If you're hearing this, something has goneterribly wrong. Or terribly right. I'm not sure which yet.
It's October 23rd, almost midnight, and I'm standing at the edge of theCarolina woods with a guitar, a camera, and enough stupid confidence to thinkthis is a good idea. Three years I spent in Nashville chasing a music careerthat never happened. The algorithms didn't like my sound. The labels didn'treturn my calls. So I came home to North Carolina, back to the stories mygrandmother used to tell.
Stories about a place called the Devil's Tramping Ground.
Forty feet of bare earth in a perfect circle where nothing grows. Not aweed, not a blade of grass, nothing. Legend says the devil himself walks thatcircle every night, plotting against mankind.
The clearing is just ahead. I can see the moonlight catching the edge ofit through the trees. My grandmother's voice echoes in my head, warning me tostay away. But artists don't make great art by playing it safe.
The moment I step from the forest floor onto the circle, everythingchanges. The texture under my boots shifts from soft leaves to hard-packedearth. The ambient sound drops like someone threw a switch—no crickets, norustling leaves, just an unnatural silence that makes my ears ring.
"Jesus," I whisper, and even my voice sounds wrong here. Dead.Absorbed.
The circle is exactly as the stories described. Forty feet across,perfectly geometric, the soil a strange ash-gray color. I walk the perimeterslowly, and it's like tracing the edge of a wound in the world. Somethinghappened here. Something that left a scar.
Content that will finally get people to pay attention to my work. Butstanding here now, I feel something else. A weight in the air. A pressureagainst my eardrums like descending too fast in an airplane.
My field re-corder goes on the ground, red light blinking. Everything isready.
I pick up my acoustic guitar and move to the center of the circle. Theexact center, where the silence feels deepest. Where the air feels heaviest.
I don't know it yet, but this is the moment my life divides into beforeand after. Before I pressed re-cord. And everything that comes after.
Chapter 3: The Performance
I hit the camera's re-cord button and take my position. Center circle.Guitar in hand. The performer's mask slides over my face—the version of DukeTyner who knows what he's doing, who isn't scared, who belongs here.
"This is Duke Tyner at the Devil's Tramping Ground," I announceto the camera. "It's midnight on October 23rd. What you're about to hearis an original piece I'm calling 'Carolina Ghosts.' This one's for everyonestill haunted by home."
My fingers find the strings and I begin to play. The melody emergesslowly—fingerpicked notes in a minor key, mournful and deliberate. In thestrange acoustics of the circle, the guitar sounds both intimate and distant,as if the music exists in two places at once.
I close my eyes and begin to sing.
"Walk these woods where shadows fall, listen close, hear nothing atall. The ground remembers every name, but the living forget just thesame..."
I'm deep into the performance when I first notice it. A low hum beneathmy playing. So subtle I almost miss it. At first, I think it's my tinnitusacting up—the constant ringing in my ears left over from the studio fire thatkilled Jake. But this is different. This is external.
The hum grows. Swells. Becomes almost harmonic with my guitar.
"Carolina pines stand tall and—"
SNAP.
The high E string breaks with a crack like a gunshot. My hands jerk awayfrom the guitar instinctively. "Damn it," I mutter. Brand newstrings. I changed them yesterday specifically for this shoot.
Then I hear it.
In the silence after the broken string, beneath the wind in the distanttrees, a whisper. Female. Barely audible.
"...press re-cord..."
My entire body goes rigid. That wasn't the wind. That was a voice.
