The sound of the harmonica does not come from him.It comes from the air, from the bodies, from memory itself.The wind sings, and flesh vibrates.
When he raises his gaze, he doesn't look at me.He looks through me, as if my body were only a window to something breathing behind it.Then the blood on the walls parts, shaping figures that turn like clocks with no hands.And there, before me, I see his origin.
A hundred years ago, he too crossed the threshold—not in search of power, but of peace.He was a wandering musician, playing to silence hunger, until war took everything: his village, his child, his name.He wandered until he found a city that no longer exists, swallowed by fog and erased from every map.
There he heard a whisper.A chorus of voices begging for justice, redemption—or perhaps just company.He forged his harmonica from the bones of those he could not save,and every note he played opened a door.Not to hell, but to the mirror of humanity itself:a world where souls were matter, and pain could be shaped like clay.
I see him kneeling, hands drenched in blood,blowing into his instrument as a woman dies in his arms—the same woman who now, a century later, watches him from the shadows of my mind.And I understand: the cycle never ended.He is not an immortal being.He is an echo, condemned to relive his own regret.
His voice resounds inside me, as if spoken within my skull:
"I am neither god nor demon.I am what happens when a man tries to give shape to suffering.The space you see… it is not punishment.It is a house built from the walls of human pain."
The ground trembles. The faceless bodies bow before him.Not with devotion, but with fear.His gaze pierces me, and something within me breaks—the border between what I am and what I might become.
Then, my daughter's voice cuts through the air, sharp and close, as if standing behind me:
"Daddy… if he could build his own hell… what are you building?"
The Man with the Harmonica lifts his instrument.He blows a single, low note that unravels me.Reality fades.And before darkness swallows everything, I hear his final whisper:
"Time does not move, boy.It only changes its mask."