The Last Unplayed Track

The day they lowered Marcus into the ground, I stood at the edge of the crowd holding the silver armband I’d found in his desk drawer. It wasn’t the one he wore to every choir practice, the one with the tiny bird engraving. This was older, tarnished, with a latch that stuck. I didn’t know why he kept it, but I knew I had to. The priest’s words were a blur. I kept thinking about the thing we’d promised to watch out for. The thing in the music room.

We weren’t supposed to be there after dark. The janitor had to lock up by six, but Marcus had a key that he’d convinced the old groundskeeper to lend him, a key he said was for ‘practicing late.’ We’d use it sometimes, me and him, to sneak into the room with its peeling posters of dead composers and the piano that had been out of tune since the 90s. The room was always cold, even in summer, and the only warmth came from the small space heater we’d plug in near the conductor’s stand. That’s where we’d sit, on the edge of the risers, talking about everything and nothing while the heater clicked and hummed.

That last week, Marcus was different. He was quiet, but not his usual thoughtful quiet. It was a tight, coiled silence, like he was listening to something only he could hear. He kept pulling out his phone and scrolling through the music app, but never playing anything. I asked him what was wrong. He said, ‘There’s a track on your playlist that’s not yours. It has your name on it.’ I laughed. He didn’t. He just stared at the screen with a hard, flat look that chased the warmth from the room.

The track he meant was the one that appeared on my phone the morning of the funeral. A single song, no title, no artist, just a waveform that looked like a sawtooth. It started playing automatically when I opened the app to stop his music. The sound wasn’t music. It was a high, thin whine that made my teeth ache, and beneath it, a rhythmic pulse that matched the flickering of the fluorescent lights. I yanked the earbuds out, but the sound seemed to stick in my ears, a ghost of a frequency.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing Marcus’s face as he said, ‘It has your name on it.’ I pulled out my phone again, expecting the track to be there, but the playlist was gone. Instead, there was a new album cover, a black square with a single silver armband silhouette. I tapped it, and the music room appeared on the screen. It was a live feed, not a recording. The camera angle was from the old conductor’s podium, looking out at the risers. And there, in the center seat, sat a figure I didn’t recognize. It wore the same silver armband I’d found, but it was too long, covering the entire forearm. The figure wasn’t moving. The room was silent except for the distant hum of the heater.

Then, slowly, the figure turned its head toward the camera. Its face was a blur, like a smudge of static. But its eyes were clear. They were Marcus’s eyes, but darker, older, and full of a lonely despair that I’d never seen in him. It opened its mouth, and what came out was the same high-pitched whine, but now it was words, a distorted voice saying, ‘You left me here. The quiet is too loud.’ I dropped the phone, and the screen went black.

The funeral home called the next day. They said Marcus’s body had gone missing from the viewing room. The police found it in the high school, sitting in the music room, on the risers, with the silver armband on its arm. The armband was the one from the drawer. The coroner said his hands were frozen around an invisible object, as if he’d been holding something that wasn’t there. They couldn’t explain the deep scratches on the inside of the piano lid, or the fact that every clock in the room had stopped at exactly 6:00.

I haven’t turned on my phone since. But sometimes, at night, I hear a faint whine from the corner of my room, and when I look, the screen lights up on its own. It shows the music room again, but now it’s empty. The camera pans slowly, looking for something. And then it stops at the edge of the door. A figure stands there, and it raises a hand. It’s holding a pair of earbuds. It mouths something. I can’t hear it, but I know the words. It says, ‘Your turn to listen.’ The armband on its wrist gleams in the dark. The heater hums a low note. The quiet is coming. And I know, when it arrives, it will speak my name.