Chapter 7: Composing the Exorcism

Chapter 7: Composing the Exorcism

He ran. He didn't know where he was going, only that he had to get away from the sight of Sarah’s vacant, smiling face and the horrifying sound of her soul’s whimpering death rattle. The world's music was a graveyard, and he was the only one who could hear the ghosts. Every person he passed was a potential carrier, a vector for the viral silence. The lazy acoustic strum of the man in the park, now tainted with a single note of Lilith's void, was a weapon that man didn't even know he carried.

The horrifying realization hit him with the force of a physical blow, stopping him dead in the middle of the sidewalk. It wasn’t just spreading. It was following him. He was the nexus. His unique perception, the very thing she had mocked him for, was the lens through which she viewed this world, the conduit for her infection. The people whose songs soured were the people who crossed his path, who entered his auditory field. She wasn't just a predator who had moved on; she was a parasite still latched onto his senses, using him as a mobile broadcast tower for her plague of fear. He was being hunted, not for consumption, but for use as a weapon.

The Deafman wasn't just a cruel nickname; it was a job description. He was making the world deaf with her silence.

There was only one place to go. Back to the source of the infection. Back to the tomb.

His apartment felt colder than ever, the August chill a permanent, biting frost that had settled deep into the plaster. The phantom whispers slithered from the corners, bolder now, sensing his terror. They were the sound of her, a distant echo of her power, mocking him from the void. The empty armchair by the window seemed to watch him, a throne waiting for its queen to return.

For weeks, he had been a victim, a haunted man reacting to a force beyond his comprehension. But the sight of Sarah's broken song had cauterized his fear, replacing it with a white-hot, diamond-hard rage. He looked at his guitars, not as tools for art or expression, but as the only weapons he had left. She operated in silence, in absence, in the sterile perfection of nothingness. He would fight her with the opposite. He would fight her with noise.

A frantic, desperate energy seized him. This room would no longer be a tomb; it would be a ritual chamber. A fortress. He grabbed his heavy bookshelf, muscles straining as he shoved it against the front door, the wood groaning in protest. The barricade was more symbolic than practical, but it was a declaration of intent. He was sealing himself in. He dragged his mattress over, jamming it into the gap at the bottom of the door to muffle any outside sound. He tore a bedsheet from the mattress and tacked it over the window, blocking out the dying afternoon light and the sight of the decaying city. He was creating a resonance chamber, a sealed vessel to contain the storm he was about to unleash.

He sat in the center of the now dim, claustrophobic room, his electric guitar in his hands, his small amplifier humming beside him. What music could fight a void? Not beauty; she consumed beauty. Not rage; she fed on the chaos of simple emotion. He had tried those and failed, becoming nothing more than a dull book she’d finished reading.

No, this had to be something else. Something she couldn't read, couldn't process. This music couldn't have a simple emotional narrative. It had to be the sonic equivalent of life itself—complex, dissonant, chaotic, and stubbornly, illogically persistent. It had to be the antithesis of her perfect, sterile silence.

His fingers found the strings. He didn't begin with a melody. He began with a chord, a jarring, unresolved cluster of notes that hung in the air like a question mark laced with a threat. It was the sound of anxiety, of a problem without a solution. Then he added another layer, a frantic, arpeggiated riff that climbed and fell without ever landing on a satisfying root note. It was the music of a system on the verge of collapse, a mathematical equation that refused to be solved.

He was composing an exorcism.

As he played, the phantom whispers in his head faltered. The constant, insidious hissing that had become the soundtrack to his life was pushed back by the wall of deliberate, complex noise he was creating. A flicker of triumph shot through him. It was working. He pressed on, his fingers flying across the fretboard, weaving together layers of discordant harmony and broken, syncopated rhythms. He was building a sonic ward, a fortress of sound around himself.

The room began to respond.

The single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered violently, in time with a particularly savage burst of notes. The unnatural cold in the room, which had been a constant, oppressive presence, now seemed to gather itself, deepening into a biting, razor-sharp frost that made his breath plume in the air. The temperature was fighting his music, the silence pushing back against the sound.

He ignored it, pouring more of himself into the composition. He thought of Sarah's whimpering flute, of the tarnished brass of the businesswoman's ambition, of the static infecting the teenager on the subway. He channeled all of it—the decay, the loss, the horror—and forged it into fuel. The music grew louder, wilder, a controlled chaos that filled every inch of the small apartment. It was the song of a world fighting for its life, a defiant scream into the abyss.

A stack of sheet music on his keyboard suddenly slid to the floor, the pages scattering as if struck by an invisible hand. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow in the corner of the room—a patch of darkness deeper than the rest—detach itself from the wall, stretch, and then retract.

The barrier was thinning. His music was not just a ward to repel her; it was a beacon, a challenge. He was plucking the strings of reality, and her realm, the one that existed in the silent spaces between the notes, was starting to vibrate in response.

He grinned, a feral, desperate expression. He was no longer the frightened musician. He was the Deafman, and he was cranking the volume to a level that the entire silent hell would be forced to hear. He took a deep breath, his fingers finding their place on the neck of the guitar. He wasn't just trying to protect himself anymore. He was picking a fight. He was calling her out.

Gathering every last scrap of his will, his talent, and his defiant rage, he struck a single, monumental power chord.

The sound was a physical force, a shockwave that slammed into the walls of the apartment.

The lightbulb didn't just flicker. It exploded, showering the room in a brief, brilliant flash of light before plunging it into near-total darkness, the only illumination the faint red glow from his amplifier.

The cold became absolute. A thin layer of frost instantly bloomed on the inside of the sheet-covered window. The scattered pages of sheet music on the floor stirred, lifting into the air and swirling in a miniature, silent vortex.

And from the corner of the room, from the direction of the empty armchair, came a new sound. It wasn't one of the phantom whispers. It was a low, deep groan, like the sound of a great and ancient hunger stirring from a long sleep. The ritual had worked. He had made a sound loud enough to get her attention. And now, she was coming.