Symphony of Humanity
Warning: This story contains violent, graphic content.
I am the conductor, and I love the sound of your screams.
I awake in the forest just as the sun is setting. Moisture from the afternoon showers still lingers in the cold evening air. Water droplets fall from the leaf-less branches of autumn, and land on the wet earth below. Squirrels and rabbits scurry through brown and yellow leaves that litter the ground.
Birds sit on the gray wooden branches, and I listen to their songs as the sun sinks below the horizon. I like their little songs. We don’t have anything like them where I come from. We do have birds, but they don’t have mouths. Nothing has mouths where I come from.
I walk to a stream where a family of deer drinks. They don’t mind me. The animals needn’t fear me. I look down at my reflection, and begin to get myself ready. Staring up at me from the water is a short, muscular figure in a black suit. A black bowtie hangs over the white shirt under the black jacket. At the sides hang long black tentacles, in place of arms. Sprouting from the back are six other tentacles that wiggle in the autumn air.
And the face; a face that has sent a chill through the collective spine of humanity, the face that stares out at you from old photographs and computer screens, the face scoffed at by some, talked about in hushed whispers by others. My face.
It’s bald, a sickly beige color. In place of a nose there is merely a smooth bump. Instead of eyes there are shallow gray sockets. And no mouth of course. I can still see and smell, for my species possesses senses and abilities unheard of to humans. But speech is not one of them.
I tighten up my bowtie, smooth out some wrinkles on the jacket. The bald, blank face in the stream nods, and I’m ready to go.
I look up and watch as the sun finishes its descent, dousing the light of the day. The moon, flanked by an army of stars, rises up, and lords over the night. An owl hoots and a wolf howls. The symphony of the forest.
But I can’t let myself be distracted. I have to get ready for the evening’s concert.
Back where I’m from, the world without mouths, I was quite the music aficionado. I’d haunt the concert halls and theaters, and listen endlessly, to the music that seemed to flow so effortlessly from the players on the stage and in the pit. I loved the balance of it all; the way the instruments all came together, to create emotion through sound. Through those sounds I felt joy, sorrow, anger, hate, love, fear; all that could be felt, poured from the stage.
But despite all their talent, and they were talented, I always felt something was missing; something which prevented the music from reaching the emotional peaks which I craved, and which great music strives to achieve. I became a musician partially because I wanted to try and solve this problem. It wasn’t until after performing numerous times, that I’d finally figured it out. It was proxy; all of the emotion was expressed through a proxy.
The musicians expressed their emotions and feelings through brass and strings, and not through their own being. This was to be expected; my people have no way to make sounds naturally. The emotions that we feel are simply forced to remain bottled up inside, or be expressed in distilled form through instrument. Such was the shortcoming of our race.
But your world is different. I still remember the day I first walked on your soil, and beheld the music of your world. The sounds of the animals sent shivers through my very being, and awakened me to the wonder and beauty of vocalization.
My next shock came when I stumbled upon your concert halls, and heard the passion of your singers. Notes and melodies of anger, sorrow, fear, expressed not through proxy with some tool, but through a natural organ, more pure than any sound I’d ever heard in my life.
Sulking in the shadows of your auditoriums, I heard some of the best singers your world had to offer. My heart ached at the magical sounds that radiated from the souls of those singers.
But even with all that, I still wasn’t satisfied.
The singers I’d heard sang with passion, but it was a tamed passion. The best vocalists of your world practiced and honed their singing abilities. But in the process, they also defanged them. They drained from their vocal cords the innate animal purity within, and replaced it with a refined mechanical sound. Produced, uninspired, lifeless; everything that is not art.
I saw the potential of your beautiful voices being squandered and misused, and I yearned to see some example of a truly pure performance, one unhindered by pretentious polish.
Then I heard your screams.
The first time was by accident. I was simply walking through the forest, basking in the blue white light of your moon, when I heard a sound like twigs being crushed under foot. I turned around to see a small face illuminated by a lantern.
It was a little girl, who’d wandered into the forest from a nearby farm. For several quiet moments, we stared at each other. I was frozen in fear that this child had found me. It was the first time a human had seen me, and I dreaded to think what would happen next.
Then the child shrieked. It was a high-pitched, earth-shattering sound. I felt it vibrate in my chest and legs. It reverberated off the trees, and consumed by entire being.
Suddenly the sound stopped. I was left reeling from the onslaught of emotion. My tentacles were quivering, and my legs struggled to support my weight. A euphoric dizziness came over me.
“Papa!” the girl screamed. She dropped her lantern, and began to sprint through the forest, back the way she’d come. I couldn’t let her leave, not yet.
As fast as I could, I chased after her. It wasn’t long before I’d caught up with her; you humans are so slow. I grabbed her by her small arms, and held her while she wailed.
“Papa!” she shouted.
No, no, I thought. That wasn’t the sound. I didn’t want her fear to be filtered through language, didn’t want its bestial honesty to suffocate behind the machinations of civilized society. I tightened my grip around her arms. Within my grasp, I felt the tiny bones of her arms break under her skin. The cracking sound they made was quickly drowned out by her screams that shot from her like a concentrated stream of pain and misery.
It washed over me in a great wave that made me tremble. This was it! This was the music that was unconstrained by something outside the body. This was the purest music there was.
“Momma!” she cried through screams of agony. I couldn’t let it stop. I began to wrap some other tentacles around her kneecaps, when I heard more footsteps coming through the forest. I dropped her to the ground and ran away.
The sounds of her screams receded into the night, before disappearing altogether. I sat curled up in the branches of a tree, rocking back and forth, unable to take my mind off the torrent of emotion swimming in my head. If I’d had eyes, I’d have wept.
That night was just the beginning. Since then, I’ve sought out more humans, taking them into the woods, and experimenting with them. I tried different combinations of pain stimuli: two broken bones, one broken leg, two broken arms with two broken legs, punctured organs, removed body parts, and everything in-between.
I also started experimenting with more than one human. One human is too weak, but anymore than five and it becomes too impersonal. I found four to be the perfect number.
Although I’ve spent the better part of a century just experimenting, playing around with this new, beautiful instrument, it’s only been recently that I felt comfortable doing a proper performance. I’d spent months practicing beforehand. The rehearsals proved difficult for two reasons.
First, I constantly had to replace the instruments. You humans can be very delicate. It took me a little while to sort out your limits.
Second, I had to keep moving. People tend to avoid a forest after finding two or three or twenty bodies.
And so it was for many years, me moving from place to place, practicing my art, honing my skills, all for this moment; the moment I give my symphony.
As the sun sets, I leave my forest to collect my instruments. Like I said, I need four; two men, two women. They have to be adults; young but not too young, experienced but not too experienced. An equal mixture of youthful innocence, and mature bitterness would be needed for the perfect performance. Finding suitable instruments won’t be difficult, it never is.
The first two wander into the forest of their own accord. A male and female, strolling under the canopy of crooked branches, on a path of dirt and twigs. They walk very close to each other, cautiously looking around every corner of every tree they pass.
They are a lovely young couple. The girl is a tall, skinny thing, with long black hair that’d been tied in a ponytail. She wears a white t-shirt, khaki shorts, and black boots. Her hands are locked with those of her male companion. He is a little chubby, with a more round face. His attire is less sporty than his companion; blue jeans and white sneakers.
Their hands shaking, they follow the beam of their flashlight, looking for something to break the monotony of their rigid civilized existence. They got me.
From behind trees, and from the branches, I watch them. I listen to the sound of their slow breathing, to the frightened mumbles under their breaths. I can see dread and terror in their faces. These instruments would be well-tuned. I don’t need to do too much more work with them. All I need to do is catch them.
They walk under the branch I sit on. I lower myself to the ground and wrap my tentacles around their shoulders. They don’t stop screaming until they lose consciousness.
I leave them in the forest to sleep. I still have a few hours before they wake. More than enough time to find two more.
I have to leave the forest to find the other two. There is a little town that sits just outside the woods. It’s a quiet place, isolated from the rest of the world by dozens of miles of farmland. Aside from the prescription drug abuse, corrupt city officials, and xenophobia, nothing much happens here. I’m the most interesting thing to happen to this community in quite some time. It’s not every day that a famous avant-garde musician comes for a visit. They should welcome me with open arms, appoint a committee to greet me, beg to be used as an instrument in my grand performance. But a willingness to participate would delude the purity of the performance, would it not?
It’s the middle of the night when I hear footsteps. Down an empty street, I spot a young woman. A black tank top, ripped blue jeans, stringy black hair that had been dyed blonde. Her face was haggard for such a young body, and it was covered in caked-on make-up. The face of lost innocence.
The stench of liquor and weed pervade her being, as she stumbles down the street. It’s late. I wonder if her mother ever warned her about the strange men that prowl the streets at night. I don’t think she had this strange man in mind.
I take care of her quickly, and go to a small house. Through its windows, I see my final instrument. A young man, stuck in front of a computer, pouring over obscure facts, and erotic videos. He fancies himself a writer, and desires to write a story about me, based on my legend, that has spread across the globe on fiber optic cables. He’ll have more than enough material for such a story. Too bad he won’t live to write it.
I stand outside his window, peering inside. He has such an active imagination. I can sympathize. All artists have active imaginations; it is that quirky part of our nature that allows us to think beyond the limits of human understanding and vision. It has allowed me to see the limits of traditional musical instruments, and become the artist I am today. It is what allows this young man to imagine people and worlds in his stories. It is what will make him nervously glance up from his computer, as he writes his frightful story.
I only need to wait a few seconds, before he looks up and turns to his window. His eyes go wide, and he lets out a beautiful scream.
He darts out of the room, almost tripping over the threshold. I break his window, and climb over the broken glass. He is halfway to his front door, when I catch him.
I wrap my tentacles around his body; tightly but not too tightly. I don’t want to cause pain just yet. One of them wraps around his mouth to quiet his screaming, as much as it pains me to do so. I press my blank, featureless face against his face.
I feel his screams intensify under my tentacle. The feeling of an otherworldly face so close to yours is an assault on the senses; exactly the effect I need to achieve. The human psyche is not normally used to such shocks, and when confronted with something so alien, so strange, and so singularly inhuman, it has no choice but to spare its mind from this attack, and simply shut down.
It isn’t long before the young man faints in my arms. I carry him back to the forest. The others are waiting there.
The area where I will be holding tonight’s performance is a clearing. I regret that no one will be able to watch the show, but I believe that most theater lovers wouldn’t be able to appreciate the frankness of my little number. Over-education in the musical arts has made philistines of them all anyway. Let them hide behind their bourgeois ways, and pretentious techniques. The avant-garde have no use for such things.
I arrange them all in a circle around me; one behind me, one in front, one on the left, and another to the right. I stand in the center, my tentacles spreading out to touch them. I pin them to the ground and shake them awake. Soon they begin to squirm within my grasp, and call out to the forest.
“Help! Somebody help!” The curly haired young man screams.
“Please let us go!” his black-haired companion begs.
“Get the fuck off me!” the blonde-haired girl shrieks, in a voice both hoarse and shrill.
The one who fancies himself a writer asks me, his voice quivering as he does so, “What do you want?”
Sounds of fear hiding behind meaningless, restrictive language. It is time for the real song to begin.
I start with the curly-haired boy. I wrap my tentacles around his index finger, and bend it backwards at the middle knuckle. A frightened howl pierces the night, stunning the other three into silence. The first note of the symphony has been played.
The black-haired girl is next. As the howl of the curly-haired boy dies down, I gently lift up the girl’s shirt, revealing her naval. Quickly, I insert one of my tentacles in, and burrow through her stomach. My tentacle slithers through her body, until I enter her lower intestines. There, I shake my tentacle, thrashing it about. Her cries intrude upon the night soon after.
The blonde is next. I move more slowly with this one. Gently, with the very tip of a tentacle, I grip a canine in the front of her mouth, and pry it loose. High-pitched, raspy cries shoot out through a blood soaked mouth.
The artist is last. I move my tentacle through his thick, unkempt brown hair, grab a clump, and rip it off, bits of blood dripping from where it was plucked from the scalp. An angry defiant cry rises from him.
So it went. For the rest of the night, I inflicted every pain I could conceive of, eliciting screams as the pluck of a string elicits a twang. Sharp pieces of wood jammed under finger nails, knee caps crushed under rocks, eyelids ripped from the face by fingerless arms.
At one point, the blonde girl stops screaming. I investigate, and see that she is drowning on the blood that’s pouring from her increasingly toothless gums. I flip her over so she lies on her stomach. There is a wet sputtering sound, as a small pool of blood falls to the ground, then a gasping scream. The show will go on.
Eyeballs are sliced open. I do my best to stay away from the torso and the neck. I don’t want to interfere with their breathing; otherwise the whole show would’ve been for naught.
It’s a challenge, but I’m able to go a good five minutes before outright amputation. Ears peeled off, fingers twisted in a spiral, until they simply snap off the hand.
The sounds of the forest have been replaced with a chorus of shrieks, cries, and howls that shake the leaves from the trees, and shock the animals into silence. It echoes through the ground, and soars to the sky above. It strangles my ears, and causes me to tremble. It is the purest sound I’ve ever heard in my life; so raw, so ugly.
Yes. Pain, fear, suffering. Yes. This is it. The truth. This is what society, what civilization and manners try to hide. This is what cannot be expressed through lifeless proxy instruments, what language suppresses. This is what truly lies within all beings! This is what I have set free! The symphony of humanity!
The glorious symphony ends after only fifteen minutes. The forest remains silent, as it reels from the horror it has witnessed. I am the same.
My four instruments lie in their circle around me, crippled, eyeless, limbless, hairless, toothless husks, with scars that will never heal.
I rest on all-fours. I am exhausted. I feel drained, as though all the stress and anxiety inside me, all the emotional baggage that inevitably builds up in one’s life, has been lifted from me. After years and years of practice, rehearsals, false starts, botched performances, I have completed my masterpiece. My tentacles, wet with blood, throb with sadness after the performance. I look up at my poor ravaged instruments.
The agonized screams of moments ago have been replaced with soft whimpers, and slow breathing. Slowly, I reach out my tentacles, and gently hold their hands.
I want to thank them all for this, want to thank them for helping me to create the purest, greatest symphony, express the darkest, deepest, most painful feelings, a sentient being can endure.
And I want to say I’m sorry.
Humanity isn’t just pain and misery. There are other sounds to make, other songs to sing. Songs of joy, sorrow, anger, confusion. But I can only play the songs of pain and fear. They are the easiest after all.
I would say all these things, but for my lack of speech. If I could speak, and had organs and bodily mechanisms for vocalization, I’d sing. I’d sing songs of anger at the pretentious bourgeois, who destroy the arts on a daily basis. I’d sing songs of joy, at the wonderful things this world has to offer. And right now, I’d sing a song of sorrow, for the four sacrifices to the arts that lie around me.
But I can’t do any of those things. Instead, I thank them the only way I can. I let go of their hands, and move up to their necks. They don’t squirm as I do this. I wrap my appendages around their necks, and wait until my grip is tight. The cracking sound that follows is loud and quick. Their suffering ends. That is the only thanks I can give them.
I’d already prepared graves beforehand. I carry them one by one to their final resting places. I know this means their families may never find them, but I think its best they don’t see them like this.
I bury them, and leave their graves unmarked. After that, I spend the night strolling through the woods, a cold emptiness beginning to take hold. After fulfilling my greatest desire, I am uncertain as to what to do now. I’ll probably just practice for a little while, experiment with other techniques, and maybe do a public performance with a captive audience. And maybe I’ll eventually teach myself those other songs. Maybe.
The sounds of the forest come back, and I listen to them until dawn. I then find a nice big tree with lots of leaves in it. I climb inside, and drift off to sleep, trying not to think of the lonely, uncertain future ahead of me.
I am the conductor, and I love the sound of your screams.
This story can also be found in the short fiction collection of the same name, available here
