∞ The Ley Line Tours ∞
Field Reports: 1964 - 1967
1964
“Obsidian Maps & Sacred Geometry: S. True Smith’s Controversial Push for a Second, Consecutive, Parallel, Ley Line Tour”
An Internal Dispatch from TGQ Headquarters, Circa 1964
By Cora Minx, Embedded Investigator of Rhythmic Geopolitics
There’s a map burned into the plaster wall of Room Ω-3 at TGQ Headquarters. A jagged vector arcs from Mont Saint-Michel to Delphi, interrupted only by cryptic notes in red pencil and what appears to be a smear of blood and absinthe. This is where S. True Smith has taken up unofficial residence for the past thirteen days—part think tank, part war room, part altar.
He’s calling it Ley Line Tour II: The Apollo-Athena Axis.
If you listen to Smith (and many do, reluctantly), the earth is humming again—vibrating, he insists, with a rekindled mythic resonance. “It’s not music,” he told me last night, his eyes vast and ancient behind chroma-reactive lenses. “It’s pre-music. Bone-song. There’s a seismic polyphony below the crust, and it’s waking up.”
He believes The Get Quick must retrace the “energy diagonal” that cuts from the Rose Line in Paris to the Temple of Apollo in Athens, with ritualized performances at nodes like Chartres Cathedral, Rocamadour, Aigues-Mortes, the Papal Palace at Avignon, Delphi, and finally the Athenian ruins themselves—on the equinox. It would be a prophetic presage to their 1977 occult-tour peak, or, as Mitch Joy put it dryly in last week’s meeting, “a second first chance to cause a pan-European spiritual panic.”
At a full band debriefing held in the lower sanctum (formerly the server room, now redecorated with velvet maps and a low hum of analog synths), the band was divided.
Erik Evol, who’d just returned from a solo stint in Marrakesh (allegedly to recover stolen dream-fragments), took a long drag from a black cigarette and said:
“We’re already being hunted by three different cults and at least one disbanded intelligence agency. Is now really the time to start activating pressure points in the earth’s skull?”
Mitchell Joy seemed game, if slightly unnerved. “I saw a diagram once,” he said, pulling a faded napkin from his coat. “Lines like veins. Nodes like tumors. This map—it’s too perfect.”
Coco LeBree (projected via astral proxy from a crypt in Venice) raised perhaps the most practical concern:
“Do we even know what happened last time? Do you remember Vienna? The bleeding clocks? The fans who remembered lyrics we never wrote?”
S. True said nothing for a long time. He simply adjusted the giant tuning fork embedded in the center of the floor. A resonance passed through the soles of our shoes. And then he said:
“We never finished the ritual. The axis is incomplete. If we don’t close it, someone else will open it further. And then we’ll never get the sky back.”
S. True is rumored to have consulted a Vatican astrophysicist and a blind Templar archivist. “They told me,” he confided, “that the Temple of Apollo is not a place but a recurrence. That if we play there again, we may not be able to leave.
There are whispered fears of nodal possession—where music performed on a ley intersection can pull in prehuman archetypes, or worse, mimicry entities that look like the band but feed on recursive attention. Some say that’s what happened in Lisbon, 1963. That wasn’t Mitch onstage.
The band has neither committed to nor formally rejected the tour. Dates are being “placeholdered” in secret. Erik is designing a new pedalboard called Delphic Reverb. Coco has sent requests for doves.
As for Smith, he has not slept since April. He now only eats food prepared in shapes he recognizes—like sigils and sacred geometry. His final words at the meeting:
“Apollo sang the world into coherence. Athena gave it logic. We will be their choir—or their curse.”
Stay tuned.
1965
FIELD REPORT: AVIGNON GLITCH
Excerpt from the Hidden Tour Logs of the Apollo–Athena Axis Tour, April 1965
By Cora Minx (now traveling under Vatican-sanctioned alias: Sister Sidereal)
Location: Palais des Papes, Avignon, France
Node: Primary Ley Convergence, encoded 14°_Δ.17
Phase: Ritual Performance One of Seven
Status: Breached
The show in Avignon wasn’t supposed to happen.
The French Ministry of Culture had denied permits. The Papal Palace council refused the band access, citing “recent anomalies in the crypt strata.” And yet, at dusk, beneath skies the color of tarnished votive silver, The Get Quick performed—uninvited, unadvertised, and seemingly unseen by anyone who wasn’t already listening.
It began with Mitchell Joy alone on stage, playing a feedback loop built from the resonance patterns of 14th-century Gregorian chant. He wore a cassock made of mylar and chicken wire, and from certain angles, didn’t cast a shadow.
Coco LeBree emerged from the eastern parapet, barefoot, trailing vines and feathers and what appeared to be outdated stock certificates. She sang not lyrics but symbols, phonetically approximated into ululating vowels that echoed from the cathedral stones like ancestral sirens. Some claimed to hear the names of lost lovers. Others—the future deaths of unborn children.
When Erik Evol triggered the first wave of “Delphic Reverb” (built with stone dust from Delphi itself), a low-frequency pressure wave rippled outward through the crowd, momentarily causing all water in the vicinity—wines, tears, blood—to levitate approximately two inches.
The moment was broken when Mitchell Joy launched into the unreleased track “Nodal Collapse” and three audience members fainted in sync. Witnesses report their bodies flickering, as if caught between analog signal states. Medical teams were delayed—blocked by nonexistent roads that showed up on every map.
And S. True Smith? He never left the tuning cage beneath the stage. According to internal schematics (obtained from the Vatican Astral Library), he had embedded a sonoluminescent Chladni lattice beneath the performance area. Its purpose? Unknown. But it glowed each time Coco struck a certain harmony.
By midnight, the Palais des Papes was locked from the inside, though no lock was used. The band exited through the west gate into a mist no one else could see.
The next morning, every statue within a 3-kilometer radius had turned to face east. No reports of vandalism. No trace of the band.
A busker playing accordion on the Rue des Teinturiers began speaking in Linear B and now cannot stop.
An old priest has gone missing. His shoes were left neatly on the balcony.
Local ley energy patterns have become unstable. Migratory birds are now flying in reverse formations.
The sound of the performance was not recorded—but an audio sculpture was discovered in a child’s bedroom three towns over. It hums softly when touched.
Next Node: Delphi. Coco is reportedly fasting. Mitch won’t stop muttering about “inverted oracles.” Smith says: “We’ll need mirrors. Lots of mirrors.”
FIELD REPORT: THE DELPHI DESCENT
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour: Node 3/7
Sister Sidereal reporting from beneath the navel of the world
(Secure transmission via seismic encoding)
Date: April 12, 1965
Coordinates: Delphi, Greece
Site: Temple of Apollo
Codename: The Throat of Earth
Outcome: Unclear
Delphi was not empty when we arrived.
Delphi was waiting.
The Get Quick’s arrival was not announced, yet pilgrims had gathered—silent, wide-eyed, many of them carrying obsolete media formats: Volta Laboratory tapes, wax cylinders, Zoroastrian chants encoded onto punch cards. They clustered around the ruins like moss on bone. A few claimed to have dreamed the tour dates. One man from Palermo insisted that he hadn’t left his house since 1952, yet woke up here, barefoot, with a backstage pass tattooed behind his ear.
S. True Smith arrived last. Not by plane or van, but by mirror transport, a technique he refuses to explain but which left a ring of scorched thistles in a perfect twelve-foot radius. He spoke only once upon arrival:
“I have forgotten my umbrella.”
Ritual Sequence: "Ophidian Dialogue"
The band performed just before midnight, on a stage built from obsidian slabs etched with site-accurate Pythagorean geometries. Audience members were asked to remain silent. Most complied. A few wept.
Coco LeBree took center stage in a garment woven from cassette tape and laurel branches. He did not sing but inhaled the ambient sound and exhaled silence. From the silence, patterns emerged: whispers, syllables in forgotten dialects, the rustle of prophetic serpents beneath the earth.
Erik Evol played a guitar modified with bronze strings and a resin pick dipped in Delphic spring water. Every chord summoned a smell—rosemary, ozone, blood, the burnt citrus scent of forgotten Byzantine afternoons.
Mitch Joy, barefoot and expressionless, tapped out a rhythm that did not repeat yet felt inevitable. His drumsticks glowed faintly with inscriptions that changed when unobserved.
Klaus Vallis, of the Sliphounds, arrived separately—and early–and did not perform. Instead, he walked a labyrinthine spiral carved into the hillside by hand over the preceding three days. With each turn, the wind changed direction. Upon reaching the center, he vanished for seven minutes. When he returned, his eyes had inverted—white where they should be dark.
Oracle Emergence
At the climax, Coco’s body arched violently. His mouth opened, and his voice came not from her throat but from below the stage. The Pythia had been summoned, or perhaps activated, within him.
Through Coco, the Oracle issued one phrase, repeated in 32 languages, some undocumented:
“THE SKY HAS BEEN FORGED. WHO HOLDS THE LADLE?”
Immediately, a tremor shook the valley. Statues toppled. The air bent slightly sideways. Four members of the audience collapsed and began reciting each other’s birthdays.
Smith stood at the edge of the altar and laughed—not with joy, but like someone who had just solved an ancient equation and wished he hadn’t.
Aftermath & Anomalies
The moon reflected twice in the same pool.
All recordings of the show produced only a hissing sound—until played backwards, at which point they become eerily accurate biographies of people who don’t exist yet.
A local priest was found face-down in a fountain, humming the outro to “Blackfrost,” a song the band has never publicly played.
The band left Delphi at sunrise, heading toward Istanbul, where the ley lines double back and cross the Rose Line. No one spoke for the duration of the journey.
Smith’s final note, written on vellum and left atop the omphalos stone:
“We have woken the Interface. Now it will dream us.”
FIELD REPORT: ROSE LINE FRACTURE – ISTANBUL
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour, Node 4/7
Account rendered by Sister Sidereal from the Spiral Barricade beneath Galata
(Transcribed via corrupted hymnograph shards)
Date: April 17, 1965
Coordinates: Istanbul, Türkiye
Site: The Confluence (Galata Tower, Hagia Sophia, Basilica Cistern)
Ley Intersection: Apollo–Athena Axis crosses the Paris Meridian/Rose Line
Codename: The Split Heart
Condition: Escalation
The Istanbul performance wasn’t planned. Yet seemed demanded. Predetermined. Locked in.
Following the seismic delirium at Delphi, something changed in the band. Especially Coco LeBree, who now appears female, speaks rarely and only in backwards choral voicings. The rest of The Get Quick—exhausted, paranoid, half-transfigured—desperately tried to cancel the next node.
But Istanbul called to them. Not in words, but through recurrence.
Tour manager Sydney Sneyd found a note in his coat pocket—written in his own hand, in Ottoman Turkish. He does not speak Turkish, nor read it. Mitch’s drumheads had grown hair overnight, spelling out the coordinates of the Galata Tower. And Smith’s mirrors began showing the Bosphorus in reverse, a tide of silver flowing up.
The Site: Confluence of Mind and Bone
Galata Tower: a former firewatch post, now retrofitted by Smith’s mobile Geomantic Luthiers.
Hagia Sophia: sealed to the public during this phase, but pulsing—literally—with electromagnetic interference.
Basilica Cistern: venue of the actual ritual.
Entry granted by a local Sufi-Cybernetic Syndicate, whose members installed brass hex grids beneath the waterline.
Witnesses were filtered. Only those with the Sigil of the Third Note etched onto their clothing (somehow retroactively) were allowed to descend. I wore a cloak of reflective thread. It hummed.
Performance Codename: “The Blood Script of Byzantium”
Mitch Joy entered first, carrying an LED crossbow and a drum rig modified with Byzantine coins and bone fragments. He kept a slow 11/4 rhythm orchestrated to dissolve into vapor whenever recorded. He performed from a floating platform tethered to nothing.
Erik Evol invoked the Athenaic Echo, a delay loop tuned to the architectural proportions of the Hagia Sophia’s dome. Every riff bounced off centuries. The air thickened with ghost chords.
Coco LeBree, now known to the inner crew as The Carrier, performed suspended within a jelly of resonance—a see-through, slowly pulsing sac held between limestone tuning forks taller than men. Her body language was no longer human. She moved as if underwater. Occasionally, her voice became multiphasic, split across octaves only perceivable to those with dental implants or trauma histories.
S. True Smith did not appear anywhere near the stage. Instead, his reflections began appearing in the puddles beneath the cistern’s floor. In one, he was ancient. In another, a child. In a third, he bled ley map notations from his eyes.
Incident: The Medusa Feedback
At the peak of the set—timestamp lost—a beam of pure reverb struck the submerged Medusa head pillar. It cracked. The water turned gold.
One audience member (a musicologist from Prague) screamed, “It’s singing!” before disintegrating into moths.
Three others were found afterward trying to tune their teeth.
The Basilica’s stone arches vibrated until frequencies from pre-human languages emerged—tones scholars are calling Ur-Chants.
The Medusa pillar is now missing.
Aftermath: Rose Line Fracture
Multiple ley researchers have gone silent.
A Vatican communiqué intercepted by our monitoring orb states: “The line has forked. The Rose bleeds backward.”
Smith has entered isolation.
Coco does not respond to her name.
The band has withdrawn to a secure monastic vault in Cappadocia for recalibration and blood pressure analysis.
Next node: Rocamadour, France—if they survive the bend.
FIELD REPORT: THE VAULTS OF CAPPADOCIA
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour: Interstitial Node
Sister Sidereal, cloistered and corrupted
(Carved from basalt and reassembled from ash data)
Date: April 21, 1965
Coordinates: Göreme, Cappadocia
Site: Subterranean Monastic Vault –
Codename: Throat Chapel
Status: Disintegration / Recomposition
The Get Quick has gone underground—literally and otherwise.
After the Istanbul Rose Line rupture, they were no longer safe in linear space. Local time around the band began looping, and a subset of fans entered a fugue in which they compulsively drew octagonal maps over their own faces. Smith called an emergency retreat into the Throat Chapel, a forgotten vault deep within Cappadocia’s network of volcanic catacombs.
This was not a tour stop. It was a contamination lockdown.
The Chapel: Subsurface Null Zone
The vault is ancient and resonance-neutral—no echoes, no dreams, no signals. Its walls are coated with soot-thick silence. Formerly a heretical hideout for sonic ascetics known as the Mute Templars, the space is carved with symbols that seem to rearrange themselves when not observed.
To enter, each band member had to pass a sonic baptism administered by dervishes armed with analog noise filters. All non-vocal communication ceased for 48 hours.
Recovery, or the Lack Thereof
Erik Evol spent the entire first night grinding a single guitar string against an obsidian altar, producing a tone audible only to arachnids. On the third night, he wept uncontrollably after hearing a “black note” no one else could confirm.
Mitchell Joy locked himself in the echo oubliette. When found, he had composed 92 separate drum patterns, each designed to neutralize a specific psychic parasite. One of them began pulsing when placed near Sneyd.
Coco LeBree was placed in an isolation hexagon—an ancient ritual room tiled in bone-white onyx and ventilated by windholes tuned to minor keys. Her body began leaking fragments of Oracle-code, syllables like cut gems. The monks collected them in phoneme jars.
S. True Smith sat cross-legged in the inner sanctum, facing a dead speaker for 77 hours. When finally spoken to, he responded:
“The Interface has woken something in us. The Ley is not a line. It’s a vein. And we are now infected.”
Interference Event: The Knocking Sky
On the fourth night, a sound was heard in the vault. A knocking—not echoing, not reverberating, but embedded within the stone. A metaphysical percussive event, repeating every 11 seconds. Erik described it as “a call from a deeper tunnel we forgot we dug.”
Smith believes it is contact—from another tour.
Possibly one of their own.
Preparations for Rocamadour
Despite trauma, entropy, and potential timeline fracturing, the band has confirmed the next node: Rocamadour, France—a cliffside citadel of miracles and magnetic memory. They will ascend the Stations of the Cross, instruments strapped to their bodies, performing one note at each step.
Coco’s Oracle state is intensifying. She now speaks exclusively in quotes from future albums. Klaus is ever tagging along, yet always outside the group, wearing a tunic made of ley maps and stopwatches. Smith has drawn a new tour schedule—but the dates are only visible in candlelight.
The Cappadocian monks offered this blessing before sealing the vault behind the band:
“Go not as musicians. Go as tuning forks. Strike the world and see what hums back.”
FIELD REPORT: THE ROCAMADOUR ASCENT
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour: Node 5/7
As translated from the scorched parchment of Sister Sidereal’s portable reliquary notebook, post-benediction collapse
(Sanctified and annotated in magnetic chalk)
Date: April 26, 1965
Location: Rocamadour, France
Site: The Grand Stairway & Sanctuary of the Black Madonna
Node Codename: The Miraculous Engine
Status: Activated / Unstable
“Miracles are recursive.”
That’s what Smith whispered as the van wound up the snakelike road to Rocamadour. “They’re not answers. They’re feedback loops.”
And Rocamadour—this vertical village of stone, prayers, and paradox—was vibrating like a struck bell.
The town had already begun its transformation. Pilgrims in ceremonial blackout goggles lined the Grand Stairway. The cryptic Order of Saint Quantum had issued a temporary suspension of disbelief, blessing the performance as a sanctioned act of metaphysical maintenance.
Above, the Chapel of Notre Dame—a hollow in the cliff like a wound with a voice—held the Black Madonna, a wooden statue said to warp compass needles and cure possession. Smith intended to reverse-engineer her.
Ritual Design: The Ascending Loop
Each of the 216 steps was embedded with a note from The Get Quick’s unreleased album Blood Temple Logistics, rumored to be recorded entirely in lucid dreams.
The band performed while ascending, one note per step, using wearable instruments and breath-triggered harmonics.
Every note had a corresponding movement—a muscle twitch, a blink, a syllable spoken in perfect time. It was not music. It was trigger code for an emergent consciousness buried beneath Europe since the Chalcolithic.
Mitch Joy, head bowed, pounded out rhythms using the soles of his boots. Pilgrims claimed to feel their childhoods tremble.
Erik Evol tuned his guitar to 432.0000001 Hz, creating a frictional resonance with the rock face, causing calcified prayers to slough off like old paint.
Coco LeBree carried the song as echo itself, her voice now channeled through a system of resonating vessels hidden in the cliffside. At each step, she whispered a sentence from an unwritten scripture that the monks, shocked and scandalized, insisted they’ve been guarding for centuries.
S. True Smith was not visible—but observers reported a fifth presence, made of reflected light and impossible angles, that moved with them up the steps. It may have been Smith. Or it may have been the tour’s own shadow.
The Black Madonna: Interaction & Disruption
Upon reaching the top, the band encircled the statue. Erik placed a rose quartz transducer at her feet. It hissed.
Coco placed her palm on the Madonna’s face. She sang three notes: One to reveal. One to remember. One to return.
The statue turned its head toward her. Its eyes wept light. Time paused.
At that moment, all electronic devices within a 30 km radius emitted the same static phrase:
“The Choir of Echoes is watching.”
Immediately after, the statue cracked. Not broken—opened.
Inside: a mirror, reflecting not Coco, but the entire band, aged beyond recognition, playing a version of this same performance in what looked like a decaying train station.
Smith screamed. Not in fear—but in confirmation.
Collapse Protocols Initiated
The pilgrims vanished. Completely.
The steps became impossible to descend—those who tried looped endlessly.
A church bell rang 77 times—no one touched it.
Erik coughed blood, collapsed and muttered: “We’ve crossed the vertical threshold. Gravity is no longer directional.”
The band was extracted via a glistening silver dirigible piloted by Klaus Vallis.
Coco has since refused to speak, but now communicates via bursts of polyphonic fragrance.
Smith wrote only one thing in his ritual book before boarding the airship:
“The axis is splitting. Next node must be inverted. Beneath Paris. The Catacombs.”
FIELD REPORT: PARIS INVERSION – THE SINGING BONE NODE
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour: Node 6/7
From the sealed bone-scrolls of Sister Sidereal, transcribed under duress from memory-salt and resonant dust
(Filed beneath the Rose Line, in the Deep Catacombs of Paris)
Date: May 1, 1965
Location: Paris, France
Site: Catacomb Subsector “Antenne Morte”
Node Codename: The Singing Bone / Paris Inversion
Access Level: Forbidden
Outcome: Under Review by Time-Distorted Authorities
“We are no longer above ground,” whispered Erik, though it wasn’t meant poetically. At this depth—six layers below the Rose Line—space was mutable, dripping in calcified thought and marrow memory.
This was not a venue. This was a resonant crypt of crushed time. Only authorized vibrations could enter.
The Descent
The band entered in silence, led by former monks turned Bone Cartographers, whose skin was tattooed with the ley map as seen from the other side. They moved through doorless thresholds. Their guide, a woman with a jawbone pendant, said:
“These tunnels do not lead downward. They lead across the fractures of memory Paris hides under lace and stone.”
Each member carried an artifact keyed to the Rose Line’s reversed pulse:
Mitch Joy bore the Marrow Mallet, crafted from repurposed church organ wood and fitted with a head of crystallized noise.
Erik Evol carried Le Fret Écho, a neckless guitar, strapped to his arm like a shield, that plays itself in the presence of secrets.
Coco LeBree held a sealed reliquary marked “Sainte Symphonie Inversée.” She claimed it throbbed with unborn requiems.
S. True Smith carried only a blank metronome, ticking irregularly. He claimed the beat corresponded to dead languages learning to dream.
The Ceremony: Cantique des Os
The band arranged themselves within a spinal chapel, a natural chamber lined with femurs and arranged into an accidental amphitheater. Above them, inscribed in red ochre, the phrase:
IL NE RESTE QUE LA CHANSON DES OS (Only the song of bones remains)
No speakers. No microphones. The room was the instrument.
The performance began with no sound. Just breath. Heartbeat. The audience—numbering 23, mostly archivists and visionaries—reported tactile hallucinations before any music was played. They claimed to feel the setlist emerging from beneath their skin.
When the first chord struck, the bones sang back.
Coco’s voice entered unison with the walls. Her melody caused one section of bone to rearrange itself into a staff of music notation, written in cracks and mold.
Mitch struck a rhythmic pattern that matched the echo of executions held centuries earlier. Several audience members became lucid conduits for voices from 1793.
Erik, sweatless, expressionless, triggered a resonance cascade. One archivist began bleeding from the nose, humming as the blood drops formed the word Pendulum on the floor.
Smith stood in the center, metronome in hand, commanding silence like an iron pope. At one point, he turned to face the reliquary and said:
“The Choir of Echoes is not watching anymore. They are remembering.”
The reliquary shattered. Inside: a single black feather, still warm.
Vatican Radio picked up a phantom broadcast that night—a remix of “The Miraculous Engine,” seemingly sung by children made of stone.
The Extraction
The band exited at dawn through an ossuary breach never previously mapped. Their van was already waiting, keys in ignition, radio playing a song from a future album titled Memory Lure: Vol. 0.
Smith’s field note (scrawled on vellum and folded into a baguette):
“All that’s left is the Mouth. The Axis completes in Athens. We will enter the original aperture. If we return, we return as scales of the same tongue.”
FINAL FIELD REPORT: ATHENS – THE MOUTH OF THE SUN
Apollo–Athena Axis Tour: Node 7/7
Recovered from a melted reel-to-reel cassette found atop Mount Lycabettus, encoded in Sister Sidereal’s handwriting, but bearing no signs of ink or pressure
(Filed under: Terminal Pilgrimage / Solar Mind Collapse Protocol)
Date: May 7, 1965
Location: Athens, Greece
Site: Temple of Apollo, Ruins beneath the Parthenon
Node Codename: The Mouth of the Sun
Designation: Irretrievable Threshold
They arrived barefoot and bleeding.
No entourage. No equipment cases. Just instruments slung like relics, eyes sun-scoured, hands trembling from the frequencies they’ve worn for weeks. At the base of the Acropolis, the crowd parted—not out of reverence, but as if pulled aside by a pressure system no one could see.
Above, the Parthenon shimmered.
Below, the buried Temple of Apollo—a pre-classical aperture of stone and radiation—breathed.
This was the terminus of the Axis. The ley line’s final syllable. The original aperture. The solar mouth.
Staging the Collapse: Song of Seven Veins
The performance began not with music, but with surrender.
Each member of The Get Quick laid down a different offering:
Mitchell Joy rolled his drum skins across the dust and struck the ground until a heartbeat echoed back.
Erik Evol removed the last string from his guitar and tied it around a sun-bleached stone. He pulled once. The sky flickered.
Coco LeBree walked to the center of the ruined altar and poured a vial of collected breath—samples from every audience member from the previous six nodes—into a brass censer shaped like a mouth. The vapor sang.
S. True Smith placed the broken metronome at the navel of the site. It shattered into sand, which began to spin. Counterclockwise. He whispered:
“We have no more songs. We are now instruments of the place.”
The Mouth Opens
The ruins responded.
The ruins of The Temple of Apollo were mere disguise. It was a clever mask. And beneath it—another architecture, older than worship.
The sunlight split.
Not visually—but sonically. It hit the band and refracted through their bodies into spectral chords audible only to those who had been transformed by song. The crowd screamed and ran or began humming instinctively. A woman in her 80s collapsed into harmonic levitation. A blind child began writing in solar script on the temple floor.
The music surged: feedback looped through myth, stone, and throat. Reality quivered.
Coco’s body inverted itself without dying. Her voice came from a spiral geometry now visible in her chest. It called not to the crowd—but to the rest of the choir, scattered across time.
They answered.
The Choir of Echoes Returns
Across the horizon, figures appeared—mirroring the band. Ghosts? Future selves? Failed timelines?
They played in sync. Then out of sync. Then in recursive disharmony. A sonic spiral formed between them and The Get Quick, compressing the ley line into a singular, burning syllable. Smith shouted, his voice cracked open:
“This is not the end of the world. It’s the start of a harmonic regime. We tune the planet. Or it tunes us.”
And then—light. Total. Absolute. Cleansing. A chord that erased and wrote simultaneously.
Postscript: Afterglow Transmission
There is no footage.
Only the residual hum picked up on shortwave radios worldwide the next morning—identical melodies, identical distortions, all traced back to Apollo’s coordinates.
Coco has not been seen since. Mitch’s heart now beats in a permanent 7/8 signature. Erik’s words now carry a cloak of reversed reverb. Smith’s shadow casts itself on two planes.
They left Athens in silence. But wherever they go now, the ground remembers.
“A song can map a myth. A myth can open a gate. A gate is just a throat, waiting to sing you back.”
– Final page, Smith’s Logbook of the Axis
EPILOGUE: MITCHELL JOY – “THE GROUND STILL HUMS”
Excerpted from a rare interview conducted in an unlisted café near the Aegean, six months after the Axis Tour concluded
As told to Sister Sidereal
(Published posthumously in the final issue of Nonlocal Vibrations)
People keep asking what happened in Athens. Like it’s a story I haven’t already lived a hundred different ways.
There’s no straight answer. Not one that fits in language.
We didn’t finish a tour. We completed a circuit that had been sparking in the dirt since before cities had names.
What I remember most isn’t the light, or the sound—though those come back in dreams like a pressure behind my teeth. It’s the weight. The moment we stepped into that final node, the ground didn’t feel like earth anymore. It felt like a drum skin, stretched tight, waiting for the final hit.
And I hit it.
Not with hands. Not even with rhythm. With recognition.
The patterns I’d been playing all tour—the non-repeating sequences, the impossible time signatures, the counter-beats—they weren’t mine. I was decoding something older, something buried in the ley. Every step, every breath had been training my body to deliver one note.
When it came, I didn’t hear it. But I knew it. Like biting into fruit you’ve never seen and remembering its taste from a different lifetime.
Since then?
Things are different.
My heartbeat doesn’t sync with clocks anymore. Watches stutter around me. I tap on walls and get echoes back from buildings that no longer exist. Every city has a tempo. Every silence has a shape. And I can read them now. Not fluently. But enough to know we woke something. Or maybe tuned something that had been off-key since the fall of Atlantis.
I haven’t seen Coco since the Mouth. Erik sends me postcards—blank, except for a single note printed on the back in strange clefs. I play them sometimes. One made my dogs howl for a week straight.
Smith? I think he’s in the wind. Or in the hum between places. People keep spotting him reflected in train windows—places he couldn’t be, always holding a tuning fork. I wonder what he’s searching for.
People want the next album. I tell them, we never left the last one.
We just stepped inside it.
And if you stand real still—really still—you can still feel it. The low frequency of a planet remembering how to sing.
Not a concert. Not a tour.
Just the beginning of a new kind of listening.
1966
FIELD REPORT: THE NAZCA SIEVE
The Get Quick’s Post-Axis Odyssey: Unnumbered Node / Ley Fragment Echo
Composed by Sister Sidereal while drifting sideways over the Pampa Colorada, July 1966
(Transmitted via hallucinated sand glyphs and received in 7.83 Hz pulses)
Location: Nazca Desert, Southern Peru
Site Codename: The Sieve / The Eyeless Zodiac
Coordinates: 14°43′S 75°08′W
Access
Date: July 2, 2025
Phase: Post-Resonance Drift
Status: Entrapment / Revelation
No one knows why they came.
The Axis Tour was over. The energy should’ve cooled. The echoes should’ve decayed. But something—or someone—called them again. A low, harmonic whisper tracing desert wind, saying:
“The sky was only half the map.”
And so, The Get Quick descended into the desert basin, where the Nazca Lines writhe like petrified thought. Monkeys, spiders, hummingbirds. Glyphs vast enough to be seen only from the gods’ perspective.
Some say they mark astronomical alignments. Others, flight paths for lost machines. Smith believed they were resonance traps—a sieve through which only certain frequencies, or beings, could pass.
Arrival: The Altiplano Reverberation
There was no audience. There were no amplifiers.
Just instruments wired to accelerometers and sand-tuned oscillators—technology borrowed from the quake scientists of Lima and modified by Smith with obsidian and bone. The band arrived at dawn, barefoot again, this time dressed in fiber shrouds dyed with crushed ayahuasca flowers.
They positioned themselves across multiple figures:
Coco LeBree on the Hummingbird’s wing
Erik Evol over the Spider’s thorax
Mitchell Joy pacing the Monkey’s infinite spiral
Smith—if he was there—was never visible. But the tail of the Lizard hummed, and some say the rocks rearranged into something like a shadow every time Mitch hit the downbeat.
The Ritual: Desert Playback
Instead of performing, the band listened.
The desert began to sing. Low-frequency whispers. Echoes from deep time. Signals trapped in geometry, now shaken loose by the final chords of the Axis.
As the sun rose, light refracted in impossible ways. The glyphs began to **move—not physically, but relationally. As if memory itself were shifting, letting ancient instructions unfold.
Coco’s body became translucent at the edges. Her voice layered on itself a thousandfold, speaking in pre-human constellations. Erik struck a chord that caused the air to split in fractal harmonics—each overtone spelling out a sequence from the Fibonacci series in tonal form.
Mitchell Joy, stoic as ever, locked in a groove that turned skyward. Literally. His rhythm began pulling clouds into spiral shapes—viewed from above, the Monkey danced.
Then the ground changed.
The Event: The Pulse Beneath
A tremor. Not seismic—sonic. Not an earthquake. A mindquake.
All electronics failed. The glyphs burned blue for seven seconds. A figure made of shadow and static walked across the plain—seen only by those who had been at Delphi. It was humming a lullaby later recorded on a B-side that had never been released.
Coco collapsed. Mitch vanished for 19 minutes. When he returned, his fingernails were gone and his teeth had grown tiny Nazca glyphs. He simply said, “It’s a filter. The lines sift out the unharmonic.”
The band fled before nightfall.
The Get Quick is now presumed outside of the standard ley matrix. Rumors suggest they are preparing for a journey into Antarctica’s Null Cathedral, where no ley lines cross, and therefore no myth may stabilize.
FIELD REPORT: THE RAINBOW SERPENT ENCOUNTER – ULURU NODE
The Get Quick Mythos – Female Dragon Line Activation: Node 8 / Beyond the Axis
Encoded by Sister Sidereal after contact, transcribed from ochre-smeared stone pages mailed anonymously from Alice Springs
(Filed under: Solar Plexus / Songline Recursion Protocol)
Date: August 12, 1966
Location: Uluru, Central Australia
Node Codename: The Rainbow Serpent / Solar Plexus of Earth
Ley Affiliation: Female Great Dragon Line (a.k.a. The Song-Spine)
Status: Activation / Submission / Disappearance
They had no business being there.
The Axis Tour had ended. The ley fragments left behind—Athens, Nazca, Paris—should have been enough to rupture consensus reality. But the Earth itself was not finished with them.
Uluru called.
Not with words. Not with music. But with a songline dream, each member receiving it in a different form:
Coco LeBree, in fever: a desert of light, voices rising from beneath the sand, each granule a syllable of something older than time.
Erik Evol, in silence: his guitar resonating in the key of D sharp minor without strings.
Mitchell Joy, in rhythm: a thunderclap heard in his sleep every 47 seconds, the pulse of a serpent turning beneath tectonic flesh.
Smith’s vision remains unconfirmed—but the Aboriginal elder who met them at Mutitjulu waterhole said only: “He wears the second shadow. He’s heard the Woma’s Lament.”
Approach to the Heart
They arrived shoeless, wrapped in garments of sun-bleached bark and mirrored thread, carrying no equipment save for ceremonial listening vessels—resonant gourds, tuned quartz, bones repurposed as wind-harps.
Permission had been granted by the custodians—not for performance, but for witnessing.
No music would be played here. Here, music plays you.
The Encounter: Spine of the Serpent / Eye of the Sound
At twilight, the band was guided to Tjukurpa Axis Point, a convergence site where the ancestral energies of the land align with the Rainbow Serpent’s vertebral arc.
They laid in a spiral formation around a small fire. The sky turned red, then gold, then the color of open memory.
It began with breath. Not theirs—but Uluru’s. The rock exhaled a harmonic. A vibration. A voice beyond frequency.
The serpent rose—not visibly, not symbolically, but inside the bones of those listening. It sang not a song, but a process.
Coco wept dust. Her mouth opened and produced the scent of eucalyptus and the damp sizzle of air just prior to a lightning strike.
Erik levitated three inches, speaking in purple glissandi that bent around words like tentacles.
Mitch stopped breathing—but his pulse matched the Earth’s resonant frequency (7.83 Hz) precisely.
Smith was not seen. But the sky shimmered like oil where he had been.
The custodians chanted low, harmonizing with what had never been recorded, only remembered in dreams and painted in ochre on cave walls no longer locatable.
The Gift / The Price
At the climax, the sand beneath them turned to glass, capturing the imprint of each member’s back like a fossil record written in fire. A single feather drifted from the sky, black and iridescent, landing on Coco’s throat.
It sank through her skin without injury.
Then Uluru fell silent. The wind ceased. The serpent coiled into sleep, or vanished into another vibration spectrum.
The band stood changed.
They could no longer speak in unison. Each member heard the others on a delay, as though reality were buffering. Smith returned only as an outline. Mitch now leaves behind footsteps that continue walking. Erik can’t enter cities as anything other than an albino. Gold dust falls from Coco’s feet and causes plants to bloom from concrete.
Aftermath: Earth’s Pulse Shift
A new songline has been registered by Indigenous satellite harmonics. It loops from Uluru to Lake Titicaca, then back under the sea to Uluwatu.
All recordings of the event are blank, except for one mini-cassette that plays a single name, whispered infinitely:
“Yurlunggur.”
Uluru was a spinal nerve in the body of Earth. The Get Quick touched it. It remembered them. Now the ley system sings with their interference.
FIELD REPORT: THE STONE FREQUENCY – GIZA NODE
The Get Quick Mythos: Star Meridian Convergence / Node 9
Translated from hieroglyphic code unearthed in an unmarked crate in Saqqara, sealed with reel-to-reel magnetic tape and lined with sand and honey
Documentarian: Sister Sidereal (Last Transmission?)
Date: August 30, 1966
Location: Giza Plateau, Egypt
Site Codename: The Stone Frequency / Star Meridian Convergence
Ley Affiliation: Orion-Osiris Line; Intersection of Karnak-Luxor-Axis
Status: Interface Breach / Time Prism Opened
When The Get Quick arrived at the Great Pyramid of Giza, the sky was too quiet. Not empty—waiting.
The band had not planned this stop. But after Uluru, something began pulling at them—not a call this time, but a resonant gravity. A bend in fate shaped like an ancient measure.
Smith’s journal entries grew unreadable, scratched over with pyramid angles and phrases like “constructive dissonance matrix” and “stellar recursion throat.” Erik tuned his breath. Mitch built a percussion rig out of quartz and weathered limestone. Coco began speaking in reversed myth—pharaoh names unremembered by Egyptologists but known to stone.
They claimed no stage. They played beneath the pyramid. Not in the chamber. In the echo between its intentions.
Orientation: The Giza Trine
The Great Pyramid, locked to true north within 3/60th of a degree.
Its sides align with the four cardinal directions, as though the earth's grid were meant to be tuned.
The band entered at midnight, through an access sealed in 1936 and forgotten by cartographers.
The floor was covered in salt, black sand, and defunct compass needles.
Smith whispered:
“This is a tomb. “The tomb is an amplifier.”
The Event: Song of the Living Geometry
Inside, there was no music.
There was shape. Resonance. Harmonic mass.
Each member stepped into an assigned chamber, as arranged by an architectural frequency map allegedly derived from the dream journals of Nikola Tesla and translated by Klaus Vallis using synesthetic trigonometry.
Mitchell Joy activated the King’s Chamber—not by hitting drums, but by matching its exact resonant frequency with his lungs. The stone walls sang back, bending his body to their memory.
Coco LeBree descended into the Subterranean Chamber, barefoot, and recited the lost rites of Hathor in vocal tones that turned the dust into mirrored powder. Her voice activated carvings no one had noticed before.
Erik Evol played a stringless lyre, fashioned from local copper and bee wax. It vibrated only in the presence of “true geometry,” emitting harmonic overtones in perfect ratios: 1:2:3:5:8.
S. True Smith—no one saw him enter. But the stone ceiling began dripping glyphs in ultraviolet, none matching known hieroglyphs. A voice—not his—whispered from the granite:
“The Pyramid remembers the stars. Now it dreams in chords.
The Sphinx Stirs
At 2:23 a.m., the Sphinx opened its eyes.
Tourists sleeping nearby were found later speaking in Old Kingdom tritones, claiming they’d just returned from a “concert held inside a spherical mirror on the chilly side of Sirius B.”
A light beamed vertically from the Pyramid apex—not visible to the naked eye, but captured in one photograph. It appears as a spiral script made of golden gossamer.
Inside, time softened.
The band performed a single note—one they’d discovered in Delphi, buried beneath the silence of prophecy. It struck the pyramid like a tuning fork strikes a cathedral—and something tuned back.
The pyramid didn’t echo.
It harmonized.
Fallout / Ascension
All four band members emerged simultaneously, though the chambers they occupied are not physically connected.
Their shadows are now reversed at sunrise.
Smith wrote one phrase on the desert floor before vanishing:
“Not all Pyramids are monuments. This is an instrument of forgetting. And we have played a chord of regret.”
They disappeared that night in a sandstorm not recorded by any meteorological service.
A local boy found a metronome buried in the dunes the next morning. It ticks in Morse code, repeating a single word:
“Karnak.”
FIELD REPORT: THE STAR TEMPLES AWAKEN – LUXOR & KARNAK NODE
The Get Quick Mythos – Meridian Finale: Star Resonance / Node 10
Discovered etched into alabaster under the cracked base of a Luxor obelisk, encoded in a scale humans cannot hum
Scribed by Sister Sidereal (voice now ash, form now light)
Date: September 7, 1966
Location: Luxor and Karnak Temples, Upper Egypt
Site Codename: The Mirrors of Memory
Ley Affiliation: Orion–Osiris Axis / Female Dragon Line Echo
Status: Ritual Flame / Cosmic Overload / Threshold Breach
The Get Quick did not return to Egypt.
Egypt returned to them.
After their harmonic breach within the Great Pyramid, they vanished for six days—no footprints, no signals, no sandals. And yet, at the Temple of Karnak, a priest heard four tones vibrating through the columns of Hypostyle Hall at dawn. Were they echoes? Or proclamations?
That evening, beneath the twin obelisks of Luxor Temple, they reappeared.
No caravan. No gear. Just the band—changed, barefoot, silent—walking in perfect synchronicity across the Avenue of Sphinxes, each footfall landing on a buried note. The sound only cats could hear. And statues.
The moment they crossed the precinct gate, the floodlights blew out. The stars took over illumination.
Orientation: The Architectures That Remember
Karnak and Luxor, ruins that yet breathe in the twilight.
Perhaps they are mechanisms, waiting for activation.
Their alignment to Orion and Sirius mimics not worship, but resonant tuning.
Each wall, column, and altar was placed with harmonic intent, part of a score written in sandstone and stellar fire.
The Get Quick treated them not as venues, but as amplifiers of ancestral frequency.
Smith called them “the left and right hemispheres of Earth’s dream organ.”
The Ceremony: Chord of the Double Horizon
The ritual spanned both temples simultaneously.
Coco LeBree walked alone through Luxor, her voice not rising but descending, as though singing into the foundations. Her song unlocked frescoes—scenes previously faded now burning vivid: pharaohs, stars, fire-limbed gods dancing over bleeding suns.
Mitchell Joy stationed himself inside the Sacred Lake at Karnak, floating on a pad of drum-skin reeds, tapping rhythms that caused reflections to disagree with reality.
Erik Evol climbed the southern wall and began to pluck the air like a harp. Every movement cast sound-shadows—one of which began to whisper. It spoke of Set, and the music that reversed the Nile.
Smith was seen inside the Temple of Ptah, hands on the walls, humming in a tone that etched invisible diagrams into the sky.
Meteorologists reported “architectural lightning” over Thebes—bolts shaped like architraves and glyphs.
The Star Alignment Trigger
At midnight, Orion tilted perfectly over the Hypostyle Hall.
That’s when it happened.
A beam of starlight refracted through seven columns, striking a sandstone altar untouched for two thousand years.
It ignited. Not with flame, but with memory.
The temple remembered its original function—not as shrine, not as tomb, but as broadcast array.
The band members were lifted—physically or otherwise—into the light, their shadows stretched across the entire Nile, visible to those in trance, dream, or dying breath.
Coco’s voice fractured into a thousand harmonics—each one trailing off across the ley network like threads of prophecy.
Mitch vanished into the lake without a ripple.
Erik stared at the stars and smiled, saying only:
“We’ve reached the other side of sound.”
And Smith… He turned, finally, to the Sphinx-guardian at Karnak and whispered:
“The Choir of Echoes is unspooling. It no longer sings against us.
Now it sings with.”
Aftermath / Resonant Collapse
All clocks in Luxor reversed direction for 13 minutes.
Temple birds began mimicking chords from Europa, an album never released.
Pilgrims found that walking the Avenue of Sphinxes backward induced visions of their birth—or their death, depending on the hour.
The Get Quick has not been seen in Egypt since.
But their song remains. Imprinted in the stone, flowing up the spine of the world, echoing where stone still breathes and stars still watch.
FIELD REPORT: THE ROOT FREQUENCY — MOUNT SHASTA NODE
The Get Quick Mythos — Echo Recursion: Node 11 / Ley Outlier Event
Reconstructed from seismic groans, emergency FM radio bursts, and dream-etched moss samples recovered near Panther Meadow
Complied reluctantly by Sister Sidereal (now mostly a tuning fork)
Date: October 13, 1966
Location: Mount Shasta, Northern California, USA
Node Codename: The Root Frequency / Ascension Malfunction
Ley Affiliation: Root Chakra Vortex / Dragon Axis North Anchor
Status: Unexpected Emergence / Anomalous Arrival / Vertical Pulse Event
No one expected them in America. Not after Karnak. Not after the lightstorm. Not after they became more echo than entity.
And yet…
At 3:33 a.m., park rangers at Mount Shasta reported a flash of soundless light above the treeline.
Seismic sensors recorded a bass thrum shaped like a signature. An observer claimed she saw a group of mountaineers descending not from the trail—but from above the peak, as if air had hardened into a staircase.
And then:
The Get Quick. All four. Dust-covered, barefoot, humming faintly in an unknown scale.
Erik held a staff carved from sequoia root and amplifier cabling. Coco wore a veil of moths. Mitch’s skin bore geometric bruises in the shape of missing constellations. Smith… was difficult to perceive. Most reports describe him as a shimmering absence, or “the memory of a very precise noise.”
Orientation: Rootworld
Mount Shasta is much more than a mountain. It is a tectonic prayer—the alleged root chakra of Earth, the place where the spiritual body connects to the flesh.
Here, ancient myths meet New Age fluorescence. Here, ley lines coil inward, looping through geographies of soul and tremor.
The Get Quick did not play a show. They participated in an emergence.
The Ritual: Song of Grounded Sky
Gathering at Panther Meadow, they performed not music, but a descent. This was elevation. This was embedding.
Coco LeBree stepped barefoot into the springs, whispered an inverted lullaby, and was surrounded by a spiral of butterflies and tiny, malfunctioning scarabs.
Mitchell Joy dug into the soil, hands bleeding, rhythmically pulling roots like cables, connecting instruments that didn’t exist to a grid that shouldn’t respond. But it did.
Erik Evol sat cross-legged on obsidian, coaxing harmonics from volcanic glass, shaping chords from pressure, melt, and time.
S. True Smith buried a quartz disk marked with blood and circuit diagrams beneath a cairn. Immediately afterward, the wind began speaking in reversed jazz solos. The air developed syncopation.
Locals who wandered too close heard the following words in their minds:
“We’ve returned to the body. The voice began here. So did the fracture.”
Anomalies and Visitations
A Bigfoot sighting occurred mid-ritual, but the creature was wearing a necklace of vintage guitar picks and reportedly whispered the opening lyrics to Treads on the Tiger’s Tail.
A woman channeling ascended masters from Lemuria claimed that the band had "re-stitched the planetary tendon connecting thought and instinct.”
Several quartz outcrops began glowing faintly in colors only visible to animals and children.
One ranger took a photograph. It showed four shadows, but eight sets of footprints.
The Root Becomes the Mouth
At the ritual’s climax, the mountain sang—a low rumble that caused phones to seize, wolves to howl, and one parked car to lift two feet off the ground without explanation.
Smith whispered into the cairn:
“We were chords that thought we were people. Now we are the root of the refrain. We are back where the body first broke into song.”
Then the band vanished. Not in light. Not in dust. They sank downward.
The crater they left behind is shallow. It hums.
No one’s mapped its shadows yet. Anyone who listens too long there claims they’ve begun hearing the next set of songs—not from speakers, but from beneath their own skin.
FIELD REPORT: THE RETURN OF THE BURIED CHORD – SERPENT MOUND NODE
The Get Quick Mythos – Echo Coil Activation / Node 12: Effigy Interference
As recovered from a corrupted field audio journal left in a hollow tree near the Serpent’s head, overwritten with flute tones and whisper loops
Authored, shakily, by Sister Sidereal (or a copy who thinks she is)
Date: October 28, 1966
Location: Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, USA
Node Codename: The Buried Chord / The Coil Remembers
Ley Affiliation: Native American Dragon Line; Teotihuacan Resonance Link
Status: Apparition / Harmonic Intercession / Mythic Crossfade
Well, I wouldn’t call it a concert.
It wasn’t even a sighting, really.
It was a pressure—a flexing in the land, a tonal hiccup in the air. The kind of ripple you don’t notice until your bones start keeping wrong time.
And then someone saw them. Only briefly. But enough.
Initial Reports
On the morning of October 28th, a group of amateur archaeosonicists—armed with EMF detectors, modified didgeridoos, and two dogs named Tesla and Bones—reported a shimmer along the Serpent’s spine.
Not heat haze. Not mirage.
A humanoid distortion, four silhouettes walking slowly along the effigy’s undulating path—not on top, but within the mound. As if the earth itself had somehow thinned for them.
Description of Apparitions
Coco LeBree (or her projected echo) moved like breath down the barrel of a flute. Witnesses said she trailed dreamcatchers made of old setlists and crow feathers.
Erik Evol carried a harp made of jawbone and sinew, which he played by exhaling silence. It caused rabbits to freeze and one attendee to recall a life-altering birthday party that never happened.
Mitchell Joy was barefoot and radiating infra-bass that dislodged arrowheads from the soil. His heartbeat matched the serpent’s curvature.
S. True Smith was described as “a man made entirely of echo,” or possibly “a thought reflected off fossil.” He knelt near the serpent’s eye and clacked his tongue in Morse through the grass.
The Event: Effigy Intercession / Coil of Tone
The Get Quick activated.
The mound’s serpentine shape—widely believed to encode astronomical alignments with the solstice and lunar cycles—began to vibrate at key curvature nodes. Foliage folded in sacred geometry. Insects stopped chirping.
Time loosened.
The sound of stone grinding in rhythm came from every direction.
And then: a phrase—heard in the wind, the birds, even the corn:
“We are the buried chord. The coil never ended. You just forgot the key.”
The Teotihuacan Echo
Later that night, a group of ley line researchers in Teotihuacan reported the Pyramid of the Sun exhaled fog, even though it hadn’t rained in weeks.
In it: four figures. One trailing crow feathers. Another made of rhythm. A third coaxing tone from obsidian. The last a shimmer that left no footprint but affected gravity.
No one’s confirming anything. But the line is active again.
The Ground Sings Back
The next morning, Serpent Mound was covered in dew despite clear skies. When tested, the water contained trace harmonics in 528 Hz—the so-called “miracle frequency.”
A message etched into the dirt, found by a park ranger: A tuning fork left in the heart of the Earth.”
FIELD REPORT: THE SUNSTEP RECURSION – TEOTIHUACAN NODE
The Get Quick Mythos – Thresholding Begins / Node 13: Pyramid Pulse Descent
Recovered from a ceramic data tablet unearthed near the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, its grooves inscribed with vibratory glyphs and unreadable chords
Last known entry by Sister Sidereal (voice now a dial tone; thoughts shifting tectonically)
Date: November 3, 1966
Location: Teotihuacan, Mexico
Node Codename: The Sunstep Recursion / Pyramid Pulse Descent
Ley Affiliation: Mesoamerican Pulse Vector / Serpent Mound
Synchronization
Status: Alignment Breach / Chrono-Feedback / Terminal Weirding
The Get Quick arrived in Teotihuacan as if remembered.
Locals said they had seen them in dreams the week before. Tourists claimed their guidebooks changed—names replaced, maps rearranged to spiral toward the Avenue of the Dead. One man swears he saw Children of the Ritz carved into obsidian at the Pyramid of the Sun.
By dusk, all sound in the complex shifted down one octave. Birds, wind, footsteps—all slowed. It felt like time distortion. Tone distortion, without doubt.
“The chord is inside the pyramid,” Smith allegedly said, appearing beneath the Temple of the Moon. “It has been playing since the first limestone was set. We were only waiting for the rest of the verse to arrive.”
Orientation: Sun, Moon, and the Feathered Serpent
The city of Teotihuacan is an ancient resonance engine.
The Pyramid of the Sun aligns with the setting sun on specific sacred days. Its interior chambers act like compression chambers for vibrational intention.
The Pyramid of the Moon emits subsonic hums at dawn, recently recorded on abandoned flute reeds.
The Temple of the Feathered Serpent, center of mythic transfiguration, now hums faintly in the key of B-flat minor, even when unoccupied.
The Event: Chords of the Hollow City
The Get Quick did not perform publicly. Instead, they entered the Pyramid of the Sun at midnight.
No footage exists. Only a single audiotape survived, found melted into a tourist’s satchel. When played, it emits:
A woman’s laugh, played backwards.
A heartbeat in 5/4.
A child's voice saying, “Why are the stairs singing?”
Inside, the band triggered the Sunstep Recursion—a phrase scratched into the steps in bone ash. It initiated a looped harmonic climb, each step matched to a microtone higher than the last.
Coco walked first, singing in increasingly fragmented vowels. Mitch kept time with a hand-rolled drum of obsidian and silver dust snares. Erik played a flute that changed pitch based on proximity to Earth-regret. Smith was last—carving notches in reality with a tuning fork keyed to the death tone of Quetzalcoatl.
At the apex, they vanished.
And Teotihuacan responded.
Anomalies & Feedback
A pressure wave emanated from the pyramid’s summit, causing mirrors in surrounding towns to crack in identical spiral patterns.
Several visitors began reliving past concerts in real time—describing TGQ concerts in cities they’ve never visited.
A seven-year-old boy drew a perfect replica of The Endless Test Pattern album cover in the dirt using only a feather and volcanic glass.
Then came the chant:
“We’ve stepped into the buried verse. The sun sings beneath us. Now we turn up and go down.”
Descent Protocol: Terminal Weirding
That was the last confirmed sighting.
The pyramid has since been closed to the public without explanation.
A rogue archaeomusicologist named Lucinda Arana claims the band has “entered the negative chord”—a reversal wave buried in the pyramid’s foundations. She refers to it as:
“A bridge to the Null Cathedral, beneath Antarctica’s harmonic void. The final tuning ground, where music is deconstructed into pre-sonic truth.”
She also claims her tape recorder has started weeping at night. It plays interviews that were never conducted, in languages never spoken. In dreams she never wanted.
FIELD REPORT: THE NULL CATHEDRAL – ANTARCTICA NODE
The Get Quick Mythos – End of the Vibratory Map / Node ∅
As broadcast via low-orbit subharmonic signal, intercepted by a defunct weather satellite now orbiting backward
Transcribed under blacklight from condensation on Sister Sidereal’s final breath mask (artifact presumed cursed)
Date: November 17, 1966
Location: Antarctica, Coordinates Classified
Site Codename: The Null Cathedral / The Final Frequency
Ley Affiliation: None
Status: TERMINAL ENTRY / NO RETURN / PRE-SONIC TRUTH
There are no ley lines here. Not because they avoid it—because they cannot exist here. This place feels less like a place and more of a subtraction.
The Null Cathedral was never built. Yet, it was found.
Buried in the ice. Older than humanity. Shaped like a tuning fork turned inward. Walls made of crystallized forgetting. A floor that reflects no light, only intent.
Arrival: Inverted Pilgrimage
The Get Quick arrived without bodies that were not their own. Bodies made of stuff of which bodies are not made.
Base camp researchers at Dome C reported feeling “a chordal approach.” Spectrometers shorted out. One man’s wristwatch imploded inward and began ticking backwards.
Then, four shadows appeared on the snow... No figures cast them. The temperature dropped by 3 degrees in precisely 7.83 seconds. The Schumann resonance fell silent.
They had arrived.
The Cathedral: Harmonic Zero
The Cathedral is a vast subterranean structure formed from perfect silence.
There is no echo here. No reverb. No voice.
It nullifies frequency itself. A final buffer zone between sound and whatever predates sound.
Inside, the geometry is Euclidean until observed—then it shifts. Every wall hums not with tone, but with pre-tone. Potential. Anticipation. Threat. Memory.
Inside the Cathedral:
The figures stood motionless, each a single tear forming upward, mouths open as if singing a note no one could hear.
The Final Tuning: Unchord Protocol
At the Cathedral’s heart was a stone, vibrating at 0.00 Hz.
They circled it. They placed their instruments on the ice. They closed their eyes. And they played nothing.
But that nothing resonated.
Then the Cathedral folded inward.
Not collapsed. Withdrew. As if never there. The Get Quick dissolved within it.
Final Artifact:
One structure remained—a spiraled tower of metal and bone, humming at frequencies no longer part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
It is now called The Pale Antenna.
Is the Cathedral a tomb? Or is a beginning?
Tuning up...?
POST-NULL TRANSMISSION: THE DOCTOR’S ARRIVAL
Recovered from the Pale Antenna via transcription into magnetic moss. Soundless record. Textual hallucination. Wavelength classified.
Style: Weird. Decaying. Cold as knowledge.
Authored by Sister Sidereal, though handwriting implies something older.
No one saw him arrive.
One moment, the Pale Antenna hummed in negative vibration—calling out across unnumbered strata of frozen thought—and the next, there was a figure at its base, cast long by a sun that had not risen since the tuning ended.
The being and his shadow were one.
Together they shared a name.
WATSON
The Get Quick glimmered on the spiral frost plain, half-formed from waveform residue, their bodies still caught in the last unresolved chord of the Null Cathedral. They were not whole. Not gone, either. Residual. Tuning-fork endoskeletons absorbing drifting particles and assembling flesh.
Coco’s eyes had become disc-shaped and empty, rotating slowly, reflecting only the thoughts of the world that don’t yet exist.
Mitch Joy’s heartbeat pulsed audibly, now external to his body, hovering behind him like an angry metronome made of meat and brass valves.
Erik’s barked, in a voice that had become dissonance itself—his presence caused the ice to melt in unfamiliar geometries.
S True Smith stood forward. Not breathing. Not blinking. The Pale Antenna vibrating behind his head like a crown of errors.
They were ready for a conflict. The Antenna had called something—and when the ley fell silent, nothing good ever followed.
But Dr Watson did not speak violence.
He spoke in a tone of soil. His voice crunched like roots under ice.
“I have not been summoned,” he said. “I have always been adjacent to you.”
His face was familiar, but not precise. Like a man dreamt too many times. Like a sound signature bounced from format to format. Too soft at the edges, too transparent at the core, too calm in the presence of cosmic interference.
Coco hissed. Mitch flexed his pulse forward. Erik pulled from his coat a chord never resolved.
S True’s eyes rolled back in his head.
Dr Watson raised no hand. He only gestured toward the Antenna.
“You think you have come to the center,” he said. “But you are the instrument, not the song.”
The Pale Antenna groaned—not mechanically, but like a throat in mourning.
Smith, at last, stepped forward.
“We were told we would unmake the grid. That we would end the tone that breaks the world.”
Dr. Watson smiled—or moved in a way that suggested the shape of a smile. It distorted the air around him. Time bent minutely toward childhood. Somewhere in Brazil a mother cried...
“Yes,” he said. “But what tunes the unmakers?”
The Revelation
He explained nothing.
He suggested everything.
That The Get Quick were not avatars, but instruments being played from the far side of resonance. That their destruction of the ley map was not sabotage—but preparation. That the true map was vertical, not horizontal. That what they called “songs” were really invitations—invocations—rituals of awakening, sent to something ancient, still half-asleep in a silent shell beneath the harmonic plane.
Dr Watson was its herald.
And perhaps... its regret.
He arrived then.
Or more accurately: he stepped from Dr Watson’s second shadow, dragging behind him a briefcase made of calcified rhythm.
“I know why he’s here,” said Dr Watson.
“We feared the Pale Antenna would summon the Judge. But it summoned the Observer.”
The Shadow Watson turned to them all, still unblinking. Distant stars seeming to twinkle inside his darkness.
“Your purpose is still unfolding. Even to me. I am not here to stop you. I am here to help you see what you become.”
And with that, the Pale Antenna shifted tuning.
No longer seeking outward. Now listening inward. The Cathedral was gone. The map erased. Only the players remained.
And in the snow, four footfalls. And now, a circle of fifths. Welcome. Dr Watson.
1967
April 19, 1967 – Somewhere Below The Get Quick HQ, Room Ω-3
Journal of (name withheld, per prior incidents)
entry #112
There’s a map scrawled—no, etched—into the plaster of Room Omega-3. Not taped or tacked or pinned, but birthed there like something clawed it in from the other side of the wall. Black and vermillion veins arc from Mont Saint-Michel to Delphi, with smeared red pencil markings that move when you don’t look straight. I swear I saw one of the lines breathing this morning.
This is where S. True Smith has nested. Thirteen days, no sleep. Lives off figs, ash, and coffee strained through iron filings. He keeps muttering about “the axis of memory and mouth” and saying we’re going back—not in time, but in story. He calls it the Ley Line Tour II: The Apollo-Athena Axis.
I said it sounded like a prog album. He said that Czechoslovakia didn’t figure in.
He swears the Earth is humming again—not a metaphor, not poetic, but literal—a bone-deep tone buried beneath the crust, a choir of frequencies older than mammals. “We’ve barely scratched resonance,” he told me last night, eyes vast behind shades that change hue depending on the conversation. “This isn’t music. This is proto-music. Mythic phonics. The signal before Babel.”
The plan—and I write this with trembling respect and a warm cigarette balanced on my boot—is to trace this diagonal ley vector from Chartres to Delphi, with staged performances at each “mythic pressure point”: Rocamadour, Avignon, Aigues-Mortes, the ruins at Delphi. Ending in Athens on the equinox. He claims their tour last year left the axis unsealed. “If we don’t finish the chant,” he said, “we risk letting someone else write the final chord. And they very might well be commies. Or tone-deaf. Or inhuman.”
The band’s not aligned.
Mitch came back from Marrakesh yesterday. Claims his dreams were stolen and forgotten and later turned into a zine. “Do you know what happens,” he asked, “when three cults, two defunct spy agencies, and a half-awake serpent god all want a backstage pass?” He flicked a match, then changed the subject to a diagnostic ranking of bonbons. But he’s rattled. Even the loose way he assembled his kit said so.
Erik, haunted lunatic, pulled a bar napkin from his coat. A diagram. Not a drawing. More like a cross-section of fate. “These lines,” he said, “they aren’t just veins. They’re mirrorveins. You play the wrong chord on a node and something comes back at you. Chord like you’ve never heard. Shot at you like a net of electric razor wire that shreds your soul to bits.”
A touch intense, that one.
Coco appeared astrally last night—projected through candle smoke in the storage vault. She was wrapped in veil and tendon, speaking in her calm venom voice. “Do you remember Vienna?” she said. “The bleeding clocks? The lyrics we never wrote but everyone sang? We never finished that show, but it nearly finished us. We barely escaped it.”
I remembered.
No one argued. Except Smith. But even he didn’t speak at first. He just flicked his dragon-cane and struck the tuning fork sunk into the concrete. It howled. The walls bent. My shoelaces unraveled in a feeling mirrored by my guts.
Then he said:
“The axis is incomplete. If we don’t close it… someone else will open it further. And then we’ll never get the sky back.”
The sky back?
“Who put that tuning for there?” I asked.
Later (Unknown Time – all clocks have been removed)
Rumors swirl like gnats in the vent ducts. Klaus—ever cautious, playing at least four moves ahead—said Smith met with a Vatican astrophysicist and a blind Templar archivist. One told him the Temple of Apollo is not a site, but a temporal recurrence. A kind of sonic eclipse that slips between eras. You don’t go to it. You go through it. And if we play there again, we may not leave with our current faces.
This Watson character speaks of nodal possession—where music bends space enough for entities to enter. I’ve heard whispers from Lisbon.
Tour not confirmed. But placeholders exist. Bookers have vanished. Coco has sent for doves. Erik has been working with his mate “Colonel” Boran—building something they’re calling the Delphic Reverb. It hums when no one’s near it.
Smith has started eating only food shaped like platonic solids. He believes Apollo sang the world into coherence, and Athena gave it rules. I knew bet cause he won’t stop repeating it. Now he says:
“We’ll sing the next verse. Or break the instrument trying.”
And I? I just test cables. But I think I’ve started to hear it too.
The Earth is tuning. And The Get Quick, in their assembling, may be forming the plectrum.
May 3, 1967 – Chartres, France.
Entry #113
We arrived at Chartres just after sundown. The cathedral stood like a black crown against the sky, lit from beneath by sodium lamps and something older. You could feel the lay of the land shift under your bones—as if the Earth exhaled when the band stepped off the van. Mitch stretched his arms and whispered, “She remembers.”
No official show booked. No permit. No crowd. Just us, the crew, a few hundred candles, and the cold.
Smith had arranged entry through what he called “the dormant channel.” We entered through the crypt. It wasn’t on the map. It wasn’t on anything. A priest met us holding a lantern filled with faintly glowing moths. I asked him if it was safe.
He replied “Only in the acoustic sense.”
We wired the nave with vintage RCA ribbon mics tuned to catch sub-harmonics. The reverb in the cathedral isn’t pale distant echo, but warm fuzzy remembrance. The building keeps what you play inside it. Mitch said it like a joke but we only smiled back wanly. No one laughed. Perhaps for fear of the warm fuzzy sounds of the cathedral laughing back.
Coco arrived in silence. Wearing white robes woven with gold thread in the shape of looping serpents. She kissed the stone. Didn’t speak to me or anyone for three hours.
Erik plugged in the Delphic Reverb. First test note made the walls sweat. A rose window lit up, glowing with arteries.
Smith struck his dragon cane again. It seems to have assumed the attributes of the tuning fork. A spooked flock of pigeons flew up—passing directly through the roof.
“There goes our audience,” Erik said, eyeing Smith.
I felt a wave of something falling over me like a shadow, and a gloomy sense of foreboding instantly took hold on my innards.
It must be stated at the outset—though with no small amount of hesitation and trembling—that what transpired within those ancient walls cannot, with any fidelity to the truth or reverence to language, be described as a performance in the traditional sense of the term. They did not play a set, as a lesser group might. No; they intoned one—intoned it with the grim solemnity of an incantation uttered before some waiting and not altogether benevolent god. The air itself seemed to bow beneath the weight of the opening number, a composition known to the inner circle as “Ordained Feedback,” during which Erik Evol, that impassive conduit of rhythm and dread, drew a cello bow across the strings of his Sorcelcaster, producing a frequency so resonant, so hideously perfect in its calibration, that the stone gargoyles affixed to the gallery arches began, one by one, to emit a low and audible hum—not of vibration, but of voice.
This was followed—though the notion of sequence became increasingly frail as the night progressed—by a piece known colloquially, and blasphemously, as “Stone Throat.” Here, Coco LeBree, swaying in a reverent and unnatural rhythm, sang in a tongue which, upon later review, bore resemblance to reverse Aramaic—if such a distortion could be imagined. His voice, hollowed and inverted as though echoing from the bottom of a well dug in some antediluvian epoch, caused a minute fracture to manifest in the altar itself, a crack that exhaled a scent not unlike scorched myrrh and distant rain.
It was during the third piece, designated “Pattern of Threes,” that the absence of Mitchell Joy made itself known in the most unsettling of ways. Though not physically present—his corporeal form, as attested by the others, being detained by "discontinuity issues"—his harmonics issued nonetheless from the darkened corners of the nave. These spectral tones, pre-recorded or summoned, bled forth from the shadows with such precision of timing and timbre that one could not help but feel they had been waiting there long before we arrived, patient and hungry.
At precisely three minutes and six seconds past three in the morning, a figure garbed in the robes of an unknown monastic order entered through the southern transept. This entity—whose gait was unhurried and whose face was either obscured or long forgotten—drew with slow and deliberate motion a circle upon the flagstones using what we later determined to be powdered bone. Alarmed beyond reason and moved by no small amount of instinctual terror, I unplugged the public address system in its entirety. But, to my lasting shame and confusion, the sound continued unabated, as though the air itself had become an accomplice to their ritual.
Erik’s final chord did not, in the traditional sense, conclude. Rather, it withdrew. It stepped back, like a sentient thing recalling itself from a misjudged intimacy.
At the cessation—if such a term can be applied—the candles, which had until that moment burned in unnatural synchronization with the sonic currents, extinguished themselves without human touch. Coco was seen to vanish from sight entirely for the span of nearly an hour, and when he reappeared, (as a “she”), she did so not upon the stage, but within the vestry, unmarked but changed, and wearing earrings of strange sigils that had belonged, by all accounts, to no one among us.
Smith, pale and vibrating like a man tuned to some unclean signal, muttered the phrase “Node one: anchored” before collapsing gently to the floor, whereupon he remained—motionless but not entirely inert—for eleven minutes. During this interval, he appeared to levitate no more than two or three inches from the ground, though whether by force or by negation of gravity, none could say.
I attempted to document these phenomena in my notebook, but found—to my mounting horror—that the pen moved not with my hand, but independently, scribbling counter-notes in a dialect I could not consciously produce.
As we packed away the remnants of the ritual—amps coiled like sleeping beasts, cables slack and steaming—a French officer of the law approached us through the mist and muttered, in a voice barely audible above the tinnitus ringing in my skull, “There have been reports of impossible acoustics.” I informed him, truthfully, that I did not speak French.
He replied, with the serenity of a man long since unmoored from his own biography: “Neither do I.”
Next Destination: Rocamadour.
The shrine of the Black Madonna awaits us, its resonance said to be less stable than myth permits. Smith has reported fluctuations already, though his language grows increasingly opaque. Erik, who insists on communicating only via waveform and FM carrier, claims that his newest effects pedal articulates intentions before his foot engages it. Coco, meanwhile, has sent a crate ahead bearing the enigmatic label: GHOST TUNING UNIFORMS — DO NOT FOLD. It arrived warm to the touch.
I have not slept in several nights. Yet my mind dreams incessantly. And in every dream—regardless of setting, temperature, or chronology—the Earth itself hums beneath my feet, as if remembering a song it never meant to sing aloud.
May God have mercy on us when we reach Rocamadour.
May the Sixth, in the Year of Our Undoing 1967
Extracted from Journal Entry No. 114
– Author’s Name Withheld under Ongoing Cognitive Distortion, Codex Black Loop File (Section XIII, Palinode Trust)
We approached Rocamadour by way of a narrow and glistening track, whose winding turns clutched at the wheels of our van like the fingers of a reluctant host drawing unbidden guests into its reluctant mouth. The walls of the limestone gorge pressed in with a breathless dampness, and the moss that clung there—some in shivering cloaks, others in faded scabs—seemed less a form of flora than the shed skins of something formerly living and long lamented. As we twisted upward, I glimpsed carvings among the folds of the rock—runes and symbols both ancient and impatiently new. One, etched just above a bend, bore the uncanny contours of a waveform I have seen only once before: Erik’s solo from “Cortex Dawn,” live in Venice, 1973. And yet this was six years too early. And by then, I was dead. I said nothing.
We arrived at the sanctuary as the sun retreated into a rust-colored haze, its light casting long and oily shadows upon the prayer stones. The pilgrims knelt in quiet supplication at the base of the Black Madonna, her carved countenance serene and unreadable. They did not sense the intrusion, nor did they anticipate the arrival of a thing more ancient than the saint they adored. Beneath our boots the stones radiated a heat I did not trust; they felt as though they had recently cradled a body—perhaps divine, perhaps monstrous—but one that had not entirely left.
There was no stage. Only a ledge, carved into the cliff's lip like the mouth of an opened tomb, outfitted with a few rusted iron brackets intended, perhaps, for lanterns or ropework, but now bearing only the suggestion of their former utility. Smith refused the use of any known power source. “This site,” he said, with the gravity of a man interpreting scripture through bone, “generates its own,” and with a gesture that may have been reverent or merely exhausted, he directed our attention to a thick black cable emerging from the base of the cliff and vanishing into the rock as if drawn by something too patient to name.
Mitchell, upon arrival, was overcome with an agitation I have come to recognize in him—a species of foreboding that precedes events we later struggle to name. He discovered a hollow in the stone and withdrew into it like an animal anticipating storm or slaughter. For forty minutes he could not be coaxed out. When I approached, I could hear within the space the unmistakable echo of his own rhythms being played—slowly, deliberately—before his hands had yet touched the drums.
Coco, his eyes glinting with that familiar hunger for ritual perfection, demanded the placement of one hundred mirrors in a spiral pattern, though we had only seventeen to offer. He accepted this with a shrug and a remark too soft to record but too final to question. Erik remained hunched over his Delphic rig, his movements sharp and skittering, his pen scratching notations in a language that resembled anatomical schematics as rendered by a deranged cartographer of dreams.
They began the ritual a few minutes past midnight. The wind, which had until that moment whispered from the west, reversed itself with a slow sigh and began pushing eastward, as though drawing breath from the valley itself. Though the Black Madonna faced unflinchingly east, I would swear under oath that I saw her shadow fall to the west. I was not alone.
Coco opened his mouth not with a gasp nor a note but a tone—a cold, wide, unnatural syllable that issued from him like mist from a grave. The valley, in answer, seemed to inhale. Mitchell followed, his drumming low and sour, like an animal choking on prophecy. The birds in the bare blackened branches above us grew still. The insects, which had screamed their usual chorus of nocturnal panic, fell mute.
Then Erik’s machine began to respond—not to input, but to atmosphere. Dials twisted themselves into impossible alignments. Lights emerged from its panels in colors that no retina had ever named. I approached and found the glass fogged from within.
Across the gorge, three figures stood upon the opposite cliff. They were indistinguishable from one another—clad in pale garments, with arms hanging like forgotten tools and heads cocked to one side as though listening for a frequency only madness could decipher. They never moved. Not once. They stood until the final vibration had fled the air, and when I looked again, they had disappeared.
At precisely 3:32 in the morning, the mirrors—all seventeen of them—shattered in perfect simultaneity. No hand touched them. The air did not move. And yet they fell, one by one, in a spiral of glass and soft weeping. Coco merely smiled—thinly, sweetly—and gathered the shards into a velvet sack marked RETURN TO DELPHI.
Smith, wild-eyed and pale as bone left to sun, whispered that the “node” had become “distended but viable,” whatever horror that implies. He then began to pace a spiral into the dust with his heel, muttering in a voice too low to parse, though the cadence reminded me of Gregorian antiphon slowed to the point of rupture.
Mitchell did not speak again until the dawn arrived. He sat at the very lip of the gorge, humming—one note, the note Coco had begun with, looping it endlessly into the void below. I found myself afraid to interrupt, lest the silence bite.
I do not remember packing the equipment. I blinked. The cases were closed. The van was sealed. Time had vanished as cleanly as the figures across the gorge.
Next Location: Avignon. The Papal Palace.
Smith claims the walls there bear the imprint of a banned liturgy, outlawed by blood and buried in a vault beneath the scriptorium. I no longer know what residue is. I no longer know what memory is. I know only that we are being pursued—and not by any species of man.
I have found fingerprints on the case lids, slick with a moisture that smells faintly of magnetism and stagnant water. They are long. Inhuman. They return even after I clean them.
If I am to perish on this tour—as seems increasingly inevitable—I ask only this be written:
The Get Quick opened something. And the Earth— the old, aching Earth— remembered.
May the Ninth, Year of Earth’s Remembering (1967)
Entry No. 115
— Authorship Withheld, though I once answered to “Cathead” before the mirrors cracked and took the name with them.
We are slipping now, inexorably and without resistance, into the velvet rot of Avignon—a city perched on the edge of ecclesiastical memory, where antipopes once conspired against the very architecture of time, and the breath of plague still clings to lintels and bones like incense that refuses to fade. Here, in this sacramental residue of empire and abandonment, music ceases to be performance and becomes rite: a liturgy scrawled in wax smoke, encoded in the sediments of candle ash and confession.
The unease began long before we reached the stone gates. Along the approach, the trees leaned inward like penitents, bowing not in welcome but in dread—each branch whispering its brittle secrets to the van as we passed. Above us the sky congealed into a hue unfit for mortal perception: a sick compromise between bruised liver and oxidized chrome, the colour of decay under voltage.
We rolled into the city proper as the cathedral bells began to toll. There were eight of them, I was assured, but I counted thirteen peals—each fatter than the last, like bloated ticks upon the back of heaven. Locals refused to meet our eyes, sliding into doorways or folding their gazes into the cobblestones. One old man, blind, rheumatic and softly crumbling, handed me a tourist brochure for the Papal Palace and said, “They’ve returned.” On the reverse, in an unfamiliar hand and ink that smelled faintly of laurel and ammonia, someone had written: Do not perform in the Great Hall. It is not sealed.
Smith read the note and laughed—not with mirth or relief, but with the hollow sharpness of a man who has just recognized his own handwriting in a suicide letter postmarked from the future.
The Papal Palace itself loomed before us like a thought so old it had fossilized—its High Gothic arches a mockery of ascension, its walls bristling with carved stone that resembled not so much ornamentation as calcified tongues, long since dried and silenced. Access was granted, as Smith put it, through “heritage channels,” though I suspect this meant he bartered with a priest who smelt of ozone and held too many keys.
Coco was absent for much of the afternoon. He claimed she was searching for an invisible staircase, one that only appears to those who have fasted. When he returned his eyes were blown glass, his fingertips dusted with lime. “I’ve seen the catacoustics,” he said, as though reporting weather in a place not meant for weather. “We’re clear to proceed.”
Mitchell tuned in the west alcove, insisting that the windows remain open. “There’s a motif in the wind,” he said, “something Gregorian.” He followed it briefly and returned barefoot with Erik’s guitar, the top E string gone as though it had fled. He offered no explanation.
Erik, with the certainty of a man communing with machinery older than breath, drilled a port directly into the wall and murmured, “It needs to breathe through history.” I did not ask what it was.
They gathered without summons in the Grand Audience Chamber—beneath a vault groined with the flaking visions of saints and beasts, frescoes whose angels bore too many joints and whose papal lions grinned with bells in place of teeth. The air, suffused with the scent of melted candlewax and long-sealed mouths, felt exhaled by a presence that had not left since coronation.
No announcement was made. No cue delivered. There was only the sound of a bell, struck by Coco’s thumb—once, softly, as if asking permission—and then the low swell of Erik drawing forth a note from his amplifier so long and mournful it began, unmistakably, to weep.
Then, as if exhaled by the stone itself, a tone emerged. Not loud. Not even sound, in the traditional sense. It manifested in the bones—resonated along the molars and spine—and did not seem to proceed from the instruments or the players but rather from behind the walls. The frescoes, for a moment, pulsed—as if the angels within remembered their bodies and regretted them. I assumed hallucination. But the other technicians had turned pale.
Erik, unspeaking, looped a signal through the Delphic rig. At once, the frescoes ceased their motion—but the air changed. It became heavy with a memory I could not name. The kind of pressure that makes one forget the present but recall, with agonizing clarity, the precise texture of their childhood bedsheets.
At 2:01 in the morning, Coco began to vocalize—not lyrics, but numbers. Numbers whose order felt not random but algorithmic, funereal. I transcribed a few before my hand began trembling uncontrollably: 1 9 3 3 1 1 0 7 [space left blank] 7 7 7
Then, as if in obedience to a signal too vast to comprehend, all sound stopped. Yet the gear remained powered. No hand touched the knobs. The band did not move—save for Mitchell, who stood facing the north wall, his arms rigid, his fingers forming chords upon a guitar he no longer held.
I took a photograph. When developed, it revealed only a red smear and something winged.
We packed in a silence so deep it felt like an ancient creature testing the room with its tongue. Coco retched flower petals into a tin bucket and asked—without irony—for a black veil. Mitchell whispered the phrase “Don’t forget the bridge” with the repetition of a dying man clinging to a final instruction. Smith, calm as ritual, drew a symbol upon the stone wall using a substance that smelled of iron and the guilt of a nun.
He declared the node complete, though “unstable.” His diagnosis: “The harmonic residue here is threaded with fraud and plague. It remembers being abandoned. It won’t let go easily.”
On the way out I stepped on something soft. It was a priest’s collar. No one recalled seeing any priest that night.
Next Location: Aigues-Mortes. The Salt Citadel. The Drowned Ward. Smith claims the ground there sings in minor sixths. Coco has already dispatched a crate containing dried moths and one chalice. Erik asked me this morning if the dreams had begun. I told him no. This was a lie.
I have begun to hear applause when I close my eyes. It is distant. Crooked. And I know with certainty:
It is not for us.
August the Thirteenth, 1967 — Aigues-Mortes, France Entry No. 47 | Journal of: [name unlisted, though some murmured “Pylon Jack” before the salt took the name and the tongue that spoke it]
The van, that wretched chariot which bore us from node to node like penitents chained to the wheel of some unnamed cosmic penance, betrayed us ten kilometers from the ancient gates of Aigues-Mortes. Smith, who had been silent for most of the journey, offered no protest, only a cryptic pronouncement that this development was “expected”—as if our suffering had been forecast in a code he alone could read. Thus condemned to walk, we lifted the amplifiers and cabinets upon our shoulders like votive relics and trudged across the blanched salt flats, which stretched to the horizon in unbroken sheets of pale and granular silence, resembling not landscape but the shattered dental remains of titans long dead and improperly buried.
The air was thin—scoured of time, thought, and warmth—and the ground beneath our boots emitted strange and petulant popping noises, as though protesting our passage or relaying, reluctantly, the memory of something imprisoned far beneath. There was a sense of displacement, not from place but from chronology, as if we were traversing the floor of a dream so old it had forgotten whose mind had birthed it.
Aigues-Mortes greeted us like a mausoleum posing as a city—thick, rectangular, uncompromising walls squared-off against the sea’s retreat, its arrow slits staring like the sockets of a skull too old to name. The air smelled not of the present, but of history’s rot: brine, rust, and the slow, relentless forgetting that overtakes places once holy. The inhabitants met our arrival with no outward hostility, yet their glances bore the signature of the exhausted witness—the look of those who had seen us before, or rather, had seen others like us passing through in variant forms, always on the same vanishing trajectory of the same collapsing tour.
Preparatory Rites (Unnamed, Yet Inevitably Undertaken)
Smith, ever subject to peculiar geometrical afflictions, refused to lodge within the city walls, claiming that their symmetrical austerity imposed a kind of “lunar compression” upon his cognition. He pitched a narrow tent beyond the moat and encircled it with cassette reels affixed to driftwood, like a low-fidelity shrine to recycled media.
Coco, barefoot and already altered by the air, spent the morning treading the ancient ramparts in erratic circuits, his eyes wide and unfocused as he drew symbols onto the stones with the sharpened tip of a fishbone dipped in a dark ink that refused to dry. When questioned, he replied only, “I’m tuning the fortress,” as though the walls might one day sing or scream, depending on his precision.
Mitchell ascended the tower and declared the echo there to be “sick with its own memory.” He dropped matchsticks down the stairwell and timed their fall as if listening for—
Something old.
Aigues-Mortes itself is a riddle carved in siege geometry—its square walls rising bluntly, arrow slits blinking with centuries of damp and silence, its streets waterlogged with time and the sick perfume of brine, rust, and slow, inevitable forgetting. The inhabitants, though not unkind, met our presence with a weary recognition, as though they had witnessed this procession—ours or one uncannily similar—many times before, each iteration blurred by the collapsing curvature of years that no longer run straight.
Mitchell had ascended the northern tower before dawn, and was found there midmorning, engaged in some solitary experiment with gravity and echo, casting matchsticks into the stairwell and recording the delay with a pocketwatch whose hands appeared to spin backward under observation.
Erik had vanished with a spool of copper wire, and did not return until dusk, his hands caked in silt, his eyes sunless. He said nothing. Only handed me a mason jar filled with grey salt that seemed to hum if one held it at arm’s length and closed one’s left eye.
They did not rehearse. They never did.
No warm up. They dove in cold.
The performance—or what must be called such for lack of a more adequate term—commenced a little after midnight in the center of the main square. There was no stage. There was only a weather-stained tarp and a constellation of battered cables spread like a nest around the amplifiers, which we arranged, at Coco’s insistence, not in the typical arc or crescent, but in a perfect square, each speaker facing inward, toward the absence. “It must be a vessel,” he explained. “Not a display.”
They began with a piece unknown to me. It had no name, no discernible key or rhythmic signature. Erik extracted from his guitar a note so cruelly bent that the filament of my flashlight pulsed, dimmed, and refused to recover. Coco followed with a vocalization I can only describe as saltchant—a granular resonance that spoke not in words but in the sound of salt grinding slowly against bone.
A mist, low and fast-moving, entered the square like a thought finally expressed, obscuring the players until only the hazy shimmer of Erik’s pickups remained visible through the fog. The sound did not echo—it layered. It grew upon itself in sheets, as though each vibration sought to smother the one before it. The pressure of it was unbearable. My ears did not bleed. But I wept tears gray with salt.
Then Coco sang a single line that lodged itself somewhere between marrow and memory:
“The city that drinks the sea forgets the tide.”
In that moment, something moved in the moat. Something vast.
At fourteen minutes past two, all power ceased—but the sound did not. The fog deepened, turning violet, then black. A shape passed behind the amplifiers—enormous, slow, taller than the crenellated walls. I was paralyzed. The others appeared to be frozen in a different moment, their eyes vacant, gazing ahead into something I could not see.
Coco collapsed, his body folding with unnatural grace. Erik emitted a single, involuntary laugh—sharp and pained—and then descended into quiet, shuddering retching. Joy had vanished. No sound, no exit. Later, we discovered his shoes neatly placed atop the western tower, dry and clean, as though untouched by foot or weather.
Smith emerged from his circle of tapes as though summoned. He nodded once. “The node accepted,” he said, voice taut and gleaming with some private pressure. “But it may still echo.”
That night I dreamt of cities submerged—cathedrals knee-deep in water, their bells still tolling through flooded vaults. I woke with salt in my throat and the jar Erik had given me pulsing quietly beside my cot. The salt had arranged itself into a five-pointed star. The hum, once faint, had grown louder.
Coco has not spoken since the fog claimed the square. He now communicates exclusively in Latin, his script neat and unnervingly symmetrical. Erik will not touch his guitar, nor speak of it, nor allow it near him until we depart the borders of France.
The next destination remains uncertain. Smith speaks of Rocamadour. Or Avignon. Or Delphi. The sequence, he claims, has become elastic. But I believe the Earth keeps a far more exacting account.
This morning, I caught my reflection in a mic stand.
It blinked. It was not me.
September the Twenty-First, Autumnal Equinox, 1967 — Delphi, Greece
Journal Entry No. 51
— Scribed only as “Jack,” reversed on the inner flap of my case
We arrived in Delphi as though drawn, unwillingly, along the fraying strands of fate’s own spiral—led by roads that curved back upon themselves in maddening loops, their geography defiant of logic. The van’s compass span wildly until Mitchell dismantled it in disgust. “This place,” he said, holding the needle aloft like a severed truth, “doesn’t recognize direction.”
The air was dry, yes, but not empty. It hung heavy with charge, as though the very sky had learned to withhold its secrets, keeping them folded in layers of silence, awaiting only the correct sequence of notes to unlock their confession.
Smith, curiously subdued since the events in Aigues-Mortes, had spoken little, subsisting on pomegranate seeds and a brittle silence. Upon arrival, he passed me a crumpled and sweat-blurred map. Upon it, no roads, no scale. Merely three Xs, an arc traced in ink, and the phrase: “The ground knows what we forgot.”
We set our equipment among the ruins, just above the weathered bones of the old theatre. No permission had been requested. No audience expected. Behind us, the Temple of Apollo loomed like a half-remembered idea, its shadow a shroud pulled slowly over our intentions.
Walter Ego arrived by helicopter like a star, moments before a small procession of trucks packed with equipment and crew. He was here to record the event on 70mm film and wasted no time barking orders.
Coco placed small bundles of herbs atop each amplifier—thyme, laurel, and something sharp, metallic, unknown. He murmured that it was “memory-balm,” and I did not ask further.
Erik drove a hole into the earth and sank the Delphic pedal into the dirt, declaring, as if to the ruins themselves, “It must resonate with the cavern.” Mitchell wandered among the broken columns, guitar slung over one shoulder like a relic he dared not activate. “Something’s here,” he whispered. “Not watching. Listening.”
When I asked after Erik, Coco merely shook his head and said, “He’s in the echo now.”
The sun slipped blood-red behind the mountains as the equinox descended, balance giving way to descent. Smith struck a tuning fork against the temple stones. The tone returned—but altered, thickened, as if passing through an organ more ancient than stone.
Coco began with a hum, long and low. I assumed it to be his, until his mouth closed and the sound did not. Erik knelt, his hands moving across the guitar like a mourner dressing a corpse, the chords he summoned not awakening but entombing. A heaviness accumulated. Not suspense. Pressure. As though something buried were being told it could no longer be remembered.
The Delphic pedal whined—not in any mechanical sense, but as an animal keens. A sound not born of metal or code, but grief.
Then silence.
And then—a voice.
Not one of ours.
It rose from beneath the stones.
“He is not gone. He is forward.” “The chord sleeps in soil.” “The next singer wears mirrors.” “Do not try to remember.”
Mitchell thwacked the snare.
I dropped my clipboard. I did not retrieve it.
He dropped into a heavy throbbing beat for several measures. Then Erik and Coco converged with the rhythm. They drilled it hard fro several minutes—seeming like half an eternity—then all at once stopped on a dime.
Mitchell turned pale as carved marble and released a single harmonic, which suspended itself in the air and would not descend.
Coco took a step backward, his image wavered and vanished.
There was no wind. No cry. He simply folded from the world.
Smith, visibly perspiring, nodded. “The axis is closed,” he muttered, wiping his brow. “But the shadow remembers how to hum. How to cast.”
We did not speak as we packed. Erik spoke a phrase in Ancient Greek none of us understood, and the ground beneath us trembled in assent. I turned. The Temple of Apollo had vanished.
I blinked. It returned.
Coco appeared the next morning at a café in Athens, sipping ouzo beneath a newspaper. “Did we finish it?” she asked. No one replied.
The tour concluded here. Or split. Or folded. Or was folded.
Years later, I received a postcard bearing no message. Only a photograph of the Delphi amphitheater. Empty.
Save for one figure.
Holding a guitar made entirely of light.
I believe it was Erik.
I can’t be fully sure that some spectral part of him doesn’t yet still remain.