Have you ever heard the sound a heart makes when it beats outside of its calcified prison?

I find it quite intoxicating, really. There is no deep, rumbling rhythm from deep within layers of sinew and tissue. These things are irrelevant to the music-maker within every living creature. It sounds, I imagine, how whale-song might sound if one had the privilege of isolating such a mythic beauty from the impure, sonic warper we treat with such reverence. There is no nobility in that, in treating the deepest and untraversable places as if they are holy.

Music is art, and art is the sufferance of all that humanity that builds up in one’s bloodied and beating circuit, that corporeal labyrinth for which anguish has no escape but through little shocks to the brain and the performances of the body.

None of it, however, is true art.

It is the false and blasphemous marrying of the internal and external actions, the treatment of the spiritual as, not a mental affliction, but a manifestation of the inner workings of one’s corporeal machine.

No, dear reader: the truest and purest expression of humanity is the exposure of life itself. A heart torn from its marionette strings, eyes and brain freed from their Cassandrean circuit loop of interpreting everything into legible translation for their human masters. The simple existence of the body without philosophy: hands without occupation, lungs without life, man and woman sexless and holy, made anew once devoid of that animal-cycle which dictates the functions of a system too vast, too beautiful to be understood.

You will find, I think, that I am not the monster you have already begun to imagine. My name is Dr. Alistair Venn, though names are little more than conveniences of the social machine I have long since outgrown. Once, I was a man of some esteem, frequenting lecture halls with minds who believed themselves my equals. Unlike them, I studied anatomy as a listener. Where others saw function, I sought resonance.

My undoing began, as these things often do: with a mistake. A patient expired upon my table during what was meant to be a routine observation. There was nothing remarkable in the death itself, for the ever-turning wheel of mortality had completed yet another revolution in my presence. What arrested me was what followed. Silence. Not the absence of sound, as you understand it. This was a cessation, a vanishing of something immeasurable. The body lay open before me, its architecture exposed, its mechanisms stilled. And yet, something had fled. Something that had once imbued each beat, each tremor, with a quality I can only describe as intention. I had heard it before, of course, that low, ceaseless rhythm buried beneath flesh and bone. But I had never considered its absence.

You see, it is not the beating of the heart that fascinates me. It is the quality of its sound when divorced from its prison. When freed from the dampening, corrupting influence of the body’s systems, it becomes something purer. Unburdened by the labours of purpose, it becomes something true and clear. I pursued that truth with a diligence that cost me everything I had once been. My colleagues, how quickly they recoiled! How eagerly they named me aberration, heretic, butcher--their outrage was almost touching. They clung so fiercely to the illusion that the body is sacred, that its processes must remain unseen, unchallenged. As though ignorance were a form of virtue.

I left them to their sanctimony.

Here, in this place, this cathedral of my own design, I am free to continue my work without interruption. You would not appreciate its architecture, I suspect. Most do not. The walls are lined with instruments whose purposes would elude you, waiting as if they, too, await revelation.

Do not mistake me: I do not kill for pleasure. Pleasure is a crude and fleeting thing, tethered to the same animal cycles I have spent my life dismantling. What I seek, dear, is far more refined. I seek to isolate the moment in which life ceases to be a systemic circuit of functions and processes, and becomes something else entirely, contained within itself. An expression. You may wonder why I address you so directly. Why I draw you into this confidence, as though you were seated across from me as an equal. I know the antiseptic stings your nose, I had become numb to the scent months prior.

It is because you are already implicated. You have listened, have you not? You have considered the possibility that what I describe is not madness, but clarity. That beneath your own ribs, there is something waiting to be understood. Do not recoil now. That would be dishonest.

Do you hear it?

How remarkable, that you have lived your entire life in its presence, and yet never truly listened.

He came to me on a damp afternoon. I suppose most might call it dismal. He certainly was--a twig of a boy, his shoulders hunched like they carried the world, dressed in a jumper twice the size of him and a worn-out wool cap, out of which peeked unevenly chopped strands of blond hair. He knocked at the cracked door like he wanted to bring down the entire building. When I answered it, he glared up at me--as if I were a disappointing sculpture that couldn't live up to its acclaim.

"I'm sorry, my dear boy, but we're currently--"

He cut over me with no small impatience, "Alistair Venn, right?" He went on without waiting for an answer. He was an arrogant young lad, there could be no doubt. "You posted in the paper. You're a scientist, aren't you?"

It was less a question and more a prompt for confession.

I deliberated, then asked carefully, "Supposing my publishings were anything more than fiction. What would that have to do with you?"

"It's not fiction. I can tell just standing here. You hear it too." He considered his own words, then amended, "Well, you hear a whisper of it. Anyway, if you can hear it, then you can help me, right?"

"Help you with what, my boy?"

He lifted his gaze to mine--a gaze void of all those simple, animalistic qualities people call 'human'. A clear gaze.

"That sound you chase after. I've heard it since I was born. I want you to make it stop."

That was how I came to meet Arthur Mayfield.