I work a lot with commercial and corporate jingles. I had a bit of a breakthrough a few years ago when I made a tune that was picked up by a major coffee chain. I’m not gonna divulge exactly which, but let’s just say you’ve heard it. I know you have.
So when I was contacted about making a musical piece for a movie project, I was immediately on board. Things had been slow for a couple of weeks, and my backlog was thinning out. This job would put me back in the green, for sure.
And that’s how this started. I’ve switched a few names around for anonymity, but I think I can still get the point across.
They reached out to me through my business e-mail. It was sent from some kind of private server, with the sender listed just as “515”. They did sign it though, using the name “Mark.” No last name.
They did send me an advance though. A hefty one.
It was supposed to be a quick job – a 3-minute song used as the end credits to a solemn piece. They provided me with references, a few samples, and a contact. Savanna, or just Anna – a jazz singer who lived in my immediate area. She was to provide backup vocals.
It was a bit strange though.
No one talked to me in person. No one called or double-checked my credentials. They just wanted this done, quick and easy, with no questions asked. I wasn’t even allowed to see the movie, or the context in which the song was played. All they told me about it was;
“It’s the end credits. It’s really sad.”
I always start with a few simple notes. B4 to E5, D5 to G4. Four solemn notes. I started working it into chords, trying out different tempos, and adjusted along the way. I always end up re-doing the intro later anyway, so I put it on hold and moved on to the main verse.
It took me about two days to get a decent outline done. It was melancholic, with this hint of nostalgia. I had to remake parts of the pre-chorus as I realized the music box samples were a little too much. I bounced around a few ideas, such as adding a horn section, or maybe a violin, but I kept returning to a simple reverbed piano – nothing else. Keep it simple, stupid. Never forget.
The only thing I lacked were the vocals, so I called up Anna.
When working piano mixes, I spend entire days just re-listening to anything by Elton John. I get kinda lost in it at times. When I first went to meet Anna at the Morning Swirl Café, her first impression of me was sitting in my car singing along to “Your Song” while she waited across the road in plain sight. Not the best impression I’ve ever made. Not the worst.
From the moment I met her, Anna, was a professional. A proper handshake, a brief introduction, and she was ready to go. We took my car back to my home studio, letting Elton John move from Your Song to Rocket Man, to Tiny Dancer. As we turned into the parking lot, we were both engulfed – singing an impromptu duet of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. She outclassed me by a mile, but it was all in good fun.
That car ride was all it took for us to become best friends.
I showed her my home studio, discussed my ideas, and asked for feedback on a few passages in the post-chorus that I wasn’t all too sure about. She came at me with a lot of ideas right out of the gate – suggesting a vocal bridge and a tempo change. We just started jamming.
We spent all day experimenting, mixing, trying out key- and tempo changes. It was a lot of fun, and we lost ourselves in the work a couple of times. We also spent at least an hour listening to samples and shamelessly dishing about our favorite movie scores. Anna might seem like a bit of a stick-in-the-mud at first, but once you got her talking about her true passions, she was an unstoppable music nerd. My kind of people.
Somewhere around dinner time, we called it a day. At least work-wise. We decided to get some take-out and watch Sound of Music, just for fun. We were about halfway through two servings of chicken tikka masala when Anna turned to me with a curious look.
“You know… I got no idea what this is for,” she said, pointing at our barely balanced pile of notes. “It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but… I don’t like not knowing, right?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Like… what if it’s something bad?”
“What do you mean?” she frowned.
“I mean… it could be like an Alex Jones kind of deal. Something crazy.”
At that, she shook her head, leaning back into the musings of Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.
“That’d suck,” she sighed, poking the takeout rice. “That’d really, really suck.”
It was an uncomfortable thought. Something the two of us making together, ending up misused as something vile, or political. That night, long after Anna had left, I decided to try to and reach out to Mark at “515” again.
I sent him a message asking him to clarify the purpose of the score – as in the context which it would be used. I described that I didn’t want it to be used in something inherently negative, or controversial. Within just a couple of minutes, I got a response. I figured it was automated, seeing as I’d contacted him at one in the morning, but it turns out it wasn’t. It read;
“I can’t tell you anything about the project, but you retain any and all rights to the song, including the manner of which it is used after the initial broadcast.”
A suspiciously generous offer. That would mean I’d keep getting unhindered royalties, and I could pull it from being played at the drop of a hat. I’d never been allowed that kind of control before.
If anything, it made me even more suspicious.
During our next jam session, we re-did a couple of vocals and started matching it up to some background instrumentals. After playing through it a couple of times, and sensing some minor mixing issues, I brought the e-mail up to Anna. It didn’t seem to put her at ease.
“I don’t even know what that means,” she laughed. “Have these people worked with professionals before?”
“No idea. Never heard of the, uh… 515 before.”
“What’s that?”
“Their e-mail. The account ending with 515.”
“That’s…”
Anna checked her phone, holding it up to me.
“That’s not what I got.”
Her e-mail looked completely different. It was sent from a private Gmail-account through some kind of auto-generated contact form on Anna’s website. I figured whoever filled it out had accidentally let it auto-fill, meaning it used a private e-mail rather than a company one. There was an e-mail address, written as a single word; “Markalton”.
“Markalton. As in… Mark Alton? Mine was from a Mark too.”
“I thought it was, like… a fake name. A nickname.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s our employer.”
“We gotta cyberstalk him.”
“We just gotta,” I agreed.
We put our work aside and started checking our socials. There were a handful of people who matched Mark’s full name, but it was hard to see which one we might be dealing with. We excluded a few of them, figuring we probably weren’t working for a college undergraduate or recently divorced ex-plumber in his late 60’s. No, we were working with someone with a little technical know-how and a job that could pay for anything – even a pair of sassy freelance musicians.
We couldn’t find anyone matching the description on our first go about – but looking a little closer, we found the account of one May Alton; possibly his wife. She had a fancy house out in Nebraska, with three dogs and a pool. From context, we could tell her husband was pretty well-off. She also name-dropped him as Mark a couple of times in the comments.
Finally, Anna elbowed me, and showed me her phone.
An Instagram post of the Altons, in some kind of recording studio.
“This has got to be the guy,” she said. “Right?”
“Could be, yeah,” I agreed. “Sure looks like it.”
“Can’t tell what he’s working on though,” she sighed. “They haven’t been active in a while.”
“I guess we just… gotta dig deeper, right?”
“I guess we do,” smiled Anna.
Long after we’d called it a day, we kept in touch. I tried to find some kind of LinkedIn, while Anna was trying to get access to May Alton’s private Facebook profile. Somewhere around my third re-listen of Elton John’s “Blue Eyes,” Anna called me up. It was close to midnight; not a time which I expected a sudden call.
“I talked to one of her workmates and got an invite. Turns out May has friend-of-a-friend kind of setting, so, uh… I can see it all,” Anna said. “You gotta check this out”.
I received screenshots of May Alton’s profile, showing what’d been happening as of late. Maybe it could give some insight into what kind of project we were actually working on.
What I saw was a long series of posts illustrating the married life of May and Mark Alton. How they moved from their house in Nebraska to some kind of military housing in the outskirts of Ohio. There were cryptic messages about things being “tough”, about having to give away their dogs, and “living among boxes”. They didn’t seem to settle down and were ready to move at the drop of a hat.
There were strange questions too. Things like… where to find water filters, and what weather sites were the most accurate. May posted about trying to learn what wild mushrooms were edible, and what roots could be used as a homemade pain remedy. She started obsessing about her teeth, about the thought of having them suddenly break, with no way to have them fixed – despite living in a town with plenty of licensed dentists.
At one point, she’d made the mistake of posting one of her google searches as a Facebook post, simply reading;
“ocean boiling temperature Fahrenheit”
“What the hell does that even mean?” I asked Anna over the phone. “Ocean boiling?”
“Keep… keep reading,” she said. “That’s not all.”
She sent me a few more screenshots. Some of which were less than a week old.
Pictures of tarp-covered boxes. A hand-dug latrine. And finally, what looked like an old quarry – with lines of trucks loading something into a kind of underground tunnel. It was barely commented, framed as her showing her friends she was okay, with bits and pieces of information revealed in the background.
We got confirmation on the very final image, where she and Mark was standing next to a moving truck, with a long dark tunnel ahead. At the very corner of the truck was a notice about government property, followed by a sticker that simply read “515”.
We just sat there in silence for a moment, trying to figure out what we were getting involved in. This sure as shit wasn’t no simple movie, or a hobby project. Whatever they were working on was large in scale, and none of it seemed to involve an actual movie. There were no cameras, no actors, no movie sets. This was something else completely.
Something chilling crawled up my spine, as something dark settled in my stomach. An uncomfortable thought. Something in the back of my mind surfacing. It didn’t take long to find exactly what I was searching for. It was hidden away under an outdated members list on the wayback machine. It couldn’t be a coincidence. It just couldn’t.
Turns out, Mark Alton was a government liaison for one of the largest public access TV channels in Ohio.
The next day, I met up with Anna at the Morning Swirl Café. We got ourselves a couple of cappuccinos and positioned ourselves way off in the back. I told her about my findings, and she didn’t seem to know what to make of it. After pondering it for a while, she whispered to me;
“How much time we got left to deliver?”
“A few days,” I said. “Not sure about a specific time.”
“You know… I’m willing to bet that if this guy is paying for music, he’s probably paying for video editors too.”
“What’re you thinking?”
“I’m thinking someone at that channel is being paid to work on something that’ll give us an answer.”
She had a point. This seemed like sort of a rush-job, chances were another freelancer was involved.
We went back to my home studio, putting the final version of the song on hold for the time being. Instead, we started making calls. We took turns going down a list of names that seemed influential enough to know what we were talking about. Most of the time we were left either on hold or hit a brick wall. A few of them simply didn’t know who Mark Alton was, and some of them refused to talk about him and his work. They were very cordial about it though.
Finally, we got through to one of the program directors. He, in turn, had personally recommended a video editor for one of Mark’s unnamed “projects”. We got a number and an e-mail address to a man named Christian – a supposed freelance video editor who’d worked with Mark previously.
It took us a few tries and a few bounced calls before we got through to him. Anna was the one who did it, putting Christian on speaker phone. After the initial greeting, Anna got straight to the point.
“Christian, I think you and I are working on the same project. We didn’t get that much of an initial briefing, so we thought you might be able to fill us in on the details,” she said. “Could you send us a copy of your final project render?”
“Sure,” he said. “I finished it up last week, I think Mark is adding the text later.”
“What text?” Anna asked.
“Right now it’s just a… collage. A slideshow. But, uh… we’re adding the final touches in post.”
“What final touches?”
The line went cold as Christian considered the question. After a while, he let out a soft chuckle.
“Honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea.”
He sent us the project file not long after, but we were having trouble getting it to load correctly. After a bit of back-and-forth, he simply linked us a cloud link of the project folder, giving us direct access. I told him it was necessary since we were to upload the final export of the song there either way. Christian didn’t seem to mind.
When we finally sat down to watch it, I couldn’t help but to feel my pulse rise. The name was pretty standard, just “final render”, but there was something to it that just tickled my brain. As I clicked it, Anna immediately pressed pause.
“Should we?” she asked. “You sure?”
“No idea,” I said.
We shared an uncertain look, as she pressed play.
There was no sound. This is where our song was supposed to play.
The clip opened with a drone shot of a sunflower field; showing a mix of vibrant yellow and dark blue. The camera faded into a melancholic low-saturated view of the Columbus city skyline. The picture faded into a view of various people, moving in slow motion. A young couple praying. An older couple reading a bible. Children holding hands, looking up at the sky.
Every now and then, a large and sudden text would appear, simple stating “PLACEHOLDER”.
A 30-second long clip of a woman waving goodbye to the ocean.
A family stepping into a cellar, passing bags back and forth.
An American flag at half-staff, unstirred by wind.
A sky growing darker.
A final white text against a flat black background, simply stating “PLACEHOLDER”.
Then nothing.
We played it over and over again, trying to figure out what we were looking at. Anna was the first to come up with something.
“Looks like one of those late-night end of broadcast things.”
“Don’t they usually play something uplifting?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Yeah, they, uh… they do.”
This wasn’t uplifting. If anything, it felt apocalyptic. Like an unspoken threat. My eyes lingered on the clip of the woman waving goodbye to the ocean – such an insignificant gesture.
Maybe that’s all this was. Some kind of insignificant gesture to an overwhelming, unstoppable force.
Something as vast as the ocean.
When Anna and I finally called it a day, I stayed up long into the morning hours, playing that video over and over. Watching the terrified faces of the family running into the cellar. Watching the clouds darken, bathing the world in gray. Christian had done a great job putting it together – I could tell none of it was stock video.
It gave me this enormous sense of dread, like I was missing something obvious. Something terrifying.
I stepped out on my balcony just as the morning sun broke the horizon. And I swear – the clouds looked darker that morning.
Darker than usual.
I woke up around noon to the sound of an incoming e-mail. I’d already missed two from Anna, but this third one caught my attention. It was from Christian.
“You can just talk to Mark yourself,” it said. “Send me the final song export, and I’ll hook you up with some contact deets.”
While Anna and I could still work on a few more details, I was too curious. I sent the mix we had immediately, uploading the final export to the online project folder. In return, Christian sent me an e-mail and a phone number to Mark Alton himself.
I considered whether I should really call. I thought about it for a long time. Not only could it jeopardize the job itself, but more importantly, I might not like what he had to say. This wasn’t just any project – this was… shady, at best. I just sat outside, watching the dark clouds on the horizon.
I decided I needed answers.
It took him four rings to answer.
I had no idea what to say. For a few seconds, I just sat there, breathing into the phone. Finally, a voice on the other end spoke up.
“I know who this is,” he said.
It was a tired voice. Someone who hadn’t known rest for a long time, or possibly slept at all.
“I wanted to talk to you about the job,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
There was a deep sigh on the other end.
“Might as well,” he said. “Hold on.”
I heard him get up, wander about, and return. As he did, there was the sound of something being poured just to the side of the phone. Finally, as he picked up, he smacked his lips with a relieved sigh.
“Alright,” he continued. “Looks like we’re airing it.”
“You weren’t sure?”
“You know about the Turner Video?” he asked. “The CNN one?”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s, uh… a kind of goodbye,” he said. “In case the worst comes to pass.”
“Has it?”
“Has what?”
“Has… the worst come to pass?”
There was a short pause as Mark swallowed something. He chuckled and put a glass down.
“Yeah,” he said. “It has. I’ll upload the texted version in a bit.”
“For broadcast?”
“For broadcast.”
As the conversation faded into nothing, I updated the project folder. Sure enough, there was a final composition.
I clicked it.
There were only four lines in total, all seemingly written by Mark himself.
“THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE”
“THANK YOU FOR BEING HUMAN”
“WE FAILED YOU”
And finally, as the screen faded to black;
“EO EMERGES”
I stayed on the final screen for a long time, feeling my heart rise in my chest. I was getting text after text from both Anna and Christian, both asking me if I’d seen it. Asking me what it meant. Asking me what the hell we were doing. I couldn’t bring myself to answer.
I looked it up; The CNN Turner Video. Turns out it is a sort of just-in-case video to be shown at the literal end of the world.
The clouds on the horizon looked darker. There was a moisture in the air that I’d never felt before. Something electric. Hundreds of birds flocked over the horizon, dancing silently, as if in mourning. A text file was added to the project folder stating a time for broadcast.
13 hours.
I just sat there, feeling like I’d shrunk. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream. It all seemed so helpless, and everything looked different in this light. The news sites were reporting several new environmental record lows. Images of dead fish washing ashore in New England. Birds falling out of the sky in Florida. It’d started to seem so commonplace as of late; but looking at it again, I should’ve seen the signs. It wasn’t just record lows; it was all-time lows.
At some point, I heard a car. Looking down from my balcony, I could see Anna parked out front. She honked at me, over and over, causing onlookers to stop and stare.
“Get in!” she yelled. “Come on!”
I didn’t hesitate. I ran down the stairs, leaving my front door wide open. I didn’t stop to lock, to turn off the lights, to grab my charger. I just burst into a sprint.
Anna had already started the car when I got in, speeding off as soon as my feet left the ground. As I struggled with the seat belt, I gave her a wide-eyed look. She was sweating bullets, her eyes wide.
She’d figured it out too.
We kept going north, watching the clouds gather, feeling the winds grow stronger. As soon as the warnings started to pile up on the radio, Anna shut it off. Before I even asked her, she looked at me and said;
“I can’t hear it again. I just can’t.”
“Me neither.”
After a while, we stopped looking at the signs and the maps. Anna broke the speed limit, driving anywhere and nowhere. For hours on end, we just kept going – hoping to outrun whatever this was.
There was a storm brewing. A cold storm, leaving specks of frost on the windshield. Water wasn’t draining away fast enough, making the roads impossibly slippery. But despite the deafening sound of ice spatter against glass, I could hear Anna’s shallow breaths. Just as shallow as mine.
We were driving, desperate, hoping for a miracle.
Anna was zigzagging through traffic, passing straight through every red light, struggling to keep the car straight. At one point, it looked like she was on the breaking point. She was barely keeping her eyes open; thin tears streaming down her face.
“What the fuck do we do?!” she screamed, slamming her hands against the instrument panel. “What the fuck do we do?!”
I didn’t have an answer. Instead, I just shook my head, stuttering for the right words.
I got nothing.
As we got back on the highway, she completely lost control. A flash flood caught up with us, slinging the car all the way around, making the wheels spin and screech – failing to catch ground. As it drifted, we saw flashing lights in the distance. Firetrucks had to throw themselves on the handbrake; unable to pass through a 2-feet tall flood washing across the highway.
Anna and I stepped into the storm, immediately feeling the shivers dig into our spines.
A few cars behind us didn’t manage to stop in time, front-ending one another into a car pile-up. We hurried off the road as the sound of screeching metal chased us away.
Hand in hand, we kept going. Into a field, across a dirt road, and ending up at an abandoned hay loft.
We settled in. We couldn’t go any further. We were frozen, drained, and panicked. This was it.
For the next few hours we just sat there, waiting for whatever would come. Our phones were silent, but the wind was howling outside. There were no funny quips, no friendly banter. Just two terrified people, watching the sky break apart.
I remember that feeling. I think about it every day. That deep rumble worming its way to the surface. Not an earthquake, but something… deliberate. I remember hearing explosions in the distance – something resembling a powerful cannonade. In the small crack of the barn doors, we could see flashes in the distance. Some of which were lightning strikes – some which weren’t.
Then it all went quiet.
We sat there, in the dark. The storm subsided and the trees went silent. I could barely hear the world over my runaway pulse.
I didn’t know what it meant, but I could feel it.
Eo emerges.
An invulnerable, inevitable, cold.
An end to more than I could fathom.
Something so definite, so incomprehensible, that not even despair was sufficient.
We held our breaths, locking our hands tight – shivering.
It was all we could do.
I don’t know if it was just seconds passing or entire minutes, but at some point I felt my phone vibrate. With the passing of the storm, cell coverage returned – if barely.
News alerts about flash floods and a highway pile-up. A hurricane warning, urging everyone to stay indoors.
And at the bottom of the screen, an update to our online project folder.
The timestamp had changed.
To ‘cancelled’.
I have no idea what happened that night. I don’t know what kind of 11th hour magic they managed to pull off, but I never heard from Mark again. We got paid though, but I’ve since deleted everything about that song from every backup I own. I want nothing to do with it and reminding myself of it even existing causes this dark feeling to sink into me – like slowly falling into an eternal well.
Hence why I’m writing this. I want to put an end to this and move on. My therapist says that my obsessive need to watch the news for “signs” is tearing me to pieces, and I trust that she’s right. So I need to put an end to this. To acknowledge what I experienced, and how close we were to something I can’t begin to imagine.
After that night, the bond that Anna and I shared is something unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. It’s like we were melded together; our lives intertwined from that day going forward.
I have this feeling that whenever this airs, for real, I want her to be there with me. It’s like it was meant to be. That we’re living on borrowed time.
I hope I never get an answer to what was supposed to happen that night.
But I know that the next time I hear that song will be my last.