Mix from the Grave

for "Invalid Item" 

"Yeh," I said looking around the bare concrete walls, "Its all right for a basement room."

"You get your own bathroom," the owner mentioned hopefully. I looked at the bathroom, and then gazed along the pipes and heating ducts along the ceiling. A carpet, some posters and black lights would make a nice feel to it. The cement would be good for my mixing--no more neighboors banging on the walls.

The owner seemed kind of eager to get someone in there. He had taken the price down to $400 a month, which is a pretty good price, even for Powelton Village. He was also giving me a month by month lease, in the middle of a Drexel term. The fact that I would have to enter via an old school cellar stairway didn't bother me at all. "Yeah man, I'll take it."

"Great," he said. "Let me get the paperwork."


Three days later, my cousin Carl was helping me move in. I didn't have a whole lot in the way of stuff. Just a matress, some clothes, a chair and my mixing equipment. Despite the fact that majoring in sound engineering at Drexel University got me access to some pretty sweet equipment nothing beat mixing at home.

We were almost done when Carl had to go and say something typically Carl. I was walking in with my amp, the last from the car, and found him staring at someting on the bottom of the wall, next to the bed. "This is interesting," he said. "You ever seen that symbol before?"

I looked at it. It was a chalk picture of what looked like a key with a little pac man as a handle. "No. Well, I mean I see the pac man..."

"No, thats not pac man. Thats a rare symbol they use to..." He trailed off and didn't say anything. I didn't press him for the rest; Carl was wierd like that. Carl was a ghosthunter. Every few weekends he stayed up all night skulking around crop circles and old barns with a bunch of pseudo scientific freaks that lacked his ability to pass for a normal human being.

If he had left it at that, I would have been fine. Still should have punched him, but I would have been fine. As it was, before he left he went out to his truck and came back with a candle. It smelled funny. "You might want to use this."

"What does it do? Trap ghosts?"

"Not really. But it might help you. Just light it every once in a while." Never had I gotten a more ambigious instruction from him, and I was unsettled for at least ten minutes after he left. I forgot all about it as soon as I was done hooking all of my equipment together. I spent a few hours mixing, then went out drinking with my friends.

I came back hours later and fell into bed. The next morning I woke up with all of my clothes on and for a second panicked, thinking I had gotten myself lost somewhere before I remembered about the new room. Then I looked down at my feet and swore. My shoes were gone, and my socks were all muddy and soaked. I had a sort of tendency to lose my shoes when I'm drunk. Yeah, I know, its a rather odd idiosyncracy, but what can I say?

Fortunately I found my shoes in the middle of the room, with a funny and insulting note from Drew, who had apparently seen fit to bring them back. Whatever. It's not like I was going to go to class that day anyway. I tried to put my shoes on, scraping my right toe on something thin. I pulled my right foot back out and found a key inside it. It looked like a key to one of those lock boxes down at the train station. I wondered what it could possibly be doing in my shoe.

On my way down and back to a 1 pm breakfast at the pizza shop, I tried to think of whose key it might be, but the only possibilities I could come up with were that it was either some kind of prank where I find something funny in the train station locker, or someone had dropped it at the party. Probably the latter. I put it on my key ring and forgot about it.

Back at my pad, I found a recording on my laptop that I didn't make. I played it back, hearing the eeriest voice. I couldn't quite make out what the person was saying, but it had a kind of rhythm to it. There was an ethereal tapping, and some scratching noises, which reminded me of mice. Alone the noises sounded irregular, but together they formed a mysterious beat. There was no bass drum, but I still found myself bobbing my head to it as if there was. It was entrancing. Though I was kind of pissed off that someone messed with my equipment, I couldn't hold back my curiousity about the recorded voices. I played it back over and over again, trying to discern the words. As I listened to it I picked up on another element: a slight melody. It sounded like some kind of flute, but distorted, like it was playing underwater.

I burned the recording to a cd and listened to it on my bed, with my headphones on. It was so wierd. The voice, and the sounds. There was even a slight wind too. When I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was floating. It was like those dreams where I realized I was dreaming and could fly and breath under water. After a while it became a bit unnerving, and despite my curiousity, I grew too intimidated to play it.

Then I realized it was already past seven; I had spent half the day listening to the rouge recording. I resolved to get some work done, and made a dent in my econ homework. After it got dark out I found myself getting uneasy again. The hair on my arm was standing straight up.

I figured I'd light Carl's candle as I got ready for bed, just for the heck of it. Stupid Carl, it was all his fault. I assumed it was his wierdness that had put me on edge. I lit the candle anyway with matches I kept in the bathroom.

What I saw next was the single most unnerving sight I've ever encountered. I'm not a pussy or anything; I've held my own when some punk tried to mug me last year. But this was so completely different.

It was a pale white face, behind me, in the mirror. I swear my vertebrete littally froze in their places, and my heart started pumping adrenaline through my blood. The face was gaunt and bloodstained atop an indefinate body covered in a black shroud. The eyes seemed hollow and stared straight at me. I don't quite remember what happened. I was incredibly terrified, and I think I immediately turned to face the apparition. Unfortunately, more terrifying was the static, empty space behind me. Yet when I looked back in the mirror it--he, was there. I was immediately and completely freaked out and, throwing the candle at the mirror, bolted out of the bathroom.

The surge of adrenaline and the strenght of my panic were too much for my coordination, and I spent a great amount of time clawing at the floor, trying to regain my balance and fly out of that dank, cold prison.

Once on the street I was screaming and running indiscriminently. I may have stopped screaming after a block or so, but I didn't stop running until I was down near center city, standing on the market street bridge over the Schuylkill river. There I collapsed of sheer exhaustion onto the railing and eventually caught my breath, holding onto it with white knuckled hands.

I stayed there, staring at the black water, my body shaking as it returned from the adrenaline high. I was there for a good number of hours. Eventually I calmed down enough to think somewhat rationally again, but when I did the haunting melody stayed with me. There was something inescapeably familiar about it. I knew that melody; I had heard it before but couldn't think of where.

I tried as hard as I could to make memories of the song surface, but the details eluded me. The only thing I was sure of was that Drew had not put that recording on my laptop, which had been the theory in the back of my mind the whole time. Then I remembered the key, and the creepy feeling that he didn't leave the key either stayed with me. I began to wonder what was in the locker at the train station.

In truth I was terrified to find out, but I couldn't go back to my place, and there was no way I could think of an excuse for crashing anywhere else at what my watch believed was five in the morning. I didn't completely trust it; The sun had been down way to long for me. Almost against my will, or at least my better judgement, I kept thinking about my key and the locker at the train station until it became my plan. I decided to check it out as soon the sun came up, and not a moment before.

Compelled by my growing curiosity, I changed my mind and started walking as soon as the first few rays of daylight lit the sky. Once inside the train station I got most of my nerve back. The background noise of the vendors and the intercom announcements evoked memories of my days as a commuter. I made my way to the section across from the ice cream place with all of the lockers, and found the one that matched my key. The key got stuck the first time I tried it. I had to turn it so hard I thought it was going to snap off, but it eventually opened.

Inside was an orange pair of earphones with a yellow cord, a newspaper clipping, and a homemade cd with a date written on it. I didn't have to even read the newspaper clipping to know it was about the kid DJ who had died last year. He had OD'd on exstacy or something. Thats what I recognized the faint melody from.

I left the locker open as I walked out. Out on the sidewalk something began to form in the back of my mind. I told myself the candle must have had PCP in it or something, and that I was heading to the occult store on South Street to find out if it was true.

On the way there, I started getting kind of angry. Someone was messing with me, and I didn't appreciate it. In my frustration I snapped the orange headphones and immediately wished I hadn't. They bled on me. Bled right out of the cracks in the plastic. Shuddering I threw them as far as I could into the river. They landed with a small splash. Someone driving by in a car looked at me funny. I tried to pretend none of that had just happened, wiping away as much of the blood as I could off with my shirt.

What felt like twenty blocks later, I was entering the occult store on South Street and immediately greeted with the aromatic taste of incense. I was completely lost in the store, and had to resist the urge to run out and go to one of the music shops nearby. I almost left empty handed until I found a box of candles on the floor in the back. I picked up one that looked like it was the same color as Carl's candle and sniffed it. It was the same scent, but there were no markings or labels on it. I asked the girl behind the register about it but she had no idea what it was. It took her five minutes just to figure out how to ring it up.

I walked out of the store without a plan, or direction. But sometime after a lengthy visit to starbucks, I eventually found myself standing before the cellar doors opened to the steps leading down to the hole I had just rented. I found a smoker to light it for me and then descended slowly into my private dungeon, step by step. By the time I was at the bottom my knees were shaking. Luckily, where was no ghost. At least not that I could see or hear. What I did see was writing on the wall to my right, above my audio gear. It was faint until the candle got close when it became more visible. Putting the candle at just the right angle allowed me to read it: "Never Finished" written in wet blood. I left promptly, practically jumping up the last few steps. As I did so my cd player banged against my left from inside my cargo pocket. It had a broken screen but seemed find otherwise. The strange recording was still inside.

Then I realized what had happened. He, the kid, had never finished the mix. Whatever he had been using must have been his inspiration, but it killed him. On a hunch I headed straight for the lab, and paid off some prissy girl who had reserved it to let me in there. I spent the 8 hours of my life inside that sound room, mixing with the unfinished cd, the mysterious recording, and some tracks I had left in there from previous projects that term. When I left I had a professional quality, 12 track mixed disc. It was industrial techno, with a bit of a goth feel. It also had an element of rock, my personal touch. I labeled it "Mix from the Grave" as a way of sort of citing the true source.

I composed a back story, an intro about a brilliant DJ who overdosed in the middle of his greatest mix every, but came back from the grave to finish the work. One of my film major friends found someone to do a voice over for an intro track. It was awesome.

All of my music major friends loved it, as did my non music major friends. I showed it to a comp sci friend and he didn't listen to more than two seconds before tossing it into his laptop and ripping it all into mp3s.

I knew then that I had something special. I never went back to the apartment. Instead I gave some friends my key and promised them pizzas and money for moving my stuff out. I quickly forgot about the strange events that lead to the creation of that mix. It wasn't really hard to forget either--it was all so surreal it seemed like a dream to me, and I was soon occupied with record deals, as well as mixing in my new apartment. Drexel was going to make away with most of the profits of that first mix since I had used their equipment, which meant me staying up day and night working on a second.

When everything was back to the status quo, I completely forgot about the ghost. Months later, after deciding to live with my new girlfriend, Amy, I came back with her to our new apartment to find a message waiting on the answering machine connected to the phone line that had not been activated yet.

When I played it I heard scratching. It sounded like digging, in sand. In the background there was something else that rose and faded. I turned the volume on the answering machine all the way up. It sounded like the ocean. Then there were words, faint but unmistakably some form of a human voice.

Amy, being some kind of foreign language major, recognized it as latin. "I think he's saying...'It is good to be finished. Good bye and thank you.' What the f--it must be a used tape or something."

"No," I said, bending over the sofa, "Its not the tape." I held up a familiar looking pair of orange earphones with a yellow cord attached.

I had told her about the ghost of that DJ, and where the mix really came from, but she didn't believe me. Needless to say, she did now, and for three weeks the apartment reeked of those strange candles before she calmed down and believed me that the ghost was gone.

I have kept those earphones ever since.