by Aaron French
***
After the cat evaporated, other objects began vanishing too. One morning I finally worked up the courage to go grocery shopping, but stepping outside, I found no car. I stood for a long time in the early morning dawn, staring down at the place where my car had been.
The following day it was the television. A vacant, dustless spot dominated the oak entertainment center where, for so long, the TV had stood. Next is was the pictures on the walls (not including Clown Face, which actually appeared to be growing).
Later the furniture began to dissolve. The two sofas in the living room, the dining table, the chairs, the mirrors, dressers, and beds. Soon I found myself walking through all the empty rooms scratching my head. The solitary feeling of The Castle was growing, and it seemed much bigger and danker.
After some time had passed, the only things remaining in The Castle were myself, my writing desk, and the painting. The two cats were gone, but there was one other thing, something I wished would disappear. My cell phone.
“I’m worried about you,” Jim Royce said the last time he called me. “We used to get in touch once a week. Now you almost never answer my calls. And when you do, you can’t wait to hang up. What’s the deal?”
“You’ll be pleased to know I’m nearing the end of my novel, Jim.”
“Terrific! Is that why you’ve been so scarce lately?”
“That’s why. To be honest, this is the most absorbing thing I’ve ever written. It’s like I’m actually taking part in the narrative.”
There was a pause. “Well... you are taking part in it. You’re the one writing it.”
“It’s not just the writing process. There’s something else going on. Strange stuff. The kind of stuff I’m writing about, Jim. The stuff I’m writing about has bled over into my reality.”
“I see.”
Another pause.
“Well, how about chapters?”
A piercing screech ripped out of the earpiece and I yanked the phone away. Then, as I hurled it toward the wall, it dematerialized midway through the path of its trajectory and before it could smash into smithereens, it flicked out in midair.
I had never felt more alone.
***
I returned to work on my manuscript, and was shocked to find that Clown Face had grown to four times its original size. It no longer resembled a painting. Now it was like a large viewing screen.
Clown Face bobbed in its ocean of whiteness, eyes large and godlike, mouth red-painted and bloated. It commanded me to take up my pen. I did, and Clown Face started speaking again.
“There is a misconception held by the people of the world, that what they think is inside of them, and what they do is outside of them. If one person has an interaction with another person, and this interaction somehow turns disagreeable, then both people leave feeling either insulted or guilty for offending the other. Each person is then thought to go their separate way and to take this experience with them. But that is wrong. No one goes anywhere with anything. It’s all in the mind.
“Just as you are every person—every character, rather—in your dreams, so are you every character in your reality, for your reality exists only in the mind. Just as you are all phenomenal objectivea in your dreams, so are you all phenomenal objectivea in your reality.”
“You just said that.”
“Well it bears repeating. You are the organisms, the rocks, the light particles, the dust motes, the plants and animals, the buildings and cars—you are the sky itself, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the universe. You are infinite.”
Scribbling furiously, I rushed to write down his words. I wrote without thinking. When I was finished, I looked up and nearly tumbled out of my chair.
Clown Face was gone. The painting remained, large and dominant on the wall, its walnut frame gleaming in the mellow light. But in the frame was only soft, swirling white space that seemed to go on forever.
I stood up slowly, and the moment I did, the chair vaporized behind my back. My trembling face aimed at the painting, I kept retreating, back and back, as the writing table flickered out. The walls began to resemble mirages. They too flickered out and finally the floor upon which I stood flickered out. Then I was surrounded by infinite whiteness.
Everything was gone except the large walnut frame hanging in space and looming before me like some kind of bizarre entryway.
When I came to it, my whole body was trembling. I could barely keep still. Colors appeared in the vast whiteness, more and more of them mixing together, swirling about.
Soon they took shape inside the walnut picture frame. Everything else remained endless and white, and the frame itself appeared to shrink now. I glanced at my body and was appalled to find that it had vanished from the neck down. I tried to speak, to scream, but all that came out was a gasp.
The picture frame contracted until it was only big enough to fit around my head. I became affixed to that place. The colors and shapes were soon definable only by textures, angles, and patterns. Out there I could see another room, one very similar to the room containing my writing desk.
And the more I looked out there, the more I realized it was the same room, and the same writing desk, and even my old furniture. Everything that was once a part of my reality was now out there.
Clown Face was sitting at the desk, dressed in a gaudy blue-and-white clown suit, with orange puffballs running down the chest and ruffles around the sleeves. Its face no longer appeared painted and cartoonish; it now appeared very real... and very unsettling.
Looking up and staring through the walnut frame with big goofy eyes, Clown Face gave me a sneering, loathsome smile from its bloated red mouth.
“What are you going to speak about today, Charles Face?” it said. “Are you going to lecture on the nature of reality, hm, perhaps you still believe there’s an objective world outside of your mind?”
I tried to speak but I was paralyzed by fear.
Clown Face shook his head almost ruefully. “No, I’m sorry to say, for you Charles there is only one mode of experience, and to that mode you will forever be a prisoner and that mode will forever be in your mind. The sad lesson of all this, Charles, is that you are forever doomed to your own subjective experience. You can never experience my reality, nor anyone else’s. There is only Charles Face... and you are forever stuck with him—”
Clown Face got up from the desk and slowly made his way to the left, exiting the walnut frame and leaving me staring at the empty room. Once this happened I was finally able to transform my terror into something more audible.
Something more like a scream.
About the author: Aaron J. French has appeared in many publications, including Abandoned Towers, The Absent Willow Review, Golden Visions Magazine, issue #7of Black Ink Horror, the Potter’s Field 4 anthology from Sam’s Dot Publishing, and Something Wicked Magazine. He also has stories in the following anthologies: Zombie Zak’s House of Pain; Ruthless: An Extreme Horror Anthology with introduction by Bentley Little; Pellucid Lunacy edited by Michael Bailey; M is for Monster compiled by John Prescott; and 2013: The Aftermath by Pill Hill Press. He recently edited Monk Punk, an anthology of monk-themed speculative fiction, and is working on editing Satyrs, a satyr-themed anthology being published by Wicked East Press.
The Music of Bleak Entrainment
Gary A. Braunbeck
You should see the expression on your face right now—all the trouble you’ve been through in order to get the clearance to interview me, and I start off by talking about household appliances and math instead of those twelve people I killed. Not that anyone gives more of a damn about them now than they did ten years ago—after all, what’d the world lose? A dozen mental patients who were a drain on society’s pocketbook. None of them were ever going to be released, they were lifers, and as far as I ever knew none of them had any living family.
Huh? Do I feel bad about it? What the fuck kind of Journalism 101 question is that? No, I don’t feel bad—I fee
l horrible about it. You weren’t there, you didn’t see those faces, those eyes... Christ. Those lonely, isolated, frightened eyes.
You want to know something that the news reports back then never mentioned? Not a one of them tried to run away, to get to safety. It was like shooting tin ducks at a carnival booth. Hell, some of them seemed to welcome it.
I tried to explain everything to the authorities at the time but I was pretty... out of control. No, wait, scratch that—I was so fucking scared it was like I wasn’t even me any longer. I was trapped somewhere inside myself just watching it all happen and... ah, never mind. But I’ll tell you the same thing I told my lawyer and the court—I was not insane. Not for one second.
As you can tell from our posh surroundings and this lovely canvas jacket with the wraparound arms that I’m sporting, they didn’t believe me.
Look, it all started because Steve and I got this idea about using entrainment to visually illustrate how the human body can—
—excuse me? Oh, sorry.
It’s been proven that externally-imposed sound vibrations can have a profound influence on our physiology. We’ve all experienced this phenomenon—it’s called entrainment. Say you’re sitting in your kitchen trying to balance your checkbook and you begin to notice that your shoulders are hunched up and your back is tighter than normal. Suddenly the refrigerator snaps off and you heave a sigh of relief. Your shoulders drop, your back loosens up, and your whole breathing pattern changes. What do you think just happened? Certain biological rhythms have unconsciously “entrained” themselves to the 60 cycle hum of the refrigerator’s motor.
Right—sound caused your body to temporarily alter itself from within.
Think you can bear with me for a minute or two while I bore you with some specifics?
No, Steve was the Music major. I was the Physics dude.
I was doing some research into the work of Hans Jenny. He was a Swiss doctor, artist, and researcher who helped pioneer the field of Cymatics—which is basically a very specified and intensely focused form of entrainment, geared toward using sound and vibrational waves to heal the human body. He followed the work of a German physicist and acoustician named Ernst Chladni who, toward the end of the 18th Century, created intricate sand patterns by vibrating a steel plate with a violin bow. Jenny employed the modern technology of the day to carry out more precisely replicable experiments. He used a sine wave generator and a speaker to vibrate various powders, pastes, and liquids, and succeeded in making visible the subtle power through which sound physically structures matter.
Now, imagine hearing a tone, and watching as sound waves involute an inert blob of kaolin paste, animating it through various phases in a nearly perfect replica of cellular division—or watching as a pile of sand is transformed into life-like flowing patterns, mirroring fractals—the symmetrical geometric forms found in nature—simply by audible vibration.
Jenny described our bodies as being “nested hierarchies of vibrational frequencies” which appear as discreet systems functioning within larger, more complicated systems, which themselves are contained within even larger and more complex vibrational structures, right? All physical existence is determined by vibrational frequencies and their formative effects on matter.
You can view the whole universe in this way, from sub-atomic particles to the most intricate life forms, to the nebulae and galaxies themselves—all are resonating fields of pulsating energy in constant interaction with one another. The science of it all aside, I find it profoundly moving to think that sound in all its forms might very well be the glue that holds our consensual reality together.
I was really excited about this when I was explaining it to Steve, and I didn’t want to bore him, so I started putting it in musical terms. The universe exists—beneath all or most other layers of perception—as essentially a vibrating-string note among a wild symphony of equally vibrating harmonic or non-harmonic quantum notes being played on similar strings—
—yes, like an orchestra. Exactly like an orchestra.
Steve asked me if it were possible to show him how this process worked, so he and I repeated one of Jenny’s early experiments. We placed a small wooden ring containing about 20 cc. of kaolin paste on top of a magnifying lens, then attached a crystal to the lens and applied a small sound current, creating a specific vibration... which can vary, depending upon the frequency or the current if you apply electricity directly. Just as a speaker vibrates, displacing air and creating specific sound waves according to the frequencies it’s subjected to, the vibrating crystal transmitted its oscillations from the sound current frequencies, through the lens, and directly into the paste sample. Light was projected up from beneath the lens, through the paste, and into a camera lens looking down from above. I was able to photograph the disturbances—the standing wave patterns—created in the paste as it vibrated in response to the sine waves—the music—to which it was subjected. Steve played some of his recent compositions on the cello, which was attached to the lens by a string of piano wire. A bit on the primitive side, I admit, but effective nonetheless. The moment was captured, then it was just a simple matter of instantly freezing the shape the paste assumed and encasing it in amber.
No, we didn’t freeze sound. We froze a specific instance of sound physically altering matter.
The next thing we did was even simpler. We ran the music through a basic computer visualizing program—you know, one of those extras that come bundled in with music playing software? Right. We decided to use the Fractal Pattern option, and I gotta tell you, the flow of images that accompanied the music was quite lovely. So now we had both the music and the fractal visualization for sensory input.
This really got us both going.
Steve had just finished a new composition—he hadn’t given it a title yet, he always sucked at titles, anyway—but he was stressing over it because something was missing. He kept lamenting how it was impossible to gauge a person’s emotional reaction to music, aside from what they themselves would tell you after hearing it.
I thought of Jenny and Chladni.
I thought of all the Cymatic equipment gathering dust in the Bioacoustics Department.
And I thought about how both Steve and I were in danger of losing our scholarships if we didn’t come up with a term-end project that would floor everyone.
Have you heard the piece of music that Steve composed for the initial phase of the experiment? No? Too bad—it’s a beautiful piece of work.
It begins with an acoustic guitar rhythmically picking out four simple notes, the sound of raindrops pinging against a cold autumn window, four austere notes that remain constant and never change, then builds in musical and emotional intensity, culminating in a three-minute finale where the guitar is joined and then replaced by an orchestra whose individual instruments compliment the underlying four-note foundation in the same way that wind, thunder, and lightning accompany a sudden spring downpour. The music is both glorious and sad, tinged at the edges with a certain disquieting darkness, an unnamable fear that we all experience during strong storms; as this section nears its end the four-note foundation suddenly stops, leaving only the melancholy musings of the other instruments, which mix into one another like the stray thoughts of one for whom the rhythm of the rain brings a sense of peace, but when robbed of that rhythm, when finding there is no longer the hypnotic pinging of those raindrops against the cold autumn window, is left to their own devices, slowly succumbing to the sadness and disquieting fear that the sound of the rain had helped them avoid facing. In these final moments one could close one’s eyes and easily picture the drab gray sky and the cheerless, soaked, bleak world.
Initially, we decided to use individuals, people we knew. They’d come into one of the acoustically-tiled rehearsal rooms and sit in a chair. I’d hook them up to the EKG and EEG machines, and then Steve would play a recording of the piece for them while the fractal program was projected through an LCD screen. The EKG and EEG machines would measure thei
r physiological reactions during the music while watching the LCD, and that was the extent of their participation.
After three or four people had done this, both Steve and I realized that, well, most of our friends had high blood pressure, for one thing, but more than that, there was no way to holistically quantify the results—at least, not the way we were doing it. All we had was a series of readouts to show how these people’s bodies reacted to the music, nothing to prove that Cymatic theory was even applicable.
Then Steve got this bright idea about incorporating synthesizers into the experiment. I had to do a lot of begging and fast talking to the Bioacoustics Department heads, and I have no idea what Steve said to the bigwigs of the Music Department, but we were both given access to the equipment we needed.
I got the use of an EEG- and EKG-measurement/interpreter that served as a conduit between the EEG and EKG machines and the synthesizer bank. The M/I had once been used for Cymatic experimentation—specifically the direct estimations of the main parameters of neurons—time constant of integration, level of internal noise, etc.—received by the cells, or for our purposes, the auditory reactions located on different levels—or in this case, the subjects—hooked up to the system.
I’m sorry, I’m getting off on a technical tangent. I’ll try to put it in simpler terms, but I make no promises. After all, I’m crazy, aren’t I?
The basic experiment remained unchanged. A subject would come into one of the rooms and we’d hook them up to the EEG and EKG machines and then have them listen to the music and watch the fractal program, only instead of just getting a simple readout of their physiological reactions during the music, those reactions were filtered through the M/I into the synthesizer’s computer where they were interpreted as an actual auditory event.
