The heavy wooden door of the auditorium slammed shut, a sharp punctuation mark that severed the ridiculous, mud-and-pineapple chaos of my friends from the pristine quiet I craved. I leaned back against the cool, dark wood of the polished piano, letting out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. The silence that rushed in wasn't the pure, echoing void I usually cherished after playing; it was a confused silence, tainted by the ghost of strong cologne, the sharp tang of sweat, and a weirdly comforting note of reckless enthusiasm that only Beatrice could generate.
I rubbed my sleeve quickly—a frantic, private gesture—across the spot where Justin had attempted to clean the mud. It was now just a bigger, slightly smeared patch of dirt on the highly polished surface. Why are they like this? The question wasn't angry, just exhausted, edged with a painful, grudging affection. They were my gravitational pull, the strange, erratic force always yanking me out of the safe, quiet orbit I preferred. Their presence, loud and uncompromising, made me feel intensely real, yet simultaneously amplified the anxiety I carried.
I pressed my hands flat against the ivory keys, still faintly warm from my performance. The Nocturne—the one I'd written in a frantic four days, an act of sheer, desperate creative release—was a shield I only lowered for the keys. When I played, the stage fright vanished. It was replaced by a total, exhilarating clarity, a focused control I couldn't find in conversation, in my life, or in my home.
But now, the music was dissolving, leaving the raw, flayed nerves exposed. And those nerves were screaming not about an audience, but about Beatrice's outrageous blackmail. Perform tomorrow.
It wasn't that I couldn't play; it was that I couldn't be seen while playing. The stage fright wasn't about the skill; it was about the exposure. A spotlight didn't illuminate; it felt like a cold, dissecting microscope. Every eye in the auditorium, even if there were only two—Mr. Abernathy's and Beatrice's—felt like a lens focusing on my deepest, most vulnerable truth.
And the truth was fragile. I had lied about my parents being "busy" at their own concert. It was a familiar, well-worn lie. They were professional musicians, constantly touring, constantly performing, but the half-truth was the crushing part: they were always at their own concert, always too busy to come to mine, or to care that I even had a concert. Their absence wasn't a schedule conflict; it was a pattern of profound, conditioned indifference. It was easier to fabricate a lie about a prior engagement than admit the truth—that I wasn't important enough to warrant even a single seat in the second row. Justin's disbelief, genuine and loud, was a terrifying reminder of what a normal, supportive family looked like, and it stung worse than Caleb's muddy jersey.
I ran a finger over the Nocturne's main melody, a simple, mournful arpeggio I called "The Watcher's Lament." It was meant to capture the feeling of watching a lighthouse beam sweep over an empty sea. A beautiful, solitary loneliness. But tonight, it felt less like a lonely meditation and more like a high-pitched, insistent warning.
"The realm of shadows and whispers."
I pushed away from the piano bench, the memory of her intense sapphire eyes, brimming with dangerous excitement, making the hair on my arms stand up. Beatrice had a genius-level intellect and an equal-level disregard for consequences. She didn't believe in danger; she believed in experience. Summoning a portal wasn't a risk to her; it was just a more advanced form of chemistry experiment, a particularly compelling footnote in a musty old tome.
I pulled my jacket on and started the long walk home, leaving the quiet sanctuary of the music room.
The late afternoon light was usually clear and sharp, cutting bright lines between the brick buildings. Tonight, however, the air felt strangely thick, almost textured, heavy like breathing underwater. The shadows, usually crisp and clean, seemed to cling to the ground, absorbing the light around them. The streetlights flickered with unsettling inconsistency, not due to a power surge, but randomly, as if someone was carelessly flipping a master switch one by one, watching the world wink in and out of existence.
The city sounds—the distant traffic, the howl of a neighbour's dog, the faint rhythmic beat of a basketball game—seemed slightly muted, distant, as if wrapped in cotton wool. I stopped at the corner where the old oak tree dominated the sidewalk. That tree had been hit by lightning three times and was famous for being ridiculously resilient.
But as I looked at it, I realized something was profoundly wrong. The shadows under the dense canopy didn't look like normal shadows; they looked… denser. Like someone had smeared thick, black ink across the ground. And the whispers Beatrice had mentioned? I heard them, yes, but not with my ears. It was a sound registered deep in the cold hollow of my chest, a chilling intuition that runs straight down the spine.
It sounded like a thousand low-pitched voices talking just outside the range of human hearing, a dry, continuous, rustling noise, like static electricity mixed with dried leaves dragged across concrete. It was the sound of something listening—not with curiosity, but with vast, incomprehensible patience.
I broke into a terrified run, the Nocturne's melody now screaming in my head, high and discordant, a frantic, warning cry. I didn't stop until I reached the familiar, beige concrete of my apartment complex.
I fumbled with the key, unlocked the door, and practically threw myself inside the small, overheated lobby. Once inside my own third-floor apartment, I slammed the door shut and leaned against it, gasping for air, clutching the worn sheet music—my Nocturne, The Unseen Sea—in my sweating hand.
It's fine. Everything is fine, I repeated, forcing myself to take slow, shuddering breaths. It was just Beatrice being dramatic, and me being paranoid. The whispers were just the wind. The flickering lights were bad wiring. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to reclaim the control I desperately needed.
I opened my eyes, determined to rationalize, to prove the world was still sane. I looked down at the sheet music.
And then, softly, unmistakably, a sound drifted from the far side of the apartment, near the kitchen.
It was the very last, shimmering, high note of the Nocturne. The C-sharp in the seventh octave. The one that had hung perfectly in the auditorium minutes ago, dissolving into silence.
But here, in my apartment, it wasn't an echo of the piano. It was the note itself, plucked from memory, perfectly pitched, but horribly wrong. It was held for far too long—stretched, thin, and impossibly brittle, like pulled taffy, before it cracked with the sharp, sickening sound of breaking glass and vanished entirely.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a trapped, terrified bird. This wasn't imagination. This was physics defying itself, a violation of the pure, mathematical structure of music I devoted my life to.
A cold, metallic taste—like old pennies—coated my tongue. I slowly pushed off the door, my entire body rigid, and turned towards the empty hallway. My apartment was small, and my piano was twenty blocks away.
The hallway was dark, but a faint, hazy condensation seemed to coat the air, clinging to the edges of the walls. I moved forward, driven by a horrifying curiosity. Near the kitchen counter, where the sound had seemed to originate, there was a minute, almost imperceptible film of frost on the polished wood. And a shadow.
It wasn't a shadow cast by the light—it was a two-dimensional, perfectly round patch of absolute blackness clinging to the tile floor, about the size of a tea saucer. It absorbed the light from the overhead fixture so completely that it looked like a hole torn in reality. I stared at it, the chill radiating from it raising goosebumps all over my arms. The shadow wasn't moving, but it felt alive, a single, waiting pupil.
Beatrice's words, recited with such theatrical flair, echoed in my mind: "A recipe for something big. Like, 'summon a cosmic entity to grant wishes' big."
The truth hit me with the force of a punch to the gut: Beatrice's "harmless prank" wasn't a joke anymore. Something from that realm of shadows and whispers had not only entered our world, but it had followed me home. And its first act was to mimic my most private piece of music. It was listening. It was learning.
A wave of pure, shaking adrenaline finally prompted action. I needed to call her. She had the book.
My hands fumbled for my phone, the screen blindingly bright in the dim apartment. My fingers, usually so precise on the keys, were clumsy now, trembling as I scrolled to Beatrice's name.
She answered on the first ring, her voice a bright, impossibly cheerful distraction.
"Alex! I was just about to text you! I'm getting Caleb and Justin to help me find a vintage smoke machine for the play tomorrow. We need maximum ambiance for the demon gate scene, you know?"
"Beatrice, listen to me," I cut in, my voice tight and raw. I struggled to keep the frantic edge out of my tone, knowing if I sounded hysterical, she'd simply dismiss me. "It worked. Your spell worked. Something is here."
"Well, duh. Did you see the shadows outside the school? Totally ominous, right? I tried to take a picture but my phone died. Did you get a good shot of it?" she chirped, completely missing the terror in my voice.
"No, Beatrice, not outside. It's here. It followed me. I heard the Nocturne note—the final high C-sharp—right in my kitchen. And there's… there's this shadow. It's too dark. It's not a shadow, it's a void."
There was a moment of silence on her end, a rare, unnerving occurrence.
"Oh, a void? That's interesting," she finally said, sounding less scared and more like a professor evaluating a complex differential equation. "I knew the chant was powerful! I was thinking it would just be a smoky wisp, but a void? Alex, that's incredible! It means the ancient Greek translation was mostly correct! Do you think it's sentient?"
My jaw tightened. "I think it's dangerous, you idiot! Where is the book?"
"Oh, the book. It's with me. I took it home to cross-reference the phonetic transcription. Turns out, the word I translated as 'harmless smoke' might actually be closer to 'malignant, sentient echo.' Small translation error. Happens all the time with ancient Thracian dialects." She sounded unapologetic, even faintly proud.
"A malignant, sentient echo?" I hissed, running a hand through my already messy hair. "Beatrice, you need to find the counter-chant. Now. Before this thing fully arrives."
"Counter-chant, counter-chant…" I could hear papers rustling frantically on her end. "It's not that simple, Alex. The reverse phrase requires a specific frequency and resonance to seal the gate. The book says it must be performed 'at the mouth of the echo' and using the purest sound produced by the summoner."
I froze. The purest sound. I was the one whose music the entity was mimicking. The Nocturne was the sound it had chosen to announce its presence.
"What about the 'mouth of the echo'?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
"Hold on… the book is pretty crumbly here… Ah! It refers to the location where the initial summoning was performed, or where the entity was last sensed near the summoner."
The auditorium. The music room. The place where the shimmering note of my Nocturne had just dissolved.
"The auditorium, Beatrice. It has to be the auditorium," I stated, the fear now giving way to cold, sharp focus. The chaos of my emotions settled, replaced by the mathematical certainty of a crisis that required fixing. This was a structure, and structures could be disassembled.
"You have to bring the book to the school. Now. And that thing about the purest sound… it means my music."
Beatrice sighed dramatically. "But I promised Mrs. Periwinkle I'd pick up the dry cleaning for the Hamlet costumes. Fine. Give me fifteen minutes. I'll meet you by the side entrance, but if I get a stain on this priceless tome, I'm blaming Caleb."
She hung up before I could object.
I stood there in the chilling silence of my apartment, staring at the perfectly round void on the floor. The malignant shadow seemed to have grown infinitesimally larger, maybe the size of a teacup now, and the metallic taste was stronger. The thought of waiting for Beatrice, that reckless, unreliable genius, was unbearable.
If the Unseen Sea was here, and if its counter-charm required my music, I couldn't afford to lose control. I had to go back. I had to seize the narrative from Beatrice's chaotic hands. The safety I found in solitude was gone, but the control I found in music remained.
I didn't trust the apartment anymore. I didn't trust the air. I didn't trust the silence.
I grabbed my Nocturne sheet music—my weapon and my shield—and raced out the door. The whispers outside were louder now, no longer sounding like leaves, but like thin, sharp glass being rubbed together. It was the sound of something hungry, a malignant echo in the air, and it was waiting for the perfect frequency of my fear.