Bloody Fucking Hell #6
The blood drained from his face. He read it again. And again. The letters stayed where they were — cold, precise. No emoji. No explanation. Just an accusation. And a question. Why?
“Who the fuck are you?!” he screamed. His own voice sounded foreign, as if it were coming from the hallway. The phone fell silent. And then something clicked in the apartment.
It wasn’t loud, not even remotely dramatic. Just a faint mechanical beep, like a device powering on after years of neglect.
The stereo system.
Johnny turned slowly. The Pioneer glowed in the dark. The display read TRACK 01, even though the CD wasn’t inside. He was certain of that. He was sure he had ejected it, locked it away, hidden it.
The sound began without warning.
Not a riff. Not drums. Not music as he understood it.
It was a collision of frequencies that had no right to coexist. A cacophony designed to unmake him.
A low rumble beneath everything, like continents grinding against each other, overlaid with piercing highs that scraped the inside of his skull.
Someone — or something — was trying to tune an instrument that did not belong to this world. The instrument of Nikola’s suffering.
“No,” he pleaded. “No, no, no. I’m sorry, I --”
Another device powered on. The small radio in the kitchen. Then the laptop. The phone in his hand began to vibrate in a rhythm that hurt. The apartment was suddenly too full. Too much sound. Too much hell.
Johnny gasped. The walls seemed farther away than they were.
The music shifted. Now it had structure.
Rhythm was not of this world — lopsided, stumbling over itself, then surging forward again, daring his heart to follow it and fail.
Johnny recognized the riff. The one he had played at the first rehearsal after the CD. The one the audience loved the most.
“I — I was just --” he stammered, but the words collapsed before they reached the air.
Behind the amplifier, something opened. Not a hole, but not a shape either. A tear in space, from which charred, coal-black filaments spilled outward. Behind them flowed a darkness that was not the absence of light, but the presence of something else. Something older.
The entity had no face. It had contours that constantly shifted, smoke struggling to remember whether it once had edges, spikes. Where its hands were — if they were hands — ran organic structures resembling cables, wires, tendons. They pulsed in time with the music.
Johnny fell backward, slamming into the table. The pills began to take effect — but not in the right way. Everything slowed down and sped up at the same time.
“Give it back,” the creature rasped.
“I didn’t know,” Johnny screamed. “I thought it was -- that it was --”
A gift? came the answer. A loan?
The music swelled to the point of pain. Not just sound, but pressure — in his ears, his bones, his skin.
The apartment became a resonant chamber; the walls bent, swelling into curves and bulges that reflected the sound into infinity.
Light flashed before his eyes, blinding him.
And from inside, from his swollen mind, visions poured out and overtook him: nightmare worlds without horizons, black mountains made of amplifiers, trembling masses of wretched beings standing and listening in despair, endlessly, without rest — tortured yet fully aware.
“I didn’t mean to steal it,” he said, realizing it was both the truth and a lie.
The creature moved closer; he could smell it — rotting flesh and scorched plastic.
The stereo exploded in a firework of sparks.
One caught the curtains. Fire spread through the apartment.
The window glass cracked and burst. The music shattered into a scream that didn’t come from the speakers, but from the space between him and the thing.
The walls trembled, then stilled — not empty, but saturated with that poisonous sound, the music from the CD.
In the silence that followed, Johnny still felt the rhythm deep inside, in his knees and jaw — a pulse that doesn’t stop even when the heart does.
And then everything stopped. Completely.
No music. No noise. No crackling sparks or rising flames. Even the shadows stood still.
In that perfect, almost comforting silence, he thought it was over. That his pursuer had relented. That it had taken what it wanted and gone. He drew a deep breath for the first time in what felt like forever.
Only then did he understand that silence did not mean absence, but waiting — and that whatever had been in the apartment had not come to be seen, but to return for what belonged to it.
Johnny ran.
He didn’t know where. Just away from the sound, away from the monster, away from himself. He tore off his shirt as he ran, his skin burning, feeling as if the music had carved itself into his flesh.
He leapt through the shattered window, spinning in the air.
As he fell — as his thoughts dimmed like an amplifier losing power — the last thing he heard was not his own scream.
It was metal distortion.
It followed him to the other side, faithful and unrelenting, all the way into the stillness of eternity.
The End