotal moment.
Emily sang on the other side of the wall. I could no longer be sure if she was still my daughter.
All I knew was:
I had already sung four hundred seventy-two times.
Only one more left.
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