The City from the choir (Short story - Horror )

This was inspired by a Minecr.aft ARG - Searching for a world that doesn't exist - which itself took inspiration from an 18th century novel (or perhaps a play or musical) 

TW - Horror genre

The city from the choir

The studio air still smells of spilt beer and ozone, and a thousand burned out circuits. My first official session with The Basalt Theorem - TBT.  I’m their hired gun brought in to replace Joshua, their bassist who according to the guitarist Leo “went full cra.ckp0t"  and according to the drummer Chloe “just couldn’t handle the volume inside his own head.”

They’re polite but distant, a unit of three that’s sealed over a wound. The details are hazy, muttered over whis.kies...  hallucinations, ranting about “broadcast signals,” a final, incoherent email about “the anthem of the angles.” They think it was bad acid or maybe just the genetic lottery finally cashing a bad cheque. Im just here to lay down a solid groove and collect a pay cheque.

Im setting up my gear, syncing my tablet to their ageing studio computer. Leo says “Josh left a bunch of junk on the hard drive. We havent touched it. Can’t bring ourselves to wipe it. Maybe you’ll find something useful.”

It’s a gesture, an offering to the new bloke.

Most of it is junk... tempo maps named after constellations, hundreds of bass takes that subtly drift out of tune, field recordings of underground tunnels. Then I find a folder labelled C A C O P H O N Y. Inside, a single audio file: source_vocal_take_1.wav.

No project file, no stems.

I press play.

The music is… not what I expected.

It’s not the chugging post metal TBT plays. It’s minimalist, eerie. A bed of shifting, harmonic static, like a radio tuned between stations, but pulsing with a strange, arrhythmic heartbeat. And a voice. Joshua’s voice, I assume, but processed, layered, whispering and singing at once—hauntingly, devastatingly beautiful. It hurts to listen to.

Then I hear the lyrics.

“Remember the weight of the sun on the pier, when the water showed you your other face, clear…”

A cold needle slides down my spine.

I do remember.

I’m seven years old, on a weathered wooden pier that collapsed decades ago. The sun was a physical pressure. I leant over the green water, and for a second, the reflection wasn’t mine—it was older, terrified, mouth open in a silent scream. I’d buried that. A childhood nightmare, lost for thirty years.

“The static in the nursery, the lullaby from the wall, the voice that promised you’d never, ever fall…”

My breath stops. The static. My old baby monitor, a constant pink noise. I told my parents a nice lady sang to me from it. They laughed, called it an imaginary friend. I haven’t thought of it since I was four.

Line after line. The feel of my dog’s fur the hour she di.ed, a specific, forgotten shade of blue in my grandmother’s kitchen, the exact taste of a cough medicine I had at age five.

Impossible.

I feel the world tilt.

I listen on loop, in my headphones, in my car, each pass unearthing another buried shard of me—a forgotten birthday disappointment, the smell of a long demolished cinema. It’s an aut0psy of my subconscious, set to the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.

The band notices. Chloe looks at me with pity. “You’re going grey around the eyes, man.”

I have to find Joshua.

 The band hasn’t seen him in six months. He vanished after sending that final email. I scour his socials, dead ends. I call his listed number, disconnected. Then, in the studio computer’s recycle bin, I find a deleted text file. A single line, dated the day he disappeared: “I went to see the city they sing about.”

The city they sing about. The “they” in his lyrics. The voices.

I start hearing the static everywhere... in the hum of my refrigerator, the white noise of my shower, the rush of traffic.

Using producer forums and old band contacts, I piece together a trail.

Psychiatric hold, release, then a one way bus ticket to a decaying, post industrial city... a place Joshua called home.

I found Joshua’s flat on the edge of the city, a third floor walk-up above a shuttered pharmacy. The landlord, a weary woman with no interest in mystery, took my cash and handed me the key. “He said he was coming back. Left everything. Artists,” she sighed, as if that explained both the mess and the madness.

The place was surprisingly tidy, spare, almost monastic. No obvious signs of psychosis, no scribbled manifestos on the walls. Just books on architectural theory, radio astronomy, and a shelf of vintage sci-fi paperbacks.

And then, in the small sitting room, on a massive sheet of plywood supported by sawhorses, I saw it.

His city.

It was a model, breathtaking in its intricacy.

Not a fantasy metropolis, but something hauntingly familiar. It was built from scrap... circuit boards became plazas, jagged shards of mirror formed lakes, coaxial cables snaked like motorways. Tiny LED lights, de.ad now, dotted the landscape. The buildings were made from carved plaster, textbook covers and pieces of old guitars. They leant at unsettling, fluid angles in a way that felt like a different set of rules. 

I stared at it for maybe twenty minutes, tracing the impossible avenues with my eyes. The silence in the flat was absolute.

Then I laughed.

A sharp, relieved bark that echoed in the empty space.

Of course. This was it.

The grand delusion of a broken mind.

What was I even doing here? Chasing ghosts in a madman’s flat.

I drove home that night, the weight lifting with each mile.

The familiar smell of stale coffee and carpet cleaner the next day was a relief.

In the studio, the glow of LED meters, the quiet tension of a band trying to capture lightning in a bottle. They were re-tracking “Labour of love,” a song they’d been wrestling with for weeks. Leo’s guitar was a wall of precise fury, Chloe’s drums a tectonic pulse. My job was to lock it down, to be the anchor.

We took a break. Chloe slumped on the sofa, scrolling her phone, the silver cross on her necklace catching the overhead light. We talked about nothing... the weather, a new plugin, the terrible coffee.

“Alright, let’s run it down from the top,” Leo said rolling his shoulders. “Chloe, you’re sure about that fill before the second chorus?”

“I’m sure. Lets just do it.”

We slipped our headphones on. The click track counted in. The music surged.

We hit the second chorus and Chloe leant into her mic, her voice cutting through the mix with raw, clean force:

“And the promises won’t hold, when the love bends! The beginning and end...”

As she sang the word “end,” the light from the control room hit the polished silver of her cross at a perfect angle.

It flared—a sudden, starburst point of blinding white light, like a tiny, captured sun.

I flinched, closing my eyes against the retinal burn.

When I opened them, the music was gone.

And I was standing in the middle of a wide, dust-blown boulevard under a searing sun.  I gasped, the heat immediate and shocking on my skin.

I turned.

And I saw it.

It stretched around me to a bleached, impossible horizon. Towers of rusted steel and pockmarked concrete rose in those same familiar, gravity defying curves. The plazas were vast expanses of shattered tile that mimicked the circuit boards. The coaxial motorways hummed with a sub-audible vibration I could feel in my teeth.

I was in the city.