A Seattle music venue. Five forgotten master tapes. One hungry frequency that wants the whole city to go quiet.

Donny Wickersham is a professional fixer—an audio engineer who can hunt down any buzz, any feedback loop, any bad connection. When he inherits his late uncle’s legendary club, The Downbeat, he intends to do the only sensible thing: patch it up, sell it, and move on.

Then he plays a tape.

The sound is too good to be abandoned… and too loud to be safe. The building’s old hum dies. The air turns cold. Liquor bottles become projectiles. A presence in a nineteenth-century suit makes its claim: My house.

With bartender Katie Douglas caught in the crossfire and a disgraced critic sniffing around for a scandal, Donny teams up with Sherry Wick—a sharp, skeptical podcaster who maps hauntings like circuitry and treats ghosts like measurable signals. Together they uncover a “dead man’s riff”: a binding melody etched into Seattle’s buried history, waiting for the right catalyst to finish its song.

But if Donny can’t rewrite the final chord, the Downbeat won’t be the only thing that goes dark.

This novella delivers:

A haunted music venue with analog-tape mystique

Occult acoustics, frequency-forensics, and Seattle history

Escalating supernatural danger with a hard technical edge

A battle where sound is the lock, the key, and the weapon