Silent Songs

Content Warning: murder

My head pounds, my stomach growls, my fingers bleed. I cannot stop playing. The same song, over and over. The same silent song. My eyes are stinging, my tears dried up days ago. I have had no food or water for at least a week;  I should be dead by now, but it wants me to go on. Wants me to keep playing. I don’t know if it will ever let me die. My body is not my own.

It is perhaps a unique torture that my mind is still free, that I can drift back in time to when we first came here. How unhappy I was then, unaware of how much worse things could still get.

*

I remember when I first saw the house, solid and imposing despite its ramshackle condition. An old manor house, with peeling paint and boards on the windows. My mother’s face was white and stiff, holding back the anger that had been simmering for days now. My father was trying to make this seem like a big adventure. My younger sisters actually thought it was. They were laughing, running and hiding behind trees in the large grounds. They didn’t understand that we were in exile for our father’s sins. They didn’t half hate him like mother and I did.

I thought wistfully of our house in the city. It was much smaller but it was bright and new. I had my own room and piano lessons every week after school. We had a dog, Sunshine, who had been given to a neighbour last week, since father said we couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. I wished we could have left father behind instead, this was all his fault!

Inside the house was worse than the outside. It was filled with dust, broken furniture, unidentifiable animal droppings. The place was a shambles, walls half knocked down then left to moulder. The smell of mould tickled the back of my throat. In one room, we found a stained old mattress. Father said that my sisters and I would be sleeping here. I wondered if someone had died on that mattress.

Mother put a fresh sheet over it, smiling in a brittle way, holding back her anger. I pretended I didn’t notice that father was sleeping in the car and mother on an old upholstered sofa that had also been left behind.

The next morning, mother made breakfast. At least the eggs and bacon were familiar, even if they were cooked on a camp stove in the dilapidated kitchen. Mother sipped black coffee and didn’t talk, while father tried to be cheery.

After breakfast we were sent outside to play. My sisters ran off between the trees, but I lingered near the house, listening to the sound of raised voices. As I wandered around the outside of the house, I saw a small door in the brick. I tried the handle, expecting it to be locked, but it swung open easily. Inside was a dark corridor. I might have hesitated a minute at the thought of something happening to me alone down there, then I thought that it would serve my parents right, and I moved forward into the darkness.

My fingers scraped the brick walls as I moved slowly through the darkness. As I followed the tunnel, I saw a light up ahead. The tunnel opened up into a large room, lit by flickering candles. There were hundreds of them,  on the floor and on top of the piano that sat in one corner of the room, dripping wax onto the wood. Had my father set this room up for me to find, lit the candles? Was the piano his apology to me? I moved forward, stroking the smooth polished surface of the piano with my fingers. The one thing that had kept me happy through my parents fighting was my weekly piano lessons. And now, here was a piano for me!

I sat down on the stool. The lid was already open, revealing yellowed ivory keys. There was sheet music sitting on the stand, handwritten in a spidery scrawl. The ink was brownish and faded.  The first sheet was titled, Love.

It had been some time since I played, but my fingers knew what they were doing. They danced over the keys like they had an intelligence of their own. I waited for the rich notes to flow from the piano, but nothing came. I played through the entire piece. I could hear the notes in my head, like I could always hear music when I read the notations. But all around me in that room was silence, thick and oppressive. The keys thudded dully as I pressed them.

When the song came to an end, I got up, I opened the lid of the piano and looked inside. There were no strings, only cobwebs and mildew. I shook my head, disappointed. Once again, father had failed me. Why had I expected any better from him?

When I went inside the house, something was different. I could feel it in the air. I came into the old ballroom, now a shambles, and my parents were dancing. They hadn’t done that in years. There wasn’t even any music, but my father was whirling my mother around and she was laughing. Their feet stirred up the dust and motes danced in the air around them. They were happy, in love like they hadn’t been since the twins were babies.

I wanted to go to them, but I could tell that this moment was all their own, as I watched, father took mother’s face in his hands and kissed her so passionately I blushed just watching. Then he swept her up in his arms and threw her on the sofa. A cloud of dust blew up and they laughed through their coughing. They were ripping at each others clothes, and I didn’t stay to see the rest.

After that, we played happy families for a while. Mother and father were fixing up the house, laughing as they got covered in dust and plaster. If I’d known what I know now, I would have treasured it more. Our last happy days.

I was busy helping mother and father with the house, carting out the old broken furniture and junk we found in the many rooms. I was wary of their cheery mood, knowing it would not last. I avoided them whenever possible. I was grumpy and  ungrateful. I could not stand seeing them like this, knowing it had to end. Sooner or later, they would have another fight.

It was three days until I escaped them, making my way outside as they splashed whitewash on each other, and sneaking through the door under the house. My fingers ached to play the strange, silent piano. The sheaf of music was open to the second piece of music, Distrust, and when my fingers touched the keys, it felt like this was meant to be. The piano and I were one. Once again, the room was thick with silence, although I could hear the notes in my head as they would have played, a sorrowful tune.

When I finished playing, my fingers hurt. I must have been out of practice. I sighed, and went back to the main house. When I came inside, the first thing I heard was the sound of crying. It seemed everything was back to normal.

Over the next few days, mother was constantly accusing father of things, sneaking away to gamble again, pawning her jewellery, which seemed to be missing. Even the twins were arguing constantly, I guess they had picked up on our parents bad moods. Father even accused mother of flirting with a man who came to deliver the timber. He was old enough to be our grandfather!

Desperate to get away from it all, I found myself sneaking back to the hidden room and its silent piano. I played through several songs, Jealousy, Avarice, Rage and Betrayal. Every time, my fingers ached more, now they were hurting all the time. I should have told my parents, but they were always fighting, yelling now, even coming to blows. Only under the house was there silence. It called to me. I was going to the room below the house in my dreams. I was not surprised when I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself there, sitting  on the piano stool, fingers touching the keys.

When I looked at the song in front of me at the piano, I felt a sliver of cold in my chest. The title was Murder. I knew that, whatever else I did, I should not play that song. I knew that I should go. I tried to pull my fingers from the keys, but they were stuck fast. I pulled my whole body away from the piano, but my hands remained on the keys, as if glued there. I found myself sitting back down on the stool, my feet settling on the pedals. My fingers danced over the keys, I had no control over them. And the pain, oh the pain! As I played, I felt bones in my fingers snapping. I howled in pain, but my voice could not break through the deafening silence. Finally, the song reached a crescendo. I pulled my mangled hands from the piano keys. Slowly, I made my way back into the house to see what my playing had wrought.

I found my father on the ground floor, in a pool of his own blood. My siblings were in their bed, tucked in, blood leaking across the sheets. Mother sat by the windows, her arms gloved in blood. She turned her eyes on me, dark and empty.  “I had to do it, they’d have betrayed me in the end, just like him!”

I did not blame her. I knew it was not her actions, but the work of the piano. It had forced my family to play out its stories: Love, Jealousy, Avarice, Rage, Betrayal and Murder. And I had been its accomplice!

I left my mother there. She was already gone, nothing but a shell. I took the axe from the block outside, and headed beneath the house one last time. I thought I was there to wreck the piano. I thought I really could just take the axe and demolish the thing that destroyed my family. What a fool I was.

Once I was inside the room once more, the axe dropped from my hand and I found myself sitting down at the piano. There was one piece left, but it was an endlessly looping piece. It repeated on into infinity. I felt the broken bones in my fingers shift as they hit the keys, but there was nothing I could do. The piece was called Eternity. I was alone with the monstrous piano forever, a captive.

I heard them, then, the voices of all its past victims, screaming inside my head. A warning silenced until it was too late.

The house sits empty now, awaiting its next victim, while underneath, I play on. I play my dreadful silent song.

(c)opyright Laura Morrigan, 2021