Soon, the world will be destroyed by sound, and I will make it into music. The sounds that are being created everywhere have already driven the mammals out of the forest, and the birds are almost gone; soon, the trees will shrink and shed their bark, and finally the insects will go, always the last. The new vibrations in the earth will drive them to the sky, where they disintegrate. And I will record it all. 

   I remember spending half the night in the forest once. I had only meant to be out until dusk, but I had stayed too long recording the ground, the humming of the leaves, a rare bird on the burial mound. I’d started to walk back but I was missing one of my microphones; returning for it, I became lost in the withdrawing light. Alan came with a search party—Sila and Deon, my two sisters—and they found me in the early hours, hunched by a slime pond, recording the feeble croak of a rain toad. 

   Usually, I mix the recordings on my computer. I want to create new sounds from the dying ones. I mix the pattering of the stream I’ve sat by all day with the movement of a branch in the wind. I take any birdsong and repeat it endlessly, as it’s so hard to find. Also, I always record the quietest place I come across in the forest, and position it in the background. I call this the forest’s dream.

   Alan frequently knocks on my bedroom door. 

   “Lia, won’t you come down? Come and play us your music. I enjoyed what you were making there, so much, I could hear it—you could share it with the world, I’m sure people would love it…”

   I try to ignore him when he provokes me this way, but sometimes I can’t help myself. 

   “You don’t understand,” I say, “it’s not for you. It’s not for anyone.” But he never responds. His eyes fill with fatherly concern, and he withdraws silently. Even when I shout at him, he can’t hear me—none of them can. 

   As well as my two dynamic mikes, and my directional mike, I have four contact mikes. If you can find a cedar tree with a panel of bark flat enough and large enough to attach a contact mike, you can record the inner sound of the tree, like a hollow groan. You can do the same on an old oak, although the sound is different. One time I captured both and ran them side by side through a track, like two backbones. 

   I like recording the wind, too. The wind always makes layered sounds: the low roar at the back, the trickling water-pouring sounds, the little cracks… 

   A few months ago, I let my older sister Sila join me. She wanted to know what I do all day, and everyone else was out, so I said she could come along. I gave her jobs, like threading wires around trunks, or holding the raised mikes when I couldn’t find a place to put the stand. 

   “Why don’t you release your music, Lia?” she asked, while we were recording a new spot I’d found. “You are so talented. You could be famous, and so many people would hear your music and love you.” 

   I glared at her, partly because she had ruined the recording. I made myself calm.

   “I don’t want anyone to play it,” I said. “The forest is already dying because of the sounds people are making. I don’t want to add to that.”

   She shook her head, still holding the mike in vain. 

   “You don’t get it. When people make music, it’s for others; it’s like you’re adding to…all the things humans have ever made. It’s the same with my acting. If you just keep it to yourself, it’s pointless.” 

   But she didn’t get it. Everything was going to end, and all because of the noise made by people like her. She wouldn’t understand, so I didn’t see much sense in arguing about it.  

Sometimes, I have to go to the city with them.

   “Lia, I can’t make you,” Alan always says, “but I want us to do things together. We’re a team!” He hugs Deon to his side, who smirks. “Besides, what about Grandma?”

   So I end up going, because Grandma is old, and I want to see her. 

   Still, the city is hard to bear. Last time it was worse than ever: hundreds of people burbling on the streets, in the metro, shouting into mobile phones; car engines, blaring horns, train wheels screeching…all sounds that are killing the last forest, and the world. I couldn’t tell them, though I wanted to scream it; I just stayed quiet, putting my hands over my ears. 

   Eventually we reached the old district, where Grandma lives.

   Last year, Grandma took a vow of silence. She reasoned she had made a lot of noise throughout her life, and she didn’t need to make any more. She never took the train, or the bus. She only walked from place to place. Alan said to me and Sila once, “Grandma’s getting old, she doesn’t speak much.” Alan really is an idiot. 

   As the others talked and drank tea, I went over and whispered in her ear. 

   “Grandma, I think it’s happening now.”

   She nodded, without saying anything.

   “I’ve made you another tape—it’s in the kitchen.”

   She looked at me and smiled.

I was born into a world already ending. I learned in history about the things I had missed: the coral reefs that flaked away, the jungles turned to desert, the great animals, bigger than people, that used to roam in the grasslands. 

   But I am creating a new forest from the last forest. I am multiplying the dying forest. By recording the roots of one tree and the branch of another, I make the sound of a new tree, one that doesn’t exist. I am recording the world to create the world, not to save it.

   One day last summer, I had missed dinner and was in my room. Alan knocked on my door with a tray of food. I took the tray, but he didn’t leave. 

   “Lia,” he said. “You know I am very proud of all of you—Sila with her acting, you with your music, and Deon I know will be something special…” He was looking down with his lips pursed, his head tilted to one side. 

   I had a tightening in my stomach. 

   “What is it Alan?” 

   “Before you react, just remember: this is good! This could really lead somewhere. Do you want to live in this house forever? Don’t you want to be near Grandma?”

   I felt tears build behind my eyes, but I didn’t cry. 

   “Some people are coming tomorrow. They heard your music on the internet. They got in contact with me. They want to—”

   I slammed the door in his face. I then waited until he’d gone, and ran into Sila’s room. She was sitting at her desk, pretending to work.

   “Sila—” I tried to catch her eye. “Sila, why did you?”  

   She shrugged, without turning. 

   I saw the tape on the side and grabbed it, forgetting its insignificance now. Sila said nothing, and went on reading her screen.  

   No one came the next day, in the end, but it didn’t matter: from that moment on, people would arrive at the house in a steady stream. I don’t know how they always found us. There were just a few at first, but as time passed, more and more of them came. I never knew any of them, and I never spoke to them. Alan said they wanted to meet me, that my sounds were popular in the city. 

   “People want to feel a connection to the forest, Lia, and your music…it takes them there,” he said. He always asked why I wouldn’t come out to meet them. But he couldn’t understand. People drove around in loud cars, they bought things made in booming factories, they laughed and screamed. They gave birth to noisy babies. Those same people were causing the sound-death of the world.

One effect of the noise was on the soil. That’s why the crops were failing, why there were no young trees growing anywhere in the forest. In some areas, the earth was so loose that all the trees with shallow roots had fallen, leaning on one another; it was as if they had tripped over themselves, trying to escape. In other places, the weakened trees would break, the newly-exposed wood in their stumps revealed as rotten mulch.   

   It occurred to me, recording these areas, that the silences were more important than the sounds themselves. It was these silences that told most truthfully the story of the world’s end. 

   Usually, I was out before my first visitors arrived, but not always. One morning, I opened my door and saw two figures through the bannister, facing away from me in the kitchen. I couldn’t see Alan, but I could hear his voice, mixed with one of theirs. 

   “No, she doesn’t like to be disturbed. I try to give her what—Well, that’s kind, I’m sure she’d love to hear that—Yes, yes exactly—”

    I snuck out of the back door and onto the track. I always had to walk into the forest for at least an hour to escape the low groan of traffic from the edges of the city. I followed the path that ran on thinly for a while, before dissolving into the grey and green of the woodland. 

   The quietest place I knew in the forest was among the great fir trees, where the floor was cushioned with pine needles and pulpy moss and small sprouting fungi. The trunks absorbed the sound in the air between them, like a vacuum. When recording, I would sometimes be disturbed by the pulsing of blood in my own ears.

   I set up as I usually would. I positioned two mike stands on a stable bed of vegetation and set the mikes working. I then put my headphones on and knelt in the moss, closing my eyes. I listened intently to the sounds made by the dying forest, thinking. I thought about the people I’d seen in the kitchen that morning. An idea entered my mind, but I dismissed it. 

   When I got home that day, there was a small crowd in the living room. It turned out to be two people from Sila’s youth theatre group, practising lines, and three strangers. One of them lifted her head as I entered, then quickly turned, her eyes moving all around the room, as though unsure where to look. 

   “There she is—our little artist!” Sila emphasised the words deliberately as she stood. She extended her arms to me in a mock hug; her face was flushed. “Sister, this is Mylo, Lorne and…”

   “Gemma,” the woman finished, clearly embarrassed.

   “They want to interview you for an article,” Sila continued, “I told them to wait with us. Is that okay? I know you can be funny about these things.” 

   Gemma stepped forward. “If you want to, of course, Lia. We just wanted to show—”

   “Please leave.” I felt my cheeks redden. 

   “Lia, honestly, don’t be like that…” Sila then shrugged, reading my expression, suddenly losing interest. 

   The three visitors had started moving. “We’re so sorry,” Gemma said, grabbing her coat. “We should never have come.”

It was August, but each day more yellow leaves and browned-out bracken would appear on the path. I put my palm in the soft mud. I could feel the gentle rumble that came from the factories outside the city, the rumble that shook the roots loose in the earth and made the animals sick. I realised I’d never lived at a time when the fine sounds in the air weren’t permeated by tendrils of people-noise. I realised I’d never heard the trees make sounds for themselves only. 

   I approached the old burial mounds. I imagined saying to Sila, “Here’s the only place where people are quiet,” which would upset her, and she would say something about being disrespectful to mum. But the burial mounds contain ancient people; mum’s buried in a graveyard in the city.

   I had started skipping dinner almost every night. I needed each moment of daylight to be out in the forest. I also wanted to avoid the visitors who came. Alan would tell me about them when he brought my dinner up to my room, casually. 

   “This morning there were a group of three,” he said one day. “Architects. They were working on the new insulation projects, it was interesting to hear them. They were excited to speak with you.” 

   I took the plate from the tray and placed it on my desk. I turned away from him and put my headphones on, but without anything playing. 

   “Lia, I do wish…” I felt him linger for a while, before gently closing the door. I rested my forehead in the crook of my elbow. 

As the summer days shortened, things began to change again. The road closures were becoming longer and more frequent. The radio reports were becoming more repetitive, and more frenzied. 

   “I’m sure things will be back to normal soon,” Alan kept saying. “There were curfews last year, and we got through them, right?”

   But I liked it when the roads closed. It meant no visitors for a few days, and the house became quiet, except for Deon screaming or laughing, and Sila rehearsing her parts. Also, I could cycle to Grandma’s in the city on my own. When I saw her, we would sit together in silence, listening to my music on her old cassette player. Usually, they would reopen the roads after a few days though, and the traffic noises would resume, along with my stream of visitors.   

   Then, there was an announcement: the reopening of schools would be delayed. It didn’t affect us, though, as Alan taught us from home. 

   Then, a week later, they closed the roads indefinitely. 

A lot of the things I know, I have learnt from recording the forest. Making recordings has taught me that each moment is unique, and if you aren’t ready with your microphone when it comes, it will be gone forever. It has also taught me that when you record something, a connection is formed between you and it forever, even if no sound is captured.

   I started hearing changes in the music I was creating. I heard the pine trees sighing and the bramble turning in on itself. I heard the rare squawk of a fleeing bird. I knew now that these were the final sounds themselves, not a premonition, not a warning—the playing out of the sound-death as it was happening, in this moment.

   I looked out of my bedroom window. There was a group in the front garden every day now. People sat in camp chairs, and there were children running around. Some of the adults had started carrying microphones, which they attached to sticks, like protest boards. Often there was someone to take pictures, and a cluster of bikes on the front gate.

   Alan had begun keeping the visitors outside, which was one thing I was grateful for. He no longer invited people in to chat, and he’d stopped hassling me about them all the time. They had become a presence that went unmentioned, that seemed irrelevant. Besides, Alan was becoming more withdrawn. When I left in the mornings, he was often up early, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio. 

   “I’m worried about Grandma,” he said one morning, staring at the window. I could tell he hadn’t slept. “I know they have food supplies, but I don’t want her to…” He trailed off.

   I paused at the door, my back towards him. 

   “I think Grandma will be okay,” I said, before walking out.

Although the forest was in decay, there were a few places you could still hear birds. Even if you didn’t see them, their wings beat the ground as they took off, making a solid, rhythmic sound. Or, rarer still, you might hear them sing. More than ever, I felt these birds were alone, performing their last music as the world fell in around them.

   I tried to explain this to Grandma during my next visit. For the first time, I told her about the callers who came to the house. I told her about the people who gathered in the front garden and always wanted to see me. 

   “I think they want to help,” I said. “But I never asked for them. I wish they wouldn’t come.” 

   I looked at my knees. 

   “People have destroyed everything,” I said at last.

   As soon as these words had passed my lips though, Grandma stood and turned off the music. She sat beside me on the sofa and clasped my hands in hers, shaking her head. We sat like that for some time. Eventually I cycled home, confused, wondering what I’d said to make her cry. 

The next day I went deeper into the forest than I ever had. I started running—something was driving me, a sharp feeling, a last burst of anger in the dying undergrowth. Dreams entered my head as I ran, and I knew that the trees were directing me. I had the idea that I was being led to a young woodland, a new forest full of saplings, however impossible that might be. Eventually I stood, my thighs aching, sweat gleaming on my forearms.

   I was in a narrow clearing, one side of which was lined with holly bushes. The clearing was similar to many others I had seen. I stumbled about for a while, feeling stupid; there were no saplings, of course. If anything, this was a very old part of the forest. I closed my eyes. The leaves, turning in the breeze, made a sound like sand pouring. I stood like that for a long time before I came to, and began clumsily drawing my equipment from my bag.

   I didn’t make it home until late that evening—I ran the final section of the path in complete darkness. I’d spent the afternoon in a trance state; when I did finally leave, I was hardly aware of myself as I wound up my cables and took apart my mike stands. Before going, I had looked around the clearing one last time. I was still convinced the forest was speaking, but I couldn’t work out what it was trying to say.

   My heart sank as I neared the house. There was a large crowd spilling out of the back door. Getting closer, I saw that there were about thirty or forty visitors of different ages, some of them wearing hiking rucksacks, or with walking sticks. A hushed whisper gathered above them. 

   I saw Alan pushing his way through the crowd. A small girl said, “Oooh it’s Lee-ah, look mu—”

   “Shush!” her mother cried, crouching and placing a hand over her mouth, though her eyes were fixed on me too.  

   “Where have you been?” Alan said, approaching. He knelt, lowering his voice. “There are more out the front. They’ve all walked here—they’ve been travelling all day. This is getting out of hand, Lia. There are young children, babies even. I’ve brought out some food, but…” He seemed weakened; his voice was drained. “Lia, listen. Please, speak with them. At least hear them out, or, something—” 

   I pushed past Alan, through the crowd and into the house, which was also full of people. A group of small children were playing on the sofa with Deon, rolling and shouting, but most of them stood quietly. Some people stepped back to make space for me. Many of them held up microphones. Climbing the stairs, I heard a woman’s voice say, “Lia, please—” I ran into my room and shut the door. 

   I felt strange, as though something was lodged in my throat. I put my headphones on; I wanted to listen to the recordings I’d made that day at the clearing. I slid down in my chair and pressed play. After listening once, I replayed them from a different point, the tears drying on my face. I then played the recordings through a third time.

   I stood, swaying on my feet. I then walked to the window and opened it, the headphones cable trailing behind me. Faces looked up at me from the dark front garden. Some people held paper cups, or plates of food; a small boy, lifted onto his father’s shoulders, broke into a grin, waving his arms up. I don’t know why I stood there, as I still wanted them all to leave; I just know that when I listened back to my recordings that evening I heard—alongside the dying of the forest—another sound altogether.

Sam Jamil is a writer and musician based in South-East London. He is currently working on his first novel.