The knock on the door was firm and determined. The kind of knock that suggested that, if it wasn’t answered very quickly, shoulders, or perhaps even battering rams, would shortly follow. I opened the door therefore, to find two large, solid looking men standing there in identical black suits. Neither of them was smiling. “Yes?” I asked.

“Dennis Grey?” asked the first black suited man in a flat, emotionless voice. I agreed that that was my name. “We’re from the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.” They show me their warrant cards. My name is Detective Jonsson and this is Detective Beckford. May we come in?”

“What’s this about?” I asked, making a point of not standing aside. I didn’t like the way they’d knocked on my door, as if they’d wanted to establish right from the start that they were in charge and I’d better cooperate if I knew what was good for me. That kind of thing just winds me up. Besides, I knew I hadn’t done anything to warrant their kind of attention. The kind of thing I might have accidentally gotten myself mixed up with would have regular police officers on my doorstep, not these guys. That gave me the courage to stand my ground, even though my heart was hammering like the drum beat from Whiplash by Metallica.

The two men looked annoyed but didn’t press the point. “Do you know a man called George Trent, retired music teacher and part time research assistant at the University of Belfairs?”

“George?” I said in surprise. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“Do you know him?” The man pressed.

“Yes, I know him. I’ve know him for twenty years, ever since he was my music teacher at Eastwood High.”

Music had always been my favourite subject at school. I could play all kinds of instruments, but the piano had always been my favourite. My parents had given me an electronic keyboard for my seventeenth birthday and that was what I used to learn on, but it was the school’s baby grand piano that was my real joy, and George Trent’s joy was to teach me. With his help I went from being able to play Billy Jean, the Michael Jackson song, with two fingers to being able to perform Chopin and Bach at almost concert level in under six months. I got a place in the school orchestra, and I also got a place in a band of fellow school pupils performing in pubs and clubs.

The band was called The Members, a deliberate double entendre that had us all in stitches. Members as in ‘He opened his raincoat and exposed his member to the terrified schoolgirl.’ If anyone asked, we would just say that it meant we were members of the band, while we would hang promotional banners saying things like ‘The Members will be standing proud in Hammersmith this month.’ Looking back on it now, it seems so ridiculous and childish, but we were young and foolish back then and we really thought we were being clever.

I played the keyboard of course, while guitars and vocals were performed by the Allenn brothers, Dave and Eddy. There was also a drummer, Chris, I can’t remember his last name, and a girl called Susan whose job was just to sway alluringly in skimpy clothes while adding backing vocals.

I stayed with the band for two years, until I left to go to college. That was the extent of my music career, but I stayed friends with George Trent for ever after. He had once been a gifted neurologist, I discovered to my surprise. He’d once worked in a hospital, diagnosing patients with CAT and MRI scanners, before leaving to pursue a musical career in concert halls. He’d had only limited success there, though, and so had taken up teaching instead, getting a job at my school where he’d taught before eventually retiring at the age of sixty, two years ago.

I used to go to his house once a week, every Tuesday evening at around eight o’clock, and we’d talk, drink beers, listen to music on his expensive hi-fi system and occasionally play on instruments. Sometimes one of us would play while the other listened. Sometimes we played a duet which he would record so he could play it back later for critical analysis. Neither of us ever married. Neither of us had much in the way of family, so we were each the only real company the other had. Occasionally we would go to a concert and listen to a real musician, someone with talent we could only dream of, but that gradually stopped as it only reminded us of our failings and inadequacies. We were both only mediocre musicians, we were forced to realise. So long as it was just the two of us we could indulge in fantasies of greatness, but we gradually came to resent being reminded of the truth.

Just recently, though, something else had taken his interest. He’d spent a large part of his savings on some expensive computer equipment including spectral analysers and ADC boards. He’d decided to use his medical knowledge to investigate the neurological basis of musical appreciation, he told me. Why was one sequence of notes pleasing to the human ear while another was not, that sort of thing. Plenty of other people had gone over this ground before, of course, some of them celebrated scientists much better qualified than him, but he’d had an idea for a new approach and he intended to pursue it.

He’d tried to explain it to me one day. There are certain tunes that stick in your head, he told me. You hear it once, and it’s with you for the rest of the day. You know what I mean? Of course I did. It’s a phenomenon familiar to everyone. For me, the greatest culprit is Joe Dolce, perpetrator of the crime against humanity known as Shaddap You Face. I hate that song! I really hate it with a passion, and the worst part is that I don’t even have to hear it any more. Someone only has to mention it and the song’s in my head again, cursed to remain there for the next couple of hours at least. The phenomenon has a name, I learned. Involuntary musical imagery, but most people know of it as The Earworm.

That term is so right, so correct! I can almost imagine that Joe Dolce’s insanely cheery voice is a maggot chewing its way through my brain. If a real, actually maggot somehow entered my skull and started riddling my brain full of holes, the experience could not be more hateful and unpleasant. The interesting thing, though, George said, was that it was different for everyone. For him, it was the chorus of the Disney tune ‘It’s a Small World’, for instance, a tune that doesn’t bother me at all. “And why is that?” he had exclaimed one day. “What is going on in the mind of the listener when he hears one of these tunes?”

He told me that he’d been trying to convince the local hospital to let him borrow their fMRI scanner so he could see what was actually going on in the brain of an earworm afflicted man. He showed me the letter they’d sent him back  handing it over with a smile of amusement. The letter explained that the scanner was an extremely expensive piece of machinery, having cost over two hundred thousand pounds, and that it was far too busy diagnosing patients and saving lives for it to be used for such a frivolous purpose, but that they wanted to thank him for his interest. I was forced to smile in return as I handed it back.

So, George was forced to pursue other avenues of research. He’d been making enquiries online, asking people for examples to earworm music, along with details such as age, race, gender, etc, to see if there was any correlation he could discover. He’d had no luck there so far, but he had made an unexpected discovery. He’d amassed quite a collection of earworm music by then, and while analysing them he’d discovered that they had quite a few features in common. “There are tonal sequences, harmonics and frequency shifts that seem to feature in most of them,” he’d told me on my most recent visit, just last Tuesday. “Nothing that would be apparent to the casual listener. You have to delve quite deeply into them with sophisticated analysing techniques.”

He’d gestured at the banks of electronic equipment that now filled his living room to make his point. “I’ve been combining all these elements into one sequence of notes. It’s not finished yet, there are more elements I still have to incorporate, but it already has an eerie, almost hypnotic quality and it repeats in your head in a way even the worst earworm can only dream of. Do you want to hear it?”

I’d said yes, just to amuse him, and so he brought up a music file on his laptop and played it.

I was astonished! It wasn’t music as such, there was no melody. It had more the sound of something natural, like birdsong or the lapping of waves on a beach. It was gripping. It filled my head like the singing of angels, like the trumpet of Gabriel himself. I could almost imagine that if I listened carefully enough I might hear the voice of God Himself in it. I sat there totally entranced as the music file played, and when it finished the music continued in my head, as real in my ears as any sound I had ever heard. I could somehow tell that I would be hearing it for the rest of my life.

“I feel that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough,” he’d said. “Something really important. Something that will tell us something fundamental about how the human mind works. Something that might unlock the secrets of the very nature of consciousness itself.” He’d been quite excited at this point, and had promised big news upon my next visit, a week later.

“Has something happened to him?” I asked the two black suited men. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“Perhaps if we could talk inside...” The man said again, taking a half step forward.

I sighed in resignation and stepped aside, then closed the door behind them as they strode in. They walked through into my living room and stood in front of two of my armchairs, but made no move to sit. I joined them, and they turned to face me.

“To the best of your knowledge, does George Trent have any connection with any terrorist organi...”

“What?” I exclaimed. “Are you serious? He’s a music teacher! We play piano, go to concerts... What the hell is this all about?”

The two men looked at each other as if having a silent debate. “At nine am yesterday morning, one of his neighbours phoned the police to tell them that his post and newspapers weren’t being collected. Normally when he goes on holidays he cancels his newspapers first. The neighbour was worried that something had happened to him. When the police arrived there was no reply so they let themselves in. They found George Trent in his living room, apparently in a hypnotic trance.”

“What do you mean, hypnotic trance?”

“He was apparently awake, but unresponsive. He was standing, his eyes were open, but he ignored every attempt to talk to him. He remained that way even in response to painful stimuli. The officers called for medical help, and while they were waiting they searched the house, leaving one officer, PC Farmer, in the living room with Mister Trent. When they returned, they found PC Farmer in the same apparently hypnotic state as Mister Trent. Mister Trent himself had not changed position in any way.”

“But you think he was responsible somehow?” I asked.

“It’s possible that he was working on some kind of biological or chemical agent on behalf of someone else,” the second man suggested. “The house was evacuated and a full biohazard team was deployed. Mister Trent, PC Farmer and three members of a technical analysis team are now in quarantine at a military facility.”

“What technical analysis team?”

“There was a large amount of computer equipment in his living room...”

“Yes, he was doing some research into...” I froze as a crazy idea came to me, and the two men took a step towards me, staring at me intently. “When the police broke in,” I said, “Was there a music file on his computer monitor screen?”

One of the suited men took out a notebook and turned a few pages. “Yes, there was,” he replied, looking back up at me. “What do you know about this music file?”

I ignored the question for the moment. “While the other policemen were searching the house, might PC Farmer have noticed this music file and played it? And this technical analysis team, they might have played the file while they were analysing the contents of the computer. They might have listened to it together.”

“What do you know of this music file?” repeated the suited man, more intently this time.

I couldn’t say it, though. It was just too ridiculous. If I told them that I thought the music file contained a super earworm that he had created, an earworm so powerful that it seized the mind of anyone who heard it, they’d think I was mad. It is mad, I told myself. The idea that a mere sequence of notes could have that kind of effect on a human being... But then I remembered the file he’d played for me, the effect it had had on me. Even as I thought about it, I could still hear the music, still going through my head as it had ever since I’d first heard it. A permanent musical accompaniment to my life. And that was just the imperfect, not yet finished compilation he’d been working on. What if he’d finished it? If the unfinished piece could have that effect on me, what effect would the finished piece have? Could George Trent really have created a piece of music so entrancing that it put anyone who heard it into a catatonic state?

“Mister Grey,” said the first man in a definitely warning tone. “If you know something of this affair and you withhold it...”

“I don’t know anything,” I replied. “Just a suspicion.”

I gave a sigh and, knowing I had no choice, I told them about his work on earworms. Their reaction was everything I knew it would be. Disbelief. Annoyance. Suspicion. “Mister Grey, I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this situation. If you think this is an appropriate occasion for humour...”

“This is the only explanation I can think of,” I told them testily. “If it’s not a super earworm on that music file, then I have no explanation for what happened. If I’m right, though, then anyone who listens to that music file will suffer the same fate as George and the others. Imagine if someone plays it over the intercom to a whole building full of people, or gives it to a national music station.”

“If we discover that you know more about this affair than you have told us...”

“Yes, I know. I’ll be in big trouble. I don’t know anything else, I promise. George is my friend. I’d tell you anything I knew in case it could help him.”

“Then we’ve taken up enough of your time.” They moved towards the door and I opened it for them. They strode across to a huge, black muscle car, got in and drove away.

That was two months ago, and until just now that was the last I heard of the affair. I made enquiries, trying to find out where George was and how he was, but got nowhere. So far as I know, he’s still lying in a hospital bed somewhere, surrounded by military guards, still in a catatonic state possibly caused by a tune of his own creation going round and round in his head. I was beginning to resign myself to never finding out any more about it, until an item on the news grabbed my attention. A small band of rebels in Afghanistan was holding out against the full might of allied forces, causing all kinds of trouble. Every attempt to root them out had failed. Then, a pair of journalists reportedly saw a single British helicopter flying over the rebel camp. A helicopter with a huge pair of speakers mounted on the sides. Shortly afterwards, a troop of British soldiers had simply walked in, encountering no resistance, and arrested every single rebel. A government spokesman had then denied the report, though, saying that the rebel camp had been destroyed by a cruise missile fired from a destroyer.

I find myself believing the journalists, though, and my imagination fills in the details. The helicopter, crewed by men wearing earplugs, had played George’s earworm to the rebels, all of whom had immediately fallen into a hypnotic state, just like poor George. The government had turned the earworm into a weapon, and they were keeping it secret. I wondered whether George would ever come out of his coma, and what would happen to him if he did. Would they just let him go, taking with him the secret of their new weapon? And what about me? If the earworm weapon is real, and not just a product of my own imagination, how safe am I? To what lengths would the government go to keep it secret?

The phone starts ringing, and I stare at it in alarm. Just a friend calling me? Or would I lift the receiver only to hear haunting, hypnotic music coming from the speaker? Is there a team waiting outside the house even now, waiting to take me to the same secure facility where George is being held? I stare at the telephone, wondering what to do...