I used to be a big fan of music, Infact, I used to adore it. I couldn’t go a day without listening to music…but now a simple single note on any instrument…haunts me and drills a cold sensation like bullets into my soul. Why? Musics a good thing, right? Some people may even say that music made the world a better place…well, if you hear this story about the Piano Man, I’m almost guaranteed you’ll change your mind.
It was a Thursday. Every Thursday me and my Mother would go to our local pub to watch an old family friend, Ernest Vermillion, perform the same 3 classical numbers as she does every week, as she has done for the past 18 years.
Ernest was a classical, traditional women with some french heritage. She had been playing piano since about the age of 11. She referred to her piano as her ‘bestfriend’..which, I’ll be honest, creeped me out a little. She said that music saved her life, and that it changed her completely. She even thought that her music influenced everyone who ever heard it. Never-the-less, her music, I very did enjoy.
Ernest was around half-way through performing her second weekly piece when a huge crackling sound occurred and all of the lights blacked out. The landlord of the pub reassured us all that everything was okay and it was just a power cut. But if all of the power was cut, why would the lights still be on in the back room behind the bar?
The lights flashed back on again, with a few quiet ‘yays’ in the background.
After waiting for about 5 seconds after the lights turned back on, there was a few murmurs and people looking around the pub room indicating that they was wondering why Ernest hasn’t continued playing.
A similar occurrence had happened about 3 years ago, but Ernest trooped on and continued playing where she had left after straight after.
“Ernest?” I heard someone shout from behind me, warily, asif they was subtlety afraid of communicating with her.
Because of this, we all turned to look at Ernest, expecting to see her sharing a friendly smile towards the person who said her name. This is the usual behaviour which we’d always expect from Ernest, she was a kind person, clearly wary of hurting peoples feelings.
But I wish I wouldn’t have turned to look at her, because what I expected, was very much different to what I saw.
She looked, dead, in a way. Paralysed on the seat. All life had left her face. She turned an eerily gray colour, and her eyes solidly transformed to black, like her eyeballs had been tattooed black.
“Ernest, stop messing around” said the Landlord of the pub. I could hear the fear in his voice as his pronunciation quivered.
After this, I just zoned out. I just…stared at her blank canvas face. Terrified at how the life and soul in her had just vanished. All I could hear was the faint, near to silent breaths she took, and all the noise in the background just muffled out. My eyes were just fixed on her, asif something was drawing my view to her, fixating my pupils on her lifeless eyes, like a young child does, when they spot something that they want. I couldn’t look away.
After about a split second, my ears travelled to the sound of a clicking noise. The exact sound you make when you click your fingers. Someone clicked their fingers. It wasn’t an artifical sound…or machinery clanking around, it was a human being with human fingers…
That sound travelled right through me, through my right ear, around my brain and out from my left, instantly releasing the trance which Ernest’s deadly glare had left me in. I took a huge gasp of air, as if I’d been submerged under water for the last 5 minutes.
My eyes again immediately fixated on Ernest, to see if she was released from the paralysed state she was locked in.
And then this, is what freaked me out. I turned to Ernests direction, glancing at her for a split-second. My look had released her. She snapped out of her trance and took a large breath of air, similar to me. I felt her breath run threw me. It travelled through the air at the speed of light and flew into my mouth, down my throat, choking me. I coughed, purging her breath from my esophagus, where it vanished into the midst of the air surrounding me. I held my mouth shut for a moment; I didn’t want the remaining particles of her breath forcing their way down my throat..again
I glanced up and everyone was comforting Ernest. She was in shock of what just happened.
My mother called my name, indicating me to come and assist her of comforting Ernest, not aware that I had just been under the same spell. I stood up, obeying her commands. But, when I stood up, I felt a dizziness around me. My legs went numb. All feeling ran back through my legs, stabbing every single nerve to revive the sensation.
And then, I just dropped. A cascade of sinister wind came about me, and I just fell to the floor, crashing to the cold, hard ground. I felt a stabbing sensation, as if a stone had been thrown through a window, but that stone substituted my skin. A nail between the floorboards impaled through the skin of my forearm. All of the blood rushed through my body, and it all just turned black.
I woke up to the familiar voice of my mother and my cousins husband, who is a doctor. I opened my eyes, and replacing the darkness was the room of a doctors. The ceiling was bright white, so white it was painful to look at, and the 4 walls surrounding me were painted a greeny gray colour.
“Well..looks like someones awake” said Joe, my cousins husband, to my mother, who immediately forced her face upon mine, inspecting my eyes.
“Mum, please…” I said, in hope of her backing up a little.
I shuffled, uncomfortable with the horrible doctors bed thing I was laid in.
“Hey, darling. How are you feeling?”
Not even noticing her question, an immense pain pulsed in the left side of my forearm.
I lifted my arm, finding myself looking at a bandage wrapped around where the pain was located. I looked at my mum, with a confused expression.
“Its when you fell, darling…” My mum stated.
Scared to continue, she then said
“we found a black piano key jabbed in your arm”.
She rubbed my leg, as a sign of comfort. She gave me an uneasy smile, with a sigh of sympathy.
“Mum, I didn’t fall, I collapsed. And..I landed on a nail dislodged from the floorboards, not a piano key?”
“Um, the doctor said you’d be fine, we can go home now, come on love”
she said, trying to avoid the situation. She grasped onto my wrist and slightly tugged my arm indicating that we should leave. With her force, I shuffled off of the bed, smiling at Joe as she dragged my arm out of the doctors door.
She shoved me towards the car door, and i uneasily opened it to get in.
“Mum?”
No answer.
“Mum? Please?”
No answer.
“MUM!”
Still no answer. She ignored me the whole way, with an angry and irritated expression on her face. It’s just like something had triggered her to act this way…something I had said, possibly.
She pulled up in the driveway of our home. She opened the door and slammed it immediately. I ran after her, and when I reached her, I tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention. She hesitated, and then slowly turned around. Not a natural, human like movement. It was more mechanical. She stood face to face with me. That’s when I noticed that her face was the same drained gray colour as Ernest’s was the previous day.
Her eyes were filled with black. Like Ernest’s.
A huge cascade of memories overwhelmed me from yesterday.
I panicked, my heart faltered and skipped a beat with fear.
I ran. I just ran. As fast as I could, in the opposite direction. I looked back, just once, and saw her, just stood there with the same expression and exact position.
I shouldn’t have turned around. It put me off. I lost focus and tripped up on a stone. I plummeted to the concrete pavement, luckily preventing my face being hit by having my hands in-front of me. I layed on the floor for longer then I should of. I just released a huge sigh, feeling relaxed layed there on the cold ground.
I felt a tiny gush of heat above me. I looked up and saw two hands above me. One held the position of gesture, held out to me for me to grab it so the person could pull me up to my feet.
It was a man, with a long black coat, a little bit further down than his knees. He was wearing leather black shoes, and his hands were coated in leather black gloves.
Shakily, I held my hand up to his and grabbed hold of it. He slowly pulled me up, until me feet were flat on the floor.
I looked at him, in hope to find a face, a familiar face. But he was wearing a hat, similar to a bowler hat, and he had his head tilted, which meant that it covered his face.
I saw the rim of his hat slowly rise up. He was lifting his head towards me.
My heart started to race…I was kind of scared.
And there it was.
Black eyes.
Gray, dead face.
Just like Ernests and my Mums.
Just like a corpses.
I realised what this meant and began to run off, but before I could even move an inch, he grasped hold of my arm, down on the place where the nail had been stabbed into my arm. I winced in pain. He knew where it was, he knew that it was going to hurt me, so that’s why he did it.
I collapsed right into his arms which he had held out, because he knew that I was going to fall into them. The pain was just too great, I couldn’t take it.
I woke up in a dark and cold room to the sound of a piano playing music. I had recognised the song immediately. It was the same song which Ernest played when that whole possessed thing happened to her. This made me panic. I tried to scream but all what came out was a muffled cry. My mouth was taped together. My arms and legs were tied together by a worn out rope, worn out or not, it felt steel chains strong enough to hold the biggest beast of them all.
“So you’re awake then?” I heard a voice say, obviously knowing that they was asking me a rhetorical question..seeing as I was inable to reply as my mouth was pratically moulded shut. The voice was…sinister, it pierced through me. I hated that voice. It raised all the hairs on the back of my skin.
The music stopped, and the door opened. The man walked through, the same man with the knee-length coat, gloves and bowler hat. He brought something in behind him. I noticed a glimmer of shine enter the room. I looked behind him, to notice a quite large mirror being wheeled in by a cart.
I was confused.
He placed the cart with the mirror on top infront of me. I had a hunch that this would be the last time that I would ever see my reflection again. I felt a tear brim up in my eye.
The man walked away from the room, and continued playing from the piece he was playing before.
My eyes started stinging. Stinging turned into burning. Burning turned into melting. I felt me eyes rotting away before me. I couldn’t even try to rub them and rid of the pain because my hands where tied up. I looked at the mirror, the colour of my eyes were fading away. The white socket turned to gray. Then darker, darker, then black. My pupils dilated, then burst, forcing the blackness of my eye sockets to take over the colour. My whole eye..was black. Just like the mans, my mums and Ernests. I could see perfectly fine, but it still scared me. Then I felt all heat leave my body. I felt my facial skin peeling, and all colour just…vanished. My face turned gray. I looked dead. As if I was a corpse. I felt dead. I felt no more pain, no more emotion, nothing. All love and care I had for people disappeared. I had no consideration, for anything. My arm didn’t hurt anymore, the fact that I had just pratically just been abducted and murdered didn’t bother me. I was dead.
I could still hear the music in the back ground, but yet I still just sat there, as still and frozen as a stone. The music stopped, and the man returned back into the room, and he said, in an emotionless and lifeless voice:
“Once, an old lady told me that her piano was her bestfriend. That music saved her life. That music changed her completely. She thought that her music influenced everyone who heard it…I guess she was right”
Credit To – Briony Refson

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