Lasciare Suonare

by Andrew Wilmot

This is a sample from Augur Magazine Issue 1.1. The full story can be read by purchasing the issue here.

The world screams day and night as villages, towns, entire cities are wiped clear from its surface. The extinguished souls are, in death, condemned to a realm of anti-sound. They form an ever-present wail, a white noise the shriek of catastrophe, as if the Earth’s tectonic plates are scraping against one another like the vertebrae of a spine fusing into an incapacitating knot.

The world screams, and Xian listens.

Now, at this moment, it’s the sounds of industry she hears: artifice coloured the grey of a construction site, the shade of mathematical precision and cost analysis at the backbone of any population centre. It is the thrum and rattle of cars; wind; birds chirping and dogs barking and people squawking but not actually saying anything. Their voices are a muddled slew of vowels creating the illusion of life, like the background movements of people on a busy street—extras in a film. It feels unreal, just a soundstage reproduction, drafted and compiled from another place, another time.

She continues up the narrow dirt path, a filthy cloth sack in her left hand, and heads toward the cacophony: thunder and rolling seas, voices vibrant and piercing, like hard rain through the tops of waves.

The clamour intensifies. Xian reaches up and switches off the hearing aid behind her right ear. Doing so immediately lessens her discomfort, quieting the chaos somewhat, though it muddies what she now hears with her good ear.

She stops then. Despite only hearing out of one ear, the sound has reached its apex, becoming bedlam, a wall of noise. She shuts her eyes, envisions a rainbow shattered into shrapnel several thousand times over, like prismatic static. Opens them again to see it there, just a few feet away, off the side of the path and in front of the pieces of a “Welcome to . . .” sign, and half-sheltered by overgrowth: the marker. It stands five feet tall, a tapered rectangular spire like an elongated headstone. Forged from granite, it has a metal faceplate inscribed with the name of the village and those who’d lived there at the time of its destruction. Surrounding the base of the spire, angled upward, are eight circular speakers inset into its surface—two on each side.

The marker, she reads, is from ten years past. It was erected weeks, maybe a month, after the Altro came through, smearing every surface with the remains of the villagers. Painting the town red, so to speak.

The noise crackles loudly, unpleasantly, like glass crunching underfoot, amplified a hundredfold. Xian kneels at the marker’s base, and clears leaves and dirt off the lower speakers. The change is instantaneous—the sounds come through clearly again. To Xian, though, the effect remains unconvincing; the aural construction rings false. Too much a soundtrack, not enough of a score. The town is a corpse, its memorial insincere.

She pays her respects and hurries on her way.

•••

It’s hours later and many miles more when Xian comes upon two travellers—a woman and a man—coming down the dirt path. The woman looks to be in her mid-thirties, with short black hair, and is dressed in military garb. She carries a rifle in her hands. The man beside her is more comfortable, wearing jeans and a dark jacket, with a large duffel slung over his shoulder. His face hides behind a patchy grey-and-black beard, but Xian can see his sour expression and sickly green-tinted complexion. He stares at the ground as Xian moves between them.

The soldier, passing on the right, says something to Xian, but her words are lost underwater.

Xian switches on her hearing aid. “Say again?”

“I said you don’t want to go up there.” The soldier nods in the direction from which they’ve come. “Nothing there you want to see. The Altro didn’t leave much.”

“It’s fine,” Xian says, and continues forward.

The man looks up. “Don’t you know you’re ’bout to walk into a—” He pauses to consider Xian: skin like ash-dark wood, hair a set of thick braids knotted at the back, the ends tucked into a kerchief around her neck. Clarity dawns like awe. “Christ, you’re her, ain’t you?”

“Her who?” the soldier asks.

“This here’s the Gravedigger. Xian.”

“She’s a Foley?”

“She’s in the trade, yeah. Practically a legend. Only, I ain’t had the pleasure.”

The soldier regards Xian, unimpressed. “Never heard of her.”

“It’s been less than a day,” says the man. “Horror’s still fresh.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Xian proceeds up the path. She hears the soldier start to say more, to warn or perhaps chide her for not taking them seriously, but she switches off her hearing aid again and trudges onward.

The response wasn’t as severe as she’s come to expect. Most soldiers and brigands have at least heard of her—enough, anyway, that they know to keep their distance and just let her do her job. It’s always worse when crossing paths with other Foleys, especially ones who consider themselves artisans and auteurs, who arrive on scene with their sounds pre-selected, as if every village, town, or city were the same, made of pieces that could be swapped out freely and with little repercussion to the accuracy of the scene. To Xian, their approach is inauthentic to the experience of documenting places as they’d been, before the Altro razed them.

The Foleys have made the destruction into industry.

They’ve made it artifice.

Xian had been twenty-three—fifteen years younger then—when the Altro first appeared. A junior Foley artist in the film industry, she had watched helplessly as the first wave of invaders swept effortlessly over the eastern nations, who were unprepared for the onslaught. She watched, too, as others like her—Foleys, all—developed the roles they would later play in the changed world. How they could take from their skill sets and histories, personal and professional, and adapt them. How they could go from creating illusions of the living world to memories of a dying one. Yet they remained only illusions; Xian wasn’t satisfied by their uncanny valley. She wanted more—she could do, can do more.

She crests a short hill and her destination comes into view: Sulchet. Once home to nearly two thousand, and emptied not a day earlier. Notice of the town’s destruction is spreading rapidly through back channels. Most Foleys prefer to wait upwards of a month before entering dead towns, allowing time for stagehands to clean out the worst of the viscera before starting work on their reconstructions. This also affords them time to investigate their locations, readying soundscapes like selecting puzzle pieces from a bin, sticking them together in hopes that the image created will serve, to someone, as adequate memory.

Xian doesn’t like to wait. She wants to capture what’s left of a location before its echoes vanish.

Echoes remain like footprints in sand, fading slowly, until swept over by the tide of time. The military spent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars investigating the auralstatic residue left behind after every attack only to discover, to their horror, that what endured in the wake of each assault wasn’t a key to understanding who the Altro were or what they wanted. What endured…the auralstatic residue that remained was the people they left behind, or their imprints, anyway. The last moments of the dead smudging the air.

As she approaches the homes on the town’s boundary, Xian spots the piecemeal remains of towering steel shield generators resembling enormous antennae, once having arced high over the town. Now they’re shattered slabs of skin from enormous mechanical serpents, which had flattened homes and other buildings when they’d fallen. The ground in and around their bases is hollowed out—the townspeople hadn’t imbedded the generators deep enough into the earth to withstand an attack from below. The Altro would have had no difficulty toppling them, digging down just far enough to crack the town’s outer energy shell.

Xian climbs over the broken shaft of one of the generators. The stench of mud, gunpowder, and scorched flesh is overpowering. She lifts the kerchief from around her neck and covers her mouth before proceeding past a row of houses, shops, and a general store abuzz with flies and rats and other vermin. Xian suppresses the urge to peer inside as she passes. She continues on.

Around the broken fountain at the centre of town, bodies rest atop one another in various states of obliteration, their positions indicating the font as the origin of the Altro’s null-sonic detonation. The blast shredded the bodies of the townspeople in an ever-widening circle, orbiting the point of detonation. In the near-silence, only the sounds of running water—and blood, likely some blood—trickling into and around the destroyed fountain can be heard.

Xian opens her cloth sack and removes a micro SD card. She takes off her hearing aid, pops open a small slot at the top, and inserts the card. Next, she takes out a svelte black rubber glove with electrodes sewn down the length of each finger and across the palm. She slips it on, then takes a wire extending from the motherboard at her wrist and connects it to a port along the top edge of her hearing aid, which she places back behind her ear and switches on.

Sound rushes in, but a different kind than what came from other Foley’s speakers. Atop the rustling of nature and the soft pfft of sparks from the decimated shield generators, she can hear a low purple hum like a clothes dryer digitized. She raises her hand and the noise sharpens, becomes pink, then red. She lifts it above her head and hears voices rising from the ether, oranges and yellows crawling up out of the dirt they lie buried in. They speed up and stop with the pitch and yaw of her movements, as if scrubbing an audio file.

Xian inhales deeply, her fingers twitching. Every motion causes her insides to rattle as the echoes of the dead surge through the glove like verbal electroshock. The fear of their last moments barrels in, transforming the world around her into a livid, neon bruise. Circling the fountain, and careful of the flood of gore at her feet, she hears individual words vibrating above the din, voices and people murmuring from their own spatial-temporal pockets. She walks toward them and, gradually, words become sentences, paragraphs…entire conversations cohere like aural kaleidoscopes. She pinches the air, selecting individual tones, tugging at threads of conversations. They are rendered clearer and more opaque the farther she walks. She moves from the centre of town to its western perimeter a hundred yards away, to a small house situated there, at the edge—the point at which all lines appear to intersect.

At the house, Xian is positive she’s discovered the source of the town’s entanglement—the axis around which its populace had revolved. She opens the door and is forced back as dialogues soar past her, flying off in all directions. She shuts her eyes, watches the vibrations—words, lives—of every colour and shade that thread the bruise, a scar stitched along the open wound of the townspeople’s terror.

She enters the house, her hand treading the air, searching, making a fist around each unique voice until she’s able to discern the clearest in the room. Located two feet above the seat of a short wooden chair at the kitchen table, the voice is bright like daylight. Xian pulls from her sack a telescoped metal rod. She flicks a switch and a stake extends. She drives its daggered base through the seat of the chair and a light atop the Schlieren Wave Net starts blinking red.

Like the glove, the Wave Net had been created to harness something from the Altro that the governments of the world could use to defeat them. Now, its primary use is to record sound waves from the strongest point of entanglement—the echo to which all others were once drawn.

Xian removes the glove and yanks the cord from her hearing aid, and the town dies a second death as everything goes dark and quiet. She presses her palm to her left eye to still the rhythm section in her head. The migraine is blossoming, tremorous, as if tinnitus were somehow pressurized.

She leaves then. Others will find her beacon, the Wave Net recording the echoes of the dead for as long as they remain. That’s where they’ll build their false monument and bid their farewells.

For now, she lets the echo ring.

Continued in Augur Magazine Issue 1.1 . . .