HorrorAddicts.net Press Present: An Excerpt from “Crescendo of Darkness”

Music has the power to soothe the soul, drive people to obsession, and soundtrack evil plots. Is music the instigator of madness, or the key that unhinges the psychosis within? From guitar lessons in a graveyard and a baby allergic to music, to an infectious homicidal demo and melancholy tunes in a haunted lighthouse, Crescendo of Darkness will quench your thirst for horrifying audio fiction.

HorrorAddicts.net is proud to present fourteen tales of murderous music, demonic performers, and cursed audiophiles.

Please enjoy an excerpt below from Crescendo of Darkness.

“Solomon’s Piano” by Jeremy Megargee

A grieving husband builds an unnatural piano, but can his music raise the dead?

It was only after Solomon lost everything that he decided to build his grand piano. He had lived most his life with a symphony in his soul, but the death of his wife silenced the music within. The melodies curdled. The lyrical notes turned to ash, and it left his mind feeling like a field in the wake of a firestorm. Lorna was his source of harmony, and on the gray day her remains were lowered into the ground, Solomon’s eardrums deadened, and no words of sympathy penetrated the barrier. He became an insular man, driven to isolation and brooding, to numb the few senses left to him.

During his prime, Lorna often spoke of his hands as magical tools capable of creating marvels, but his trade as a craftsman suffered drastically after her passing. His long fingers were often covered in nicotine from poorly rolled cigarettes as opposed to wood varnish. No matter how much smoke he sucked up, it did nothing to flavor the weight of parasitic sorrow.

He had liked making beautiful things for her. She was his muse. She worked at the finest theater in the heart of New Orleans, and her operatic vocals were known far and wide. Reviews often compared her voice to a seraph descending from the gilded gates of Heaven. She stirred something inside those who were privileged enough to hear her perform. Her songs mined emotion with relative ease, and members of the audience would often leave her performances while weeping freely or sporting enormous smiles. She was that good. Solomon always thought she could change the fabric of reality with her voice, turning even the most listless day into something optimistic and wonderful with just a few offered notes.

It had been so vindictive of fate to steal her voice in her final days on earth. Of all the illnesses to plague the human race, Solomon hated throat cancer the most after he’d seen how it ravaged tissue and smothered something so incredibly pure. He watched his poor Lorna turn into a wasted sack of flesh and bones.

When all hope was lost, her voice became nothing but a ghostly croak from the bleeding corridor of her esophagus. It was a perversion of her talent. It was the scorn of the universe raining down hellfire on a true innocent. How pompous of Death to make it impossible for her to even offer her husband a proper goodbye at the end? All Solomon heard were the dull hoofbeats of a pale horse ripping her away, and when she exhaled her last breath, Solomon could have sworn the Reaper laughed at his lament.

Death’s laugh opened a flame inside of Solomon, and a dark furnace burned in the remnant of his heart. Intent to feed it, he consumed forbidden knowledge and the memorized words of archaic rites. He hunted down shunned grimoires and he visited secret libraries of the eccentric and the mad. In the search for justice against Death, he read books bound in necrotic flesh beneath the glow of sickly lamplight. Each new taste of the occult whittled a ragged scar into his thoughts. Over time, his obsession became his sole reason to live.

After searching for what felt like ages, Solomon cobbled together the makings of a ritual. The intention was simple. He would cross the veil of the netherworld and raise the dead. Lorna would rise. She’d sing and Death would tremble at the sound of her resurrection. He must construct an object of power, a conduit between worlds with enough durability to sustain the portal to bring Lorna back from oblivion. As her performances were often accompanied by the haunting tones of a glossy black, grand piano, Solomon thought it fitting that a familiar instrument should draw her from the grave.

He’d discerned a normal piano would not be up to snuff. A rare and visceral creation was required to pierce into the shadow pits of the dead, and Solomon felt a sense of empowerment at the chance to put his skill set to use.

His idle hands trembled with grief, but the godless work steadied his nerves. Solomon became proficient at obtaining the ingredients necessary to erect his piano, and his workshop burned with infernal passion from dawn until dusk. His personal crusade flayed his sanity like skin from boiled sinew, but Solomon never noticed his own descent into madness. He was too focused on the endgame, blinded, driven, and harried by the desire to see his bride come wailing back from the outer dark.

He became a ghoul beneath the moonbeams, and he scoured the graves of Louisiana to obtain the talismans required to anchor his piano. First came the ribcage of Henry Roelan Byrd. It was just a fragile and mossy cage of brittle bones, but it served as the perfect enclosure to connect the strings. His night work led him to another choral king next, and with pick and shovel in hand, he tore at Moses George Hogan’s tomb and pulled his grinning skull up from the loamy soil. He extracted the teeth and the finger joints from the ancient cadaver, and he carved them down into perfect ivory keys. Old Moses never felt a thing…

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To read the rest of this story and thirteen other horror music shorts, check out: 

Crescendo of Darkness

Direct link: https://www.amazon.com/Crescendo-Darkness-Jeremiah-Donaldson/dp/1987708156

Edited by Jeremiah Donaldson

Cover by Carmen Masloski

HorrorAddicts.net Press

 Let music unlock your fear within.