Wave Glass: Chapter Five

Music. My grandmother disappeared in 1981. My grandfather's never stopped looking for her.

There's a tone in Mill Creek that haunts the bones, and it wanders through the trees around this town. It's taken other people too. So my grandpa and I built a machine to follow it. Strange things happen here. Murders and light, brilliance and shadows. I'm Oren Dez. And this is Wave Class.

We went back to the Brayden house later that night. There was still no cops around, but we took our time and stayed cautious. All the doors were locked up tight, so Grandpa looked puzzled when I walked straight up to the back door and popped it open. Then a knowing look came over his face. So you still remember that trick Chad showed you? Yeah, I grinned. It's come in handy a few times.

Back when I was still a student at Silver Branch High School, Grandpa got me a gig doing construction cleanup for Chad Morrison, a local contractor who comes into the story later. We'd sometimes show up to a job only to find the homeowner forgot to leave a key under the painted rock or the doormat. Chad hated losing time, so he taught me a way around it. You take a credit card, or one of those flimsy grocery store reward cards, and check to see if the door's got a little play in it.

If it does, slide the card into the gap a few inches above the latch. Keep it pressed against the jam and work it down to the strike plate. Press in and pull the door closed. The goal is to get the latch to slide up onto the card, and the door will pop open. It was almost pitch black in the house. We walked in through the kitchen and my feet caught up on an incline. The floor was buried under a foot of soil, enough to swallow the foot of the cabinets and the empty door frames.

Along the outside wall of the family room and the two front bedrooms, little nest-like burrows had been carved out of the dirt, each one lined with bits of clothing and personal effects. Look, Grandpa. I pointed to a corner with toys and stuffed animals. They had kids living here. Something moved in another corner of the room, and I jumped. Grandpa saw it too and swung his light around. Did you see that? He said. I did, but there was nothing there.

We moved deeper into the house, and I felt unease moving through me. The living room was one of those sunken down ones, the kind with a couple of shallow steps leading down from multiple sides of the room, and a fireplace with a couple of steps around each side, I thought we were going to find a bunker or something. Instead of the bunker, the living room floor was dug out, a big black hole with tunnels branching off in every direction. A six-foot ladder leaned against the bottom step.

The way forward was clear enough, but my nerves were shot. This is wrong, Oren, really wrong. But the cops have been through here.

Hollis, Bud, the whole posse We'll be all right The living room windows were painted black, Thankfully the cops had left a work light in the pit And a string of naked white bulbs running down eight of the ten tunnels, An extension cord snaked up the ladder to an outlet around the corner I plugged it in I could smell the turned earth Organic and metallic, Iron, maybe copper. It feels like these tunnels are breathing, Grandpa. Grandpa stood at the edge of the pit, frozen.

He'd gone tharn, like one of General Wundwart's officers, in Watership Down. Caught in the work lights, held in place by the paralyzing gaze of a predator. Then he blinked and shook it off. Going against every screaming impulse in my body, I stepped onto the ladder, climbed down, and crouched at the mouth of the first tunnel. And grapple followed. The tunnels had burrows, too, carved off to the sides like sleeping alcoves. The walls and ceiling had finger-shaped grooves and circles all over.

It looked like the Brayden hive had been living down here for a while. All but one of the tunnels petered out after 40 or 50 paces, but the eighth? It sloped downward, and it was unlit.

It's to a mystery I go, be it darkly or tunneling through a light, or tunneling through my head. Gibson and Bronzini. The breath of air we'd felt earlier came from this tunnel. It smelled old, dank, and stale. About 70 paces in, we reached a chamber carved in the rock, a pouch in the passage.

On the right side of the room was a crack in the stone that stretched across the width of the chamber, maybe two inches at its tallest and those finger lines traced shallow circles across the surface making a textured backdrop for a gruesome display of sculpted cave art. At the center of the ceiling, there was a depiction of an unknown planetary system. I assumed it must be Zedrick's world, after all these were his people.

Below the star line, at about my head height, the mural stretched in a continuous panorama. Mountains and valleys, rivers and plains wrapping around the curved walls of the chamber, like a seamless landscape. Along the floor, a burning ring of fire surrounded us. The rising flames twisted into scenes of torment. Demons, biting, cutting, fucking. Above them, cambions, half-human, half-demon creatures, clawed at the bottom of the central fissure, their lips pursed as if they were blowing something

through it. There were hundreds of them. From the top of the fissure, stacks of beehive-like cells held up the mountain peaks. Each prismatic cell had some kind of brood. Eggs and larvae thrashing in their little hex pods. Some had human eyes wide with horror, peeking through torn holes in their waxy caps. Other cells were uncapped, with full-term creatures pulling themselves out into the chamber. One figure, a woman, human from the bust up over an insect's bulging abdomen.

Her arms ended in segmented tarsi. She gripped her own tongue with the bristled pads of her insectile fingers, pulling it down between her bare breasts as she dragged herself free from her cell. We stood frozen again, and the scene continued on the other side of the chamber, opposite the fissure. There, the cambions fell, prone in genuflection, all of them facing an empty altar between two tall trees, pines.

When I turned back to study that side of the room, the earth let go a long exhale against my back. A breath from the fissure behind me that shivered my spine. It looked like a crack in the bedrock, and grandpa's flashlight revealed only that it stretched as far as the beam could reach. The breath suggested the crack opened into a larger cavity.

But when we followed the tunnel about 20 paces further, it just looped back around with no sign of the fissure, like the wall had folded the space in on itself. It was a dead end. So we circled back to the pocket of cambions and demons. At first I thought the light had just hit the walls differently, like the demons had moved or something. And it appeared their flames were reaching higher. But no, the scene hadn't changed. I was sure of it.

I just hadn't caught the details the first time through. It was like any divine or disturbing art. Or like listening to well-bred music. You go back for seconds and suddenly there's more texture. Or more meaning and intention. But I didn't think I wanted to keep dropping the needle on this one. The demons that were tearing their flesh? Or the ones whispering curses? Or the ones engaged in wanton Congress.

Everyone had a single finger pointed at the fissure and one hand draped over it like a secret sign. And the cambions weren't blowing into the gap. As I previously thought, they were clearly whistling. There was an implied movement in the scene, a thrusting upward motion training us on the gap in the rock. I traced their path and found a single musical note carved into the stone and a swirly squiggle curling off to chase its dark horizon just beyond the reach of the Cambian's oohing lips.

What do you make of this, Oren? What does it look like to you, Grandpa? What are they doing? Whistling? Yeah, that's what I thought too. Now, I should have been freaked out at this point. I should have gotten out of there. But the carvings were seductive and had an almost magnetic pull. They promised me pleasures. I convinced myself it was all in my head, you know. Well, it was all in my head, but I still should have left. It all felt so surreal and so wrong at first.

Yeah, looking back, I think I accepted the evil scene as it was before me. But then I delighted in it. A feeling washed over me, one that made seeking justification for any act unnecessary. necessary. I wanted to do horrible things simply because they no longer felt horrible. It almost seemed like they were the right thing to do, and the longer we stayed, the more that feeling grew. I pictured doing many things to many people that night, the kind of scenes that mimicked the demon's etiquette.

Patty, Sage, even Andy, Hazel, Liz, anyone I'd ever given the smallest of a flirty smile to, even in jest. They all stalked through my fever dream. And when I closed my eyes, I saw flashing images of. Sweaty skin and clenching teeth and stabbing hips, riotous debauchery. I saw people worshiping the destruction, and I felt the excitement of the crowd. When I closed my eyes, I was praying with them. I was tripping with them.

Following the prompts of the demons and the movement of the cambions, we lifted our heads from the lower carvings to the gap in the rock. Grandpa and I locked eyes and pushed out our lips. Together, we whistled a chord. It came out like a hymn. And then particles of sound, maybe, spun from our lips in glinting gold and oxford blue, hanging in the air for just a moment before the gap in the bedrock sucked them in and swallowed them away. And we spun, too, just for a second.

Sudden vertigo, then a moment in dying ecstasy. I shook it off and opened my eyes, and then spat, my mouth tasted like metal. We weren't looking at the same rock anymore, we were somewhere else. This was a different chamber. The clay covered bedrock gave way to quartz crystal. But this chamber mirrored the one we'd just left, same dimensions. Here though, the opening was more like a funnel than a fissure. We had just beamed through it or something, maybe dematerialized.

We'd just been whistled through a two inch gap. I did wonder if this was how Santa Claus got through people's stovepipes. The air in the room pressed down on me like an undertow, pulling at my breath and my guts. The pressure felt almost like that jolt you get when you're a passenger and the car unexpectedly dips and rises, a sudden change of elevation. The stone wasn't sculpted like the clay-covered rock in the other chamber.

It was smooth, like a fancy countertop. and the art etched in a style that I could only call exaggerated realism. But it was cryptic and foreign. An alien comic book, maybe. Well, alien as far as the Fennar cult's story goes. Those cult folks were mad, but at least one of them was a fantastic artist. I wondered if this was the tale of Zedrick Blinick. If it was, then I assume those etchings were their holy texts.

Something about the artwork felt insectile. and mechanical, flesh over metal frames. A fever hit me, then a bones-deep chill as I looked at the images, but I couldn't make sense of them. Rows and columns of hieroglyphs, modern art hieroglyphs, whose meaning was light years out of my reach. I had no idea what I was looking at, and we didn't have a Rosetta stone. At the end of the tunnel, we stepped into a large, vaguely oval-shaped cavern lined with polished quartz deposits.

It was veined with what looked like pure silver. The whole cavern hummed with the marrow, but instead of blissful creative energy, I heard echoes, looping whispers, veil remnants of the lust and murder surrounding the previous chamber, and I saw flickering shows in my mind's eye.

This place, too, was unsettling, but the room didn't feel as drenched in evil as the last one grandpa and i recorded some of the sound then searched for a way out the place was enclosed a sealed bubble on the far end of the cavern there was a wall with a crude etching of what looked like a door but it was in solid granite with no other ideas before us we returned to the little chamber and whistled again. The impulse felt natural this time. Once more, golden blue particles popped

from my mouth and siphoned into the funnel-like hole. We spun, just for a second. Sudden vertigo and then delirium overwhelmed me for the span of a single heartbeat. And we were back in the cambion chamber. Grandpa and I got away from the Braden's house and went home. I wanted to talk to him about everything. We had always been remarkably candid with each other, but I couldn't even admit to myself the things I'd been thinking back there, let alone say them out loud.

Grandpa, too, stayed oddly quiet. We needed help. But who do you call when weird-ass cosmic sound shit is going on? A priest from the temples of Cyrex? That, too, was out of our reach.

Instead, we decided to call our friendly neighborhood sound engineer. The next morning, we called Gordon Thomas. He sounded delighted to hear from me. I told him I'd been thinking about him and wanted to make a record. I asked if Grandpa and I could take him out for lunch, either this week or next. Gordon had some time and suggested the Fox's Forge, a place I'd heard about but never visited. They hosted a lot of live music and held a weekly open mic night.

Two days later, we drove to the valley to see him. We arrived in Eugene and pulled into Fox's parking lot, just as Gordon arrived. When we walked in, nearly everyone inside greeted him with a nod or a wave. There was some dirt on the floor and plants all over the place. We ordered at the counter, then sat at a table beneath a stringy philodendron and a painting of a blue dancing bear.

Our talk started out about the record I wanted to make, but Gordon caught on right away because Grandpa and I were distracted. He cut into our babble. We'll spit it out. Y'all are terrible at bluffing. We'd driven two hours to chat and buy him a meal. He knew we had something to say. I shot Grandpa a glance, defeated but hopeful, then came clean to Gordon. There was something about him that was honest and true, and I had the same feeling back when I met him in Jackpot.

Gordon, I said, bracing for the oncoming skepticism. We really aren't here just to talk about recording. This I know, he said. I do have a bunch of new songs, and I want to schedule some studio time, but we need your help with something else. We've been studying these weird sound anomalies in Mill Creek, and I laid it all out. the disappearances, the town's history with cults, and how we'd started linking all of this shit to sound phenomena.

I braced myself again, half expecting him to get up and leave, then dove into our current understanding of the marrow of sound and our resonance engine.

Gordon nodded and said he'd heard some of the history of Mill Creek, but hadn't connected any of the weirdness to sound. So we told him everything we knew so far, Almost everything. We left out the part about Grandpa going to space. That could wait until he was on board our ship of fools, and he'd seen some of this craziness for himself. The amazing thing is that he didn't seem too thrown by our story. If anything, he looked intrigued.

He agreed to come out to Mill Creek, hear our story in full, go over the data we'd collected, and check out the art. Like I said, he's kind of a mad genius, and to him, what we were saying must have sounded at least plausible. After our meal, we followed Gordon to his studio. I was in awe the moment we crossed the threshold. Man, Gordon was old school. Racks of analog compressors lined the walls.

He showed us his Fairchild 670, a collection of equalizers, tube preamps, and other gear I couldn't even begin to identify.

An old Ampex tape machine sat in one corner, and in the center of it all was the captain's chair behind a beautiful mixing console that spanned the width of the room. It was magical. I pictured Captain Kirk saying, second star to the right and straight on till morning. I was really getting excited to record here. The main recording room was packed with instruments, a couple of acoustic guitars and electrics in all the essential categories.

Stratocaster, Telecaster, Les Paul. A gorgeous DW drum kit, keyboards, an accordion, you name it. And in one corner, a small collection of stunning bass guitars. But I didn't recognize the brands. It looked like each one of them was handmade, and clearly of much higher quality than anything I'd ever played before. Them are my babies, Gordon said. Oh, I didn't mention I played bass too?

Gordon said he had a project to complete the next day, but he could come out to Mill Creek at the end of the week. Music. Thanks for listening to Waveglass, written and read for you by Aaron Lewis Gibson, copyright 2025, all rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be copied, shared or rebroadcast without permission. Except for brief excerpts used in reviews or commentary. If you're enjoying the. Music.