Violently Fading to Silence
Robert crouched beneath the kitchen table, listening to music that conjured every evil thing he had ever dreamed.
Maybe his upstairs neighbors were simply enjoying their weekend too much, playing music at full volume and drinking until it was Monday again. But why would they choose something so haunting, so strange, for their brief respite?
This otherworldly melody contained a few elements that Robert struggled to describe despite his extensive knowledge of music theory. It seemed to be played on the flute or some similar instrument. But once he peeked from under the table, the upset piano, whose sounds transformed the room into the landscape of dreams, suddenly joined the flute.
Although the music wasn’t too loud, he felt uncomfortable as he huddled under the table, expecting at any moment the room to go silent, and with it his heart. He pictured himself having a heart attack on the cold floor of his kitchen. He pictured months or maybe years before his body would be discovered. The smell, the horror of his decomposing remains! He shook his head to banish the unpleasant vision and focused on the sounds of the flute and the piano that filled his apartment. That was all he could hear, that and the sound of his nervous heart.
“Shit,” Robert muttered as the music grew in intensity. He placed his hands over his ears, intending to block the sound. But it slipped through his fingers, through the skin of his hands, through the bones and the muscles and the joints. As the music made its way into his brain, it became excruciatingly sad. He pressed harder until his ears pulsed with pain, but, despite the discomfort, he refused to relax his hands even a little.
The music conjured up memories of his father, a musician and a quiet man who once brought home a child’s corpse and then shot himself in the heart while Robert’s mother was calling the police. Blood was still dripping from the girl’s mouth when two dark-eyed officers entered their living room. No, it was wrong. The child couldn’t have bled. She was dead, dead. Robert squeezed his head harder. Even though the music had succeeded in luring him into this particular nightmare, he knew better. Yes, his father had shot himself, but there was no child, and his mother called the police only after she had wiped her husband’s blood off the wooden floor of their bedroom. One had to keep up appearances after all.
“Why would you do that? Why?” His voice was nothing more than a faint echo of those memories.
He lowered his body so his forehead was almost touching the floor and pressed his palms hard against his skull, hoping to prevent it from receiving these agonizing messages and seeing these strange things. It didn’t work. He still saw the faces of his father and the little girl, corrupted by death and resentment, faces from the depths of his private hell.
Beside the kitchen table, near Robert’s outstretched legs, a little girl was thrashing around, her mouth opening and closing in rhythm with the music. When she opened her blue eyes, he screamed, or he thought he screamed; neither he nor anyone else in the apartment complex heard his voice. And then something cracked, and blood spilled from his mouth onto the floor.
And when he finally crushed his skull, there was a moment of pain and then silence that carried him into the blackest eternity of his most evil dreams.
Maria Barnes teaches English and writes dark fiction. Her work has appeared in The Pinworm Factory: A Tribute to Eraserhead edited by Scott Dwyer, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and Samjoko Magazine, among other places.