The rearview mirror was stained. White splotches obscured the reflection, but she continued to stare at the car behind us and exhaled abruptly when the driver turned onto a side road – an obvious sign that he was not concerned with our existence. “Thank God.”
“Who the fuck would follow us, Claire?”
“I don’t know, some crazy dude. There’s crazy dudes out there.”
“Yeah, okay.” I blew smoke from the driver-side window as the speakers belted an offensive blender of noise that vibrated the liquid inside an open beer can. The mirror now reflected the receding skyline, a floating forest of concrete and glass setting with the sun. Claire sat in the passenger seat. She wore her infinite paranoia on her face: her eyes choked by black eyeliner, nose bound with rings of metal. I wore my insignificance on my body: my arms tattooed with black lines that extended to my neck, my fingers. We sat there inside the noise, negating each other.
Friday evening, and we somehow arrived at the venue after only a few minutes of driving. All the city’s discarded bodies gathered at various locations on the north side to hear each other scream for a few hours, only to disperse again to their jobs stocking shelves and loading Amazon trucks. That night we decided on a show inside a basement headlined by a local goregrind act, CRYOEMESIS. No one really liked them too much, but they kept playing shows, kept selling tapes and shirts and they eventually became mainstays in the DIY scene. It helped that their vocalist gave drunken speeches about murdering tech CEOs before each show.
After parking, we walked past apartment buildings filled with families and leaking pipes. The venue lay in the basement of a building that looked exactly like the others. Once we paid five dollars and went through the side fence into the backyard, we were surrounded by smoke and guys with gauges who’d leer at each other’s indecipherable band shirts. The venue’s backyard was littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, and the occasional needle. Ephemera protruded from the grass like tumors – a stolen road sign, streamers on sculptures of tentacles, a large map of the city containing red circles. The fence was dotted with graffiti and a spray-painted mural of a green alien smoking a joint.
The sky turned an oily black before the first band started playing. We shuffled into the stale basement, past a large man peddling beer and cassette tapes adorned with gore. On one tape, a man lay on asphalt, his skull burst underneath a car tire, his skin cells cascading out of the artwork, onto the floor and into the Earth.
The basement’s ceiling was barely higher than my head. I left Claire and nudged my way to the front of the crowd. We surrounded the vocalist, who was already pacing the floor. His bare skin was etched with images of insects and fire and furniture. He turned toward the drummer and guitarist and screamed into the microphone – “THIS SONG IS ABOUT KILLING YOUR FUCKING BOSS.”
The band exploded in a murderous volley of sound. The guitar blazed incomprehensibly as the drummer nearly destroyed the leathery snare and the vocalist let out a strained wail. People behind me immediately began pushing each other, forming a pit that threatened to collapse the beams supporting the building above. Bodies jostled and dust upended and stuck to skin. In thirty seconds, the song was over. Three quick cymbal hits initiated the next song, and the next, and I stood there moving my head to the noise. People behind me were running in circles and spun like the arms of a galaxy, a spiral of limbs and eyes. I closed my eyes and felt it all.
The vocalist let out a weak “Thank you,” and it was over. Bodies shuffled outdoors as the next band paraded their gear into the basement. I found Claire near the back fence. Her hair was ruffled and her skin slick. “What did you think?” she asked me.
“Alright,” I said.
“Yeah, could’ve been better.”
I lit a cigarette as Claire gazed around the backyard, inspecting everyone there. She’d stare at sections of the crowd and attempt to decode portions of conversations. The world was a puzzle she was constantly trying to solve. Pieces were everywhere. In the people, in the words. In the clouds and in the Earth.
As she stared, a man emerged from the mass. He wore a black shirt and black pants, and it seemed like his torso reached us before his legs did. “Hey man,” he said, “Can I bum a cigarette off you?” His voice croaked and dripped.
I handed him one. “What’d you think of their set?”
“Pretty good,” he replied.
“Yeah, I liked it.”
Claire lit a cigarette and breathed all the way down. “What’s your name?” she asked him on the exhale.
“Julian.”
She nodded. Another piece in her universal puzzle. “I’m Claire, that’s Dave.”
“You guys play anything?” Julian asked.
“I do a bit of drums,” I said, although I hadn’t for a while. Claire told him she played bass and guitar.
Julian’s head kept darting around. He never made eye contact with us. “Nice,” he said. “Good shit.”
***
Excerpt from interview with Dave Miller by Detective Wilson Branning, December 2022.
DM: “The band was Julian’s idea.”
WE: “And I understand you have one release, right?”
DM: “Yeah, I guess.”
WE: “What do you mean, you ‘guess’?”
DM: “It just appeared on the internet. I have no idea how it got there.”
WE: “When did it appear?”
DM: “Right after they disappeared. Maybe a few days later.”
WE: “November the sixth, right?”
DM: “I guess so.”
WE: “Dave, I’m going to ask you again. What happened to them?”
DM: “I don’t know. God, will you listen to me? I don’t know what happened.”
***
We kept seeing him around. It happened naturally.
Claire and I were at a Mayhem show in a glitzy professional venue. Everyone agreed that their live act was terrible now, but we existed just in time to see them once. The opening band stepped on stage without a word and immediately began their wall of tremolo riffs.
After the first set, we spotted Julian: a shadow amid the stage lights that seemed to float toward us. “So can you guys actually play?” he asked. “Like do you play together?”
Claire sipped her five-dollar canned water. “I had a shitty black metal project in high school.”
“I don’t do much of anything anymore,” I said.
“Well I can play guitar,” Julian said, his body shifting around. “And some vocals. I’ve got ideas. Could be fun.” His eyes danced around ours.
Claire and I always regarded him with fascination. How his every move was incongruous, like his skin floated on heaving magma. We knew nothing about him even then; our conversations were always restricted to music. “That band was so brutal,” he’d say. Or “That shit was so weird.” We just stood around each other, breathing the air we all exhaled.
The noise from the crowd swelled. I had to speak louder than usual. “Yeah, that sounds cool. You have anywhere we can play?”
“We can play at my place,” he replied. “My neighbors don’t care. I’ve got a drum set.”
Claire looked at him, uneasy but with muted excitement. “Sounds like fun.”
“Come over sometime. We’ll listen to some music, maybe jam a bit.” He gave us his phone number and walked away. We didn’t see him again that night.
***
Excerpt from “VOID Album Review!” by ORGONITE666 on YouTube, July 2024.
“The band’s Bandcamp page is completely blank except for this album. And it’s super easy to miss – I mean, the cover is just a black square. But it’s a total gem. I came across it in a Reddit thread. […] Please do yourself a favor and give it a listen. I’ve been in the game for a while, and this is without a doubt one of the best black metal albums I’ve ever heard. The compositions on here are otherworldly and cold, almost wet. It makes you aware of your insides and it makes you nauseous. The drummer sounds like he’s playing on another planet. And those vocals – I mean, how can a human being even make those sounds? The shrieks follow you. […] It’s a shame that the band doesn’t seem to exist apart from this one project. If you guys know anything about them, please leave a comment below. […]”
***
The world is jagged. It cracks if you stare too long. A slice of glass glistening on the sidewalk amid fragments of paper. The pixels on a phone screen betraying a superficial fissure. The silver on a mirror and the face it reflects.
I left the bathroom and resumed standing behind the cash register. The days were slow, which gave the boss plenty of time to ramble. He looked up from his phone. “It’s getting worse by the day, I’m telling you. My customers can’t even buy bread.”
“Yeah.” I stared ahead. The freezers buzzed. Fluorescent lights pierced bone marrow.
He stared down and his phone’s blue light reflected off his glasses. “And now they’re protesting about fucking abortion or something. Who gives a shit? None of it is real. It’s all planned.”
I kept staring forward. He opened his mouth to speak again when the bell above the door rang and a customer walked in. He started toward his office.
A few hours later and I was at my apartment. I couldn’t remember exactly how I got there. I fried some eggs, fed this vessel, and the planet kept spinning. I smoked a cigarette out the window and laid on my bed. The music inside my headphones was loud, angular, and disjointed. Ugly, scattered pieces.
I sat there a while before I felt a warm trickle on my hands, like an insect crawling. I looked down and saw a drop of red liquid creeping along the back of my right hand. It grew slowly and moved over black tattoo ink toward my fingers, leaving a wet streak in its wake. I brought my hand up to my face. No cut. I looked toward the ceiling. No leak. I stared at the shimmering liquid on my hand while screams filled my ears.
My phone buzzed. A text from Julian. Hey, you and Claire want to hang at my place? I wiped the red drop on my pants and texted Claire first to make sure there was no chance I’d be going by myself. She took a while to respond. Yeah, fine, she replied.
I picked her up in my car and we sat alongside each other in silence. The sky was a deep purple tinged with the smell of cinders and gravity. “I don’t know, Dave,” she said. “This probably isn’t a good idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“We don’t know anything about this guy.” She stared out the window.
“What, you’re afraid he’s gonna murder us or something? He seems alright. We know enough.” Cars sped past as I drove. Wind skipped over metal and emitted a sharp noise. She didn’t look at me.
Claire and I met inside a basement two years earlier. We were students at different colleges in the city. After we met, I invited her to see a movie with some of my friends at a decaying theater. Slick electronic music narrated a knife-wielding maniac sawing off women’s heads. Afterward, at two in the morning, she pointed at a black helicopter weaving between clouds above us. “There they are,” she said. “They’re always there.”
“What are you talking about?” someone asked.
She didn’t answer. She just stared up, the helicopter blades fragmenting her dilated pupils.
I tried to piece her together with time. I learned that she believed she was being followed. That she knew too much – or at least had the potential to. She spoke of a whole universe just beyond her reach. Of liminal, interplanetary beings.
The mechanical voice on my phone told us we’d arrived at Julian’s place. The building occupied its own block amid trees and broken sidewalks. From the outside, there was no indication that it held any people, and the windows on the façade were cloudy. Except for my car, the parking lot was bare. Weeds crawled up between cracks in the pavement and ambled toward the sky.
Claire stood a few paces behind me and lit a cigarette as we walked toward the front door. My skin was sticky. The vestibule through the door was dusty and dim. I thought about turning back, but something told me this would be impossible. I was a fly moving toward anything warm.
I tapped the buzzer on one of the top-floor units. Almost immediately, Julian materialized at the door. As he opened it, a warm breeze emanated from inside that carried faint sounds like a dying flame. “Hey,” he said after clearing his throat.
“Hey, what’s up?” I tried to smile.
“Come in. I’m on the very top floor. Sorry in advance for the mess.”
He lived by himself in a small studio. In the middle of the room sat a tape deck and large speakers on a mahogany table. In the corner lay a bed not far from a small electronic drum kit near an amplifier and a turquoise electric guitar. A large bookshelf occupied the opposite wall, filled to the brim with old, decaying spines. The entire apartment felt archaic, its air saturated with the smell of mold and wax.
“You guys want any tea?”
I sat on the couch. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
The kitchen lay past a tiny hallway with doors that led to the bathroom and closet. As he busied himself at the gas stove, I realized I never asked Julian where he worked.
He set two steaming mugs of lavender tea on the table. Claire sat next to me and took a sip. “I like your place,” she said. “Have you read all those books?”
“Oh, no. I’m getting through them, though.”
“What’re they about?”
He paused. His eyes drifted toward the corners of the room. “Oh, you know. Magic.”
I laughed a little louder than I intended to. “Magic? You’re a wizard or something?”
He laughed in response. “Yeah, dude, I’m a witch.” He picked a stray cassette tape off the ground and held it up: Xasthur’s Telepathic with the Deceased. “See?”
Julian placed the tape inside the deck and hit PLAY. “I want to make music like this,” he said, “But maybe dronier.” He sat in a chair across from us and our bodies formed a circle around the speakers.
Claire hugged her knees to her chest. “Yeah, okay. That could be fun, I think.”
We sat there, absorbing the warbling synths in the opening track, saying nothing. That night, I dreamt of barren rooms with doors that opened inward.
***
Excerpt from RateYourMusic forum discussion on VOID Self-Titled Album, September 2024.
synth-dungeoneer67: anybody find lyrics for this thing?
thirtyfeetofconcrete: As far as I’m aware, they haven’t been published.
ghosthardware98: overrated af. sounds like Shit.
synth-dungeoneer67: that last track freaks me out so much. the vocalist sounds like they’re puking for like a minute straight. i really need to know what theyre saying.
thirtyfeetofconcrete: I’m not sure we’ll ever find out. There’s nothing on this band anywhere. But they’re probably from the US.
thirtyfeetofconcrete: I’ve read some people on Reddit saying the singer disappeared before the album was put out. Basic creepypasta stuff. Maybe someone trying to start an ARG.
fluoxetinepug: craziest riff 3:56 – 5:23 on track two.
synth-dungeoneer67: needs a vinyl press asap
***
We started jamming at his place. Claire on her bass, Julian on guitar, and myself on Julian’s electronic drum set. We’d play for hours, making dissonant, asynchronous noise. Occasionally, our noises aligned, and we’d produce something recognizable before we fell apart again. Julian would stop playing and scribble in his leather-bound notebook. He’d turn away from us and fill the pages with writing only he could access. About two weeks in, he told us what he wanted to call our band. “VOID,” he said. “All caps.”
Claire scrunched her face. “Sounds kind of basic. There’s probably like ten other black metal bands out there called VOID.”
To me, the band was never serious. I didn’t expect us to play shows or even release music. It was just something to do – a proper name wasn’t important. “I like it,” I said. “VOID is a good name.” So that’s what we called ourselves in our heads, even though no one said it aloud again.
A week after naming ourselves, we showed up at the apartment again under a greyer sky. This time, Julian prerecorded some riffs straight to a cassette tape. “I’ve got a song going,” he said. “You two play over it. I’ll do some vocals and see what happens.” He placed his phone on the floor and began recording a voice memo, then hit play on the tape deck. A harsh, repetitive sound filled the room that swallowed all the air and vibrated every surface.
Claire and I began improvising over Julian’s guitar. I tried to keep up with the pace he set, while Claire floated over the noise, matching Julian’s chords and adding her own melodies. After a few minutes, we hit a groove, and Julian paced the room. He glanced at his notebook before setting it face-down on the floor. He stopped, sucked air into his lungs, strained his gut, and began screaming.
Broken, alien sounds emanated from his throat. They pierced my skull and wormed into my brain, ricocheting inside my body and animating me from the inside. I looked toward Claire. Her eyes were all the way open, pupils all the way dilated, but she didn’t stop playing her bass.
Julian’s mouth moved with conviction and intensity. His eyes were closed as his body moved up and down with the rhythm. The screams formed the outlines of words that etched their bleak calligraphy in the walls, in the dust. Words I couldn’t understand. After a minute, I began to feel nauseous. Then he stopped abruptly, and our hands immediately stopped playing.
He picked up his notebook and studied something there. Claire set down her bass. “Where the fuck did you learn to do that?”
Julian didn’t answer. He stared at the paper.
“Hey?” She waved her hands at him. “Julian? How did you do that?”
He scribbled something in pencil. “I don’t know. It just comes out of me.”
“What are you doing? Are those lyrics?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me see.”
“No.” He shut the notebook. “I need to go to bed. We’ll try again next week.”
We clambered outside and into my car, shell-shocked. It seemed that an impossible amount of time had passed. Claire lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know. It was awesome.”
“It was scary. What kind of person sounds like that?”
“I’ve never heard anything like it.” I could barely blink.
She breathed deep. “I don’t know if I want to continue this.”
“Why? Cause the guy’s got the best vocals you’ve ever heard? Cause he’s a little weird?”
“I don’t know. What’s he even saying? Why’s he hiding that from us?”
I started the car. “That’s his problem.”
She stared out the window as trees passed, and her eyes moved with them.
***
Excerpt from “VOID mystery progress” by u/plant_mythology on r/VOIDSearch, October 2024.
“First, I just wanted to thank you all for your dedication in solving this. I wanted to make this thread to give all the new subs a quick rundown on the search for this band.
I discovered the album on a post about underrated black metal releases on r/metalforthemasses in July. The commenter, u/user96037471, was a newly created account with no other posts which was deleted two weeks later. The release date on Bandcamp is listed as November 6, 2022, meaning it had gone unnoticed for about two years. Just like you all, I was absolutely blown away after hearing it. The Bandcamp page is now down, but you can download the album here: [Dropbox link].
After I posted it on r/music, many of you noticed that there was seemingly no information about the band online, so a search for the creators began.
u/PM_ME_YOUR_AVIATION_TIPS discovered that the earliest mention of the album was on a 4chan thread from November 2022, just a week after its release. It’s now deleted, but here’s a screenshot from the Wayback Machine: [Imgur link]. The poster didn’t link to the Bandcamp page. They just wrote: ‘VOID – VOID. Untitled 1, Untitled 2, Untitled 3, Untitled 4, Untitled 5, Untitled 6, Untitled 7,’ which matches the tracklist. No one has been able to track down the IP address associated with this comment.
Last month, u/EuphoricBiology uncovered a disturbing FaceBook account that I’m sure all of you have heard of. An account by the name of “Balbay Qazi” was posting various gore videos that I won’t go into detail about here. The captions of every video said “VOID-VOID 7” and had coordinates that led to seemingly random locations in Midwestern USA, which led to speculation that the band was from somewhere around there. It isn’t confirmed that this account is linked to the band, but it’s very likely given the captions. And that’s when the mystery blew up.
Now for the many unanswered questions. […]”
***
We visited Julian’s apartment every week. His screams became increasingly more violent. It was clear he was saying something, but he was never satisfied with how it emerged from his mouth. Claire and I wondered how his throat hadn’t disintegrated by the first month.
My boss cut my hours. It wasn’t enough to live on anymore. So I kept playing, animated by the dream of something that would outlive this body. Claire’s paranoia intensified with each passing week and each sound from Julian’s gut. Once, while we were driving to his building, she nearly quit. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said. “He’s been following me.”
“What are you talking about? Like you see him on the street or something?”
“I see him everywhere.”
I wasn’t concerned. This wasn’t unusual for her. “Look, Claire, we need you in the band. But you don’t have to keep coming if you’re that freaked out about it.” I glanced over to the passenger side, hoping she’d catch my sympathetic look. She stared out the window.
“I can’t leave yet.”
We arrived at Julian’s place. He buzzed us into the building and opened his door with the notebook tucked under his arm. Over time, we learned that he was a student. The books lining his shelf were from the university library and covered apparently random topics. Reproductions of medieval grimoires with desiccated pages. Nineteenth century zoological treatises on the mammals of Africa. Ancient alien literature. The Book of Abramelin. The Guinness Book of World Records, 1999.
Julian began playing a new tape filled with new guitar riffs. As usual, he paced the floor while Claire and I jammed over the noise. But on that day, he seemed unable to focus. His eyes veered toward the ceiling, and he fidgeted with a pen between his fingers. He stopped the tape.
“Sorry. I’ll be back.” He stepped out the back door onto the fire escape, and we smelled acrid cigarette smoke. Claire and I were now alone in his room. His notebook laid on the floor, opened and face down. It had never left his gaze before.
Claire placed her bass on the floor and picked up the notebook. I walked to her side. On the paper, I saw vague, blurred outlines of angular symbols that seemed to hover above the page. Warped graphite inscriptions drifted and slipped just beyond vision before shifting their identity entirely. My eyes scanned the page erratically. It was impossible to grasp a single mark, impossible to understand how any etching comprised a unit of meaning. Fragments of letters nearly materialized before dissolving on the threshold of comprehension. I felt myself scraping against some understanding, some possible interpretation, but falling short infinitely, like a function approaching its asymptote.
Near the bottom of the page, between Claire’s fingers, was a tear in the paper. A chasm unfurled as the two sides floated apart. Milky clear substance lined the edges of the cliffs, forming thin strings as the abyss grew like an emerging wound.
Claire dropped the notebook with shaking hands. She bent down and hurriedly put it in its original position. When Julian returned, his body reeked of tobacco. “Sorry guys, I can’t today. I’m not feeling well. Next week.” We never figured out what was bothering him then.
***
Excerpt from interview with Dave Miller by Detective Wilson Branning, December 2022.
WE: Take me through that day again.
DM: Again?
WE: Yes, if you can, please.
DM: I woke up and went to work at the gas station. After that I picked Claire up at her place. We went to the lakeshore and ate tacos. Then we went to his apartment. It was about 7.
WE: Did you and Claire talk about anything at the lake?
DM: No.
WE: Nothing at all?
DM: Nothing really. Maybe about work, things like that.
WE: She didn’t seem unusual at all?
DM: No.
WE: Okay, what happened when you got to Julian’s building?
DM: We got there and tried buzzing his apartment. He wasn’t answering. We buzzed for maybe ten minutes and decided to call it. We figured he wasn’t there. I dropped Claire back at her place and I went home. And that was it.
WE: Dave, there’s things that aren’t adding up about your story, and you know it. We have your phone records. We know things. It’s best if you’re honest with me. I’ll ask you again. Where is Julian now?
DM: I don’t know.
WE: And Claire?
DM: I don’t know.
***
Water lapped onto limestone and formed churning spirals as wind carried the smell of crisp leaves falling. Friday night again, and we were eating tacos by Lake Michigan before heading to Julian’s place. We always invited him to eat with us, but since we started the band, he never seemed to leave the walls of his enclosure.
A millipede swelled across the rocks near my shoe. I leaned back and breathed detritus. Claire set down her empty plate and sipped from a tall Monster can before lighting a cigarette. “You still haven’t told me what you think about Julian’s notebook,” she said.
“There’s nothing to tell.” I stared down as the ashen-black body of the insect coiled around itself, its carapace slick with secreted oil. “I couldn’t understand it.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No. And I don’t really care.”
She exhaled deep, face toward the sky. “Fuck you. Is there anything you care about?”
I took another bite. “This taco right now.”
“What did you see on the page?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Yeah, thank god.”
She stood up and walked toward the shoreline. Grey clouds deposited misty droplets on her hair. In the sky, a helicopter cut the atmosphere. She turned toward me. I could barely hear her over the wind and helicopter blades. “Do you think he needs our help?” she asked.
“What?”
“I said, do you think he needs our help?”
“Help with what?”
“Do you think he’s okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who is he?”
“What?”
“Who is he?”
The millipede had rolled over on its back. Its legs writhed in the air as ants encroached on its body. “I don’t know, Claire.”
***
We rolled into the parking lot. Julian’s building rose into the sky, its foundation pierced with weeds and mold and the dreams of people buried beneath. We buzzed his room, and he materialized at the front door like clockwork.
Claire and I sat on his couch wordlessly. He set mugs of tea down on the table and pulled out a new tape. It held guitar riffs he recorded earlier that day. Claire sipped her tea and stared at the floor. “How’s your week been?” she asked him.
“Fine. I think I’m getting somewhere.”
“With what?”
“The music.”
She looked toward his face. “Where are you hoping to go, Julian?”
He was looking toward a corner in the ceiling. “Let me show you.” He hit play on the tape deck and familiar guitar tones droned from the speakers. “You guys play over this.”
Claire gave me an annoyed look. I sat behind the drum set and picked up the rhythm. Julian paced the room, his hands wriggling at his side as if his limbs were about to dissolve. He picked up his notebook from the floor and flipped to the last page. Claire’s eyes were half-closed and solemn, as if in mourning. She began to play her bass. Julian hit record on his cell phone and placed it on the floor. He paced and paced. Then he screamed.
The horrific noise shot into my skull, vibrating spinal fluid and flying into ether. It buried deep inside my body: the scream of an entire lineage of memories fossilized and ensnared, the scream that pulsates from origin.
I looked at his body. The scream flowed from his mouth and shook his frame. His eyes were closed and both hands held onto his chest. I turned toward Claire and her gaze was fixed on his body. Neither of us stopped playing.
Amid the noise I heard a small pop, like bone separating from socket, then a gurgling. Julian’s voice warped and bubbled. I looked at him and he was still screaming, but pink froth now came from his mouth and dribbled down his chin onto the floor.
He kept screaming and fluid kept hatching from his mouth, and the sound filled the room with amorphous pain that caused me to strain and gasp. Julian’s stomach was moving wildly in its chamber as he vomited red fluid with milky translucence and green-yellow gel that congealed in an appalling mass on the floor.
The noise kept swelling and he kept spilling, and I saw his body rise into the air. He was floating two feet above the floor when his legs began to crush in on themselves. The sound of bones and muscle and sinew compressing into a jagged paste accompanied his screams. His ruined legs caved in on his body. And from his mouth his stomach emerged. It hit the floor like a wet sponge.
All his interna followed, splashing onto the floor – intestine and beating heart and liver. His excoriated body began to invert on itself. The impossible noise intensified, forming winding spirals and jagged peaks. Skin separated from skull. Fat flowed and melted.
Then his broken body dropped onto the floor, spattering fluid across the walls and ceiling. Despite the ruined mess, Julian’s scream somehow kept ricocheting off the walls and in the space between my brain and my skull. I looked over at Claire, and she was staring, still playing her bass as my hands played the drums.
His organs and stripped skin and desiccated face swirled around on the floor. The mass of bone and body coalesced, forming an elliptical shape with two sharp peaks at the top and bottom, like an almond – an open eye, a gaping wound in the carcass of the world. Pink meat aggregated at the edges of the oval, and in the center a black perforation opened in the floor. It was glazed over with a viscous film that bubbled and steamed.
Claire finally set down her bass and walked toward the edge of Julian’s mutilated body, trudging through the fluid that once held it together. I just watched her, still playing the drums in spite of myself. A hallucinatory buzz now emanated from the oval. She kneeled over the wound in the floor and looked over the black center. In the sticky fluid she saw a reflection of her face.
She reached over and put one finger inside the hole. Then two fingers. The hole throbbed and glistened. A substance like ground meat began crawling up her arm from inside, covering her up toward her shoulder. The meat was interlaced with veins that pumped clear substance.
And then I saw Claire close her eyes. She fell forward into the hole headfirst and was swallowed by fluids and tubes and pink matter, gone. The edges of the hole closed together, and the entire mass began steaming. It emitted the smell of an open mouth and evaporated, and all trace of Julian and Claire and all the noise dissolved into the air. I stopped playing the drums and sat alone in that room, the floors and walls seemingly untouched, unsoiled, the air thick with nothing.
***
Excerpt from “TOP TEN MOST DISTURBING ALBUMS OF ALL TIME!!” by 9SHOEGAZER9 on YouTube, December 2024.
“Coming up at number six we’ve got the self-titled debut from a band called VOID. Now I’m not really a fan of this kind of music, but it sounds crazy. I mean, what kind of vocals are those? What’s really interesting about this album is the mystery surrounding it, which blew up on TikTok the past few weeks. Nobody can find any information about the band, but according to one TikTok user, it might be connected to three murders in the suburbs of Atlanta. Apparently, the vocalist went INSANE and disappeared right after the album was released, going on a KILLING SPREE and murdering three WOMEN over three days in what came to be known as the ‘Alpharetta Massacre.’ Now like I said, this is unconfirmed, but this album sounds fucking crazy guys, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Now before we move onto the next one, I just want to quickly shout-out the sponsor of today’s video, Nord VPN. […]”
— Natasha M. is a writer and musician from Chicago. Her other work can be found at nm.cowsite.net.