In a forgotten town encircled by decaying, abandoned windmills, Saleem spent his solitary days restoring rare manuscripts and historical acoustic cylinders. His workshop was situated inside a subterranean stone vault thirty meters below the surface—a damp, windowless sanctuary untouched by daylight. The only connection linking Saleem to the world above was an old, rust-corroded copper pipe engineered to transmit ambient surface sounds down into the depths.

On a bitterly cold winter evening, while meticulously cleaning a hollow copper cylinder dating back to the late nineteenth century, Saleem noticed something profoundly unsettling. The artifact was not hollow as expected; rather, it was filled with a dense, iridescent black liquid resembling precipitated mercury. The moment his bare fingers accidentally brushed against the cold chemical substance, the copper pipe above his head vibrated violently, discharging a sharp, uncomfortably warm exhalation directly against his right ear.

Saleem froze in place, initially rationalizing the phenomenon as a sudden gust of wind traversing the vertical shaft. Yet the sound did not dissipate. Instead, it dissolved into a low, guttural murmur of unearthly syllables before gradually coalescing into articulate human speech. To his absolute horror, the voice echoed in his very own vocal timbre: “Do not turn around. I am not quite there yet.”

Terror gripped his heart. As he staggered backward away from the workbench, he realized with mounting dread that his shadow cast against the damp stone wall had stopped moving. It remained perfectly stationary, detached from his body, slowly raising a pale, elongated arm to point directly toward the vibrating copper pipe. At that exact second, the overhead generator failed with a loud spark, plunging the entire vault into an absolute, suffocating darkness.

Fumbling frantically in his pockets for a lighter, Saleem felt the sound oozing out of the pipe, expanding through the room until it manifested as physical mass. It was no longer a mere acoustic vibration; it became a heavy, tactile entity pressing violently against his chest, gradually stealing the breath from his lungs. In that harrowing instant, the horrific truth crystallized in his mind. The cylinder was never a recording device—it was an ancient, unnatural prison engineered to entrap a nameless creature that fed on human identity. By listening to its forbidden frequencies, Saleem had inadvertently surrendered his voice, allowing the entity to consume his speech and replicate his physical form.

Heavy, deliberate footsteps resounded through the darkness, approaching him with a rhythm that perfectly mirrored his own natural gait. Saleem opened his mouth to scream for help, but nothing emerged from his throat except cold, empty air. His voice was completely gone, ripped away and absorbed into the metal.

The following morning, the entity wearing Saleem’s exact likeness ascended the stone stairs and stepped out into the bright morning sunlight, offering a warm, silent smile to the passing neighbors. Down below, deep within the pitch-black shadows of the vault, the copper cylinder spun endlessly on the phonograph, echoing the muffled, terrifying screams of the real Saleem, trapped forever inside the cold metal shell.