The first chapter was fine. Muzcina’s voice was low, a little gravelly—like footsteps on wet gravel. Then came chapter two. The protagonist entered a cellar. Muzcina’s tone dropped. David felt his own throat tighten. By chapter three, the voice had changed. It wasn’t just acting. Muzcina was leaning into the words, stretching vowels until they seemed to hold something else—a second meaning, a second speaker just behind his tongue.
David took off the headphones. The room was silent. But in his left ear, faint as a radio signal from a dead station, the voice continued.
He restarted his computer. The files were gone. Replaced by a single track: , timestamped tomorrow. devid dejda put- nastoasego muzciny audiokniga
“No,” he whispered.
Here’s a short draft for a story titled (based on your request, which I interpreted as: a draft looking at David Dejda, who put on an unpleasant man’s audiobook ). The Voice That Wasn’t His The first chapter was fine
He played it. Not from the beginning—from the middle. The voice was no longer Jerzy Muzcina’s. It was David’s. His own vocal cords, his own breath, recorded months ago during a calibration test he’d forgotten. But the words were not his. The words were a confession. Something about a girl in a green coat. Something about a bridge. Something David had never done.
He hadn’t opened his mouth.
It started as a favor. A friend of a friend, a man named Czernin, had produced an audiobook of a forgotten Polish novel, The Hollow Seam . The narrator was a man David didn’t know: one Jerzy Muzcina. “Unpleasant,” Czernin had warned, sliding the USB stick across the café table. “Muzcina. His voice. It gets inside you.”
David Dejda had never believed in possession—until he pressed play. The protagonist entered a cellar
David, a sound editor by trade, had cleaned up worse. He’d removed mouth clicks from a romance novelist who chewed celery while recording. He’d de-essed a self-help guru whose lisp turned “success” into thucceth . How bad could Muzcina be?
David looked at his reflection in the dark computer screen. His lips were moving.