I’d been obsessed with sound long before my accident. However, losing my sight—just for a while, hopefully—allowed sound to take over my life. Then it did more than that.
I was teaching audio editing and radio reporting at the University of Texas at Austin when things went wrong. I was an adjunct and the pay was trash, but the health insurance was decent and I loved the city, so I stuck with it. Like most people, I was willing to put my dreams on hold as long as there was food on the table and money to cover my bills. A crippling sense of agitated stagnation is better weathered with a full stomach.
As part of my class, students produced a news show that ran on the school’s radio station. Production began in the fifth week of class every semester. The first few shows were always messy, and putting them together meant we had to stay in the studio until late at night on Thursdays. I was driving home at 2 a.m. after putting together our fourth show, going north on Speedway, when a drunk driver in a black pickup truck barreled through a red light on Thirty-Eighth Street. I slammed on the brakes of my old SUV—of a brand that shall not be named—and the brake pump decided to take a nap. I slammed into the back of the huge metallic monster in front of me so hard that the toolbox the guy had in the bed of the truck disengaged, flew through the windshield, and stopped when it met my skull.
The aftermath of the accident was ugly. I woke up six days later and had never been so thirsty in my life. The toolbox—which was thankfully empty (the guy had bought just because he thought it looked cool)—fractured my skull and knocked out nine of my teeth. But the worst of it was that the traumatic brain injury, which doctors were surprised I’d survived, had taken my vision. In a nutshell, it’s easy to lose your sight when the front of your head caves in like an overripe melon. As the swelling receded, doctors were confident my vision would come back because my optic nerve was intact. It didn’t. The weight of possibility was almost as bad as the pressure from facing a life-changing event. I decided to hold on to hope.
The guy who flew through the red light at Thirty-Eighth Street got caught doing so on the camera mounted on the light, and he couldn’t drive away because he only had half a car left after my own vehicle ripped apart the back of his, so he stuck around. I guess the silver lining was that his daddy was a full professor at UT’s School of Law who had made a name for himself before that, so he was super nice to me because he knew his boy was in a world of trouble. Between what he gave me to stay quiet about junior’s drinking and reckless driving and what the car manufacturer paid me to stay out of court, never mention their brand, and forget about their faulty brake pump, I was set for life.
After the hospital, I went straight home. My dad had passed away at seventy from a heart attack after one too many burgers, and my mom had succumbed to breast cancer—mercifully quickly—two years before, so I was alone. I had enough money to pay for it, so I hired a woman by the name of Sandra González to teach me how to be blind. She had worked for years at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired and eventually started her own business serving recluses, agoraphobics, and rich people who craved individual attention. After ten months with her and with the help of a plethora of technological advances I didn’t even know existed, I could fend for myself. When she told me I was ready to live on my own if I wanted to, I closed my apartment and bought a recently remodeled cabin that sat on nine wooded acres out near Fredericksburg. It was far enough away from Austin to help me battle the depression that was threatening to destroy me and close enough to the city that I could get folks to bring me food and get drivers to take me to my appointments once or twice a month.
When I could see, I loved reading and watching movies. With those things gone, audiobooks became my go-to. Unfortunately, I quickly grew tired of bad readings, shoddy production values, and robotic voices that always seemed to emphasize the wrong words. I knew that if I didn’t stay busy, hopelessness would devour me, so I filled most of my time with music and strange sounds.
Recordings of weird sounds had been a huge part of why I got into audio in the first place. But as it became my job, the part of it I was passionate about vanished into the background. They say that if you work at something you love, you won’t work a day in your life, but the truth is that if you work at something you love, you’ll eventually stop loving it as much. With free time on my hands and nothing to do but listen, I went back to sound, looking for my salvation, and was almost immediately obsessed once again.
When I was seventeen, my friend Arjun sent me an email with a two-minute MP3. If you played it loud enough, you could hear what sounded like a loud, small electric motor and some beeps. According to Arjun, he’d found the clip on the dark web. It was supposed to be a recording of a hovering UFO someone had seen over a town in California I’d never heard of before. I spent the next five years looking for weird sounds online, and then did more of the same while finishing college.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with that image of an iceberg that shows how “deep” the dark web goes. Well, that image is relatively accurate, but the main difference between the dark web and the internet that everyone uses every day boils down to the tools you need to access it and the fact that, on the dark web, you have to know exactly where you’re going because things aren’t indexed. I never bought drugs, hired anyone to kill my enemies, or looked for the kind of porn that makes regular people nauseous. No, my passion was sound, and the go-to place for sound on the dark web was a place called Dark(Sound). It wasn’t easy to get there with my new computer, which worked mostly on verbal commands, but I managed to find Dark(Sound) again, and I soon realized how much I’d missed hunting for bizarre audio clips.
After having my computer read me a few descriptions, on the first night of hunting I ended up downloading two pieces of audio. The first, titled giuliaesorcismo.wav, was, according to the two-line synopsis provided by the uploader, who called himself El Demonio de Culiacán, a recording of a young woman’s exorcism in the small town of Alberobello in Italy. The clip lasted seven minutes and two seconds and ended abruptly. For most of that time, you could hear a young woman screaming, deep voices speaking a language I’d never heard before, and two male voices praying in Italian and then Latin. During the last few seconds, the sound of breaking bones could be heard just before one of the men screamed something that turned into a strangled moan. The audio quality wasn’t great, but it was clear enough to be engaging. It was an impressive piece of audio if you believed that everything you were hearing was real, but I’d heard audio exactly like it in a dozen movies, so it didn’t impress me as much as it would have if I had heard it when I was seventeen.
The second clip I downloaded had no synopsis, but the file’s name, which took me a few minutes to crack after asking the computer to spell it out for me, piqued my interest: vinieronaporgustavo.mp3. They came for Gustavo. It was a very short clip, just forty-nine seconds, but it was creepy as hell. The file, obviously a chunk of something larger, started mid-scream. However, there were things behind the screams. After importing the file into my editing program and filtering out the screams, the sounds of the background became clearer: a manly voice chuckling twice and the sound of something wet . . . sliding? After isolating that bit, I became convinced it was the sound of a knife going in and out of human flesh—or maybe a pig?—based on the small pop of the skin. I was sure it was a recording of a man getting stabbed repeatedly.
Being by yourself in a small cabin in the woods is great for relaxation, but awful once you spend almost five hours dissecting audio clips of a young woman’s exorcism and a man getting stabbed, so I managed to stay off the dark web for a few days and listened mostly to dark, multilayered atmospheric music that I knew would keep me entertained—Robert Rich, Lustmord, William Basinski.
I only managed to stay away for three days.
After my brief hiatus, I spent a week glued to my computer with my headphones on, ignoring my phone and only remembering to eat when my stomached grumbled. It was like entering worlds in which audio spoke to me, dared me to clean it up and expose its secrets. I didn’t need my sight to stay there, to be good at playing with the sound until it was revealed as a hoax, a bad joke, or the real deal. I listened to a full recording from an autopsy performed in New York City in 2018. The body in question belonged to a young man who’d been shot nine times in the face and four in the chest. The most interesting thing about it was the voice of the medical examiner, Dr. Elvira Ramírez, who sounded like a relatively young woman. As she carefully described the damage done by the bullets, her voice changed. I could hear sadness creep into her voice, and I loved her for it.
I listened to audio that had allegedly been recorded at 112 Ocean Avenue, the famous Amityville house where Ronald DeFeo Jr. brutally murdered his whole family. The recording came from ghost hunters who’d broken in right after the family who had moved in after the DeFeos’ deaths moved out. A young boy—presumably a ghost—can be heard saying “Help me” twice.
And those were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and my apologies for coming back to that image again. I listened to a group of young ladies chanting to a “White God” in an abandoned house somewhere in Ecuador. According to my research, they had all been found dead a few days after one of the girls recorded the whole thing on her phone. I listened to a Black Mass in its entirety, sacrifices included. I listened to a long, macabre clip of an unknown serial killer forcing a man to eat parts of his own leg. I listened to all sorts of chaos, mayhem, torture, ghosts, EVPs recorded in cemeteries, murderer confessions, and suicide notes in audio form. Some of it was obviously fake. Some could’ve been real. A handful of clips were the real deal, or real enough to fool my trained ears and top-notch editing software.
The days rolled by and I was having a blast. Not needing my eyes was great. Sure, some stuff gave me nightmares, but the hunt was exciting. I never knew what I was going to find. About two weeks into it, I downloaded a nine-minute clip titled theyrehere.mp3. That’s when everything changed.
The clip started with a small hiss and the amplified thumps of feet on a carpeted floor. The hiss and the way the steps sounded told me it’d been recorded on an old Zoom H4 recorder, which was the same kind we used at the university back when I started.
The stomping around ended and the first thing you could hear clearly in terms of ambient noise were the crickets. A lot of crickets. It reminded me of the sound that surrounded my cabin every night. Then a male voice came on: “What the hell are you doing, Sam?” Then came more moving around, some kind of cloth brushing against the recorder, and more hurried feet on the carpet. After a few seconds, a female voice whispered: “I set up my phone over there on the little TV table. Now I’m recording everything on that.”
“Why?”
There was more running around. The male cleared his throat. Then came the sound of something sliding smoothly against metal, which I guessed came from curtains being drawn.
“I fucking told you, Bobby! I saw those kids out there again.”
A sigh.
“The kids from yesterday, right? The ones with black eyes?”
“You don’t have to beli—”
“Fuck!”
Running feet stomped on the carpet again. There was heavy breathing. When the man spoke again, he was much closer to the recorder.
“I saw one. I fucking saw one trying to peek through the window!”
“I told you I wasn’t making it up!”
Then I heard something falling down and hitting the floor, but there was no carpet to cushion the impact and I felt the vibrations through my feet. Something had fallen inside my house. I jumped and my fingers flew to the keyboard to hit the space bar and stop the recording.
The ensuing silence wasn’t absolute. The fridge’s motor made its usual sound, the insects outside birthed their own small cacophony, and my pulse was pounding in my ears. The world is full of sounds that we ignore because we’re used to them. When we pay attention to sound, we notice those background noises, and we can also notice things that aren’t supposed to be there.
I sat and listened . . . and there was something else in that silence, a presence that quietly announced itself merely by the space it occupied. I focused as hard as I could and stayed still, trying to slow down my breathing. After months of reminding myself daily that my vision would come back and that this was temporary, the mental structure that held up my sanity over a dark maelstrom of chaos, anger, desperation, and grief was threatening to crumble. I wanted to be able to see the world around me. I wanted confirmation that I was alone and that whatever had fallen was of no consequence. Instead, I was submerged in darkness with the knowledge that something I couldn’t see was definitely out of place, and that I wasn’t alone.
After a few minutes of sitting there in absolute silence, I got up and felt for my cane, which I’d left propped against the wall, next to my desk. Sandra had told me stories of people who, after years of using their cane, learned to interpret the sound it made because it bounced back differently when things of various sizes were in its path. I tapped my cane against the wooden floor. It sounded the same as it always had.
I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. It didn’t do much to calm my frayed nerves, but it gave me something to do. After a while, I went back to the living room and used my cane to explore the floor in front of the sofa and around my desk. There was nothing there. I’d imagined the whole thing.
When I had learned to get my computer to read to me, I went down a bizarre research rabbit hole about the senses. The main takeaway was that the thing we believe to be the real world around us is nothing more than an illusion: layer upon layer of processing of sensory information and the way our expectations shape our interpretation of the information that comes from all that processing. For example, there’s a thing called the Charles Bonnet syndrome, in which the brain, desperate to see even in the absence of vision, creates bizarre hallucinations that include Lilliputians, monsters, and even cartoon characters, all of which blind people “see” perfectly clearly. Maybe something like that was happening to me, some misfiring of my senses caused by my brain trying to adapt to my new reality.
After sitting on the couch and thinking for a while, I went back to the computer and put my headphones on. Moths are attracted to the light, but I think most people are attracted to darkness. That explains our fascination with things like death, serial killers, cults, and ghosts. Audio had always been my way of satisfying that craving, so I went back to it despite the tiny voice at the back of my head whispering that it was a bad idea.
I pressed my space bar. The audio began again.
“I didn’t say you were making it up!” said the man. Underneath the sound of his voice there was nothing. The crickets had gone silent. The absence of their sound became an ominous presence. No one spoke. Both individuals breathed heavily.
“What are we gonna—”
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Someone pounding at the door interrupted the woman.
“Shit, shit, what is happening?” said the man.
The pounding at the door came back, this time constant and steady like a heartbeat. Then a sound began in the back, something akin to the low whine of a drone.
“We have to go. I . . . I didn’t tell you all of it,” said the woman.
“All of what?”
“All of what I saw yesterday.” The woman’s voice was a cocktail of fear, nerves, and remorse mixed with something else I couldn’t identify.
The sound of the drone increased steadily, gaining decibels and occupying the space the crickets had left.
“What are you talking about, Sam?” asked the man. He was afraid, but desperation had crept into his voice, giving it a sharp edge that hadn’t been there before.
“The . . . the kids. When I saw the kids out there last night? They weren’t kids. I mean, they looked like kids and I was sure they were kids at first, but then they came closer. I noticed their arms and hands even before I noticed the eyes. Their arms were way too long and their hands . . . their hands . . .”
“Their hands what?”
“I don’t know! It was like their fingers were all wrong. I don’t know how to explain it. The fingers were way too long and thin. They were mostly gray and that’s why I couldn’t make out what they were wearing. One of them came from behind a tree. He . . . he popped up about ten feet away from me. That’s when I saw their eyes. I looked back at the other ones, the ones that were walking toward the house, and they all had those same black eyes, like the man in that recording I told you about. I ran here and told you about the eyes, but I didn’t tell you about the rest because I was sure you’d either call me cra—”
There was a loud crash followed by screaming. It didn’t sound like glass, so I guessed it had been the door.
“They’re here!” screamed the woman.
The sound of the drone was louder now, and there was something inside it, something like the clicking of insects mixed with whispers. The woman screamed again. Someone ran. Under the sound of the drone and whispering voices, there were feet, slowly approaching. Six? Maybe eight? I couldn’t keep the count straight.
The sound of the drone became so loud it was uncomfortable. The voices were clearer and seemed to move around, sometimes close to the recorder and sometimes far away. They were genderless and spoke some strange, guttural language I’d never heard before. Along with them, the man and woman who’d been there were screaming. His voice was stronger, but then it turned into a wet gargle that sent shivers down my spine.
There was more screaming, but the sound, which was more like a sustained scream than a drone now, drowned out the words. Everything had been relatively easy to follow, but then the voices, steps, screams, and whatever the overpowering sound was melded into an impenetrable, complicated stridency. I would have to filter out the drone/screaming to see what was behind it. I hit the space bar to stop the audio and the screaming stopped, but the sounds of the drone—lower but still discernible—and the voices stayed. I hit the space bar again and the screaming resumed. A glitch? I stopped the audio again and the drone and the voices were still there. I took off my headphones . . . and the sounds were still there. And I couldn’t hear the crickets outside.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If that’s true, everyone is a bit insane. I started the audio again and then stopped it again twice. That didn’t stop the sounds. I pushed my chair back, kneeled, and felt around on the wall behind the desk until I found the computer’s power cord. I yanked the cord and unplugged the computer.
The sounds were still there.
The thoughts in my head were coming so fast they were running each other over. A glitch. A nightmare. A malfunction. A prank. A curse.
Someone pounded on my door. I grabbed my cane and thought about going to the kitchen and grabbing a knife, but then I heard something like branches scratching against the windows in the living room and that stopped me in my tracks.
The sound of the drone had morphed into a sustained scream and the voices I’d heard on the clip were all around me, whispering in that strange language, flying around me like insects. I screamed.
A strange sense of déjà vu came over me when I heard my door break. It was exactly like the sound on the clip.
The cabin had wooden floors instead of carpet, so I clearly heard the small feet as they crossed the threshold and entered the place. I think I screamed again, but the voices and the sustained scream were so loud I couldn’t hear myself.
I swung my cane and hit something in front of me. A second later, I felt something touching my arm. My heart jumped into my neck and I wished, again, that my sight would miraculously return, even if just to allow me to see the inhuman horrors I knew were standing in front of me with their black eyes and thin fingers.
They grabbed my arms. The sound grew so loud it felt like it was inside me, shaking my lungs and squeezing my heart. For the first time ever, I wished I could jump into the endless darkness, the only thing I could see, and let it swallow me. 
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, Texas. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning novels Zero Saints, Coyote Songs, and The Devil Takes You Home. Iglesias’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor, and his reviews appear regularly in such places as NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Illustration: Mike Reddy
