Bloody Fucking Hell #3
All that time, he never left the apartment.
Not only did he feel no need to — he forgot that anything besides the music even existed.
He drew the curtains and never moved them.
The outside world? It survived only as a pale memory in his mind, reduced to the vague background noise of traffic and the occasional howl of the elevator.
The music never stopped. One album. Thirteen tracks.
Each one flowing seamlessly into the next, masterful tempo shifts that tore at his soul.
It might begin like something out of Testament or Megadeth, dissolve into a swirling undercurrent of symphonic orchestra, only to strip itself down in the next moment to nothing but guitar — threatening, slicing, like something from Scream Bloody Gore, but different, more melodic, more primal.
Mostly instrumentals — but when a voice did appear (an androgynous, eerily vampiric voice that at times sank deeper than Peter Steele, and at others turned maddeningly shrill or fragile, like a demon singing a lullaby), it sang in a language impossible to recognize or understand.
Johnny was certain it wasn’t of this world.
At moments he caught distant echoes of King Diamond or Cradle of Filth, but the comparison felt weak and blurry — like watching a crystal-clear aurora borealis through fogged glass.
No. Those were pitiful, dishonest comparisons.
Every last scrap of music he had ever known was a pale counterfeit — a dilution of essence, a rough sketch of the original. A divine metal matrix now in his hands, etched directly into his brain through the auditory nerve.
When he wasn’t playing the CD, the music played itself inside his head. Riffs repeated, choruses mutated, songs coiled into his dreams, intertwining with grotesque fantasies and long, draining nightmares.
He dreamed of places he had never seen: vast, roofless concert halls filling with a slick black mass made of countless tiny, warped versions of himself; black soil and mountain peaks pulsing like flesh; cities built of amplifiers and cables — cables in constant motion, like snakes hunting prey — under a sky that roared with feedback.
And that face… the same being to whom those charred, blackened fingers belonged, still dripping —
In those dreams, he was never alone. Yet he could never see what — or who — was there with him. He only felt a presence. Like an audience.
That was what drove him mad. It itched inside him, forcing him to listen again.And again. And again.
***
The phone rang for the first time in God knows how many days.
Beside the bed, three plastic bottles stood half-filled with stale, yellow piss, catching the light differently each time the song looped — proof that time had passed, even if he hadn’t.
He flinched as if someone had struck him.
He didn’t answer. Why would he interrupt listening?
He was just about to start the CD from the beginning again.
A message. Another. Another — angry, impatient wasps buzzing one after the other.
They were from her.
The first: Hey, are you okay? It’s not cool to just disappear on everyone.
The second: I came by your place. I could hear music playing. I know you’re inside. Why won’t you open the door?
The third: I’m sorry. I mean — fucking sorry. I never meant to hurt you. That doesn’t mean we should hate each other. I just wanted you to know… you know? Ti?a and I are together now. Accept it.
He read them once. Then again.
Nothing.
He felt nothing. No sting. No anger. It didn’t touch him at all. Those messages were clearly meant for someone else — an older version of him, long since buried beneath riffs and static.
He set the phone down and played the next track. Ecstasy curdled into suspicion.
Only hours later — or days, he wasn’t sure — something inside him shifted. Like a scab breaking loose.
Or a seal cracking on a tombstone.
Why the hell did I think that?
Still, what mattered was that his head cleared.
He started to think. If he was doomed to bear witness to the existence of the most brilliant metal album ever made, he could at least find out how it came to be.
How it was him who’d ended up finding this phantom CD. And the most important question of all:
Who, for fuck’s sake, had made this music?
It sounded like something rooted in the mid-eighties.
He didn’t know how else to describe it, but the feeling was unmistakable.
Old school, but not retro. Old school, elevated — mastered.
There was no irony. No wink. This wasn’t pastiche.
This was the fucking truth. The sound was crystal clear, yet underneath it ran a faint hiss, like a dubbed cassette or a worn vinyl record.
As if the music had already lived one life before him.
He went to YouTube. Spotify. Deezer. Every music service he could think of.
Nothing. He wandered the internet, digging through every major metal forum he could find.
No trace. He tried Google and a few AI tools, but he was hopeless at it — he didn’t even know where to begin.
What was he supposed to type? The most brilliant metal music in the world?
No. That wasn’t how it worked. Track titles?
Unknown. Release year? Unknown. Country of origin?
Unknown. How do you search for something without words — at least, without words you can recognize?
What does this music resemble? Which artist?
The AIs spun in circles. Estimated response time: 72 hours.
“Bullshit!” he shouted.
Fine. He could cut segments of the masterpiece and run them through music-recognition software. He did. Shazam. Sound Hound. Music Recognition. They didn’t have a clue.
He moved on to underground music archives, torrent trackers, Pirate Bay.
Zero.
According to them, the music didn’t exist. It had been made by a ghost. A specter.
“How is that possible?” he yelled into the empty apartment. “How does nobody know about this?”
There was no answer.
He started drinking again. Not like before — not to calm his nerves, but to quiet his thoughts.
To mute the music. By then it was already festering inside him, blooming like a cancer.
More than anything, though, he wanted — just for a moment — to escape the question that kept returning more and more often:
Why can’t I play this well?
The question ate at him from the inside. Crawled under his skin. He knew how pathetic it was. He had the music right there in front of him — perfect — and instead of gratitude, he felt envy. Envy of the sound. Envy of the phantom musician who had made it.
***
One night, drunk and hoarse from shouting, he finally snapped.
“Enough.”
As if something inside the CD had heard him, the sound from the speakers stuttered for a split second. It was the first time he’d heard any anomaly in that embodiment of perfection, though he knew it was the player, not the recording itself.
He picked up the guitar.
He listened to the first track and played over it.
His fingers found their places on their own.
As if the notes had been waiting to pass through him.
He dropped in a programmed drum track — complex, asymmetrical, built on a 4/4 foundation with sixteenth notes driving the kick, but every third cycle slipping into a polyrhythmic 23/16.
He didn’t even need a real drummer. Everything was already there. He did the same with the bass.
Only the vocals — sporadic as they were — resisted him. That voice couldn’t be reproduced. It felt like it came from somewhere else. From another dimension entirely.
He recorded track after track in a trance.
No thinking. No tweaking. He wasn’t composing — just capturing what already existed.
When the sun finally crept in, his fingertips were raw and streaked with blood.
He didn’t listen back to a single second; he couldn’t.
Dawn was breaking by the time he finally collapsed, drained.
Before that — without fully understanding his own actions — he managed to send the recordings out: to the manager, the studio owner, the band members.
His former band.
He attached a single message, the only one he had the strength to write:
Listen to this… if you dare.
Then he fell asleep.
Days passed. That hellishly good music never loosened its grip — not even for a moment. When he wasn’t listening, he was dreaming. When he wasn’t dreaming, he heard echoes of riffs in the pipes, in the refrigerator, in his own breathing. Sometimes it felt like there was something beneath the music.
Like someone whispering.
Nikola…Nikola…
“Nikola!”
Someone was pounding on the door. It took him a few minutes to recognize the landlord’s voice. The apartment wasn’t his — he was just renting it. Is the rent due already? he thought groggily, and opened the door.
The landlord made a visible effort not to stare at his appearance — or at the state of the apartment, at least what little he could see past Johnny’s shoulders. The landlord spoke in a calm, nasal voice that smelled faintly of menthol cigarettes.
“Kid, we need to talk,” he said. “You’re behind on payments. And the neighbors are complaining. They say you’re blasting music all day.”
“It’s work,” Johnny muttered.
“This isn’t a studio,” the landlord said. “You’ve got a week to move out. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t give him a chance to argue. God knew Johnny didn’t have the will — or the strength — for it anyway. He shut the door and leaned against it, feeling the walls closing in. The same music that had lifted him was now evicting him.
This is it, he thought. This is rock bottom.
The phone rang.
It was the call that would change his life.
***
The third show on a tour is where a band stops pretending to play and actually enters it — becomes something else. A machine. A beast. A religion.