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墨書 Inktalez
I had forgotten what day it was.
When I woke up in the morning, I found myself sitting on the living room sofa, completely alone. The house was eerily quiet. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting fragmented patterns on the floor. Dust floated in the air like silent, falling notes.
It took me a few minutes to remember who I was.
That may sound like a cliché, but I mean it literally: I sat there with my hands resting on my knees, my ears still ringing, and my mind was a blank slate. No words, no names, no sense of self.
Until I heard that song.
The sound drifted from an upstairs room, faint and thin, as if carried by the wind from several kilometers away. It was "You Are My Sunshine," but not complete. Some syllables in the melody were stretched, broken down, and emphasized repeatedly, like a tape that had been re-edited.
I lifted my head and finally realized where I was.
I was still in this house.
Still within Emily's voice.
I had once tried to leave.
One night, I drove straight onto the interstate highway and headed north for six hours. It was raining that night, and weather warnings played on the radio while I gripped the steering wheel, my heart racing faster than the engine.
But no matter where I drove—
That song followed me.
The radio would automatically switch to that melody every hour; the car navigation would guide me home in Emily's voice; roadside billboards flashed words as I passed by:
"You Are My Sunshine."
I dozed off in a motel near the state line, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, the bedside phone blinked silently. I picked it up, and on the other end came—my own voice singing, over and over again, repeating without any emotion.
I only remember screaming as I rushed out of the room, leaving the car behind and running home.
That was three days ago.
Or maybe three weeks ago.
I'm not sure anymore.
What I do know now is that I am not taking care of Emily.
I am tending to something that needs to be awakened by song, something that resides within my child's shell, using her voice, her expressions, her name to lure me into continuing to sing.
I have thought about killing her. Not out of hatred, but out of despair.
One day, I walked into her room with a kitchen knife in hand. She was sitting against the wall, facing away from me, using crayons to sketch some sort of geometric array—these lines had long surpassed the realm of childish doodles; they possessed logic and repetition, as if notes were embedded within a structure.
I approached her and raised the knife.
“Daddy,” she said softly without turning around, “are you really sure you want to sing one last time with these Vocal Cords?”
I froze. My arm trembled, the tip of the blade touching her shoulder, yet it felt like it encountered an invisible barrier.
In that moment, I realized—Emily’s body was empty.
She no longer had flesh and blood; beneath a layer of skin was a hollow density of sound. She was not possessed; she had become part of the sound itself.
That night, I did not kill her.
I simply collapsed in the corner of the room, listening to her hum softly.
The song grew faster, its melody fracturing, like a clock turning backward.
Today, the wall cracked.
Not shattered, not broken, but opened like skin, revealing the inner "organs of sound"—hundreds of slender holes drilled out from the wall, vibrating against each other, as if the entire wall were breathing.
Emily stood in the center of the wall, her arms spread wide, like a conductor, or a priestess.
She was no longer the three-year-old girl she once was. She had grown a few centimeters taller, her skin had turned pale, her eyes completely devoid of pupils, and her lips had lost their color.
But the most terrifying aspect was not her appearance—it was her voice, transformed into my own.
The moment she spoke, I thought it was me talking.
“Daddy, let’s begin.”
The entire house began to resonate.
It wasn’t an earthquake; it was the spatial structure losing its original parameters. The walls, floor, and ceiling vibrated simultaneously, like a massive tuning fork resonating within the house, each tremor making the air heavier.
I felt as if I were about to be crushed, yet Emily’s voice remained gentle:
“Sing, Daddy; this is the last time. We’ve already counted to seven hundred and forty-two.”
I opened my mouth, and the sound flowed out automatically.
I had no control over it. I was merely a vessel. Just the last brick in this damned structure of sound.
I sang.
I finished the seven hundred and forty-third round.
After singing the seven hundred forty-third time, time felt as if it had been stripped of gravity.
I stood still, unsure whether minutes or centuries had passed. Emily stood before me, smiling. Her lips moved, but I could not hear her voice. The world transformed into a sealed glass container, where all sounds were trapped within my eardrums, swirling, crashing against walls, distorting.
I couldn’t hear Emily, but I could hear myself.
I could hear my own heartbeat, its rhythm steady, as if counting down. I could hear the sound of my blood flowing through my veins, like an incomplete melody searching for an endpoint. I even heard the frequencies produced by my vocal cords rubbing together, as if someone were recording inside me, preparing to edit.
I began to doubt whether I still possessed the ability to "hear." Or perhaps I was merely "being heard."
The entire house began to hum. It wasn’t an explosion or a collapse; it was a kind of "singing sound" seeping from the floorboards, wires, walls, and the glass of light bulbs. The whole house became a resonating chamber.
Then Emily approached me. She gently leaned close to my ear and said in my own voice:
“Dad, you’ve been singing too long. You’ve become that song.”
I wanted to ask her what that meant, but the moment the words formed in my mind, I realized my lips couldn’t move. My vocal cords were active, but they weren’t producing the words I intended; instead, fragments of that melody emerged—disjointed echoes of a chorus rearranged and played on repeat.
I wanted to escape, to turn and run, to scream loudly, but all I could do was open my mouth and sing. Each breath became a beat; each pulse turned into a note.
I lost track of how long I sang in that space. It might have been just a few minutes or perhaps three whole days.
I no longer felt hunger or thirst. My stomach felt filled with air rather than food. I hadn’t eaten, yet it felt as though some kind of sound wave nourished my body.
I recalled what Graves once said:
“Sound is not just vibrations in the air; it is... the form itself.”
At that moment, I finally understood. I was not living; I was being shaped by the "voice."
The voice was not something meant to be conveyed to anyone. It was a choice, selecting those who would carry it, reconstructing their bones, skin, tongues, and thoughts—
It rewrote you from the inside out.
Just like I am now.
I began to lose track of what was memory and what was illusion.
I remember the day Emily was born—it was a winter morning, and the snow fell outside like feathers. Sarah held my hand and said, "She will be our sunshine."
But now, I question whether that memory is real.
Did she truly exist?
Or did she come from within the walls all along?
Was she a vessel possessed by the voice from the very beginning, cast into my life to give me a reason to sing?
I remember that I once loved her. Truly. That was not fiction.
But the Emily of now—she is nothing but a mask, a face that sings. Inside, it is empty, resonant, infinite.
I even began to doubt whether I had ever been a person.
I flipped through my notes and saw those numbers, rhythms, pitches, mistakes, corrections I had recorded… Those were not traces of fatherly love; they were offerings preparing for a sacrificial ritual.
I am not a father; I am a priest.
I am the seven hundred forty-third voice craftsman, and I created the perfect outlet for that voice.
One day I woke up to find myself standing in the basement.
I didn’t know how I got down there or how long I had been there. The walls were covered in symbols, every corner inscribed with my own name. Not "Jack," but codes like "Voice 1.1," "Jack_D," resembling file names of audio samples.
I walked towards the corner of the basement, where there was a mirror.
I saw myself.
But that wasn’t me.
It was something filled with air, with cracked corners of its mouth and a floating gaze, its entire face resembling a bubble formed by sound waves. My lips moved silently. Yet, I could hear my body singing above the house.
Yes—I stood in the basement, but I heard my voice coming from Emily’s mouth. She was mimicking me, reciting every word I had ever spoken, singing every song I had ever sung.
I understood.
She no longer needed me.
She had memorized all my tones.
I was merely Vocal Cords.
I was just a sample.
The wall cracked open again.
This time, it wasn’t sound but form. Not hands, not feet, but an entire row of “life shaped like musical notes” emerged from behind the wall.
Their bodies were melodies, the three-dimensional manifestation of sound waves. Each life shimmered with the curves of a spectrogram; with every step they took, a new syllable was born.
I couldn’t describe what they looked like because they were not shapes at all; they were rhythm.
Emily stood among them, like a queen.
She spoke to me (or perhaps to the echo of my voice):
“Dad, thank you. The Seven Hundred Forty-Third Person is complete.”
“Now, we are going to start counting the next song.”
I wanted to ask, “What song is that?”
She smiled and said:
“This one.”
Then I heard it—
My own voice resonating throughout the world.
I didn’t know how I had died, nor did I know if I had truly “died.”
Perhaps I was still sitting on the sofa. Perhaps I had become a Sound File, sealed within some deserted library's Vinyl Record. Maybe a child was singing that song in his home, unaware that this melody was once mine.
And I could only listen.
Counting.
Singing.
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