No one ever told me that sound could stain a soul.

They talked about sacred chants, haunted flutes, or demonic scales played at midnight, sure. But those were just stories, things people say to spice up a bar talk or scare kids into not forming bands. This wasn’t that. This was different. The sound I found — Cankerblues, they called it — wasn’t played to be heard. It was played to change things.

My name’s Bram. I used to repair old audio equipment in Bandung — turntables, amplifiers, reel-to-reels. Analog stuff. Before everything became Spotify and silence. Clients came and went, mostly collectors or pretentious musicians. But then came Mr. Gavril.

He wasn’t like the others. His voice was sandpaper wrapped in velvet. He walked like each step owed him an apology. One day, he brought me a warped 10-inch vinyl, no label, no sleeve. He just held it out like it bit him once and he still hadn’t forgiven it.

“Fix this,” he said. “And don’t listen to Side B.”

He smiled too long after he said that.

Gavril was a local legend in our circles. Taught avant-garde music at Institut Seni Indonesia, wrote a thesis about tonal deception in Sundanese gendang, claimed he once collaborated with a dead German composer via dream-channeling. The usual mad-genius package. But the smell that followed the record wasn’t normal.

Not mildew. Not age. It was … something damp and wrong. Like a swamp inside a sock drawer. Like fermented fungus. But I needed money, and curiosity kills slower than poverty.

I cleaned the grooves, adjusted the pitch motor, and played Side A.

First time it played, everything in the room — my tools, the dangling lightbulb, even the cat — went still. The record didn’t start with music. It started with a breath. A long, slow, wet inhale. Then silence. Then a note. A single E-flat that warbled like it was ashamed of itself. And then… the foam began to form.

Yes, foam.

At first, just a few bubbles in the air near the speakers. I blinked, thought I was tired. But then they started swirling, collecting, like the music was exhaling them into reality. They danced. Almost beautiful, if they didn’t whisper. Because they did. Not words. Just impressions. Sadness. Regret. Hunger.

I turned it off.

The foam vanished.

But I didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t. The E-flat kept echoing in my head, like a toothache you can’t touch.

I returned the record next morning. Gavril was waiting on his porch, wearing a kimono with keyboard patterns on it and sipping black coffee.

“You listened,” he said, like a judge delivering a verdict.

“I fixed it,” I said. “It’s … alive.”

He just nodded and said, “She likes you.”

I didn’t ask who she was. Didn’t want to know. But before I left, he handed me a box.

Inside: four cassette tapes labeled DOCTRINE A–D, and a note that read:

“Play them in order. Not all at once. And never after a meal.”

That should’ve been it. I should’ve burned the box and changed my name. But you know how it goes. Curiosity. Loneliness. Maybe a little madness. I live alone, no family, just me and the cat who now slept in the bathtub ever since the foam showed up.

Tape A was… soft. More voices than music. A child reciting prayers backward. A gong being played under water. A woman humming while crying, but her sobs matched the beat. At one point I swear someone said my name. Not Bram, but “the listener”. Over and over.

By Tape B, things got physical.

I woke up on the floor. I’d blacked out sometime during the second play. My ears bled a little. The apartment smelled like overcooked mushrooms. On the wall, someone — or something — had drawn a circle with teeth using soy sauce. The cat wouldn’t come near me.

I tried to call Gavril. No answer.

I went to his place that night. The door was open.

The air inside was … warm. Like sauna-warm, but dry. The walls were covered in sheet music written in something like Sundanese script but backward and sideways. Instruments lay broken on the floor. In the corner, I found a chair. On it, Gavril’s jacket. Under it, just a small mushroom. Purple. Pulsing.

He was gone.

Gone in that way that didn’t mean travel.

I searched the house. Found a folder under his bed marked VINYL DOCTRINE: CASE STUDY — CANKERBLUES.

Inside were pages of madness: sketches of foam towers, musical notation with bleeding ink, a page that read:

“Cankerblues is not a song. It’s a transmitter.”

I also found the turntable. The same one he’d used for the original vinyl. It was still spinning. No record on it. Just spinning. Humming.

I pocketed the remaining tapes and got out of there.

Tape C did something to the light.

When it played, my apartment dimmed, not just in brightness — in hope. The shadows moved wrong. My own reflection smiled before I did. And in the music? I heard Gavril’s voice saying “Do not harmonize. If you sing along, she finds the door.”

I turned it off. Too late.

That night I dreamt of her. A tall woman made of mushrooms and static, standing ankle-deep in foam. She had no face, just ears. Hundreds. Listening.

“Where’s D?” she asked.

I woke up screaming, Tape D clutched in my hand though I’d locked it in the kitchen drawer.

I went back to his place one last time. Brought holy water and a friend — Rizal, a punk guitarist turned imam after a bad LSD trip in Jogja. He didn’t believe me at first. Thought I was having a breakdown. But once we stepped inside and the walls began humming in dissonant minor chords, he stopped laughing.

He read verses aloud, but the foam came anyway. From sockets, under the couch, inside a teapot. Bubbles formed words:

“D is the Door.”

We ran.

That night, Tape D played itself.

I had locked it in my filing cabinet, inside a tin box, under a bag of rice. Didn’t matter. At 3:13 a.m., the sound began. No cassette in the deck. No power to the system. Just sound. Real sound.

It wasn’t music.

It was history. Backward.

Bombs. Cries. Laughter. Markets. Gamelan. Screams. Whispers. The invention of pain. The forgetting of names. Gavril singing lullabies in an empty room.

And underneath it all, her voice.

“Let me in,” she said. “Or I’ll stay anyway.”

I opened the door. Not because I agreed. But because it was already open.

She stood in my living room. Taller now. No foam. Just pressure. Like a thousand ears pressing against your skin. She didn’t speak. But I heard what she meant.

The war wasn’t against her.

It was her.

Cankerblues was her way of leaking in. Through sound. Through us. Every play, every listen, every forgotten chorus — she grows. Not like a plant. Like a frequency. No one wins music wars when the instrument is your mind.

She offered me a deal.

“Be my needle,” she said. “Play me into others.”

I said yes.

Not out of fear. But because she promised me peace. No more dreams. No more foam. Just… the sound of forgetting.

That’s why you’re reading this. This story? It’s her.

She’s in the words now. In the way you paused at pulsing. In the part you read twice without noticing. She’s already under your tongue.

Don’t listen to music for the next three nights. Don’t hum. Don’t whistle. And for god’s sake—

Don’t play Side B.

[Fendy S. Tulodo is an Indonesian writer and musician whose work explores the intersections of nostalgia, identity, and quiet rebellion. Outside of writing, he composes music and captures everyday life through sound and story.]