“It’s a record player. Yeah, an old Zenith record player,” Anthony said into the phone.
“My grandpa’s...” He exclaimed again, but louder “I said, my grand-pa’s.” The voice on the other end of the line exhaled an understanding “ooohhhh,” and Anthony continued on.
“It was-”... “It-”... “Can you hear me?” Anthony asked. The fuzzy voice on the phone broke and stuttered.
“I don’t know, it’s the connection. My phone, TV, computer, all the electronics here have been acting funny since this morning. I don’t know why.” The voice on the phone uttered a subtle quip, and Anthony laughed. He continued.
“But anyways, my grandpa got it awhile ago. Like a long time ago. Like, late 60’s, early 70’s. Yeah, this thing’s been around.” The voice spoke, and he took a moment to think.
“There are...” He paused and collected his memories, “Three, there are three of them. Two are broken. They’re both Sinatra’s. ‘Witchcraft’ and ‘My Blue Heaven.’ The undamaged one is by Elvis. Yeah, Presley. ‘Blue Moon.’ No, I haven’t heard any of them. But I had to take them. Yeah, they’re some of the things my grandpa left to me in his will, so I picked them up this morning with the record player. Yeah, yeah, I’m looking at it right now. It’s ancient, man. It’s got chips and scratches, it’s even missing a panel in the back. I don’t even know if it’ll play, but I put the good record in it so I don’t lose it.” The voice responded in an understanding tone.
Anthony sat, listening to the voice on the phone, glancing back and forth between the table he sat at, and the record player. But something caught his eye. Something strange. It was something engraved into the bottom right corner of the record player. Something Anthony hadn’t yet noticed. He couldn’t identify it, so he got up and walked over to it. He squinted and stared at the fine engraving. It was a tiny, perfectly symmetrical star, within a perfectly round circle. A cold, unsettling feeling pierced his mind. But he took a step back, and reminded himself, he didn’t believe in God. So he didn’t believe in Satan, or angels, or demons. But the feeling stuck with him. He continued his conversation.
“Let me stop you for a minute, um, I have a question,” Anthony said. His voice was uneasy now.
“Um, so let’s say you found a… A… A pentagram, on one of your possessions. How would you react?” The voice paused. It responded in a questioning tone.
“Well, uh, I just found one on the record player. I don’t know how or why it’s there.” The voice asked something again.
“Scared? Well, not so much scared as just unsettled. I mean, I don’t believe in any deity, good or bad. So I’m just uneasy about-” The voice interrupted. “What? Yes, I said I was unsettled. I don’t have to believe in it to be unsettled. It doesn’t-” The voice interrupted again. Anthony was becoming agitated. “No! I said I’m not scared. It means nothing to me. I don’t believe it has any theological power. I wouldn’t care if it was a cross, you get me? I just don’t believe in it. So why would I be… Scared…”
Anthony paused and thought for a moment. These spontaneous, chaotic emotions had emerged just to disprove his fear of a symbol. He knew in his heart, he was scared. But he pushed that emotion to the back of his head, and concluded his conversation.
“I really don’t care. It honestly has no effect on me.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Look, um, I’m getting tired. It’s almost midnight, so I think I’m gonna go to bed. I’ll talk to you later.” The voice said something back. Anthony responded with a “yep.” The voice replied once more. Anthony ended with an “okay, bye.” He hung up the phone. He was in a bad mood now, and he kept trying to think of reason after reason of why he shouldn’t care about a simple symbol as he walked from the dining room table, through the living room, down the hall and took a left into his room.
That night, Anthony laid in bed for hours, arguing with the voice in his head that kept telling him he should be scared. He looked around his room lit by dim moonlight, and saw his mother’s old Bible on his shelf. He got out of bed, and walked over to it. He stood there staring at it, contemplating opening it. Wondering if it could help him. Wondering what it had to say. He raised his hand, but swiftly stuck it by his side again, and reminded himself that he didn’t believe it meant anything. In his moments of internal conflict, he hadn’t noticed the sounds echoing throughout his house. His ears perked up, and he slowly walked to his doorway.
Anthony heard soft music coming from the living room. A swell of confusion and timid curiosity washed over him. The walls absorbed the deep, faint notes of the bass, and they traveled through the plaster, paint, and internal wooden beams down to the doorway, where his hand rested for balance. The pulsating vibrations stung his hand like the caress of thousands of dull needles. Anthony could hear the quiet, spontaneous plucks of a guitar bouncing without a melody down the hall and tingling his ears. An overwhelming force drew him to the wall opposite him, and pushed him down the hallway. He began to slowly walk, but by whose will, he could not distinguish.
A young, masculine voice gently breathed out words that were rather short, but seemed to carry on perpetually, in an echoing, beautiful resonance, “Blue moon…” The air seemed to get thicker and thicker as the music progressed, so much so that Anthony’s legs grew tired from pushing to move forward, like trying to run through waist deep water. “You saw me standing alone…” The walls, the floors, the ceiling, everything had become blue. Anthony couldn’t discern whether the house was physically changing or his vision was failing him. Overwhelming terror consumed his mind, and a cold, sharp knot in his stomach stung like he was walking with a freezing javelin through his torso.
Each pluck of the faint, ear tickling guitar sent a cold shock wave of nerves down his spine, and each bob and hop of the cool, blue bass felt to him as a gust of cold smoke brushing against his body, like the ring of a mushroom cloud rushing past everything in its circumference.
The voice continued to hum “Without a dream in my heart…” Anthony’s legs were numb now, but they themselves wouldn’t stop moving. “Without a love of my own…” He reached the end of the hallway that opened up to the livingroom, where the record player sat on the table.
The singer droned deeply, “Blue moon…” Anthony’s blue vision was dissipating now. “You knew just what I was there for…” He had assumed it had been faulty perception from his hysterical brain, but the blue was not in his head. Not in his eyes. “You heard me saying a prayer for…” The misty, tangible color of blue slithered out from deep within the room’s corners, peeled itself off of the furniture and windows, and condensed into the foggy shape of a man, standing in front of the record player.
“Someone I really could care for…” The singer paused, and began a high pitched, falsetto moan that paralyzed Anthony where he stood. The hazy, obscure figure of blue moved towards Anthony until it was face to face with him. An enigmatic cloud of blue dust in the shape of a right hand raised in front of him, stuck up its thumb, and gently pressed against Anthony’s eye, closing it. The being’s other hand raised, and put its four finger tips together. It touched them to its thumb, and gripped Anthony’s other eye ball. He tried to scream, but nothing came out. The being slowly slipped Anthony’s eyeball out of its socket without severing the nerve, and turned it around towards his face. Anthony stared at his own terrified expression, and the cavity that once held his eye.
The corners of his vision were becoming fuzzy and murky, and his sight was slowly fading to black. Before it could dissipate naturally, his vision ceased completely as the wispy blue fingertips slithered into his dwindling field of view, and covered his pupil entirely within the now clenched fist that held his eye. He felt pressure, like the closure of the figures hand, slowly bare down upon his eyeball, until it imploded within the apparition’s grasp. His vision was now absent, his ears heard nothing but the cold, petrifying hum of the singer’s voice vibrating within his head, and his body was numb up to his neck.
Aside from stinging pain of his crushed eyeball, one thing was present in his mind. An old Bible verse his mother would say to him often to encourage him, which had quite the contrary effect on him spiritually. His numb, fleeting neurons struggled to recount the verse to him. All he could remember was “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.” And there he stood, enveloped within the icey, numbing grip of the Shadow of Death itself. With what bit of his senses he had left, he could distinguish the fuzzy impression of a hand caressing his face. The misty, freezing fingertips dragged themselves from his chin, over his cheek, to the bridge of his nose. They moved in and found their way inside his empty eye socket. He felt the fingers straighten out and start to apply pressure inwards, pushing through his head like a paranormal lobotomy. In his last seconds, he mustered his remaining capacity for thought to reflect upon his decision earlier. Should he have opened his mother’s Bible? Though he felt an inclination to do it now, unfortunately for Anthony, it was now too late.