Book Synopsis
Book Tags
Donation Rankings
Comment
0 Comments
You May Also Like
墨書 Inktalez
From the moment I finished singing for the seven hundred forty-second time, I knew I could never go back.
Emily sat at the edge of the bed, her feet gently swinging like a carefree little girl. But her eyes were like foreign objects submerged in deep water, quietly and silently staring at me.
"You sang very well today, Dad," she said, her tone unnaturally calm.
I couldn't muster a smile; I just sat in the chair, gasping for breath, feeling as if an invisible hand was tightly squeezing my lungs.
"Then... is this the last time? Can we take a break?"
Emily shook her head. "There's one more time."
I sighed. "Emily..."
"It's not me who wants this," she interrupted, her voice dropping an octave lower than usual. "It's them. You know, Dad. They've been counting; we can't stop."
A chill ran down my spine. She wasn't threatening me, nor was she being coy like before. It was a tone devoid of humanity, like a doctor reporting the grim reality that a patient could no longer be saved.
I looked at her, trying to find the details that belonged to "my daughter"—a hint of childishness, a touch of immaturity, a spark of innocence. But she sat upright, fingers neatly clasped on her knees, her eyes unwavering and her lips motionless.
She resembled a host waiting for the show to begin, just missing the sound of music.
"Do you... remember that time we went to the beach?" I tried to summon the familiar Emily. "You buried yourself in the sand and said you were a hermit crab, but then you itched all day... and kept coming to me to scratch you..."
She blinked slowly and replied in a flat tone, "That’s her memory, not mine."
"What do you mean?"
She stood up. Her movements were so coordinated they seemed almost unnatural; each step appeared meticulously crafted. This was not the body language of a child; it was something produced through countless rehearsals.
She walked to the wall, raised her right index finger, and tapped it lightly three times, the rhythm unmistakable: short, short, long.
"They say you're starting to remember," she said. "The longer you sing, the closer you get to the true sound."
"The true sound...?"
"The sound isn't what you think it is, Dad." She turned to me, a smile on her face that felt almost false. "Sound is a form; we just get too accustomed to thinking of it as vibrations in the air. In reality, it has always had a body."
I felt like I might vomit. Suddenly, I had the sensation of being heard by something. It wasn't that I was listening to her words; rather, I was being listened to, read, dissected.
The next afternoon, I returned to Graves' factory.
I wanted to escape, truly. I even thought about taking Emily to the hospital or just burning the whole place down. But what good would that do? She was no longer the child I once knew. What was she? A vessel? A conductor? Or perhaps... an embodiment of some kind of sound?
I needed answers.
As I pushed open the factory door, it felt less like entering a room and more like stepping into... a stasis of time.
The air felt as if it had been drained, its density unsettling; even my footsteps failed to resonate against the floor. I could see my movements delayed, as if the air here was not meant for transmitting sound but for storing memories.
All the machines were still operational, yet they remained in a state of "silent operation." Screens flickered, monitors glowed green, and waveforms scanned back and forth without any sound; even the whirring of the fans seemed wrapped in an invisible membrane.
Graves sat at the control panel with his back to me, utterly still.
"Graves...?"
He did not respond.
I approached slowly and caught a whiff of a smell that mixed burnt flesh with decaying protein when I was about a meter away from him—like chemical remnants left behind after searing muscle at high temperatures.
When he was still alive, he must have endured an incredibly long period of suffering.
His body had collapsed inward, as if his bones had been pulled away from beneath his skin, leaving him in a grotesque state of disintegration. His sternum was sunken, and his abdomen caved in, resembling a hollow shell folded in on itself.
His ears had burst, with black, dried crystals oozing from the ear canals—not blood, but something like a mixture of coal ash and glass shards that crumbled at the slightest touch, flickering with a faint silver light from within.
His mouth was stretched wide open, the lower jaw nearly touching his collarbone. The skin on his chin was torn and stuck to his neck, giving the impression that someone had forced him to "scream until his vocal cords exploded."
But none of this was the most terrifying part.
The most horrifying aspect was that—his throat was still vibrating.
That was not a sign of life; it was the residual echo of sound waves, as if the frequencies lingering within him were replaying the last melody he had produced.
As I leaned closer to his mouth, I truly heard that sound—not human voice nor music, but a rhythm generated by "air trembling within his throat."
The rhythm corresponded perfectly to the seven hundred forty-second time I had sung last night.
He was dead, yet he was still "singing."
I took a step back and bumped into the control panel. On the table lay the audio folder he had last used, with one page marked by fluorescent ink trembling as if alive.
I looked down to see a sentence written in blood:
"Sound must take form; humanity must shatter."
My scalp prickled, and my legs felt weak.
It was then that I noticed his fingers.
Every finger was broken, but not severed—rather, they were twisted open at the joints, spiraling outwards, with bones exposed and nails embedded in the palm. He had clearly used his own hands to carve that final message into the wall.
It was a rough claw mark line:
"Seven hundred and forty-three, it is a door."
Aside from blood and words, there were other traces on the wall.
Patterns splattered with red ink spread across the floor in a geometric structure—three concentric circles, intersected by eight lines, resembling a sound-sealing array used in ancient rituals.
As I gazed at the design, I suddenly realized:
He was not resisting the sound in his final moments—he was attempting to seal it away.
But he had failed.
Emily was already waiting for me in the room. The wall was no longer covered in crayon scribbles; instead, it bore marks carved by a knife—dense lines forming a complex array, like the gear system inside a music box, except these gears were not metal but rather the very texture of space itself.
"He’s dead, isn’t he?" Emily asked.
"…"
"He thought he could turn off the sound. But he forgot—the sound does not come from outside. It grows from within people."
I took a step back.
"Are you still my daughter…?"
She did not answer.
She slowly stood up from the corner of the wall, smiling at me—but that smile was like a glass mask, completely devoid of any muscle movement. Her eyes were hollow, and her lips parted slightly.
"Sing, Daddy," she said. "This is the seven hundred and forty-third time."
The wall began to tremble. It wasn't an earthquake; rather, the wall itself emitted a low-frequency resonance, as if some enormous instrument was tuning itself.
From a crack, a shadow emerged.
It wasn't a hand or a foot; it was a shape of sound—long and translucent, vibrating in the air like something trying to "enter" from another dimension.
I stood there, my hands trembling and my throat dry, but suddenly I realized:
I knew what the next melody was.
I had never sung that ending before.
But I remembered it.
It felt as if it had been growing inside me all along, waiting to be released.
I opened my mouth and produced the first syllable.
Comment 0 Comment Count