Echoes of the Unseen

By Carlos Segui

The Cursed Portrait of Mozart: The Pact That Composed the Darkness
A cursed symphony. An eternal genius. A secret that was never meant to be uncovered.

Vienna, present day. Lucas Bertram, a young sheet music restorer and frustrated musician, lives a quiet life among ancient manuscripts and borrowed silences... until a mysterious package with no return address changes his fate. Inside: an unpublished score signed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a disturbing portrait of the composer that seems... alive.

The piece comes with a chilling warning:

"Only at night. No audience. No repeats."

When Lucas plays it, he unleashes a wave of visions, unexplained deaths, and secrets that pull him into the hidden depths of Vienna, where a secret society worships Mozart as a prophet of a forbidden sound. With the help of Clara, a historian obsessed with cursed portraits, he discovers the score is more than music… it's a ritual sealed by a dark pact between art and eternity.

What did Mozart see before he died?

And what is trying to return… through his music?

A novel of gothic horror, supernatural suspense, and cursed art, where genius may be a gift… or a curse.

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Whispers from the Canvas: The Painter Who Fell in Love with a Stranger
The painter who captured the woman of his dreams... before he ever met her.

On a quiet street in Florence, Elías, a lonely painter, wakes from a troubling dream and, without knowing why, paints the face of a woman he's never seen. Days later, she shows up at his door—identical to the portrait… and asking the same question that haunts him: "Why did you paint me?"

Lía, an art restorer, has been dreaming of that very same painting for weeks. Together, they uncover that the piece is signed by an artist who vanished over a century ago… and that their lives are bound by a dark legacy, where art doesn't just reflect the soul—it can bring it back.

As the canvases come to life and memories begin to blur, Elías finds himself torn between a love reborn in every brushstroke and a demonic presence that feeds on the inspiration of artists. Painting her could save her.

But it might also damn him forever.

An impossible romance, an ancient mystery, and a cursed art that whispers from the edges of time.

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Newton's Well: The Forbidden Experiment of the Time Alchemist
There are doors that were never meant to be opened... and a mind that dared to try.

What if Isaac Newton didn't just study gravity… but also the crack between worlds?

Elias Morley, a young history fellow at Cambridge, discovers a forgotten letter tucked behind a portrait of Newton in the old Trinity College library. In it, the famed scientist speaks of a sealed door, biblical symbols… and a well hidden underground. Driven by curiosity—and soon, by something much deeper—Elias uncovers a secret 17th-century laboratory where Newton may have attempted the greatest experiment of all: to break time itself and witness the final revelation of God.

But the experiment failed. And it left a rift open.

As Elias ventures into a world of visions, shattered dimensions, and ancient prophecies, reality begins to splinter around him. Echoes of the past and future chase him. Voices call to him from the other side. And at the heart of the abyss, a truth awaits—one Newton was never meant to know.

A historical and mystical horror thriller where alchemy, science, and the Apocalypse converge in a story that will forever change the way we understand time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carlos Segui
• Release date: Apr 19, 2025
• ISBN: 9798230035626

Book preview

Echoes of the Unseen

The Cursed Portrait of Mozart: The Pact That Composed the Darkness

A cursed symphony. An eternal genius. A secret that was never meant to be uncovered.

Whispers from the Canvas: The Painter Who Fell in Love with a Stranger

The painter who captured the woman of his dreams... before he ever met her.

Newton's Well: The Forbidden Experiment of the Time Alchemist

There are doors that were never meant to be opened... and a mind that dared to try.

(c) Carlos Segui

The Cursed Portrait of Mozart

The Pact That Composed the Darkness

A cursed symphony. An eternal genius. A secret that was never meant to be

uncovered

Vienna—that city where the past seems to have never surrendered to the passing of time— wrapped around Lucas Bertram like a mist that both caressed and suffocated him. At thirty-two, he lived in a cramped apartment above a Hungarian bakery that started smelling like cinnamon by five in the morning. Every day, he walked the same cobbled path to the grand National Library, where the walls smelled of aged leather, parchment, and silence.

He was a restorer of musical scores, specializing in 18th-century music. His days passed among dusty glass cases, cotton gloves, and handwritten notes inked by centuries long gone. He copied, cataloged, preserved. Every measure that passed through his hands wasn’t his. It belonged to Bach, to Haydn, to Salieri… to Mozart. Especially Mozart. Ironically, the genius he admired most was the one who most reminded him of how far he was from fulfilling his own dream—becoming a composer.

Lucas had stopped writing music ten years ago. After his father—also a musician—died of a heart attack minutes before attending his first piano recital. Since then, Lucas had played only for himself, in the darkness of his apartment, on a piano no one tuned anymore.

That gray October morning promised to be no different. A light rain tapped on the windows of the restoration room when the receptionist told him a package had arrived in his name. It had no return address. The envelope, made of thick parchment, gave off a strange scent—like damp earth and old lacquer.

He opened it with the surgical precision his profession demanded. Inside, he found two items: a four-page handwritten score, the calligraphy instantly recognizable—the loops, the flourishes on the clefs, the rests drawn like sighs—and a portrait.

The portrait froze him. It was Mozart, no doubt. But not the lively young man with the powdered wig and playful smile found in books. This was someone else. His skin was ashen, his eyes deeply sunken, as if something had been ripped out from within. The style was unmistakably baroque, yet something was off. The background of the painting seemed to shift subtly, as if the artist had captured not a place, but a shadow. An atmosphere.

And the eyes. Lucas couldn’t stop staring at those eyes. They weren’t painted—they were inhabited. In them was something painful to look at—not just death, but the awareness of death. A kind of eternity trapped in a single instant.

He took a deep breath, placed the portrait on the table, and unfolded the score. The title was nothing but a number: KV 666—a sinister joke or a deliberate mistake. He began scanning the notes. He didn’t recognize the theme. It resembled none of Mozart’s known works. It was darker, filled with dissonant modulations, broken harmonies, and silences placed in impossible spots. And yet, it was him. It was his genius. His voice.

On the last page, written in red ink, someone had scribbled a warning: Only at night. No audience. No repeats.

Lucas swallowed hard. For a moment, he thought about laughing. A prank? Some kind of marketing stunt from a modern artist? But no. It wasn’t a forgery. The ink, the paper, the handwriting… everything matched the late 18th century. Even the portrait was dated: 1791. The year Mozart died.

He stood and walked to the window. Raindrops slid down the glass like tears. The city seemed to whisper something he couldn’t quite grasp. A chill ran down the back of his neck.

He looked back at the score. To listen. To play it. What could possibly happen?

But then