Putting a Curse on my Noisy Neighbour

I usually just review books, but this is my blog, and many of the books I review are on occult phenomena, so I think it’s appropriate to discuss my own occult activities here.

About a year ago, I moved into a new apartment. I lived there comfortably for about two weeks, but then my upstairs neighbour started making a lot of noise, blasting music way past my bed time. I asked him to turn it down, and he was polite about it, but then it happened again a few days later. A pattern started to emerge, and our relationship quickly soured. Things got so unpleasant that when my teething baby would cry at night, this douchebag would get out of bed and turn on his stereo.

I’m not going to give out any more specifics, but I can say with absolute certainty that my neighbour was the dickhead in this situation. If you’ve ever had a similar experience, I’m sure you’ll understand. (If you’ve ever been the unapologetic noisy neighbour, find yourself a bridge and jump off it, shithead.)

The noise really got to me, but the arrogance and entitlement were the worst. Living under that prick made me miserable. I would happily have blasted him with some of the crap I listen to, but I have small kids, and for their sakes I didn’t want to escalate the situation. What got me through the year was the knowledge that we’d be moving again this summer. Even though I knew the situation was only temporary, the tension started to affect other aspects of my life.

I write for my blog every week, but I rarely do any creative writing. I’ve been meaning to do more, and I read somewhere that a good creative writing exercise is to just sit down and start typing. I decided to give this a go a few weeks ago. I immediately produced an extremely unpleasant piece of writing about what I’d like to do to my upstairs neighbour. It’s grim and certainly not for public consumption, but I liked parts of it, so I saved it with the plan to share it with some close friends after we moved away. (If some accident befell Dingdong before we moved out, the document would certainly have incriminated me.)

Knowing that we were going to move, I regularly fantasized about the few days at the end of our tenancy when the window for revenge would be open. I planned a bit of a dance party for the night before we left. I considered blasting some brutal power-violence or death metal, but I decided that repetitive, bass-heavy techno would travel better through our ceiling. I tried finding the perfect song to blare on repeat, but I couldn’t make up my mind, so I decided to make my own.

As much as I wanted to blast this at the cunt, it just didn’t seem harsh enough. This utter bastard deserved a lot worse than a couple of minutes of confusion/mild irritation. I decided to put a curse on him instead.

Hey, remember that piece of writing I mentioned? I figured out how to use it. I only had to alter it a little bit to turn it into the text of a curse. Here is a heavily redacted version. (I’ve moved out, and I have no intention of ever having any contact with that dickhead again, but posting the full text would still be a poor idea.)

I imported the unredacted version of the above text file into Audacity, a sound editing program, as raw data. Doing this basically turns any file on your computer into noise. I then found an image of my neighbour on google images and did the same thing to that. (The image atop this post isn’t actually him.) I then reduced the playback speed of the sound of the image so that it was closer to the length of the sound of the text and panned the sounds of the image and text to opposite sides. Next, I stretched them both again and amplified the sound to make it more audible.

This was the noise through which I would wreak vengeance, but magic doesn’t have to be minimalist, so I imported this sound into FL Studio and heaped a bunch of effects on it to make it sound sick. I also added a recording that I made of the actual noise coming from upstairs. This ingredient charged my baneful magic with real emotional power. It’s also satisfying to think of my enemy directly suffering from his own wrongdoing.

Poppets (“voodoo dolls”) have been used by witches for millennia. The idea is that you make a doll that looks like the person you want to affect, then you do things to it and hope that this has an effect on the real person. It is common practice to place a lock of the victims hair, a toenail clipping, or something that belonged to them inside the poppet. Some magicians use photographs. These elements are believed to strengthen the link between doll and victim, thus making the sympathetic magic more powerful. A series of incantations are uttered over the doll, and these are what activate the link.

The sound that I have created works in a similar way to a poppet, but I know it will be more effective. It contains an image of my victim, and this image is being forced to become one with the textual incantation. The image of his arrogant face and my vision of his suffering will literally become one. The malefecarum is being charged by the audio recording of my victim’s transgressions, made while I was in a frenzy of the blackest hatred. The basic magical theory here is sound (excuse the pun), but I have more reasons to believe it will be effective.

Magic doesn’t work if the practitioner doesn’t believe in it. Magic, as far as I understand it, is not supernatural, and magical acts don’t depend on chance or luck or the fairies; they depend on the will of the magician. I don’t believe my neighbour will suffer because I want it to happen and I’ve read too many books about Aleister Crowley. I know my neighbour will suffer because I will him to suffer. I am the magician, and I control my black magic. My poppet isn’t going to lie in the back of my victim’s chimney or under his porch. It’s going after him.

We moved out a few days ago, but we were able to keep the keys to our old place so that we could clean it before the new tenants arrive. I repeatedly played my spell whenever I could hear my enemy upstairs. I didn’t play it loud enough so that he could complain about it, but it was definitely loud enough for him to hear.

Then at the end, I did play it loud. I accompanied the noise with some ritualistic psychodrama. I filmed the whole thing, but I’m only going to share the final segment where I accompany the noise with the thin, dissonant whine of my blasphemous flute. (Flutes are the favoured instrument of Azathoth, the Nuclear Chaos, so I thought this would be apt.)

I have no doubt whatsoever that he heard me, but as he had seen me moving my furniture out on the previous day, he probably thought that I was just being petty and noisy for the sake of it. Little does he know that the noise I played was heralding his ruination.

I’ll be checking the papers for his obituary daily.