Song from the Void

"Mum always said I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Apparently dying fixed that. Along with giving me involuntary visions and a leg that vibrates like a mobile phone. Resurrection has some interesting side effects."

The sun had gone down and taken the day’s heat with it, and the cool came in fast off the sand. But the fire threw enough warmth to keep it off my back, and the voices moving around it kept the worst of the quiet off everything else.

The sky had shifted through colours I didn’t have names for—oranges bleeding into purples, then deepening into something between navy and black. Not quite the twilight I knew from Tasmania, where the light would linger and soften, where you could watch Venus appear first, then the brighter stars, like the universe was being patient with you.

Here, darkness came faster. More absolute. But the campfire pushed it back, creating a circle of light and warmth that felt almost sacred.

Somewhere in the last hour, without my telling them to, my shoulders had come down from around my ears. The fire had a way of doing that—pulling the knots out of you one at a time.

Weird, I thought. Three days ago I was dead. Now I’m sitting by a campfire feeling… peaceful?

The human capacity for adaptation was something else. Or maybe I was just too tired to maintain proper levels of existential crisis.

Then, without me deciding on it, a tune started up on my lips.

I didn’t decide to hum. The sound just… happened. Like my throat had developed a mind of its own, like the damaged tissue wanted to test itself, see what it could still do.

That’s new.

As the melody drifted out of me, soft against the crackle of the fire, I caught Jamie looking at me.

He’d gone completely still. His mouth had come open and stayed there, not being used, and he wasn’t watching my face so much as my throat—the way you’d stare at a tool that had switched itself on with no hand near the switch.

What?

Something cold went through me, and my hand came up to my throat before I’d told it to.

My throat had been cut open. Stitched back together by Glenda while I floated in the void. Speaking had been agony, each word like swallowing broken glass.

And now I was humming?

And still the humming went on, weaving in under the crackle of the fire like it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

The strange thing was that I half-knew it. It sat right on the edge of memory—a tune I should have been able to name and couldn’t get my hands on.

Where do I know this from?

I racked my brain. Not the radio—Mum and I didn’t listen to music much, just the news and sometimes ABC Radio. Not a film soundtrack. Not something I’d heard at the depot.

The melody didn’t belong to any memory I could access. And yet my throat knew it. My damaged, supposedly-barely-functional throat was producing notes I’d never consciously learned.

The hum thickened, found edges, found words—and I hadn’t put a single one of them there.

"Let us celebrate our story,

The words we’ve yet to write."

What the hell?

The first note came out shaky. The second one didn’t. By the third, my voice had found some floor underneath it I hadn’t known was there—not the cracked, rationed whisper I’d been doling out all day, one painful word at a time, but something clear and full and carrying, out across the fire and into the dark.

The words weren’t mine. Couldn’t be mine. I’d never written a song in my life—couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, according to Mum, who’d endured my enthusiastic but tuneless renditions of whatever was on the radio when I was a kid.

But this… this was different. This was good. Clear and strong and somehow right, despite coming from a throat that shouldn’t be able to produce anything more complex than a croak.

Glenda got to her feet, sudden enough that the words dried up in my throat.

I stopped mid-line and dropped my eyes to the flames, my face going hot with the sudden certainty that I’d made a fool of myself.

Great. First I volunteer to build roads, now I’m spontaneously performing at the campfire like some sort of talent show contestant. Everyone probably thinks I’ve lost it.

"Please, don’t stop." Glenda had half-risen, one hand out, like she didn’t want the sound to fall out of the air. "You have a beautiful voice."

The firelight sat in her eyes, and there was something in them I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of—surprise, and something warmer underneath it.

Beautiful voice?

I’d been called many things. Quiet. Reliable. Good with his hands. Never beautiful anything.

I couldn’t have answered her even if I’d known what to say. The tune had already pulled me back under, and I let it, humming the thing again.

It came easier than anything had in days—so easy it didn’t feel like it was coming from me at all, more like it was coming through me from somewhere further back.

Or from wherever souls go when they die, I thought. Maybe I picked this up in the void. Souvenirs from the afterlife.

Glenda slipped off to her tent without a word. When she came back she had a violin cradled in both hands, and she didn’t ask—she just set the bow to the strings and came in under my voice.

The strings came in beneath me and sat there, matching me note for note, so close it was hard to say where my voice ended and the violin began.

I’d never made music with anyone before. Never had the training, the talent, the confidence. But Glenda played as if she’d known this song her whole life, her bow gliding across strings to produce notes that wrapped around my voice like they’d been waiting for each other.

Like constellations, I thought. Points of light that look random until you draw the lines between them, and suddenly there’s a shape, a story.

Across the fire, Karen leaned in. "You know this song?"

Glenda didn’t miss a note. "Not until now," she said, and she didn’t take her eyes off me the whole time she said it.

Not until now.

So she was improvising. Following a melody she’d never heard, played by a singer who’d never sung it. Making music out of nothing, out of thin air and firelight and whatever strange thing was happening to me.

Was it even a real song? Or had my own head cooked it up somewhere I couldn’t get to?

The words came round again, and this time I let them out whole.

"Let us celebrate our story,

The words we’ve yet to write.

How we all wound up with glory,

In the world we fought to right."

Glory? I nearly choked on the word. There was nothing glorious about my situation. Nothing glorious about being murdered by Portal Pirates and waking up in another dimension owned by a mysterious voice that claimed me as property.

But the song didn’t seem to care about accuracy. The song had its own agenda.

None of it was mine—not the tune, not the words—and yet all of it felt like it belonged exactly here. This fire. This dark. These people I’d known for three days.

Something settled on my knee. I looked down: Jamie’s hand, resting there.

It didn’t stay long. It pulled back almost at once, like he’d touched something too hot—and then it came down again, heavier, like he’d made himself do it, like he’d decided the awkwardness was worth pushing through.

He doesn’t know how to do this either, I realised. He’s as lost as I am.

Nineteen years of absence didn’t close up over a hand on a knee. But it was something. A start, clumsy and one-handed, from two people who hadn’t the first idea how it was meant to go.

Then his eyes came up to meet mine, narrowed—suspicious, or curious, I honestly couldn’t tell which.

Or maybe he’s wondering why his supposedly-mute son is suddenly singing songs that don’t exist.

Fair question. I was wondering the same thing.

"To Joel!" Luke was suddenly on his feet, glass thrust up, grinning at me across the flames.

And the whole ragged circle of them came back with it—"To Joel!"—loud enough to carry off over the dunes and into the dark.

To Joel.

I didn’t know what to do with that. Back home, no one toasted me. No one raised glasses in my honour. I was just Joel—the delivery driver, the quiet kid, the one who folded origami cranes and looked at stars and kept his head down.

I looked round at the faces the fire had picked out of the dark, every one of them easy and open—and every one of them somewhere I wasn’t, not quite.

Not one of them had noticed anything wrong. But Jamie had. He’d put the grin back on for the others, and it didn’t reach the rest of his face—his eyes had stayed narrow, still turning something over, still working at a puzzle only he could see the shape of.

He knows something’s wrong, I thought. Or at least something’s different. Something’s not right about any of this.

And then the buzzing in my leg cut out. It had been there for hours—a low, steady vibration down in the muscle, easy enough to forget about if I didn’t think too hard on it—and now, all at once, it simply stopped.

I hadn’t told anyone about it. Wouldn’t have known where to start; it didn’t hurt, and it hadn’t done me any harm I could point to.

But it left me feeling changed in a way that had nothing to do with the stitches in my throat or the finger in its splint—nothing to do with anything that had happened to me in the back of that delivery truck. Something deeper than that. Something I couldn’t have put a name to.

Like an engine running at a frequency you can’t quite hear, I thought. Like something inside me has been switched on, and I don’t know what it does or how to turn it off.

The talk and the laughter picked up again around me, and Glenda’s violin went on underneath it all, low and easy.

Then the buzzing came back. Soft, at first. A flutter I could almost ignore. Then not so soft.

Oh no.

Morse code from the universe. SOS from my own nervous system. Something.

I tried to put it somewhere else—to lose it in the violin, in the heat off the fire, in the ordinary weight of the food still sitting in my stomach.

Focus on the violin. Focus on the flames. Focus on anything except the bizarre tingling in your leg that definitely wasn’t there before you died.

It didn’t work. The buzzing only climbed—past strange, past uncomfortable, up towards the edge of something that actually hurt.

Is this the song? Did the singing set it off, or is it something else, something worse?

The voice, I thought suddenly. The voice that claimed me. Is this… is this it trying to communicate?

The fire was right there on my face, close enough to sting, and it didn’t touch the cold that went through me at that.

Jamie caught it before anyone else did. "Are you okay?" he asked, low, just for me.

I waved him off. The last thing I wanted was the whole circle turning round to look at me.

Fine. I’m fine. Just having a mild existential crisis about the supernatural vibrations in my leg. Completely normal. Nothing to see here.

Glenda had noticed too. The melody slowed under her bow, then stopped altogether, and she lowered the violin and looked at me, the worry plain on her face.

"Joel, are you sure you’re alright?" She said it soft and gentle, and it landed a long way off from the chaos going on inside me.

I nodded, and tried to put a reassuring smile on top of it, but the buzzing had stopped being a thing in my leg. It had spread. It was in my chest now, my arms, my jaw—all of me, humming, and none of it under my control.

Like standing too close to a subwoofer at a concert. Except the concert is inside me. And the music is something that doesn’t exist.

Then the light came. No warning, no build—just a white so bright it swallowed the fire, the faces, the whole night, and took my sight clean away with it.

When it cleared, everything had changed.

The campfire, the settlers, the tents, the dark beyond them—all of it gone, as if it had never been there at all.

In its place was white without end, a vast, weightless nothing, and strange shapes and symbols hung in it, turning slowly.

Oh shit. Not again.

This was like the void. Like the place I’d been when I was dead—except this was different. Brighter. Fuller. Not empty darkness but overwhelming light.

I tried to shout—for Jamie, for Glenda, for anyone—and nothing came out. The white seemed to eat the sound before it ever left me.

No. No, no, no.

The only sound was the symbols themselves—a hum that wasn’t in my ears so much as somewhere behind them, pitched to the exact same frequency as the thing that had taken over my leg.

The symbols meant nothing to me. They weren’t letters—not English, not any alphabet I recognised. More like mathematical equations crossed with constellation maps crossed with something that hurt to look at directly.

I stood in the middle of it and couldn’t have told you whether I was more frightened or more amazed. Both, maybe, in equal and awful measure.

What was this place? How had I come to be here?

And, most importantly, how could I return to the world I knew?

The world I knew. As if Clivilius was normal now. As if sitting around a campfire in another dimension was just another day.

The hum went on and on, insistent, like it was trying to hand me something I didn’t have the hands to take.

Like origami instructions in a language you don’t speak, I thought desperately. You can see the folds, but you can’t understand why they work.

The panic came up properly then—the kind that closes off your throat and empties your head. I was completely, utterly alone, in a place that had no business existing at all.

The thing in my leg had stopped being a buzz. It was a thrum now, deep and enormous, running up through every bone I had.

My whole body is becoming a tuning fork. A tuning fork for what?

I tried to move—to run, to fall, to do anything—and couldn’t. My body had gone heavy as wet concrete, and nothing answered when I called on it.

All around me the symbols were moving faster, swelling, growing brighter, their edges starting to blur and run into one another.

This is how I die again, I thought. Absorbed by incomprehensible symbols in a place that doesn’t exist. Mum’s going to be so confused at the funeral.

And then, cutting up through all of it, a voice. Faint. Far off. But familiar in a way that snagged at the edges of me and wouldn’t let go. Not a sound in the air—a murmur laid down directly in my head, threading in under the din of the symbols.

Joel, it said, and I strained towards it, desperate for anything at all that wasn’t the white and the noise.

That voice. I knew it. The same voice from the void. The same voice that had claimed ownership of me when I’d died.

Joel, listen to me.

I held onto it the way you’d hold a rope in a current. Let it anchor me against the storm of symbols pulling at me from every side.

And somehow, it worked. The thrum in my leg began to ease. My heart, which had been trying to climb up out of my chest, slowed enough to let me think.

Focus on the voice. Follow the voice. What choice do you have?

The voice came clearer, steadier, and this time it had more than my name to give me.

You are not alone, Joel, it said. You are becoming part of something greater, something beyond these worlds. Embrace it.

Embrace it.

Easy for a disembodied voice to say. It wasn’t the one whose leg was vibrating, whose reality was dissolving, whose entire existence had been upended by death and resurrection and songs that came from nowhere.

I didn’t understand a word of what it meant. And yet—God help me—some small, stupid part of me wanted to. There was a promise buried in it somewhere, of purpose, of belonging to something bigger than a courier run through the Glenorchy suburbs.

Something greater. Something beyond these worlds.

What did that even mean? I was a courier driver from Glenorchy. The only thing I’d ever belonged to was the after-school astronomy club, and that had disbanded when I was sixteen.

But the voice kept on, low and steady, and as it did the symbols began to loosen their hold, to thin, to come apart at their blurred edges.

Slowly, like being drawn up out of deep water, I felt myself starting to come back.

The white broke apart into colour—a whole pulsing, wheeling swirl of it, dancing across my vision.

Like the Portal, I thought. Like the swirling colours I saw before I fell through.

Then the colours started to fade, their brightness dimming down, and the ordinary shapes of the world came bleeding back through them.

And then, as suddenly as I’d been taken, I was back. At the campfire. Among the settlers, like I’d never left.

The violin had stopped. The silence it left behind hung heavy over everyone.

Glenda and Jamie were right there beside me, close, their faces carved up with worry.

How long was I gone?

Had they noticed? Had I fallen over? Had I been screaming, twitching, speaking in tongues? Or had I just… sat there, blank-eyed and vacant, while my consciousness went on a field trip to another dimension?

"Are you okay?" Glenda had a hand on my shoulder, light as anything, and that small weight was the realest thing in the world just then.

I turned to her, my head still full of white and hum, and managed a nod.

"I think so." My voice had gone back to the thin, worn whisper. "I think the day has just worn me out."

Biggest understatement of my life. Or lives. However many of those I have now.

Glenda nodded, her face softening a little, though the worry didn’t quite leave her eyes.

Jamie was already on his feet, mouth open to say something. I got there first.

"I’m going to turn in for the night," I said, and made myself sound steadier than I felt.

I got myself up onto my feet and waved Jamie back down before he could get any ideas about following.

Don’t fuss. Please don’t fuss. I can’t explain what just happened because I don’t understand it myself, and if you ask questions I’m going to have to lie, and I’m really bad at lying.

The fire was warm on my legs, ordinary as anything, the same fire it had been ten minutes ago. And none of it felt ordinary at all. Something in me had been somewhere no campfire could reach, and it had come back changed.

You are becoming part of something greater.

The words wouldn’t leave me alone. Whatever this was, whatever it wanted, it wasn’t finished with me.

I turned away from the fire and started for my tent, slow, one careful foot in front of the other.

One day at a time, I told myself. One step at a time. One incomprehensible supernatural experience at a time.

Mum’s voice echoed in my memory: One bite at a time, Joel. That’s how you eat an elephant.

I wasn’t sure what kind of elephant I was dealing with now. But I knew it was bigger than anything I’d ever imagined.

And somehow, impossibly, I was going to have to figure out how to eat it.