“No,” he whispered.
He loaded the files at 11 p.m., headphones on, tea growing cold.
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. devid dejda put- nastoasego muzciny audiokniga
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.
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.” “No,” he whispered
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.
That night, he dreamed in stereo. Two narrators. One was Muzcina, smiling with half a mouth. The other was David, watching himself from the corner of the room, reading aloud from a script that hadn’t been written yet. The room was silent
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