Mac lanapple's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Mac Lanapple wanted to finish one song, the song that would quiet every restless ghost in Applesville. He had chased that song for years. Tonight he sat in the old recording studio, where the walls cracked and wires hung like dead vines, and he played back the take he'd just cut. His melody rose clean for three seconds. Then a voice broke through it. A woman, dragging out one word over and over. A name. It drowned his guitar and left only her grief on the tape. "Diana," the voice moaned. "Diana. Diana." Mac stopped the reel player. Its circular reels spun down to silence. He had recorded eleven takes tonight. All eleven were ruined the same way. The spirit bled her name into every track, and no melody could survive it. He could not finish a song he could not even hear. He knew who might know this ghost. He wrapped the reel in his coat and walked to the bar at the edge of town, the one glowing poison green through its windows. Granny Smith stood behind the counter, a muscled green apple with a stem jutting from his head and a grin that scared off weaker men. He polished a glass he did not need to polish. "We're closing," he said. "I need help, not a drink." "Same answer." But Granny set the glass down. Mac played the tape. The name filled the lounge. Granny went still. The grin dropped off his face. A faint green light drifted through the wall. Evelyn Greenwood, the ghost trapped in the house across town, stepped into the bar. She could pass walls but not front doors. Tonight something pulled her here. She pressed a hand to her own chest. "That voice is inside me too," she said. "Since I took the button. It won't stop." "You know her?" Mac asked. "No. But she wants the same thing I do." Evelyn's tone went flat. "To be heard." Granny spoke, quieter now. "Diana was real. Long ago. Nobody ever answered her." Mac understood then. The spirit did not want his melody. She wanted her name kept, not buried. He had spent his life hiding one song so a certain person would never hear it. He knew that weight exactly. He set the reel player on the bar. He hit record. "Say it again," he told the air. "Loud as you want." The voice came. This time Mac did not fight it. He laid his low guitar beneath it, holding the name up instead of covering it. The grief and the melody moved together. When the take ended, the voice was gone. The tape held only his guitar and one clear name, sung like it mattered. Evelyn lowered her hand. "She's quiet," she said. "Inside me. First time." Mac had his first finished track. But now the name lived on his tape, and Granny stared at it like it had opened an old grave.