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.

Arthur, I had found, was wise beyond his year. In body, he appeared to be fourteen, malnourished, skinny with bones sticking up and out of his joints like skeletal valleys. In mind, however, he was far older than that. Older than human years, I would wager. Older than me. As I led him into the drawing room, calling for Hilda to stoke the fire and fetch my guest coffee, he looked around not with the awe I would expect from an impoverished youth, but with simple recognition. He took his place on the chaise longue without ceremony, no awe, no respect.

I quite liked him.

As I sat across from him, one leg draped over the other, I produced a small note-book from my pocket. "I should like to begin," I said, pen poised above the page, "with a simple question. When you say you have heard it since birth, what precisely do you mean by ‘heard’?"

Arthur did not answer at once. Hilda entered then, silent as ever, placing a chipped porcelain cup upon the table between us. The coffee trembled slightly in its saucer as Arthur balanced it upon his lap. He did not thank her, did not so much as look at her. His attention remained fixed upon something just behind my left shoulder.

"It’s not like hearing you speak," he said at last. "Or hearing a kettle whistle. It’s… underneath that. Like all of that is just noise sitting on top of it."

"Go on."

"It doesn’t stop," he continued, frowning slightly, as one might frown at a persistent insect. "Even when I sleep, it doesn’t stop. It just… changes shape, it gets louder, or changes direction, or gets closer."

My pen moved quickly now. "And this presence," I asked, "does it seem to originate from within your own body?"

At this, Arthur’s gaze snapped to mine. For the first time, there was something like emotion in it, a sharp, almost offended disbelief. "It’s not in me," he said, slower now, as if explaining something painfully obvious to a dull student. "It’s in everything else."

"You perceive it externally," I murmured.

"I perceive it more than anyone else seems to," Arthur replied.

I allowed myself a small smile. "Very well. Then tell me, Arthur, if it is not bound to the body, not confined to the heart or its mechanisms… what is it you believe you are hearing?"

Arthur leaned back into the chaise, the springs protesting faintly beneath his slight weight. He lifted the cup of coffee, sniffed it once, and set it back down untouched.

"I don’t know what it is," he admitted. "I just know what it does."

"And what is that?"

His fingers tapped once, twice, against the armrest, an arrhythmic pattern, impatient in its measuredness.

"It fills the gaps," he said, fingers still dancing across the wood. "When someone stops talking, it’s there. When a room goes quiet, it’s there. When someone dies—" His fingers stilled. "—it gets clearer."

My pen stopped. "Clearer," I repeated.

Arthur nodded. "Like something stopped getting in the way."

I found myself studying the boy more closely now: the pallor of his skin, the faint tremor in his hands, the unnatural stillness that overtook him between movements, as though he were listening even now.

"You see," I said slowly, "most would find such an experience… distressing."

Arthur let out a short, humourless breath. "That’s because most people don’t have to hear it all the time."

"And you wish for it to cease."

"Yes."

I closed the notebook.

"And you believe I am capable of accomplishing this."

Arthur’s lips twitched, not quite a smile. "You’re the only one who’s even close," he said. "All those things you wrote—the way you describe it. You’re wrong about some of it," he added flatly, "but you’ve thinking in the right direction."

I could not help but chuckle at that. "High praise indeed."

"It’s not praise," He leaned forward now, elbows on his knees, "You think the sound is something pure. Something you can take out and look at. Like it’s hiding inside people."

I said nothing.

Arthur’s eyes narrowed. "But what if it isn’t hiding?" he continued. "What if it’s just… there. All the time. And bodies—" he gestured vaguely, as if the word itself were insufficient, "—bodies are the things that protect us from it?"

A most fascinating inversion.

"You are suggesting," I said, choosing each word with care, "that what I have sought to liberate… may in fact be the very thing from which the body shields us."

Arthur nodded once. "Yes."

"And yet," I pressed, "you wish to be rid of it."

"I don’t care what it is," he snapped, a flicker of that earlier irritation returning. "I just want it gone."

"Mr Mayfield," I said, without turning, "if I were to assist you… I would require your cooperation. Your honesty. And your endurance."

Arthur met my gaze without flinching. "You’ll have it," he said.

A pause.

"Good," I replied, returning to my chair, retrieving the notebook once more.

"Then we shall begin with something simple," I said, pen hovering above the page. "Tell me, Arthur—when did you first realize that the rest of us could not hear it?"

I learned much on that damp afternoon.

For one, I learned that Arthur could perceive things beyond human senses--colors beyond our spectrum, sounds beyond our hearing. I learned that he could gauge near everything about a person just by standing within their proximity--their health, their age, their emotional and mental states, even the mutations in their very DNA . And whether or not they could hear the resonance--the echo, he called it. He told me that it was not a realization so much as a knowing that he was the sole person who could hear it in its unbridled, purest tone.

"At least, without dying," he added in an offhand.

"Without dying? Would you mind explaining that, dear boy?"

"People who hear the echo die," he said, simply, matter-of-factly. "It starts as a hum. Or a ringing. They think it's tinnitus. And then they die." He looked at me, blinked once, and said, "I wouldn't be surprised if the same fate awaits you. It doesn't yet seem like it, but who knows?"

After that, he told me he'd met six others who'd heard the echo, all of whom perished in gruesome manners within a month after they began to hear it. He shared with me ancient records of the echo, etched on the walls of caves and carved into stone tablets. He told legends from those ancient times that depicted the echo as a deity, a malicious one that took pleasure in rending apart the living creatures of the earth. He believed mankind had only recently gained resistance to the echo, through evolution. And that thread of conversation led to the most intriguing discovery.

I started to ask, "So our current immunity--"

"It's not immunity." Arthur gave another of his slow blinks, and said, "It's mere resistance. The human lifespan is dictated by their ability to hear the echo." He paused a moment, then said, "You can think of it like noise-cancelling headphones. For as long as the battery lasts, you won't hear anything. But once it runs out, you can hear again. Our bodies--our hearts, really--work on the same principal. Block the noise."

"So the echo is the sound of death?"

"No." He frowned now, and said slowly, "Life--that is, existence--is the natural state. The state which matter remains in. But 'living' creatures--humans, animals, plants--we die. And the matter of the earth, the waters, the mountains, suffers erosion and fluctuation. Death, and this constant cycle of change. . .that is the echo. So, plainly. . .the echo is death."