I was honestly really mad when the whole vinyl trend started in around 2015 or so. I was 16 back then, and I didn’t have a legitimate reason to be angry about it. I was just a teenage metalhead who hated “posers” who were only into collecting vinyl as a trend. Although it was probably better for me in the long run because everybody and their literal grandma started selling old vinyl. I’d go to my local flea market and there’d be an entire section of people selling stacks of vinyl. Of course, more than likely it was just overpriced Hank Williams and Buddy Holly. If I wanted to get my hands on some metal, I’d have to go to a specific guy who collected metal records. His name is Dan. In my southern town where the satanic panic was still going strong 30 years later, he was pretty rare. Great guy, too. I’d stop by his booth about once every two weeks and talk with him about music. I’d always try and pick up something every time I stopped by to support him.
If I wasn’t looking for anything in particular I’d just ask Dan for a recommendation, but on one particular day he couldn’t really think of anything. He told me to just pick whatever. So I started browsing, looking for anything that caught my eye. I was looking through the records in the 80s stack; all of them had extremely elaborate covers – tapestries of blood, gore, sex, anything that would make an old woman have a heart attack. I was trying to find the most interesting cover of them all. That is until I saw one. It was so different from the others I had to stop everything I was doing. The cover was so remarkably boring. It was a black background with white letters in a thin, chaotic font that read: “HATYA.”
I asked Dan if he knew what it was, but he looked confused. He said he didn’t know where he got it. After some consideration, he figured he got it in a lot of metal records on Ebay. We couldn’t look up the band on our phones because the flea market blocked all cell reception because of the shitty roof. He told me I could have it for free considering he didn’t even know the value of it. His working theory was that it was some obscure death metal band from the 80s. That’s one way you could describe it.
I drove home, and found I had the house to myself. My parents likely wouldn’t be home for a few hours. I take it out of the sleeve to find that it has no label on it, just a blank vinyl, nothing in the center. I put it on my cheap record player, dropped the needle, and sat on the edge of my bed.
I patiently waited for something to happen, but it was nothing but silence for about ten seconds. So I went to fiddle with the player but heard a faint something. It was something I couldn’t understand, but it sounded like people whispering. I turned up the speakers. It was much more audible but I still couldn’t make out the language. It seemed to me like two teenage boys who were messing around, but why the hell was it on a record? Then they stopped talking. Very faintly, I could hear a third person. But they weren’t talking like the other two, they made a sound halfway between a whimper and a scream. Then, it started playing. Someone, I assume one of the boys, started to play an electric guitar. Every time I think back to the riff he played, I get a pit in my stomach and goosebumps all over. It was scratchy, cold, and impending. It felt like wandering naked through the desert at night.
It continued like that for around a minute. Then the third voice came back. It was louder and more hectic. Again, I don’t know what language it was, but you don’t have to speak a language to know the sound of fear. Whoever was on the guitar switched what they were playing. It was a long, piercing note that lasted around three seconds. He waited another three seconds before doing it again. On the third repetition, the third person in the room let out a blood curdling scream that still echoes in my brain when I try to sleep. The playing sped up, now on every single note a scream accompanied it. Each successive one got more and more faint.
It was at this point that I took the record off the turntable. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was in both horrific shock and tears. I don’t think a human being could have created that. No man with a soul could commit such an act. This was not the musical arrangements of man. This was the symphony of the devil. I went out to the garage and smashed the thing with a hammer into around ten chunks and threw the thing in the trash. It’s my hope that I am the last pair of ears that thing ever gets ahold of. I still haven’t gone back to Dan after all these years. Partly because I didn’t want him to know I broke his record, partly because I never want to explain what the hell was on that thing.