Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  Colvin looked at them over the top of his glasses. ‘Well, I have to say this is quite fascinating. For want of a better word. You do bring me the most intriguing cases, Detective Sergeant Quinn. Now if we forget the head, or lack of head, for a moment, the body shows all the symptoms of having been crushed.’

  ‘Crushed? By what, like a car?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it. There are no external markings consistent with any tangible force. But the body has come under some immense pressure. As if it had been at the bottom of a deep sea trench, or in outer space. It’s…’ he tapped his pen against his glasses, nodding, ‘It’s like a very extreme form of VAD.’

  ‘VAD? What’s that?’ asked McGregor.

  ‘Vibroacoustic Disorder. It’s a condition suffered by people exposed to high volume, low frequency noise – construction workers, engineers, military personnel, and so on. It can be blamed for a range of medical conditions, but it’s difficult to prove. And the crucial thing is that it’s a long-term, slow-onset process. Symptoms emerge following years, even decades, of exposure. This is like a lifetime of noise hitting his body in one go. Or perhaps not. It’s really a mystery.’

  ‘Vibroacoustic?’ said Colette. ‘He was an acoustics professor.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Colvin, peering at them again. ‘And what is our friend Detective Inspector Swift’s favourite saying?’

  ‘There are no coincidences.’

  ‘It seems that sudden death is becoming a sort of occupational hazard in that department at the university. I wonder, Detectives, if it might be worth revisiting the first acoustic professor’s post mortem, in light of this coincidence? Much as I hate to question my own results. Or to suggest how you should do your job. But this does put his unexplained heart attack in a different light. I would quite like to request a second autopsy. Rather unorthodox. But if we can move now, before the funeral, then no exhumation order will be needed.’

  Fifteen

  Crammed into the back of a van, Darren rattled around, bumping shoulders repeatedly with the two hulking Norwegians on either side of him, trying not to spill the beer he had been handed. Opposite sat Helen and Mikko, Mikko leaning on a large crate of beer. It was completely against the law to be driving like this, without seatbelts, but he decided to let it go. He was letting a lot of things go at the moment, and the little rebellions comforted him somehow. Helen often smiled at him kindly, with an ironic twinkle in her eye. Darren felt oddly accepted and protected, surrounded by these virtual strangers who, not long ago, he had been investigating for murder. How things had changed since then. He smiled at the thought of how he and Matt would have laughed about his current adventure, so tangential to a case that he was not even supposed to be investigating. And then Darren realized that, if Matt were alive, then he would never have got into this van. But since nothing felt real anymore, it made it easier to be in this unreal situation.

  ‘Hold this, please.’

  From his left, Anders handed him a mirror, which Darren was obliged to hold up while the Norwegian took out a makeup bag and began painting his face completely white. When he had finished, he then painted black around his eye sockets, before beginning intricate trails of eyeliner that slithered out from his eyes like black veins or dead branches. He cursed every time the van went over a bump or jolted to a stop at traffic lights. Darren looked around to see if anyone else found all this as ludicrous as he did, and he saw Helen smiling at his incredulous expression.

  ‘Corpse paint, Darren. It’s the black metal aesthetic. I can do you, if you like.’

  ‘No thanks. So what exactly is black metal then? Apart from being satanic. Does it just sound the same as Total Depravity, or..?

  ‘No it fucking doesn’t,’ objected Mikko. ‘I mean, ok, there are similarities. It’s the same instruments. I guess. You tell him, Helen, you’re the new expert on metal subgenres. I fucking hate describing music.’

  ‘Well, I’m still learning about it myself. But there are lots of different types of black metal, and it isn’t all about Satan. Basically they use a lot of very fast drumming and tremolo picking, and screechy vocals.’

  ‘Still sounds like Total Depravity.’

  ‘Ok, so one difference is that they value authenticity over technique. They don’t do guitar solos, for example. And they often record and perform in a very lo-fi manner. It’s all about atmosphere. Harshness, winter, the frozen north – that sort of thing. The main thing to know about black metal is that is takes itself very seriously. And it does have some rather problematic fringes. I realised early on I had to be very careful in my listening choices.’

  ‘Problematic how?’

  ‘There are some extreme right elements. There’s even a type called NSBM – National Socialist Black Metal.’

  ‘What, you mean Nazis? Jesus. Wait a minute. What about this Vox Inferi? I can’t be caught at some extreme right-wing thing.’

  ‘No, no dude, you’re fine,’ said Mikko. ‘You think we would go to something like that? Vox Inferi are kind of the opposite; they’re like ultra-anarchists. Beyond anarchy. Am I right, Knut?’ He called to Knut, who was driving. ‘Vox Inferi. They’re not in any way fascist?’

  ‘Their drummer was jailed for fifteen years in Denmark. He murdered a fascist.’

  ‘There you go.’

  As dusk fell, the van left the motorway and the roads became gradually narrower and more winding, until it felt as if they were not on a road at all but a bumpy track. They could hear branches scraping against the metal sides of the truck.

  Mikko thumped the back of the driver’s seat. ‘Dude, do you know where the fuck you’re going?’

  ‘No. Fuck you,’ said Knut. He pulled over and opened the back of the van so they could pile out and stretch their legs, while he fiddled with his phone. ‘Ok, it’s a few miles further down the road, then we must leave the car and make the rest of the journey on foot.’

  ‘It’s like a pilgrimage!’ Helen said excitedly.

  Eventually they parked in a layby and began walking into the forest, Knut in front holding out his phone to find the way. There was no path. The temperature had dropped and it was hard to see where they were going as they trampled through the trees and undergrowth. It was impressively remote. They hadn’t seen a house for miles when they finally began to hear the thud of drum beats and bass, and the drone of guitars. Faint lights appeared in the distance, flaming torches that Darren was sure couldn’t possibly have been authorised by the Forestry Commission. The flaming torches marked a gateway that was monitored by two figures in black robes, who looked delighted and starstruck to see Total Depravity, but were slightly less impressed by Darren and Helen.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to leave your beer here,’ said one, motioning towards the crate being carried by two of the band members. ‘The Messiah does not allow alcohol in his forest.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  They relinquished their crate, but the figures continued to block their way. ‘You will not be required to relinquish your phones,’ the other said solemnly. ‘But taking photos and recording are…’ he swallowed, ‘severely, severely discouraged.’ They slowly parted and allowed the disconcerted group to pass.

  They entered a clearing. It was populated by straggles of dark figures, smoking outside a huge tent. This was like a wedding marquee, enclosed on three sides and open at the back. Cigarettes lit up the darkness like fireflies. Eager to escape the cold, the party entered the tent and wove its way through the intermittent crowd towards the front. The stage was empty, nondescript rock music coming from a PA system, but there was a sense of palpable expectation in the air. Something was about to happen. Bodies began to close around them as others made their way into the tent. ‘Just in time,’ mouthed Helen to Darren. ‘Are you ok?’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose,’ he said, at the moment that a figure wearing a goat mask pushed past him. He and Helen both laughed at the absurdity of their adventure. She squeezed his hand.

  The tent began to fill with w
hite smoke, insidiously at first. It swirled around their feet until it became as thick as snow, then it rose up around their torsos and they could no longer see their own hands. They were disembodied, unnerved. Mikko, standing now in between Darren and Helen, reached for both their hands and looked to Helen, but they could no longer see each other’s faces.

  As the artificial fog finally began to dissipate, they realized that the stage was no longer empty. A drummer was now seated behind the drum riser, his sticks raised in the air, poised to begin. He was shirtless but wore a black mask that covered his whole head, with holes only for his eyes and a zipper over the mouth. To the left and right of the stage stood a bassist and guitarist, both clothed in black robes and similar leather masks, their heads bowed. A female keyboard player wearing an elaborate headdress stood on a platform to one side. And in the centre, behind a microphone stand decorated with antlers, stood a minotaur. Even accounting for the mask he was wearing, he must have been seven feet tall, and looked almost as wide. He wore a bronze headdress that completely covered his eyes and had been wrought into a crown decorated with a pentagram, horns, and wings. His unkempt beard, a mixture of black and grey, reached down almost to his waist, and the blood that dripped from his mouth mingled with the bristly hair. He wore a guitar that looked comically small for him, as if it were a toy.

  A hush had naturally fallen over the crowd, and The Messiah spoke, slowly and with a microphone delay effect, in a voice so deep as to be almost inhuman. ‘I am the androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection, the Union of Opposites, Father Mithras, the Horned King, Prince of Beasts…’ He continued with his pronouncements to an audience that was now completely still and rapt. ‘I am the Goat of Mendes. I am Baphomet, the All-Devouring, The Bringer of Darkness. These are the words of the Thelema.’

  A white noise emanated from the speakers, and amplified itself into a screaming feedback that they somehow knew was deliberate. It was almost unbearable, and the group all reached to protect their ears despite the earplugs that they wore. And then the music began, in waves and assaults of blastbeats and droning riffs. Any suggestions of melody that emerged were rapidly taken away. Only the memory of silence gave them any relief.

  Lyrics were mostly unintelligible, but Darren caught the gist from the snippets that he could decipher: ‘We herald the dawn of a new Dark Age… as we metamorphose into inhumanity… I am Sound… Sound becomes me.’

  The Messiah’s invocations comprised a general litany of nihilistic visions, monolithic doom, a sort of geocosmic drone that took itself far too seriously. To Darren, this was not music at all but simply a barrage of sounds, designed to be as unpleasantly loud and discordant as possible. Tendrils of noise slunk into every orifice of his body. His flesh crept with it, sending shivers down his spine. At one point, Darren texted into his phone, Not sure how much more of this I can take? and showed it to Helen. It was the only way they could communicate. But Mikko saw it and texted back, Hold on, the best bit is coming!

  When Darren had been forced to attend a Total Depravity concert, during his investigation into Mikko as part of the Shepherd case, he had been shocked by the physicality of the crowd. People frantically banging their heads, smashing into each other on purpose, running aggressively in circles, launching their bodies to be carried to the front by strangers’ hands, then throwing themselves off the stage. Darren had found it hard to believe it was allowed, and harder still to believe that no-one got hurt. But here there was no crowd-surfing or mosh pit. There were perhaps three hundred people in the tent and they all stood perfectly still, eyes transfixed. It was as if they were willing themselves to be hypnotised. They were utterly consumed by sound, layers upon layers of it weighing them down, pushing their feet into the earth. He tried to think but he couldn’t think, couldn’t think.

  After around half an hour of what for Darren was pure suffering, he noticed that there was a stirring in the crowd, a renewed sense of expectation. Something was about to happen. The band played a chord, accompanied by a blast of drums and a guttural roar from The Messiah. The chord was allowed to ring out, and the amplifiers’ distortion was turned up so that it resonated over and over, in rolling waves, hitting lower and lower octaves. They now became aware of two giant screens, at each side of the stage. They hadn’t noticed them before in the gloom. Everyone’s eyes were trained on the screens now, everyone except the band on stage, who faced out into the crowd, trying to remain motionless but all quivering slightly. The three band members whose faces were uncovered revealed the manic whites of their eyes, as if they were terrified.

  The screens crackled into life. At first all that could be seen was static, but then out of the static appeared a flat green line. This built into a sine wave, then into a more complex wave pattern. And then it began to form a face. You had to strain your eyes, but there was undoubtedly the face of a beast. At first it seemed to writhe in agony, as if it had been wrested from sleep. Then it settled onto an expression of sinister satisfaction. The mostly male crowd erupted into deep guttural cheers, and some people knelt down and bowed their heads. The images remained on the screens while the band resumed playing, the two beast heads moving in unison on either side of the stage with a series of sinister expressions, as if they were joining in with the songs. Eventually they faded back into waves, and then static, as the show ended.

  The crowd dissipated very slowly. Darren noticed that he and his party were not the only ones who found it difficult to drag their faces away from the stage, to process what they had just seen and heard. Nobody spoke; their ears were ringing so violently that all they could hear was the inside of their own heads. Darren was overwhelmed by exhaustion. The mental exhaustion of his grief was a constant and, after their long hike through the forest, followed by standing in this damp tent for two hours, he wanted nothing more than to go home. He hadn’t even left the city for months, and was more than a little concerned about how they were going to find their way back to the van in the pitch dark. But to his dismay, he realised that Total Depravity had ideas other than returning straight home. Outside in the clearing, Knut was on his phone while the others were pushing each other around and laughing, as if daring each other to do something. He realized, with grim acceptance, that they were going to meet the band.

  In a separate clearing, about two hundred metres from where the concert tent had been erected, three rusty shipping containers on stilts made up the dwelling place of The Messiah. There was an electrical generator, a Portaloo, and a compost heap. Everything smelt slightly rank, although the scent of marijuana provided a heady cover. Five of them – Darren, Helen, Mikko, Knut and Anders – filed up the steps into the first container, knocked and entered. It was windowless and covered with the same grey foam as Neilson’s cupboard, except not as spiky. The Messiah sat cross-legged on a cushion at the far end of the container, a band member on either side. It looked as if they were just finishing a sort of post-concert meditation. He was no longer wearing his headdress, but his eyes were blindfolded with a piece of black cloth.

  ‘Total Depravity. We are honoured by your presence. Your music subverts the tyranny of religion.’ His speaking voice sounded high-pitched and reedy compared to his great size and his stage voice.

  Anders whispered, ‘How did he know it was us?’

  ‘He could probably smell you,’ Mikko whispered back.

  The Messiah was motioning for them to sit, so they awkwardly found places on cushions in the cramped space. The feeling in the room was cocooning and oppressive, and when they spoke their voices decayed instantly, with no reverberation. Darren felt as if he could hear his own blood pulsing through his veins, and he hated the sensation.

  Mikko cleared his throat. ‘Thank you for having us. It’s… an honour for us too. Dude, this room is soundproofed as fuck. Do you rehearse in here? Because I don’t think anyone would mind the noise, out here in the woods.’

  ‘We are not keeping sound in. We are keeping sound out. Since 1939, when the Nazis a
dopted standard tuning, a frequency war has been waged against humanity by the powers that be, designed to keep us docile. The 440Hz of standard tuning causes a disconnect between the head and the heart, which is catastrophic, not just for humans but on a planetary scale. We play music only in A-432Hz. This is the frequency of the human heart.’

  ‘Isn’t that just drop-A on the guitar?’

  The Messiah turned his head very slowly towards Mikko, and cocked it gently, questioning.

  Seemingly for something to say, Helen leaned forward, touched the girl lightly on the arm and said, ‘I thought your keyboard playing was beautiful, congratulations.’

  The girl, who was wearing huge noise cancelling earphones, moved her head slightly in Helen’s direction and cocked it slightly with the same questioning motion as The Messiah. But she said nothing and her facial expression didn’t change.

  ‘She will not speak to you,’ explained The Messiah. ‘She cannot hear.’

  ‘Oh, is she deaf? That’s amazing, she is such a talented musician!’ Helen nodded and smiled enthusiastically at the girl but still received no response.

  ‘No. She is not deaf. She is allergic to sound.’

  ‘Man,’ whispered Mikko. ‘Strange career choice then.’ But The Messiah continued,

  ‘It is called misophonia. In the future it will affect the entire human race.’

  And I thought Mikko and Helen were an odd couple, Darren thought.

  It was already an extremely awkward encounter, but then the expressionless girl ceremoniously moved behind The Messiah and slowly untied the bandana from around his eyes. She and he both took deep breaths, and then she imperiously whisked away the final piece of cloth. They all simultaneously recoiled in horror, for he had no eyes. Not closed lids, not scars. Just gaping sockets. Somewhere inside was his brain, but all they could perceive was darkness.