You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.
-Exodus 33:20
Introduction
The motif of great composers dying young is nothing new. Nor is the story of artists passing just as they begin to create works that might have transcended human understanding—music poised not merely to move the soul, but to awaken something divine within it. The list is long: Mozart, Pergolesi, Bellini, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Purcell, Mahler. Even Beethoven, whose final years hinted at ideas too vast and radiant for this world. Although theories abound surrounding the causes of their deaths (just look at Mozart’s), one thing has never been seriously questioned: that these geniuses did, in fact, die. A small number of people believe this certainty is misplaced. What if some of them, they ask, didn’t die at all—or at least not when we thought they did? Could it be that the lives of Schubert, Beethoven, or Mahler didn’t end at the familiar dates carved into textbooks and grave markers, that their lives may have stretched quietly onward? Could it be that the works they produced after their “deaths” were so powerful, so unearthly in their beauty and scope, that history itself had to be altered to contain them? Through these questions, in whispered circles throughout the darkest and most obscure corners of society, a different story emerges. One not of ill-timed deaths, but of extrapolated genius—of compositions so vast they began to suggest things not of our world. Things so terribly beautiful that they threaten the sanity of all who listen. This story, if true, would mean the greatest composers did not fade—but vanished, as if something needed to be hidden… buried… protected.
Heinrichtz’s Piano
In 1984, a PHD candidate in music history at Columbia University found something inexplicable in a shuttered wing of an old estate being repurposed as graduate student housing. The room had been sealed for decades, possibly longer. The owners didn’t even know it existed, as it had never appeared in any floor plans they had. Inside: dust, disused furniture, and at the far end, draped in yellowed cloth, a piano. Unlike most pianos, this one had two rows of keys, like an organ or harpsichord. While the student knew that some pianos had been built with multiple rows of keys, this one was just wrong. It is fairly common knowledge that keyboards consist of a pattern of three white keys with two black keys in between, adjacent to four white keys with three black keys in between, with the pattern then repeating itself. This one had no such pattern. Instead, following the groups of five and seven were a grouping of five white keys and four black keys, followed by a grouping of six white keys with five black keys in between. This extended pattern would then repeat. The piano wires were also laid in such ways that seemed to defy all logic of piano engineering and appeared to be made of metals he had never seen before. At the same time, though, it made such beautiful sense. Above the center of the two keyboards was the name of the manufacturer, embedded in fading gold: J.E. Heinrichtz. He had never heard of the manufacturer, nor had he ever seen such an instrument. Curious, he began to play the white keys. C, D, E, F, G. Then a tone he had never heard before: H. It was so alien, yet so vaguely familiar, as if he had heard it in a dream as a very young child. As he continued playing, an indescribable feeling began overtaking him, with elements of both intense grief and awestruck mania. These new tones continued, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, Σ. A and B then followed, repeating the cycle. Tearfully, he continued playing, never stopping once.
A few days later, some concerned friends of the PHD student came looking for him. Eventually, they found him wandering around Grand Army Plaza, disheveled and dirty. He was rambling incoherently about strange things such as “star babies that know all” and the “pulchritudinous radiance” of the very outermost reaches of the universe. Unable to be snapped out of this trancelike state, he was checked into an institution the next day. In his pocket were found two things: a polaroid photograph of the piano and a crude drawing of a star with a smiling face. He was found dead in his room several days later, with his throat slit and a star shape carved crudely into his left forearm. Although it was ruled as a suicide, others were not quite sure, for the piano found in the hidden room was gone by the time of his death and the estate had been taken from the University for “further investigation.” One of the closest friends of the PHD candidate began searching for this J.E. Heinrichtz. Eventually, while poring through an obscure biography of Adolphe Sax, she found the name mentioned once or twice. This led them to a reference to a book about makers of strange instruments, the only copy of which was in an old music library in a monastery in rural Austria. One chapter concerned an especially troubled man by the name of Johann Elias Heinrichtz. Born in 1812, he was piano tuner by trade in Vienna, rumored to have descended from instrument makers who once worked for the Habsburg court. Despite being a child prodigy, he had been banished from every conservatory and guild for proposing “extra-letter notation” beyond G, and claiming that “each sound above G has a soul of its own.” His only known surviving instrument—the Heinrichtz Supertonal—was found sealed behind a false wall in a deconsecrated church in Lower Austria in 1919, wrapped in canvas and prayer scrolls. It was auctioned off to a wealthy New York banker and had remained in his home—the one visited by the dead student—ever since. Regarding Heinrichtz’s death date, it was unknown, never having been reported.
Heinrichtz himself was a very tall, gaunt man with an uneven gait, a heavy brow, and wisps of graying hair always tucked under a battered felt hat. His eyes were described as pale to the point of translucency, like “wet glass catching moonlight,” and many reported that his presence made rooms feel colder—not in temperature, but in a more metaphysical way. He always wore the same long, moth-eaten black coat, stained at the cuffs with what one person claimed looked like a mix of rosin, ink, and blood. His fingers were almost inhumanly long, with knuckles so prominent they appeared dislocated, and he smelled faintly of scorched wood, iron filings, and incense. He was recognized early by teachers as possessing a mind of "inhuman" brilliance. One teacher of music at the Akademisches Gymnasium noted in a personal journal: “He completes harmonic exercises before I finish assigning them. He appears to intuit keys that do not exist.” Yet Heinrichtz was impossible to teach. He would sit for hours, apparently zoned out, staring at nothing—sometimes with a look of uncontaminated, radiant terror. More disturbingly, he was frequently seen crying silent tears, with no discernible cause. A classmate remembered him sketching “weird, beautiful shapes” during classes—curved staves with unknown notations—and muttering to himself about a “cosmos that sings,” and “star cherubs.” These episodes worsened as he got older. By his early teenage years, Heinrichtz had vanished from all formal education records, allegedly taken under the care of a private sponsor whose identity was never confirmed. But whispers persisted that he was often seen wandering the wooded edges of Schönbrunn, pressing his ear to the trees. One surviving fragment of a teacher’s letter described him chillingly: “The boy hears something we do not. Not madness. Something older.”
A Schubertiade
Heinrichtz, despite his overall obscurity, was not without friends in what today would be considered the highest of places in the music world. In a diary entry, Eduard von Bauernfeld, a close friend of Franz Schubert, recalled a mutual friend bringing with him a gaunt young man of around fourteen years to one of the gatherings known today as Schubertiades sometime in 1826. The friend said the young man’s name was Johann H, and that he was one of Schubert’s most devoted fans. Schubert was from the start immensely impressed by his knowledge of music theory and piano tuning, and the two hit it off almost immediately, becoming best of friends by the end of the night. After everyone had left, Johann told the man who had brought him he would return later, and that he wanted to talk to Schubert about something of utmost importance. Neither Eduard nor anyone else present that evening knows exactly what went down between the two. What they do know, however, is that Schubert’s demeanor was completely changed afterwards. He seemed much more anxious and fearful, as if sensing impending doom. He also entered into periods of intense depression, which is something that is still known today. His music also changed. It started becoming more chromatic and introspective, and increasingly forward looking. On top of that, his musical notation started becoming more difficult to read. And whenever a Schubertiade was held, the young man he had met in 1826 was always by his side. After November 1828, many believed that he had died. The truth could not have been more different.
The "last known" photo of Mahler
In the decades following, a few Viennese started claiming in passing to have heard the most incredible music ever written, but would become exceedingly cagey when pressed further, sometime being driven to tears. Their behavior was also noted to have changed, and that they would often be found talking to themselves about esoteric matters resembling topics theoretical physics and astronomy that would not be established until a century or so later. As for Heinrichtz, he became a piano tuner known only in very niche circles throughout the city, who would always rave about how his tuning skills were otherworldly. They never would give any information about contacting him, though, as if they were members of some elite secret society. Sometimes, people familiar with him claimed to have seen him making his way through dark corners of the city with a short old man with curly hair and glasses. When Heinrichtz wasn’t tuning pianos or numbly meandering around, he was said to have been in his home workshop, building and tinkering with pianos of such complexity that nobody knew how any human could possibly create them. As the turn of the 20th century drew nearer, Heinrichtz retired from tuning pianos and was seen less and less commonly. However, it was reported by some anonymous sources that he had found a new friend in a composer: Gustav Mahler. In 1907, after resigning from his position as director of the Vienna Court Opera, the subsequent death of his older daughter, and his discovery that he had a fatal heart condition, Mahler became a changed man. The dead student’s friend found out that these tragedies were not the only reason for this. Sometime toward the end of the year, Mahler had apparently become acquainted with an immensely talented piano tuner, known only by an “elite few.” After meeting with him, Mahler’s depression only intensified. Furthermore, his music started becoming more introspective and final, as if harkening the end of an era. This is something that can be clearly seen in his ninth symphony. Even more disturbingly, she found that a strange figure resembling Heinrichtz had been found in several photographs taken of Gustav Mahler toward the end of his life. In many of these, a blurred figure could be seen just at the very edge of the frame, often half-turned, in shadow, or reflected faintly in a windowpane. In every case, it was the same man. In one photograph taken in 1910 during a rehearsal of his eighth symphony, Heinrichtz can be seen standing directly behind Mahler during a break, almost grinning. That same year, he began writing his tenth symphony, which was unlike any other music he had written before. Common knowledge is that he died doing so in 1911. But as was the case with Schubert, this could not have been more wrong.
The Latter Compositions
As is widely “known,” Franz Schubert “died” in 1828 at the age of 31, and Gustav Mahler “died” in 1911 at the age of 50. These dates had never been questioned or doubted by almost anyone until the late 1990s. At the time, the Internet was growing at an explosive pace. New ways of communication were popping up left and right. All over, people were able to find forums to talk about their interests with people from all over the world. In Leipzig, a part-time researcher and frequenter of music forums, while sifting through many old crates in an off-site archive slated for demolition, found something strange: on several of the crates, a scrawl in fading ink: “F.P. Schubert — Private Estate, 1875.” Which made no sense. Franz Schubert, beloved composer of Der Erlkönig and Unfinished Symphony, had died in 1828. Everyone knew that. And yet… the box was filled with manuscripts—hundreds. Yellowing but impeccably preserved. The first was labeled D. 2101 and bore a title in trembling ink: Symphonie des Schlafenden Gottes — Symphony of the Sleeping God. He laughed nervously. “Maybe a forgery or some late Romantic pastiche,” he thought. But the harmonic language wasn’t Brahmsian, nor was it Wagnerian. It was unmistakably Schubertian, yet… wrong. Melodies that curled like mist around your mind. Harmonies too rich to be real, and yet, undeniably Schubert. His fingerprint. His breath. By the time he reached D. 12008, Wächter der strahlenden Tür (Watchers at the Radiant Gate), the researcher’s hands were trembling. Pages of music layered in up to 80 staves. Instructions written in a sort of German-French hybrid. Scores requiring hundreds of musicians, and choirs that must sing both forwards and backwards simultaneously. Some of the pieces had notations for vibrations that did not map to any known frequency—just sketched glyphs labeled “erlebtes Licht” (“light experienced”) and “zweite Luft” (“second air”). “This music wasn’t meant to be heard,” he later said, “It was meant to be encountered. Like a mountain. Or a god.”
The compositions bore dates ranging from 1828 to 1875, which suggested the unthinkable— that Schubert hadn’t died at 31. He’d simply slipped away yet kept composing. Aside from these countless manuscripts, there were also recordings of many of these works, including all his latter symphonies, of which there were 49. He shared these, and they all had an effect on those who listened. Something terrifying. “I heard the Symphony of the Sleeping God in full once,” one allegedly said. “Just once. It sounded like sunrise if it knew it was the last one. I cried for nine hours. Then it was gone. The vinyl? It... un-pressed itself.” Another person the researcher had shared his findings with, in a moment of fleeting lucidity, recalled that D. 10333 was called Die Vergessungsschleife — The Loop of Forgetting. One movement, repeated endlessly, never exactly the same. When played live, it caused minor personality disintegration in audiences, including aphasia, reverse déjà vu, and perceived mirror distortion. They then went back to rambling on about “the secret corners of the night sky.” Others who listened refused to talk about what they had heard at all, becoming frightened to a point of catatonia when pressed enough. And this was only the beginning. The researcher who found the works tried to upload the recordings to an online musical database. However, the following day, many had just disappeared. Those that did not were corrupted—but not in the usual sense. The corrupted files emitted musical tones when opened. Sounds that weren’t dissonant, but somehow wrong, yet also familiar, like a lullaby from a nightmare from early childhood. He contacted the Viennese Library of Music. They denied any knowledge of the collection. In fact, they said the building that had once housed those records had burned down in 1949. Yet he had stood in it just days earlier. When he returned, the site was a fenced gravel lot. No wreckage. No burned-out shell. As if the building had never been there. One of the researcher’s acquaintances tried to replicate one of the manuscripts, composing night after night, chasing the memory of Die Vergessungsschleife. He was found months later in a forest outside Vienna, repeating: “He didn’t die. He left the concert hall.” Today all traces of these works are gone. The D catalogue ends at 998, as if nothing more had ever been created. Experts scoff at the idea of 12,000 works. They call it absurd, impossible. But there are gaps. Manuscripts that should exist but don’t. Fragmentary themes in Brahms, Mahler, even Debussy, that seem to quote works that were never written—or were erased. Some say it’s a glitch in history. A timeline overwrite. Others whisper of something older—a force that took Schubert’s gift and hid it away, for its beauty was too much. Too revealing. “He mapped something we were never meant to see,” the researcher said in his final letter. “He wrote down the truth of where we go when we dream. And someone, or something, didn’t want that getting out.” The letter was found in his apartment, under a single sheet of manuscript paper marked only with a faint notation: D. 12001 – Rückkehr des Schlafenden Gottes (Return of the Sleeping God). No one has seen him since.
At around the same time, there was another similar occurrence. While exploring an abandoned sanatorium near Lake Altaussee, an orchestral conductor and music historian, Dr. Franz Hartmann found crates upon crates of letters, manuscripts, and recordings sealed behind a false wall. Everything in these crates, aside from the recordings, bore Mahler’s unmistakable scrawl. The scariest part, however, was that they were all dated decades past his supposed death in 1911. One bore a Vienna postmark from 1948. Another was a letter regarding his death, from 1955—a year his name had never appeared in any obituary. Thirty symphonies in total were found. The higher the number, the more otherworldly they became. Mahler, it seemed, had faked his death, or perhaps been hidden away. The first few—Nos. 11 to 16—were immense but familiar: apocalyptic, storm-driven, with choirs of glassine delicacy and horn sections that sounded like dawn breaking over ruins. But it at was Symphony No. 20 that things changed. No known ensemble could’ve performed it. The orchestration required tuned aeolian harps, whale song recordings, a choir stationed across mountaintops, a brass ensemble submerged in water, and something only described as “Das Stahlzimmer”—"the Steel Room.” The score wasn’t just notation. It had diagrams. Symbols not found in any music theory. Pages smelled faintly of copper and lilac. Notes instructed the conductor to time certain passages with the listener’s breath. Dr. Hartmann, determined to hear it, built a simulation with his orchestra using modern instruments and machines. The result nearly killed him. He never released the recording. But in his final lecture—his last public appearance—he described the experience of hearing Symphony No. 22: Die Spiegelzeit (The Mirror-Time): “I saw the sound. I saw my mother, asleep in her childhood. I saw mountains breathing like lungs. And in the final movement… I saw God—but only the part that still weeps.” By Symphony No. 26, Mahler no longer labeled movements. The music had become shapes; blocks of emotion arranged in such overwhelming beauty that Hartmann began calling it "The Language Before Words." The final symphony—No. 30—had no title. It had no ending. The last note faded into a rest that stretched across five pages, as if Mahler were instructing the universe to hold its breath forever. The final instruction read: “Let silence complete what you cannot bear to hear.” No one knows what happened to Hartmann. He vanished two months later, his apartment ransacked, the manuscripts gone.
Of all these post-1911 Mahler symphonies, it was Symphony No. 28—“Der Garten über dem Licht” (The Garden Above the Light)—that came closest to what Mahler himself, in one of his letters to a certain “Johann H”, called “the musical image of Heaven unfiltered.” Dr. Emil Hartmann once described it not as a symphony, but as a cathedral made of sound and memory, each movement a stained-glass window into something humans were never supposed to comprehend in full. The first movement was deceptively peaceful—lilting, warm, almost pastoral. It evoked the sensation of ascending a sunlit mountain trail, accompanied by birdsong and distant bells. But every bar added a faint dissonance, barely perceptible, like a hairline crack running beneath the harmony. Listeners described a mounting feeling that something enormous was waking up behind the music. Then came the second movement—“Die Strahlenstraße” (The Street of Rays). No melody. No pulse. Only slow-moving chords that shimmered in and out of phase, like light through water. The sound didn't move through time so much as fold time inward, causing one listener to sob uncontrollably, convinced she’d not only seen but also heard and felt her own birth and death simultaneously. But it was the final movement, “Das Innere des Gartens” (The Heart of the Garden), that truly destroyed those who listened to it. It began with a single, impossibly pure tone—an E-flat pitched higher than any known instrument could reach, yet fully present. Beneath it, choirs emerged—not singing words, but breathing, each inhalation timed to suggest some vast intelligence dreaming just beneath the threshold of reality. Then came the arrival: a choral explosion, the likes of which no orchestra could ever produce, so dense and bright with harmonic tension it felt like the inside of a star. Listeners described seeing a garden with no shadows, where time was motionless and color was a form of emotion. According to one, “Trees sang. The sky bent. There were no angels—only a presence, vast and unblinking, whose gaze could not be returned. It was not a Heaven for us—not made in our image. It had always existed, will always exist, and we were intruders.” Those who heard the reconstructed movement were never the same afterwards. Some went mute. Others wept uncontrollably when shown pictures of stars. One man, a theoretical physicist, left a single note before vanishing into the mountains: “It loves, but not the way we do...” Today nothing remains of Symphony No. 28. The manuscript caught fire mysteriously during a transit between archives, an occurrence noted by some as suspicious. However, it is said that fragments of the score still circulate, traded like relics, by people who don’t know the devastation it inevitably brings.
Then there were his final two symphonies: the 30th and 31st. With the cataclysmic revelations of his Symphony No. 30—the so-called "Cosmic Cradle"—many believed he had reached the limit of human composition. Orchestras that dared perform 30 often experienced immediate mass retirements, breakdowns, and in one case, collective mutism for six weeks. But Mahler was of course not finished. In the attic of an abandoned monastery near Val Gardena—where he is rumored to have secluded himself between 1953 and early 1954—a box was found in 1996, marked “Für niemand. Nur für die Öffnung.” (“For no one. Only for the opening.”) Inside: fragments. Diagrams. Barless staves that bled into architectural sketches of cathedrals that could not exist in three-dimensional space. At the top of one sheaf, written in his unmistakable, tremulous final handwriting: “Symphonie XXXI – Das Letzte Licht” (“The Last Light”) According to the notoriously esoteric music historian E. Lattimore, “This was his Mysterium. His final answer. Scriabin tried with bells and incense. Mahler tried with silence and shape. And unlike Scriabin, he succeeded.” According to unauthorized biographer N. Rashid, “He wrote that the symphony would need an orchestra of ‘half-lit minds and one open vessel,’ and that the audience would consist only of children under the age of five and people on their deathbeds.” Mahler died before completing the work. And when he did, the entire valley reportedly went silent for twelve hours—no birds, no dogs, not even the church bells rang that day. People later reported dreams of “a long hallway of mirrors that pointed upward,” and of a child’s voice whispering chords unlike any they had ever heard before. It is believed the sketches for Symphony No. 31 were quietly absorbed by a branch of the Austrian National Archives, though others claim they are hidden beneath St. Stephen’s Cathedral, sealed in lead and surrounded by tuning forks set to a frequency that only children can hear. It is also believed by some that Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, knew of these latter symphonies. According to guitarist Robby Krieger “Jim was always talking about music that ‘breathed before the world was made.’ We thought it was just the acid. But then he’d hum these weird chords… always in elevens. Not major. Not minor. Just—there.”
Despite Hartmann’s efforts to not let his recordings ever see the light of day, some did. By far the most consequential of these leaks was to an obscure classical music forum in late 1999, of the fourth movement of Mahler’s 28th symphony. One especially flippant member, going by the name NyxOrion97, when she saw the forum post, smiled to herself. She was the type who mocked old symphonies as "boomer horror ambiance" and collected lost media like trading cards. She downloaded the file, chuckling at the ominous Latin warning in the post: “Quidquid audit, memoria exuitur”—“Whoever hears, memory is undone.” It would turn out to be the most fatal mistake of her life. The file was massive and oddly compressed. The waveform looked almost like a heartbeat. Alone in a dark room, she put on her headphones and pressed play. Fifteen minutes later, she vomited. When it was over, she sat there trembling, tears flowing heavily from her eyes. The next day, she, in a trancelike state, began painting. She didn’t leave her apartment for two whole weeks. The only sounds neighbors heard were the frantic shuffling of supplies, incoherent rambling, and the occasional scream—not of fear, but of awe. It was as if something too large to fit inside her mind was trying to escape. When her neighbors finally forced the door open, her studio apartment was empty—except for the immense painting. No note was found. Her computer was gone, and so was she. The painting she left behind was, simply put, transcendent. Its dimensions were imposing, like that of Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. It consisted of a rich, dark blue cosmos, rendered with dizzying beauty. Each brushstroke was rapturously, seraphically alive with every shade of navy, indigo, and dark azure imaginable. Everywhere throughout this deep inkiness were shimmering golden stars that pulsed faintly, as if humming a tune beyond human hearing. It wasn't simply painted—it was felt onto the canvas. All those who saw it reportedly collapsed in despair and awe upon seeing it. One, an astronomer, began muttering about constellations not yet discovered and coordinates far beyond the outer reaches of the observable universe, and went into a catatonic state. At the center—horrible, holy, and heartbreakingly strange—was this entity. It looked almost innocent. Childlike. Rendered in glossy yellows and oranges like a kindergarten sticker—too shiny, too smooth. It had eyes that glistened like glass beads and a mouth curved in an eerie overly enthusiastic smile, as if it knew something and found it adorable. Its kitschiness was grotesque in context, like a cartoon sun smiling from the middle of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But the longer you looked, the more it seemed to notice you back, smiling ever more intensely and clownishly. Many call this central being “the Face-Star.” The painting was immediately sent to an avant-garde art institute and gallery in New York City. All staff who archived the painting went insane within weeks. One tried to peel the face of the star off the canvas, as if convinced that there was something trapped beneath it, whispering some resplendent truth to them. Another just sat, silently weeping, hands outstretched in worship or surrender. As for gallery visitors, all those who even caught a glimpse of it refused to enter, terrified of its presence. Not long after, the painting had to be locked in a sub-basement. The room sealed. Lights disconnected. A single warning plaque was put up next to the door to its room: "This is what Heaven saw when it first looked at us."
The Order of the Star
Today, a few of those who claimed they'd caught glimpses of the paintings and did not descend into complete madness—whether through visiting the gallery when the painting was displayed or through leaked photographs—said those few seconds were enough to make them realize a strange yet horrible connection. They began speaking, nervously at first, about a strange familiarity in the image. Not in the forms or the colors, but in the Face-Star itself. Something about its shape, its glossy over-saturation, the plastic-like texture of its smile. It triggered a memory they couldn’t place at first—something dripping with childlike innocence. Then it hit them: FAO Schwarz. Specifically, it was reminiscent of the way the toy store looked and felt between 1986 and 2003. Not the products. Not the architecture. But the atmosphere—the gleaming marble floors, the eerily cheerful lighting, the animatronic figures that moved a beat too slowly, the overblown spectacle of innocence made corporate. That sickly sweet, reverent awe children felt walking in, like they were being watched by something smiling too wide. Some tried to laugh about it online. “Lmao the Face-Star is just a haunted Big Piano mascot from 1994,” one person replied in a 2017 forum post. Any and all laughter stopped when another user replied: “No. You don’t get it. It’s not funny. It wasn’t a simply a peachy playground for children. It was a temple. Everything else was a mask, a facade. Someone, or some thing, knew something we didn’t. They were preparing us.” Dozens of comments followed—each more disturbed than the last. One user recalled being taken into the store’s “Employee Only” elevator as a child during a private tour… and feeling as though they’d gone downward too long. Another swore the Face-Star's expression matched a defunct animatronic from the upper mezzanine—one that could not be found in any catalog or official photo. And then the posts stopped. Deleted. Accounts scrubbed. Users banned or vanished. Only fragments remain in archives: blurry jpegs of golden stars against deep indigo, and one grainy photo of the Face-Star's twisted smile, labeled in shaky handwriting: "THEY BUILT THE TOYLANDS TO MAKE US READY." Whatever FAO Schwarz was at the time… it was, at heart, not meant for the amusement of children. It was for something far greater and more terrible.
The lobby of the General Motors Building circa 2002
The location of FAO Schwarz between 1986 and 2015, the General Motors Building, has in hindsight been noted as an interesting location. At the time, the base of the building, with its colonnade-like appearance, had a ceremonial, somewhat solemn look to it. Many thought it bore a strange resemblance to the Altar of Pergamon. Of course, this was never the intention. The building, completed in 1968, was designed in the International Style—modern, clean, and corporate. It was meant to showcase automobiles in a polished, state-of-the-art setting, not to emulate forgotten temples. Yet it had to have been chosen for a reason. And who chose it for this purpose? Perhaps it was a secret society, a cult, dedicated to the beliefs, works, and visions of J. E. Heinrichtz, to the Face-Star. A powerful one. For wherever it found talk of the symphonies, the painting, and the star-being, it took swift and decisive action to silence it. One forum moderator, known for preserving the last high-res image of the Face-Star, was found dead in his apartment, the windows sealed, and his laptop melted beyond recovery. The autopsy report, leaked through a whistleblower, noted "traces of rare alkaloid compounds consistent with poisons not used in civilian toxicology." The image was scrubbed immediately afterwards. Another user, “CosmosEvangelist,” posted about an encounter with two men in crisp black suits who knocked once, entered without waiting, and calmly sat down. They asked no questions. They just delivered this sentence, in perfect unison: “The Star is not for interpretation. The Star is not for memory. The Star is not for you.” They then stood up, straightened their sleeves, and walked out, vanishing at the end of the block—though no car had ever been seen arriving. He deleted his account an hour later. His apartment was found three days afterward, abandoned. Walls stripped. His body was never found. Then there was a researcher in Prague who claimed to have decoded part of the harmonic structure of Mahler’s 28th. He was found dead in his bathtub, with the water dyed faintly blue. His autopsy showed no signs of trauma. On his bathroom counter, a single item was left: a toy kaleidoscope, with one side shattered inward. In New York, an anonymous associate attorney at Weil Gotshal reported that while checking in at the security desk, she found a plastic star-shaped keychain on the floor, its smiling face painted in shiny enamel. For three days afterwards, she recalled being followed by a black unmarked van throughout the city. On the fourth day, she received an unmarked black envelope. Inside was a note that read, “Close your eyes and forget, or the Garden opens for you next. Your choice.” When she returned to work, she returned the keychain to a security desk attendant, who gave her a dark, unreadable look that she says still haunts her. The envelope and note, meanwhile, she could never find again. The most disturbing testimony, by far, was reported in February 2002 via telephone to Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell by a father of two who worked in marketing at Estee Lauder. He claimed that on maybe two occasions in the past three months, while making his way to the elevators, he heard very faint music of “indescribable” quality, coming from below the marble floors of lobby, that left him with severe headaches and nausea for the rest of the day. And a week prior, when leaving after a night of working overtime, he saw a group of men in dark blue robes moving hastily through the lobby. Some were wheeling what looked like a piano, draped in black tarp. Others were carrying what looked like a large painting, wrapped in black paper and sealed with gold wax. Their robes had hoods that obscured the upper halves of their faces. On the fronts of these hoods were gold stars. They then slipped into a doorway that he swore he had never seen before. But most unsettling thing he witnessed was when he and his wife were taking their two kids to FAO Schwarz in November 2002. While his kids were perusing shelves on the store’s second floor, he noticed an extremely old, tall man in a black coat and hat, muttering to himself in German. He was almost skeletally thin, had almost inhumanly long fingers, and his eyes were of that pale color that only appears in blind or dead people. He greeted a figure wearing the same robes as the ones moving the large object that night he worked late, and they both made their way into a door marked, “employees only.” Behind the door was what looked like a dark corridor leading to an elevator door with a glyph of a star on it. When he finished, he was met with a long silence on the other end. Eventually, Mr. Bell, who seemed shaken by what he had heard, simply told him, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can report this story. Too risky.” He then hung up on him.
The toy from the "Twinkling Star" music video
Although the General Motors Building went through several owners between 1986 and 2008, many of the most well-versed in these esoteric topics believe this cult, this order of the star was the real owner. And they had connections. In the early 2000s, WLIW, Long Island’s PBS Affiliate, produced a series of interstitial skits and music videos to be shown during breaks between children’s programming. Collectively known as DittyDoodle Works, locally produced series was, to a vast majority of people, an innocent and lighthearted musical show. However, there were some unusual things about it (apart from its almost comically low production value). For one, many outdoor scenes were filmed near Grand Army Plaza, which is adjacent to the General Motors Building, with the building prominently featured. Parts of several music videos even showed the characters exiting FAO Schwarz. The most unsettling thing, however, was one of the music videos, “Twinkling Star.” The song itself wasn’t the issue. It was just a sort of generic going-to-bed song, just a simple lullaby for overactive children. It was the video itself. It featured this plastic star with blinking lights at its tips and fiercely kitschy, almost clown-like face. Those who caught glimpses of NyxOrion97’s paintings, upon seeing the toy, claimed that it bore an unusual resemblance to the Face-Star. They also reported immediate nausea and intense feelings of discomfort. And yet, they say, it was highly watered-down from the original. One forum poster described it as a “training wheels version” of something comprehensible by “only the most broken of minds.” One viewer, in a 2009 forum post, going by the name of Sylvia M, said this: “I remember watching the show with my daughter, who was four years old, in 2002. When that star came on screen, she became eerily quiet. She became deathly pale and began trembling, her eyes welling with tears. She then said in a whisper that shook me to my core, ‘That’s what lives in the starry picture.’ Afterwards, she never spoke of it again, and refused to watch DittyDoodle Works again. At first, I was perplexed. Then it hit me: when she was about a year old, I remember taking walking by this dingy looking avant-garde gallery down some side street in Chelsea. As we passed by, my daughter, who was in a stroller, began screaming as if she were stung by a hornet or perhaps had seen something that frightened her to her very core. Although I had no idea of what was going on, I vaguely recalled catching glimpse of something terribly grotesque and kitschy through the window seconds before.” To this day, nobody has been able to find evidence that this toy ever existed, nor have they been able to find its manufacturer. Yet some people swear they saw it on shelves as very young children, and only at FAO Schwarz. A few years later in 2005, the show was upgraded from interstitials to a full half-hour program, complete with new characters and a higher budget. The show also did less on-site filming and never featured FAO Schwarz, the General Motors Building, or the twinkling star toy again. An alleged former employee of Rogar Entertainment, the studio behind the show, had this to say regarding the matter: “Between 1998 and 2004, our biggest financial backer was this weird organization that was supposedly dedicated to music education for young children. But on all financial reports, their name was redacted, and they almost never sent representatives to meet with us. When a representative did show up, they were always weirdly cagey. We never met their upper leadership either. And in December 2003, they told us they would be cutting all ties with us starting January, claiming that further engagement was no longer sustainable. They also told us contacting them would not be advisable. When we tried doing so afterwards, it was as if they never existed. Luckily, WLIW committed to taking on the more responsibility in financing the show, since it had been so successful in its initial run. But that group, there was something very wrong with them.” Like the other whistleblowers, she mysteriously disappeared a few days later, her home completely emptied of all contents. The mystery did not end there, however. Years later, some obscure media afficionados attempted to do an interview with only actor who is known to have been with the show since the interstitial era, Steve Robbins, who played Eeky Eeky Kronk. When they questioned him about the star, his previously congenial nature immediately disappeared, and he abruptly ended the interview. Exasperated, he shouted at them, “You just had to bring that up, didn’t you? You don’t see me prying into your personal matters! Learn to show some Goddamn respect!” He then left hurriedly, bitterly muttering to himself about how he should never have accepted the role of Eeky Eeky Kronk.
In December 2003, at around the same time the Order cut ties with Rogar and WLIW, FAO Schwarz and its parent company, Right Start, despite their success and steady customer flow, declared bankruptcy, closing the Fifth Avenue store. It reopened the following November but was much less garish looking. Many of the loud and colorful displays and animatronic decorations were replaced with much more muted shelves, all the neon was removed, and the ceiling in the main entry hall was painted black and covered in LEDs. Although most people would simply chalk these events and changes up to being outmaneuvered by the likes of Walmart and Target and shifting tastes in retail décor, there are some who are not so sure. At around that time, the majority owner of the General Motors Building, Donald Trump, had just lost a highly publicized court case with the minority owner, Conseco, and had to relinquish his stake to them. Why was this significant? The answer, these more skeptical few believe, lies in Trump’s history with the building. In 1998, he had purchased the General Motors Building in Manhattan for a staggering $878 million—a then-record figure. Financial analysts and real estate experts praised the move. It was, on paper, an apex of prime commercial power: Fifth Avenue, Central Park views, prestige incarnate. Nonetheless, they believed Trump had an ulterior motive for buying the building: power. Many familiar with the inner workings of FAO Schwarz believed that Right Start and previous owners of the building starting in 1986 were mere fronts. The real power laid within the Order, and that their locus of power was located in a sub-basement beneath the store. Trump, too, was convinced of this, and decided to stage a coup in the form of a real estate transaction. He was seeking to directly infiltrate the organization, perhaps become its head. Anything to become more powerful and successful. Over the following years, some noticed that he had begun acting rather strangely, alluding to “tremendous symphonies” that only a select few could truly appreciate. During a 2001 interview on Live with Regis and Kelly, when they asked him what music he listened to, he answered with this: “Oh, you wouldn’t know it. Stuff nobody really listens to. Weird things. Real classical. Deeper than deep. Things lost.” It would seem as though the Order had figured out Trump’s plan and masterminded a way to remove him from the picture. According to two members of a real estate forum, EchoesOfD12000 and TheSleepingGodLives, the organization engineered a foolproof court case for Conseco to file against Trump. They of course won, and sold the building to Harry Macklowe, another developer. Shortly after FAO Schwarz reopened, Macklowe began a major renovation of the building, involving stripping the base of its colonnade-like appearance, expanding the Madison Avenue façade, and redesigning the plaza facing Fifth Avenue. This redesign would include the famed Apple cube, the entry structure to Apple’s flagship store. Although most would have also chalked this up to business as usual, the forum posters claimed that Macklowe was specifically chosen since he would be able to hide the secret of the Order’s presence, since the previous aesthetic approaches had clearly turned out to be too obvious. A supposed defector from the Order claimed, “We had to make it more subdued. Safer. The kind of place parents would smile at again. Not the kind where children would point to a blinking toy star and ask, ‘Why is he watching me?’ Not the kind of place architecture nerds would note bears a strange resemblance to a pagan altar from antiquity.” In the late 2000s, the defector also said, the Order left the General Motors Building and FAO Schwarz behind, claiming that their work there was done. They orchestrated FAO’s sale to Toys R Us and the Building’s sale to Boston Properties, around 2008-2009. One interesting thing to note, EchoesOfD12000 and TheSleepingGodLives say, is that at around the time of the sales, engineers and janitors could be seen going into the store’s basement level in teams of three or four, as if they were tasked to seal something off. Sometimes, people claimed to see them with hooded figures. By 2010, the sightings stopped. In 2015, citing rising rents, FAO Schwarz vacated their massive space at the General Motors building. Three years later, they opened a new store at Rockefeller Center. Unlike the store, this one was not only smaller, but devoid of that immense, sickening power. Today, sightings of these men in black in hooded figures are no longer reported. But the thing is, the Order didn’t vanish. It retreated.
Pivoting to the Shadows
The picture found in the envelope
In summer 2005, while working on the renovation of the lobby of the General Motors Building, a floorer found an unmarked manila folder behind the main security desk. In it was a single high-resolution printed image—a disturbingly vivid, radiant, anthropomorphic golden-orange star with glassy, wide-set eyes and a plasticky orange smile. On the back of the photo was scribbled “next phase: web operations.” The sight of it made him sick to his stomach yet had a distant familiarity about it that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Wanting answers, he uploaded a scanned picture of it to the paranormal board on 4chan. Although most replies were mundane and joking, there were a few more disturbing ones. Multiple users claimed that the character’s expression seemed to be not only of overly enthusiastic joy, but of agony and malice as well. A self-proclaimed forensic design expert, who pointed out a few anomalies about the photo: it had color grading inconsistent with turn-of-the-century printing, and digital smoothing techniques more advanced than anything commercially available at the time. In short, no known technologies of the time could create such an image. Another reply said that it looked like a “more intense, more alive, more grotesque, more knowing” version of a weird toy he had seen in some low budget show his little sister liked watching a few years prior. Most disturbing of all, though, came from a former mental patient who had been discharged a week prior. They claimed that the star character looked remarkably familiar to one featured in a painting created by their twin sister, who had been an audiophile and frequenter of obscure musical forums before her disappearance. They said that the painting was the last thing she created before disappearing. And yet, this last poster claimed, the star character in the photo was still a heavily attenuated version of the being in the painting. They said it was as if whoever created it “placed a safety filter over it to shield our meek psyches from the full intensity of whatever that thing, that Face-star was.”
Years later, people realized something horrible: that same figure in the image found in the folder appeared as a character in an animated children’s video based on the classic song Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Furthermore, the entire image was part of the video’s thumbnail. Aside from the star character, the video, and channel in general, featured strange, grotesque, and garishly colored characters that some claimed looked like toys they had seen on the shelves at the store in the late 90s and early 2000s. It had been uploaded by a YouTube channel known as GiggleBellies back in December 2009, almost exactly five years after FAO Schwarz reopened after its bankruptcy, and not long after the Order had supposedly left the building and store behind. While a majority of people have dismissed GiggleBellies as just another low-budget kids' entertainment company, many of them also found the channel's animations to be hideously gaudy yet somehow dimly familiar. In addition, a few persistent researchers uncovered some unnerving patterns. The people believed to be behind GiggleBellies—rarely photographed, never named in any formal filings—had reportedly been spotted at animation expos and marketing conferences wearing metal badges in the shape of the General Motors Building's footprint and solid gold star-shaped lapel pins. It would seem as though the Order, sensing that tastes and behaviors would change sooner than later, decided that the best path to take going forward was a digital one. Not only would they use a new and highly effective medium to reach audiences, but they would also make their existence much less obvious, especially after the failed attempt to take them over from the inside that nearly blew their cover. In any case, 4chan went down a week later, and when it came back online, the paranormal board had been completely purged. As for the floorer, he was last spotted being escorted by two men in black and an impossibly old, skeletally thin tall man wearing a black coat and hat into an area of FAO Schwarz marked as being for employees only. He was never seen again after this. Records today claim that this man never worked for the flooring contractor. All the more eerie is that all other records of him seem to have been destroyed. It was as if he had never existed.
Epilogue
To this day, a vast majority of people are completely unaware of the remarkable events that are said to have transpired in Vienna and, later, Manhattan. Almost everyone still thinks that Schubert and Mahler died when they did, in 1828 and 1911, respectively. Most people who know of DittyDoodle Works, GiggleBellies, and the now unfindable toys from nebulous memories claim that they were just cheaply made products to make a quick buck. And perhaps these are the case, after all. Yet there is always that small number of people curious enough to realize that there is far more than meets the eye concerning these matters. Something to be covered up. Something both vividly beautiful and devastating. As for why the sounds, tones, and images they evoke are so pernicious to all those who witness them, the answer may be simpler than meets the eye. After all, God did say to Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.”