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The Song That Kills

*Warning: Mentions of self-harm and sexual assault*

By Jennifer ChildersPublished 3 years ago 18 min read
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“I never considered myself a believer in another dimension,” says Catherine James, a fifty-year-old Connecticut woman, as she stares out her window. “But, after this and all that’s happened, I have no reason not to. There’s just no other explanation.” Catherine James is the aunt of Theo Wood, who went missing six years ago, vanishing into thin air. Six years later, and the day still seems vivid to her.

“I have no other explanation, he simply just vanished,” she says. “I went into his room to remind him to take out the garbage. He was on his laptop, he complained as all teenagers do, but said okay. I close the door, walk down the hallway, and I hear this noise that I’ll never forget.” Her face turns pale as she recalls the last sounds she ever heard from her nephew, “I can’t even think how to describe it. It was a high pitched shriek, with a really guttural, unhuman growl. And there were these awful burbling sounds, it sounded like he was drowning, but of course he wasn’t. I ran back to his room, opened the door, and he was just...gone.”

Theo’s body was nowhere to be found. All that remained of him was a hole in his bed that was freshly burnt, and a pool of blood seeping from under his bed. Police and emergency teams were called. No trace of Theo anywhere in the house, or outside. “They kept asking me if I wanted to have a search party sent out,” Catherine recalls, “I said ‘I don’t need a search party, because he didn’t leave the house. I saw him just ten seconds earlier and he was fine.’”

It took Catherine two years before she was able to go back into Theo’s room. When she did, she found his laptop open, though dead. Was there something on his laptop that caused Theo to suddenly disappear? “I never believed in demons,” Catherine reaffirms once more, “but, there can’t be anything else. Something on this computer killed Theo.”

What makes Theo’s case even more terrifying, is that it is not an isolated incident.

*****

Theo was born on March 13th, 1996. His father died in a car crash before his birth, and his mother was mentally unwell, and not fit to raise a child. Catherine James had always wanted a child, but had never managed to settle down with anyone. So she took on the responsibility of raising Theo as her own.

Theo was an adorable, fun-loving child. “He had the brightest smile in the world and gave the best hugs and kisses,” Catherine recalls. Pictures she has shown me of Theo show a bright eyed, happy go lucky child with a crown of dark curls on his head. There are many pictures of him as a child in Little League sports, and plenty of him with guitars, behind drum sets, and on the piano stool.

“He liked to play sports for a bit,” Catherine says, “but music was his first love. He could play that guitar for hours at a time.” Theo even tried to start a rock group, but failed all the time. “Never gave up though,” she says, “it was his dream to be in a band, so he kept trying to get people together to form a band.”

Like all teens, Theo had a rebellious side. “He wore lots of black,” she says, “makeup, spikes, creepy stuff like that. Most teens go through weird phases, so I thought nothing of it.” But when Catherine got a call from Theo’s school principal, saying that he had been smoking weed on school premises, that’s when Catherine began to worry. “I was worried he was with the wrong crowd.” She said, “I tried to encourage him to find other people to hang out with.”

But, the thing was, Theo’s friends were perfectly normal! He had a girlfriend--captain of the cheer team--two best guy friends who were both straight A students, he was well-liked around the school. “He was far from what one might call an ‘outcast.’” Catherine said, “He was popular. He had an active social life. I saw no reason for him to start acting out.” Theo shrugged off his marijuana usage as “just trying something new.” Catherine decided to let it slide, after all, there were far worse drugs he could be using.

But when she became truly concerned was when she had evidence of Theo self-harming. “I wasn’t too surprised,” she admitted, “mental illness runs in the family. His mother was also a cutter when she was in high school.” She suggested Theo see a psychiatrist and get put on medication. He agreed, and the cutting stopped. For awhile.

Catherine was greatly disturbed when Theo’s girlfriend, Hannah, showed up at their house, wishing to speak to her in private about Theo. “She pulled her shirt up, and there she had the Satanic pentagram carved right into her stomach. I said, ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ She just broke down in tears and said, ‘Theo did it to me!’ I’m not usually one to deny allegations of obvious abuse, but I was extremely skeptical. Theo? It didn’t register.”

When Theo came home, Catherine confronted him. He shrugged the matter off. “I think Hannah was just joking around,” he told her. Catherine believed him, though still shaken.

Hannah Porter, who is now married and goes by the name Hannah Renton, has another side of the story to share with us.

*****

Hannah is now a 22-year-old nursing student in Boulder Springs, Colorado. But when she was sixteen, she was an aspiring “fly girl” who wanted to tour with the Los Angeles Lakers as a cheerleader. She was, and is, a very cute and petite blonde, with freckles, and a sad smile. However, photos she’s shown me alongside Theo seem to suggest there was a point when her smile was much more genuine. Though she’s now married to Calvin Renton, who she met during her first year of nursing school, it’s clear she still has a little bit of fondness in her heart for Theo.

“When you fall in love with someone, you always love them,” she says, “eventually you might move on and fall in love with someone else. But a small part of you always loves the other people. And I loved Theo.” According to her, Theo was her first everything: First date, first boyfriend, first kiss. They were both just fourteen when they met, and the chemistry was immediate. “I fell in love with him right away,” she says, “we were both in the same gym class. I sprained my ankle while running the mile. I know this sounds so cliche and lame, but he was like a knight in shining armour. He stopped running, asked me if I was alright, and when it was clear I wasn’t, he walked me back to the bleachers and ran to get me some ice. He didn’t care if it affected his score. He was genuinely concerned about me. I just immediately thought, ‘I better not lose this guy.’”

After a few weeks of shy, casual flirting, Hannah finally asked Theo if he would like to go to the movies with her. “It was really sudden. We had a blast, and by the next weekend, we’d made it official that we were a couple.” They stayed together through high school--or at least what of it that Theo survived. Hannah says she noticed him changing around the summer before junior year. “It was a gradual shift,” she says, “first he kind of became more introverted, less open. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but looking back, I kind of wished I had.”

Just two days into the start of junior year, Hannah walked in on Theo cutting his arm in her bathroom. But as if that weren’t already disturbing enough, Hannah says he didn’t even acknowledge that she had seen it. “I walked in, I knew he saw me because he was looking right at me, but he said nothing. No apologies, no trying to explain himself. There was so much blood. I was scared.” In the heat of the moment, Hannah was too panicked to ask Theo what he was doing and why. She instead went and locked herself in her room. “Then, Theo came in about thirty minutes later, acting totally normal. I asked him why he’d cut himself. He didn’t give me a straight answer, just said he wanted to watch TV. So that’s what we did.”

I ask Hannah about Theo’s alleged abusive behavior towards her. Her eyes fill with tears. “He wasn’t abusive,” she says firmly, “or maybe he was. I don’t know. Is it bad that I still love him even though he turned on me?” Like most abused women, Hannah is still very protective of Theo and often insists that when he did lash out, it was her own fault.

It all started brutally, when Theo “made me have sex with him”--or in other words, raped her. “One minute I was talking to him about how mad I was that the cheer coach wouldn’t let me be captain that year, even though I had been the previous year. And then just like that, he’s on top of me, ripping off my clothes, despite how much I’m telling him I’m not in the mood. He wasn’t listening, wasn’t responding, he said nothing. It was like he was a machine.” As she described before, afterwards, Theo went away for about thirty minutes, then re-emerged acting as if nothing had happened, leaving Hannah confused and afraid.

But unfortunately, things were about to get even worse. On a date night, she and Theo went for a walk in the park. “It was lovely,” she said, “he was acting like his normal self--funny, sweet.” However, as soon as they passed a certain fork in a trail, she says Theo changed once again. “He just stopped. There were two trails, one that was paved, and another that was beaten. He walks over towards the beaten one and just stands there, very still.” All attempts to get Theo’s attention failed. Hannah’s lips turn pale as she thinks back on that night, “He started chanting all this Latin gibberish, in a voice that wasn’t his.” Theo began wandering towards the beaten trail. Hannah ran to stop him, when she did, he turned around and clawed at her face.

“Thankfully, his nails were short,” she said, “so they didn’t do much damage.” But nevertheless, Hannah was spooked. She ran away back to the car. Only to find that Theo was already there waiting for her, with a stone cold gaze on his face. “He grabbed me by the arm and pulled out a pocket knife, and he just dug it right into his leg. Then he kept muttering in this demented voice that he needed my blood. I smacked him and drove away without him.”

Theo came to her house that night in tears. He confessed to her that he had been blacking out a lot lately, and that he had no idea what kinds of things he did when he blacked out--only that he would wake up with cuts and bruises that he couldn’t explain. “He admitted that his aunt Catherine had put him on meds. The doctors had no idea what was going on with him. I told him I would love and support him through whatever he was going through.”

Theo continued seeing his therapist and taking his meds. According to Hannah, things seemed to be returning back to normal.

*****

To maybe understand Theo’s condition, perhaps it is critical to talk about Theo’s mother; Jewel Wood. As Catherine told us, her sister was also plagued by mental illness. Particularly depression, with bouts of psychosis. She was a cutter in high school, and was placed on suicide watch twice before she turned eighteen. She married at eighteen, and became pregnant with Theo shortly afterwards.

When her husband died unexpectedly in a car crash while she was still carrying Theo, Jewel became a mess. “After she got married she was much happier,” Catherine says, “and when she became pregnant she was ecstatic. She stopped self-harming, she took her meds when she was supposed to, and was overall very stable. After her husband died, it all went to pot.”

Jewel attempted to hang herself. Luckily, her mother found her before it was too late. She was rushed to the emergency room. The doctors were concerned about the health of her unborn child, and worried for his future.

When Theo was born, Jewel fell into a deep postpartum depression; and willingly surrendered her son to be put into care by her sister.

Jewel wasn’t around much during Theo’s childhood. “She was mostly going in and out of mental hospitals,” Catherine recalls, “occasionally she would stop by to chat or see Theo. But after Theo turned three, the visits stopped.” Catherine does remember her sister having similar delusions that Theo was having. “Shortly after Theo was born, she started seeing some guy who was part of some cult called Magog Alliance. He believed he was from the direct lineage of Satan himself. I didn’t pry too much, I just thought he was crazy.”

But after dating this man for a month, Jewel also joined the Magog Alliance. Again, Catherine decided not to interfere. “Theo was my responsibility now, and I needed to focus on raising him in a healthy household--and not focus so much on what his mother was doing.” Jewel changed her name to Lilith, wore all black, and started doing concerning things. “She would catch bats, drink their blood. She and her boyfriend both carved Satanic pentagrams into their skin. She had this weird obsession with the devil, hell, and blood.”

The truly frightening part came when Catherine was awakened in the middle of the night to a then two-year-old Theo crying and screaming. She went to Theo’s room only to find Jewel standing over her own son with a knife in her hands, saying Satan was telling her she needed to sacrifice her son to him so she could achieve immortality.

Catherine managed to talk some sense into her sister, and Jewel was institutionalized swiftly afterwards. When she came out of the hospital, Jewel visited the house once again. This time, she cut herself right in front of Catherine and Theo, and then rubbed the blood on her son’s face, crooning that now he too would be an ally of Satan.

Catherine told her sister to leave, which she did. And she did not return. No news of Jewel had surfaced ever since then. Though through our investigative reporting, we have managed to snag a short witness account from a former member of the Magog Alliance, who wishes to stay anonymous. We will call him Randy.

“I remember seeing her go inside the synagogue, and she was dripping with blood,” Randy said. “There was another alliance member inside. But his face was hooded, so I couldn’t make him out. I don’t think I had seen him before. He handed her a portable CD player and headphones. They talked a bit, so I didn’t think much of it. I assumed they knew each other. Anyway, she walks away and back out to the front of the synagogue where I was standing.

“She put her headphones on as she walked past me and turned the corner. She was out of my sight. Then, I don’t really know how to describe what happened next, because I didn’t really see it, I just saw the effects of it. But I smelled fire, and there was a huge light that sort of burst out from the ground and colored the sky for a second. I heard her scream, but her voice sounded like it was drowning. I ran to go see what had happened. When I got around the corner, there was nothing there but smoke and a puddle of blood.”

Randy phoned the police from a nearby gas station and then took off. He cut himself off from Magog Alliance, but that didn’t stop them from harassing him. “They would send me packages of dead rats, bloodied knives, and used condoms. They were relentless. It got so bad I went into hiding. Left town for a new life.”

For three months, Randy says he lived peacefully in his new home. But then, one day, another ominous package showed up at his doorstep. “I opened it, and all it was was a portable CD player and a pair of earphones.” Randy remembered what had happened that night at the synagogue and went to phone police immediately. Of course, nobody believed him. “They said they couldn’t look into it unless they were actively harming me or a family member.”

Randy clicked the CD player open. Inside was just a regular burned CD, with “BELETH’S MELODY” printed in thick black marker. “I was scared,” Randy said, “I snapped the thing in half and threw it in the trash.”

But later that day, Randy went to grab something from his bedroom, and found the CD lying on his bed--perfectly mended.

Randy took a hammer to the CD and crushed it into pieces.

Later the CD reappeared again in a different part of the house--fully mended.

Randy threw it into a fire.

The CD did not melt.

“That disc,” he says, trembling, “it’s not of this world. I know I sound like I’m nuts. But I truly believe there is something evil about that CD.”

Could whatever was on this CD, be the music that not only caused the disappearance of Theo--but also his mother? Is there a hell sound making its way to certain Satanic cult members and their loved ones? Police and private investigators aren’t so sure. But they’re frightened to find out what this lethal sound is. Perhaps it will stay in the air forever.

****

February 29th

I was just a few days away from submitting this feature to New England Times, but something on the news caught my ear.

Very recently, there have been other people who have disappeared after opening an ominous MP3 file on their computers. And this time, the receivers are not affiliated with any Satanic cults. The most recent victim was Caroline Day, a 22-year-old law student from Pennsylvania. Catholic. Skeptical about all things occult. Absolutely no links to Magog Alliance, or any other Satanic cult.

And I fear I may be responsible for this new wave of disappearances.

Were there greater forces at work who knew I was writing this piece? Are they doing this now as a kind of cyber-terrorist threat to prevent me from publishing my work? Whatever their reasoning is, it won’t stop me from trying to understand this story.

I have considered writing a follow-up piece after getting more information on Caroline Day. I want to wait and see how well this piece does before doing that. But in my mind, there’s something holding me back: The fear of accidentally breathing a new wave of life into a case that we had all believed was closed for years.

I went back to talk with Catherine James. But Catherine now refuses to speak to me. The look on her face was that of restrained terror, as if I were some kind of psychopomp there for her soul. After trying to convince her to let me speak to her, she tells me of her neighbor who received the MP3 file and died much in the same way Theo did.

I went to speak to the family of the neighbor lady, who also wanted nothing to do with me.

This truly is a mystery for the ages. As for the disappearance of Theo, his mother, Caroline, and any other victims of this bizarre cyber-attack--their stories may never reach closure. And for that, I can’t help blaming myself. Maybe I really am an accidental psychopomp.

But still, I worked too hard on this piece. I did so much research, interviewing, traveling, editing. If I don’t publish this, then it was all for nothing. But, where do my desires lie? Am I really doing this to tell the world of these people whose lives were ripped from them in an instant? Or am I just using their strange tragedies for my own gain?

*****

She decides to shrug off her feelings of guilt. This is too interesting of a story, and she put so much work into crafting it. Quickly, she finishes making her final edits before submitting it for publication. Finally, she hits “send” and breathes a sigh of relief. She opens a new blank document to brainstorm her next big piece. A notification bell rings on her computer, a new email. Absentmindedly, she clicks to open it.

“ALEXANDRIA WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU”

Attached to the email is an unnamed MP3 file. Alexandria freezes, staring at the screen before her. Her finger hovers over the link for a moment. Her journalistic instincts want to see if this is the sound that kills. She wants to know what it sounds like. But she decides to let her curiosity rest, and quickly moves the email to the trash bin. She breathes a sigh of relief.

But not ten seconds later, her email notification rings again. A new email from an unknown sender.

“YOU WILL REGRET THAT, ALEXANDRIA”

And before she can delete this email, her laptop glitches. A shrunken face with transparent eyes overtakes the screen, and the MP3 file she just deleted opens itself. Alexandria starts to run for the door, but black tar pours from the cracks, cementing her inside.

“No,” she cries, “I don’t want to hear it!” She presses her hands against her ears to keep the sound from entering her mind. But its garish sound still wraps its way into her, like osmosis absorbing energy. Suddenly, a hole opens in the ground, fire engulfs her as she screams, but her throat is filled with blood which she has no choice but to gargle as she is pulled by an unseen force into the burning pit. The hole closes up, and the room returns to its normal state. However, Alexandria is gone--and in her place is just a puddle of blood and the smell of burning flesh.

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About the Creator

Jennifer Childers

I just write thoughts on anime, games, music, movies, or other things that are on my mind. Occasionally a poem or short story might come up.

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