(Originally published in Looming Low II.)
B major: harsh and plaintive
B minor: solitary and melancholic
Bb major: magnificent and joyful
Bb minor: obscure and terrible
Key and mode descriptions from Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Regles des Composition, ca. 1682
KAYLA PRATT, HELP-LINE VOLUNTEER
Tell me about the call.
How it happened was, I was volunteering on the Keep It Street-Safe vandalism tip-line, the one they set up to find out who’s been knocking out all the RESCU cameras in the area around where King Street East turns into Cherry Street, past Front Street down to Lakeshore—you know, that big development where they’re building what’s gonna be called the Canary District. Red light cameras mainly, but they’ve also knocked down a couple of traffic monitoring cameras, some ATM cameras…it’s like they’re trying to turn the whole area into one big dead spot. It’s hard enough to get an idea of what’s happening down there anyhow, because it’s pretty much either construction sites or a whole lot of old, semi-industrial spaces like the areas under the Gardiner Expressway, buildings no one’s bothered to demolish yet.
I didn’t get the call myself, because I was monitoring for control that night, but I saw out of the corner of my eye that Sam seemed to be having trouble, so I cut in, took it over. It took a minute to figure out what was going on, because it was two people and they were talking really quietly, whispering right up close to the phone, like they were afraid somebody was going to hear them. There was a lot of echo, a lot of noise; they told me they were in a bathroom, but I could hear stuff coming in through the walls too, like people singing, or—you know that thing really hardcore Baptists do, like at that church up near Pearson International Airport? Speaking in tongues—glossolalia, they call it. It was like that, but singing. Singing in tongues.
These people, these girls, they sounded really young, like kids. One of them had a bad cough, really wet, rattling in her chest. The other one sounded stronger, but her voice was still so hoarse I could barely make out what she was saying.
What was she saying?
Uh, like…“Help us, please send help, we need somebody. Our Moms are going to die, the Mouth says they have to do it to themselves. She says everybody has to.” Just like that, over and over again. She never stopped. Not even when the phone cut out.
Didn’t you think maybe it was a prank? I mean—
—if it was real, why didn’t they call 911? Yeah, that’s what my boss wanted to know, too. “Why would they call us, Kayla?” Like I could give a fuck about that question, right then… not that I said it out loud, obviously. Not like that, anyway.
Because you believed the call—the callers.
You’d’ve believed it too, if you‘d heard it.
I have, actually. The recording.
Oh yeah, okay. Well—she sounded pretty fucking convincing, right? Like they were both scared out of their minds, like they were gonna start crying any minute: A hostage situation, somebody being held against their will, maybe a bunch of people being coerced into…murder, suicide? Mass suicide? (PAUSE)
Minute I heard the one with the cough talking like that, I knew we needed to kick this up to somebody who was a lot better equipped to deal with it than us.
The Emergency Task Force.
That’s what they’re there for.
•••
ETF STAFF SERGEANT ARSHAN NAJI, SPECIAL WEAPONS TEAM SUPERVISOR AND NEGOTIATOR, TORONTO POLICE SERVICES
Tell me about what happened next.
Well, we couldn’t get a hold of the landlord immediately, because it was a weekend, but the building manager said they’d been there since before she applied for the job; it was a condo, fully paid off, and the owner lived there, along with a bunch of her friends. Zusann Groff, that was the owner’s name—and she was a lawyer, too, so there was nothing they could do to force them out, not even with the occasional complaint about noise or overcrowding…well, suspected overcrowding. Nobody really knew how many friends Groff was cohabiting with, exactly, ’til we got inside.
Why not?
Because pandemic, that’s why not. Remember how fast people started inviting other people over, basically the minute they could prove they got vaccinated? No big parties, just keep it to one or two at a time? Well, it took a pretty long time for Groff’s neighbours to figure out none of the people coming to “visit” ever actually left, especially when we went into that second lockdown, the Rho variant scare one. She was the only person who ever came and went, the only one anybody actually saw—when you knocked on the door, she was the only one who ever answered. But when you live close by you can tell when there’s people next door, even when they’re hardly talking to each other, at least not very loud; lots of moving around, lots of flushing the toilet. An incredible amount of food deliveries. And that was a long time before choir practice started up.
Choir practice?
That’s what Groff’s nearest neighbour called it, uh…Ada Sagao. Groff was the last unit on that floor, down a little hallway, just past the stairs; Sagao was right around the corner, but she could hear it through her bedroom wall. She was working out of her home, like everybody else—said she asked Groff and her guests not to do whatever they were doing in the evenings, so she could sleep, but then they started doing it in the mornings instead, which woke her up way too early and gave her panic attacks. Then she asked Groff if she could maybe not do it every day, and Groff said they had to, because they had something coming up—Sagao thought it was a performance of some kind, but when we interviewed her later on, she couldn’t say for sure Groff ever really called it that. So Sagao complained to the manager, and Groff told the manager she’d do something about it, make alterations that’d help them keep it down.
Did she?
Brought a bunch of guys in, almost immediately. They worked quick. Things did get quieter, after that.
(PAUSE)
Until we showed up, I guess.
•••
ADA SAGAO, COMPUTER TECHNICIAN
Tell me what Zusann Groff’s choir sounded like.
I don’t know it was a choir, as such. Not officially.
It’s…hard to describe. Singing, I guess. If you could call it that.
What else would you call it?
I’m not a music expert. All I know is, it was disturbing. It disturbed me. And—no, forget it.
What were you going to say?
Well…afterwards, when I read about it in the papers, they said there were thirteen people living next door to me; the woman who owned the place—Zusann—plus twelve others. Which is crazy in and of itself, really, considering how small these units are, but…whenever they started singing, it always sounded like more. Like, a lot more.
Was it always the same song?
“Song…” (LAUGHS) Yeah, I guess it was, eventually. I mean…yeah, after a while they’d hit something that sounded…familiar. It always felt the same, somehow. Like—
Like what?
Like—cold, and high, and lonely. Awful. Like everybody was singing in two different keys, two different voices. And one went so low it droned, and the other went so far up it—yelped, shrieked? But it was still music, somehow. And sometimes, when hit that pitch…sometimes…it was like they weren’t even human, anymore.
(PAUSE)
You ever hear of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? Sufi devotional singer, did some stuff with Peter Gabriel, back in the nineties? He sang qawwali, this incredible stuff full of yearning and heartbreak, pure vocal pyrotechnics. I think it’s supposed to sound like you’re in love with God.
Okay.
Seriously, Google him, it’s worth it. Well…this was like the opposite of that.
Could you make out any words?
Most times I don’t think it even had words. Not by the end.
I heard you recorded some of it.
Not me, no. My friend, Kika—she’s a musicologist. You’d have to ask her.
Can I have her contact information?
Uh…sure.
•••
ETF STAFF SERGEANT ARSHAN NAJI
Initially there was some back and forth over right to enter, but we were finally able to push through on the idea of child welfare endangerment. I mean, “push through” sounds like we were doing something shady, but it was a legitimate concern—the threat sounded imminent, plus we didn’t have any sort of idea how long we had before things were likely to kick off, just the phone call itself and a whole lot of weird noise from inside the unit.
The choir.
The singing, yes. That was already going when we got there. It never stopped. (PAUSE) So we knocked, asked for Ms. Groff, called through the door that we were there to run a welfare; no response. Repeated it three times, asked for permission to enter: still no response. Eventually, the Crown got a warrant to us, and we were able to move forward.
How so?
We tried negotiation first, obviously—opening channels, etcetera—but…basically, they just ignored us. Kept on singing, louder and louder, to the point where we thought we heard screaming. That’s when I gave the order to breach.
Was there any resistance?
No. It was a clean entry, minimal damage. Nobody anywhere near the door. We cleared the place room by room, without incident: Kitchen, living space, one bathroom, two bedrooms. The place was spare, totally stripped down, barely any furniture left. Both bedrooms were nothing but Ikea bunk-beds—that’s where we expected to find the kids, hopefully alive.
And did you?
No. There weren’t any kids, turned out. There never had been. It was just…somebody, a couple of somebodies, pretending, I guess. I hear some of Groff’s friends used to be actors.
Why would they have done that?
Basically? I think to get us to come over and break in on them, in the first place.
(PAUSE)
Anyhow, we were stumped there for a few minutes, still couldn’t figure out where the singing was coming from—not until we checked the floor-plan, saw the unit used to have two bathrooms.
The alterations.
That’s right. They’d knocked everything out, made a whole new room, hid it behind a fake wall at the back of bedroom number two. It probably used to be an en suite.
So that’s where they all were? Thirteen people?
Yes, it was pretty tight, especially with the soundproofing. And it must’ve been just loud as hell for them in there, too, considering…I mean, we could hear it all the way outside, like I said, right through the front door. Once we got in, it was just—at what seemed like assaultive levels of volume, even with all our gear, the noise we were making ourselves: Flash-bangs on entry, yelling, what have you. Made you want to…
Staff Sergeant?
Excuse me.
(PAUSE)
It was my second-in-command who spotted the hinges, so we could open it up that way; if there was a lock on the outside, we never found it. We went in with halligan bars, tore up the plaster, knocked out the pins. It sprang open pretty quick, right at the same time the singing stopped…I think that’s when it was. It was definitely over when we saw—what was in there.
Who. Was in there.
Ms. Groff?
Her, sure. Along with everybody else.
(PAUSE)
When we opened the door at last, pried it open, there was this…you know that kind of noise when you open a can of coffee? Vacuum sealed? It was like that. And then this rush of cold coming out, intense, like dead of winter. Cold enough to crisp your ass-hairs. Plus this rush of…
Well, I know it sounds insane, but…air. Coming in past us. Almost strong enough to knock me off balance.
(PAUSE)
I don’t think I ever told anybody that before.
Casualties?
Not by our hands, ma’am.
•••
WINSTON JONAS, PARAMEDIC
Oh my God, man, you don’t even know. I never saw anything like that, and I’ve seen a lot, like, a lot. Enough so’s I can’t sleep without medication, you get me? Yeah, it was bad.
Can you give me details?
I’d rather not. But that’s what you came to me for, right? Yeah, you and everybody else.
(PAUSE)
So there was this secret room at the back, flush to the wall, no windows. They’d built it themselves. Had no lighting inside it. Just a triangular, black space—totally black, I mean like they’d painted it black themselves: The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all covered in this foam stuff with a layer of black paint slopped over it, for soundproofing. Thirteen adult human beings crammed in there, all standing with barely enough room to breathe, all staring upwards and singing, apparently, real loud. I don’t know how they could bear it.
Why do you think they—?
Not my business. Not my job. I leave that to the experts.
Which ones?
Ones that specialize in crazy, lady. You feel me?
I do.
Uh huh. So—they were all dead when we got there, probably since ETF popped the door. I mean, they must’ve been, right? Because of the singing. Glad I didn’t have to hear any of that shit, I can tell you.
They were so close-packed, we had to take them out one by one, lay them down on the body-bags and zip them up for transport. FIS Scenes of Crime needed to get in, take their samples. But we pretty much knew how they’d gone out, after the first few. Cyanosed lips, petechial haemorrhaging, orbital distension, second-degree burns over all the exposed skin—but not heat burns. Cold burns. Only thing came to mind at the time was, maybe if you drowned them all in liquid nitrogen, all at once, like they do to flash-freeze fancy snacks…
But that obviously couldn’t have been feasible.
Yeah, no shit. I mean, later I did think of something else, but—
But?
…Hard vacuum. Decompression. Except even straight vacuum doesn’t freeze you right away, you know? No air in space, so no, what’s it called, convection. Whatever took the air out of that room took all the heat out of it as well, and out of everyone in it.
Still no fucking idea how.
•••
MUSICOLOGIST KIKA RIOS
Tell me how you got involved.
I was brought in to analyze the Choir’s…work, I guess. Their style.
By whom?
By Ada—Ms. Sagao, their neighbour. We’ve been friends for a couple of years; we met in a community choir ourselves, ironically, a downtown women’s group. Stayed in touch over Zoom after rehearsals shut down. So one night I actually heard them over Ada’s speakers, and I said, “What the hell is that?” and Ada told me the story. Well, I was fascinated, on a professional level.
“You tell me,” Ada said. “Is that even music?”
“Oh, I think so,” I told her.
I asked if I could hear more. “Come over,” she said, “pretty much anytime, and just wait. You can’t miss it.”
So as soon as I’d got my latest booster and was clear to go into other homes again, I went over to Ada’s place, ran some recordings, then took them home and and tried to figure it out.
How would you summarize your findings?
Well, I—oh, can I ask? Am I going to get in trouble, for the recordings? Privileged communications, or something?
At this point, that seems…unlikely.
Okay. Good. Well, I recorded like three hours’ worth over a couple of nights, then processed it through my editing suite. Have you listened to it, yet?
No. I was hoping to.
I’ll send you some files. It’s…just insanely complicated. The base is done in the same atonal style you get in throat-singing, or death metal, where it’s all about speed and force and the harmonics are accidental at best, all percussion and dissonance. Syncopation, speed riffs, ululation like you get in tribal music. But then they’d layer in some operatic tremolo, real Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria stuff, combined with sounds like gongs and flutes and kanglings, and they’d punctuate it with roars and shrieks. Very…animalistic.
Were there lyrics?
Uh, yeah. In the beginning, most of what you heard where actually vocables, stuff that just sounds like language: you know, like “doo wah diddy, diddy dum diddy doo.” But other stuff turned out to be real phrases in weird, archaic languages—I had to get a university colleague to identify some of it. He said he recognized Sanskrit, Aramaic, plus some other thing he thought might be actual Proto-Indo-European. And some he didn’t recognize at all.
Could he translate any of it?
It wasn’t clear enough, no matter how I cleaned it up. Or—that’s what he said. Thinking about it now, maybe…I mean, it was just this look I caught on his face, but I wonder if, maybe—he understood more than he said. Just enough to, uh…know he didn’t want to understand the rest?
I don’t know. That could just be me.
One thing you have to understand, though, is…I’m making the Choir’s work sound like just random chaotic noise? But it wasn’t. It was very carefully structured. Like, Bach-level complexity. Deeper, even. At full volume in that tiny space, it must have sounded like a cross between a battlefield and a voodoo ritual. Those decibel levels, that close-quarters vibration, it’s almost…well, it’s the kind of thing they’re trying to make directed-energy weapons out of. The kind of thing that induces religious ecstasies. Altered states. Hysteria.
If that woman, Zusann Groff, if she wrote and arranged that herself, then she was either the biggest musical genius I’ve ever run across, or she was completely psychotic. Or both.
“Both” sounds about right.
Yeah. I mean, given.
•••
HAL KASHIGIAN, FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGIST
Tell me how you got involved.
I was contacted by Zusann Groff’s mother, Akela Halloway. She wanted…to understand, I suppose. How this could have happened.
“This.”
The Suicide Choir.
Hm. And how did it?
You want my report, basically? Well, it’s true that privilege doesn’t apply, not with Ms. Halloway or Ms. Groff—they were never my patients, nor did I ever sign any non-disclosure agreement. I always make it very clear to clients that in order to make an assessment after the fact, I have to be free to use whatever evidence I gather or conclusions I reach in my own work later on, and Ms. Halloway had no problems with that. So…
(PAUSE)
…all right, then.
The Choir didn’t leave any sort of testament, no bible, no diaries. Zusann Groff was their host, which probably made her their leader, but that “Mouth” epithet, in the initial hot-line call? Much like the implication there were children in danger inside the unit, this appears to have been fiction. Groff didn’t re-name herself, or give herself a title; she was no Shoko Asahara waiting to happen, any more than the Choir was Aum Shinrikyo. The only people they ever seem to have threatened were themselves.
Though she trained as a lawyer, Groff had always been interested in music. She was what you’d call an auto-didact on the subject. In particular, she was fascinated by the idea that some vocal musical performers could produce not only emotional effects on their listeners but also physical effects on the world around them: opera singers hitting notes so high they shatter glass, for example, or the theory that certain vibrational frequencies can cause hallucinations—the “fear frequency,” they call it. How a standing wave of 19 hertz in the infrasound decibel range, right below the bottom end of human hearing, can make people feel like they’re either seeing ghosts, or about to see a ghost.
What do you mean?
Don’t worry, we’ll get there.
In or around November 2019, Zusann Groff first began advertising for participants in a “musical experiment.” She auditioned over a hundred people, picking twelve: Lila Dabney, William Rhoads, Jenny Birthwell, Myung-Jin Heo, Holt Werkheim, Sarai Goshen, Morgan Morrison, Alena Rostova, Tegan List, Geza Heliot, Michael Young, and Victoria Spurling.
Why those people? What did they have in common?
They could all sing? And they took Groff seriously, too, I can only assume—that would have been the real deal-sealer. They believed in what she was trying to do.
They wanted to see ghosts.
In the beginning, maybe. But later on…
Anyhow: the Choir members all met in a common space at Birthwell’s condo, up until Toronto citizens were asked to socially distance themselves as of March 2020, and meeting publicly became impossible. As the government’s plans to deal with the global COVID-19 pandemic became more and more restrictive, they were physically separated, yet drew emotionally closer. They rehearsed by Zoom, continuing to work on the music they’d been developing. Each became the subject of noise complaints from within their various buildings.
At some point, however, something happened. What, exactly? Again, hard to tell. We only know the results.
They started moving in with Groff.
Yes. They moved in, one by one; they committed to the next phase. And so, by degrees, they changed from a choir—a community—into a cult.
Is that what they were?
What else? A cult doesn’t start out like a massive pyramid scheme, you know, or a super-church—a cult can be a family, an office…thirteen friends in a condo who build themselves a windowless room, pack themselves in like sardines, sing until they pass out. All that’s required is that they believe something for which they have no immediate proof.
They didn’t leave anything behind, though, like you said. So—how can we know what they believed?
We can’t, not thinking normally. So the only way we can try and reproduce their train of thought is by thinking, um…abnormally, metaphorically, poetically. Magically.
Magical thinking?
Of course. Like any other religion. Doing the same thing over and over, absolutely believing you’ll get a different result from the one that logic, science, the basic rules of physics say you will—I mean, that’s faith, isn’t it? That’s the very definition.
Most religious conversions still need some kind of catalyzing experience, though.
Sure, absolutely. These were people whose image of the world had already been undermined by Groff, her ideas, the possibilities of impossibility. And then things start to change all around them, without warning—a pandemic, a plague, “alternative facts,” Fake News. Panic, depression, zealotry on all sides, and they realize they have no power to affect any of it, no power over anything but themselves. So they did what they thought they had to, and believed whatever made those choices sound…well, not logical, exactly, at least to anybody outside the magic circle. But inside…
(PAUSE)
Tell me that doesn’t sound at least a little familiar.
But it’s…ridiculous, isn’t it? To think that—
Think what? That horse de-wormer cures COVID? That pedophile Jewish vampires who secretly run the world keep stables full of kids they torture for their adrenochrome? That if you only stand in a closet and sing long enough, hard enough, a door will open in the ceiling—a door to somewhere else, anywhere else? Because given the current situation, “anywhere else”…no matter how unspecific…starts to look pretty fucking good.
All of that, yes.
Hey, don’t tell my uncle. Without QAnon to fall back on, he’d probably drink himself to death inside of a week.
How does…something like this start, though?
How does anything? Someone got an idea—Groff, probably; she heard a voice, or she had a dream, or whatever. And she told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on…it spread like a meme, because everyone she told was equally afraid of the same things she was afraid of. Fear makes for fertile soil.
Look, these were lonely people, just like the rest of us. They wanted to get together and do something special—like church, like bowling, like a mosh pit. Remember going to clubs, how stacked it used to get? Swaying on the dance-floor, like a single huge, giant hug? Breathing in each other’s breath as you sang along to whatever was playing?
Yeah, I’m old, I get it; I lived through AIDS, kid. When everything—everyone—you love is suddenly infectious, you have to choose your options, take your chances.
Not every kind of worship is summed up by a monk praying in a cell; not every kind can be. People need to touch, to share, even if all they share is the same delusion, even if it’s something that could kill them. If staying alive means letting go of human contact entirely, then what’s the fucking point?
They’re dead now, though. That‘s the point.
Is it? Maybe. Maybe.
(PAUSE)
Do you know there was a deadman’s catch on the inside of the hidden room’s door, rigged to open if whoever was closest to it went slack? Heo was a contractor; she probably designed it. So I don’t think they were looking to die, necessarily. Just…
Why didn’t the door come open when what happened—happened, then?
Maybe it would have, if Naji’s team hadn’t broken in.
Oh, and one more thing. Did you know the Choir all had retinal damage that pre-dated their death injuries? The same kind of damage they all showed afterwards, but less of it—little dots just over the pupil, tiny sections of intense degradation, seared there by extreme cold. If you look at them close up, very close up indeed, they look like little galaxies.
Which means … ?
No idea.
Listen, you’re an adult—I’m sure you’ve already noticed none of this “means” much at all, in context. A lot of times, life…and death…seems utterly inexplicable, to the point of cruelty. Like: “This was just a thing that happened, make of it what you will.” Whatever the Choir ended up with, is it any better than what we’re left with, or worse? A dying earth and a plague in progress, melting ice-sheets, rising water-levels? Dead fish, bleached-out coral, garbage islands?
So I’ll tell you what I told Ms. Halloway, if a little more bluntly: I can tell what I think happened, but not why…never why. Because if any of us are looking for answers, one way or the other, I think we’re going to end up disappointed.
So you don’t know why they contacted the hot-line, then. Why NFT was brought in.
…My best guess? Witnesses.
Witnesses?
Even bible-less cults want to proselytize.
