October, 1943.
The last entry in the private record Miles Morgan kept — a record that no one else ever read, that was found in the ruins of the last standing structure in Hawthorn Creek in 1958 by a county surveyor who read two pages of it and then put it in a box and filed the box under miscellaneous and never thought about it again — reads as follows:
I played for her, and something heard me. That is the truth of it. The music was real and the love was real and none of that was sufficient protection, because the thing that heard me was older than love and larger than grief and it had been waiting for exactly the kind of vulnerability I provided.
My father warned me. I did not listen. I will not spend whatever remains of my life assigning blame for that. I know what I chose.
What I want to record, because I believe someone will need to know it someday, is this: the figure in the dreams was not alone. It was used. Deployed. Sent toward my particular weakness by something that had studied me carefully enough to know exactly what I could not resist.
The one who wore my face. The one who took Melissa from me before the fire, before the grief, before the dreams — before all of it. That was not the figure. That was something else. Something that can become anyone.
I have been thinking about this for months. About the sequence of it. The precision. About how a man would have to know — in advance, across a distance of years perhaps, looking at a family and a talent and a history — exactly which stone to move to start the avalanche.
Whoever gave the orders for what was done to this village did not do it for the music. The music was the method. The frequency is a weapon, and someone built it here, in this small place, with my hands.
I do not know who.
I do not know why.
But I believe they are not finished.
I believe this is one step in something much larger.
I believe someone, someday, will need to understand what happened here in order to stop what is coming.
I hope they find this.
I hope they are not too late.
The record ends there.
Below the last line, in a different ink — added later, the writing less steady — is a single additional sentence:
The music is still in me. I can hear it when it's very quiet, late at night, moving through the silence like something looking for a way out.
—---
Somewhere in 1942, two men watched from the shadows.
They had come a very long way to be there.
One of them could wear any face. He was wearing one now that was not his — had never been his. He watched the piano burn with the house, watched the smoke rise in the column of black against the Arizona sky, and said nothing.
The other was ordinary-looking. An ordinary face, an ordinary build, eyes that gave away nothing of what moved behind them. He was watching Miles run toward the smoke, and there was something in his expression that was not pleasure, exactly, and was not satisfaction, exactly, but was the particular quality of focus that belongs to someone watching a plan operate correctly.
"Will he do it?" the one who wore faces asked.
"Yes," said the ordinary man.
"How do you know?"
The ordinary man watched Miles disappear around the corner, toward the fire, toward everything he was about to lose.
"Because he loves her," he said. "And love is the most reliable lever there is, if you place it correctly."
"Alright we should be moving, let's go Adam"
He turned. He walked away from the burning house, away from the village, away from the desert.
He had other places to be.
Other plans in motion.
Other levers, placed correctly, waiting for the right weight to fall on them.
The frequency was born.
Everything else was only a matter of time.
END OF MELODY OF CARCASS
1990
My name's Jeremy Scott.
If you're hearing this in some evidence room, then either I guess I fcked up… or it got out.....
The story continues to Frequency 106.6