“The Voice at the Arion Awards”
(A first-person account by Marco De Vega, journalist, Manila Sentinel)
The night of the 48th Arion Awards was supposed to be a celebration—one of glamour, triumph, and artistry. It turned into something else entirely.
Even now, when I play back the recordings, I can still hear it: that raspy voice breaking through the applause, claiming, “I should have won.”
At first, we thought it was feedback, a glitch in the audio system.
But the sound engineer swore, trembling, that the microphone was off.
And the man whose voice we heard—Leon Vargas, the actor everyone believed had disappeared in 2017—had been dead for almost eight years.
1. The Night Begins
I had covered the Arion Awards for years, long enough to know the rhythm of the evening—the red carpet flashes, the orchestrated laughter, the perfumed air of self-congratulation.
That night was different from the start. The venue, the Metropolitan Grand Theatre, had been renovated for the occasion. The air-conditioning overcompensated for the summer heat, leaving the marble lobby unnaturally cold.
The nominees were star-studded, but everyone knew who would win: Daniel Torres, the golden boy of Philippine cinema, adored for his quiet intensity.
Daniel was up for Best Actor for his performance in The Last Frame, a film about an artist haunted by a phantom muse. It had swept critics’ circles, and tonight would cement his legacy.
When I saw him backstage, he was calm—too calm. “Just another night,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
2. The Announcement
The ceremony ran like clockwork until the final segment. The presenter, veteran actress Celia Robles, walked up to the podium with the sealed envelope.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, her voice steady. “The Arion Award for Best Actor goes to…”
She paused. The orchestra swelled. Cameras zoomed.
“Daniel Torres, for The Last Frame!”
The crowd erupted. Flashbulbs, applause, cheers. Daniel rose, composed, embraced his co-stars, and began walking toward the stage.
That’s when it happened.
The sound cut out for a split second. Then came the voice.
Hoarse, low, unmistakably human.
“I should have won.”
It came not from the speakers, but through them—like a whisper behind the sound waves.
The audience fell silent. Daniel froze mid-step. Celia frowned, tapping her earpiece. The orchestra hesitated, strings faltering to a confused stop.
Then, as quickly as it came, the sound vanished.
The host recovered first, laughing nervously. “Ah—technical glitch! Let’s give it up once more for Daniel Torres!”
But Daniel’s face had gone white.
3. The Ghost in the System
Backstage, chaos erupted. The technical crew huddled around the soundboards. I caught fragments of their panicked whispers.
“No mic input…”
“Channel four was dead!”
“Playback’s clean—nothing inserted.”
I asked the head technician if it could have been an echo or a prank. He shook his head. “The channel that voice came from wasn’t connected to any device.”
Daniel sat in the dressing room, staring at the award in his hands as if it burned. When I entered, he looked up slowly.
“You heard it too, didn’t you?” he asked.
I nodded.
He laughed, a dry, nervous sound. “Do you believe in ghosts, Marco?”
“I believe in recordings,” I said. “And echoes.”
He turned the trophy over in his hands. “Leon Vargas used to say that awards were cursed. That once you win one, part of your soul stays trapped inside the gold.”
I remembered Leon. Charismatic, volatile. A method actor who disappeared after his final film, Eclipse of Eden, wrapped in 2017. They said he’d gone to Japan. Others whispered suicide. His body was never found.
Daniel’s next words made my skin crawl.
“Leon was nominated the same year I was. He lost. To me.”
4. The Note
The afterparty was subdued. Everyone avoided talking about the “incident,” pretending it was a technical error.
But the real story broke the next morning.
The cleaning staff at the theatre found a folded piece of paper under Daniel’s seat—handwritten in blue ink:
“The award spares no one.”
No signature. No fingerprints.
Daniel refused interviews. His publicist said he was “resting.” But whispers spread that he hadn’t been seen since the ceremony.
By the third day, social media was a frenzy of conspiracy theories. One video analyst claimed the spectral voice matched exactly the vocal frequency of Leon Vargas from his last press conference.
Another user slowed down footage of the broadcast and pointed out a flickering shadow behind Daniel as he walked toward the stage—“a man in a tuxedo, smiling.”
The network took down the recording. But the copy kept reappearing, uploaded under different usernames, as if the file refused to die.
5. The Investigation
I couldn’t shake it. I started digging.
The Arion Foundation, which handled the awards, had no record of the sound feed used that night. The data logs from the theatre’s main system were corrupted, timestamps replaced by rows of “0000.”
One engineer confided that during setup, they’d received a “legacy patch” from an old Arion database. “Some vintage audio archives from early ceremonies,” he said. “They wanted a nostalgic intro track.”
That archive was stored on analog reels.
The same reels used in 2017—the year Leon disappeared.
When I asked to see them, I was told the boxes had “gone missing.”
6. The Second Voice
A week later, I received an email from an untraceable address. It contained a single video file named ECLIPSE_FINAL.mov.
The footage was shaky, clearly shot on set. Leon Vargas stood in front of a mirror, half in costume, half in himself.
“They said they’d never let me win,” he murmured. “But the film is mine. And if they take it from me, I’ll take something back.”
The file ended with static and a timestamp: June 9, 2017. The day he vanished.
My phone buzzed immediately after. Unknown number.
“Stop digging, Marco. The dead still have contracts.”
7. The Return
Ten days after the awards, the network announced a “tribute special” for Daniel Torres—though they refused to clarify why.
I attended the taping. The set was minimalist, just Daniel sitting across from the host under a single spotlight.
When the cameras rolled, the feed glitched. For a split second, the face on screen wasn’t Daniel’s. It was Leon’s.
The same eyes. The same smirk.
And then the lights blew.
Screams filled the studio. The teleprompter exploded in sparks. Crew members dove for cover. When the backup power came on, Daniel was gone.
In his place, on the chair, was the Arion trophy—its gold plating cracked, revealing a dark metallic core pulsing faintly with red light.
8. The Arion Curse
That night, I broke into the foundation archives. The building was empty, eerily quiet. Inside a locked drawer, I found files labeled “ARION LEGACY PROGRAM.”
The documents described an experiment launched in the early 2000s: digitizing the emotional imprints of nominated actors by scanning their vocal frequencies during live broadcasts—an attempt to “preserve authenticity in cinematic heritage.”
Every winner’s voice, emotion, even heartbeat had been recorded. Stored.
Leon Vargas’s file had one final note, scrawled in pen:
“Subject refuses termination. Signal persists through feedback.”
9. The Call
I left the archives and drove home under heavy rain. My radio flickered on by itself.
At first, it was static. Then—his voice.
“I told you. The award spares no one.”
I swerved to the side of the road, heart hammering. The radio screen glowed faintly, showing no active channel. Just “—:—”.
When I looked up, I saw someone standing in front of the car. Soaked. Still.
Daniel.
He smiled faintly and mouthed something through the windshield. I couldn’t hear him, but I read his lips clearly: “He’s still here.”
Then the headlights flickered, and he was gone.
10. The Broadcast
Three days later, all channels under the Arion Network aired a strange clip at midnight.
A dark stage. A spotlight.
Leon Vargas stood center frame, holding the cracked trophy.
“You thought you could forget me,” he said. “But every broadcast carries an echo. Every applause leaves a trace. The award doesn’t honor—it consumes.”
The feed cut off after thirteen seconds.
Officially, it was dismissed as a “broadcast intrusion.” But every technician I spoke to swore no signal entered their systems.
11. The Final Discovery
I decided to play my own copy of the Arion ceremony, the original recording stored on my hard drive. I slowed the audio to half-speed. Beneath the static, I heard not one voice—but hundreds.
Whispers layered over each other, rising like a chorus. Some familiar, some not.
And they were all saying the same thing:
“Remember us.”
When I checked the metadata, the file had changed. The title now read: ARION_049.
I was never supposed to be part of it.
12. The Last Entry
I’m writing this from my apartment, though the walls seem thinner every night. The television turns on by itself. The award show reruns without sound, but I can see Leon’s reflection in the glass whenever I look too long.
I tried deleting the files, but they restore themselves.
The latest one was added this morning: a video of me sitting at my desk, typing these very words.
The timestamp says: Tomorrow.
Sometimes, I think I hear applause faintly through the walls.
And in the static, a voice whispers—hoarse, jealous, eternal:
“I should have won.”
