Chapter 5: Ghost Chords

It started with a buzz.

Not the kind you could trace to a faulty cable or a busted preamp — but something deeper, woven through the air like a splinter in silence.

Leah adjusted her mic levels again. No change. Still that same strange undertone humming beneath every track.

She pressed her headphones tighter. “What is that?”

The note wasn’t wrong. But it didn’t belong either.

A ghost note. Just a shimmer of sound beneath the real melody — like something trying to speak through the music, not with it.

She hit stop on the track. The waveform glitched — pulsing an extra measure where none had been played.

Miles floated nearby, hovering above the studio floor like fog before dawn.

He hadn’t meant to affect the track. Not directly. He’d just been thinking in chords again — humming without breath, threading together progressions from a half-finished melody that once came to him during his last winter on earth.

Now, it echoed through Leah’s DAW like it was being pulled through the cables.

He backed away.

“I didn’t touch anything,” he said, as if someone would hear.

Cassiel’s voice flared in his mind, sharp and sardonic: That’s how it starts, you know. A whisper in the wires. Then the living start hearing things they were never meant to.

Leah spent the next day checking every input and cable. She even took the condenser mic to the local repair shop.

“It’s clean,” the tech told her. “If anything, it’s recording too well. Picking up tones outside normal human range.”

She frowned. “Like what? Ultrasonic?”

He shrugged. “More like… subharmonics. Weird resonance. But hey — some artists would kill for that kind of texture.”

Leah left with more questions than answers.

That night, she turned on the monitor speakers. Played back a rough take of her latest song.

Then stopped cold.

There it was again. Between two notes — a sliver of sound, low and aching. Like someone sighing in the walls.

She didn’t sleep.

Back in the Frequency, Cassiel was waiting beside the mixing desk, arms folded, gaze hard.

Miles hovered in silence, shame radiating from him like distortion.

Cassiel didn’t speak for a long moment.

Then: “You invented a ghost chord.”

Miles looked up. “I didn’t mean to. It just… slipped through.”

“That’s the problem,” Cassiel said. “You’re not just inspiring now. You’re altering the fabric.”

“It was only a harmonic.”

“No, it was an echo of you. Resonating where it doesn’t belong.”

Cassiel waved his hand over a spectral waveform. A ripple of violet light spread across it, jagged and unstable.

“These notes are leaking,” he said. “You’re leaving imprints in the track. Imprints she can’t explain. That she might come to fear.”

Miles frowned. “But they’re beautiful. Aren’t they?”

Cassiel’s voice darkened. “So are hurricanes.”

Leah sat in the dark, looping the track over and over.

This wasn’t like before — the stray lyric, the melody in her sleep. This was tactile. Like something was playing with her.

She turned off the speakers. The sound stopped.

But inside her head, the chord still rang.

A note without an origin. A key without a song.

She pressed her palms to her ears.

“Who’s there?” she whispered.

No answer.

But in the silence, she swore she felt someone in the room with her — watching, waiting.

Miles returned to the studio, shaken.

“She’s hearing me now,” he said quietly. “Not just emotionally. Literally.”

Cassiel nodded, subdued. “You’ve gone beyond influence. You’ve created tether points. Anchor notes. You’re haunting her.”

Miles shut his eyes. “Then what do I do?”

Cassiel gestured toward the glowing orbs — now three dimly lit, one pulsing erratically.

“You keep going,” he said. “But tread lightly. You’re walking on the edge of a melody that can either set her free… or trap her with you.”

Miles looked at the board, at the ripple of ghost chords beginning to form their own pattern — not just a song, but a presence.

“Then I’ll write carefully,” he whispered. “No more bleeding through.”

Cassiel didn’t respond. Just turned away.

But the silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It was pregnant with sound not yet born — and truths not yet spoken.