Author’s note: Since one of my favourite things in the whole world is recycling my own work, this is a edited (and translated) version of a story I wrote last year around Halloween.
Disclaimer: The PPC belongs to the awesome Jay and Acacia. Mittens and the Radioactive Moss Creature are mine.
Everybody was still shuddering after the last story, but turned to the next in line. Mittens, who had just taken a huge bite out of a pumpkin muffin, looked surprised. He swallowed hard, then said: “No, not me. I don’t know any scary stories.” He looked at the Radioactive Moss Creature; not for any particular reason, he just always looked at it, when he felt out of his depth, but the others all followed his gaze.
“How about you?” one of the other guests asked. Because of the darkness is was hard to tell who it was. “Do you know any scary stories?”
“I suppose I may know one,” it said. There was a murmur of encouragement from the other guests so without further delay, the Radioactive Moss Creature started its tale.
”I think there’s a ghost in my apartment,” Cecilia said.
“There are no such thing as ghosts,” Christoph said without thinking, and he regretted it immediately when he saw the annoyed look on Cecilia’s face.
“I know, that there are no such thing as ghosts,” she replied, sounding very patient as if he was the one, who had said something outrageous and she was now explaining to him how things really worked. “When I say, that I think there’s a ghost in my apartment, it is because I have seen something, that has made me doubt what I thought I knew. You see?”
He didn’t. Not really. But he nodded anyway and, because it seemed like she was waiting for him to do so, he asked: “What have you seen?”
He had expected her to answer something like ‘things not being where she put them’ or ‘strange sounds’; the kind of things that people in TV-shows and magazines who claimed to be haunted, always complained about.
Instead she said: “I’ve seen the ghost.”
“Oh,” he said. He couldn’t really think of anything else to say, but apparently that was all the encouragement she needed.
“Yes,” she said. “It was sitting by the piano, playing.” She looked him straight in the eye as she said it.
“You don’t have a piano,” he pointed out.
“It brought its own.”
He wanted to say that she was imagining things, but he knew that it would only upset her, and that she would probably point out how hard it was to imagine a piano-playing ghost and he would have a hard time arguing that, so in the end he just said: “Oh.”
Once again, this was all the encouragement Cecilia needed. “I was out in the kitchen, fixing myself a cup of tea and I heard the sound of a piano playing. It was low and a bit muffled, so I thought it was coming from one of the neighbours. But when the tea was done and I left the kitchen, I looked through the door to the bedroom and there I saw a piano almost right inside the door. One of those upright pianos, you know, and there was someone sitting at it, playing it. It was the strangest thing in the world, much too strange for me to even get really frightened. So I just stood there, with my teacup and all, and listened. It was a lovely piece of music, not something I recognised. When he was done, he closed the lid, very carefully, and stood up and then both he and the piano disappeared.”
“Couldn’t it have been …” Christoph began, but paused when he realized that there was no reasonable way to finish the sentence. He could think of nothing that could be confused with a piano and a man playing it, especially not when there had also been music. But there were no such thing as ghosts. He suddenly found himself wondering about Cecilia’s mental state of health. But as she was sitting in front of him, with bright eyes, waiting for him to finally make a comment that was something other than ‘oh’ it seemed absurd for him to do so. Anyway, how did you, in a polite way, ask someone if they were feeling entirely well?
He saw her frown. “Are you okay, Christoph? Now you look like it’s you who’ve seen a ghost.”
“No. No, of course not. It’s just … Are you sure? I mean, you couldn’t have been mistaken?”
“No, Christoph, I could not have been mistaken. There were far too many details for it to simply be a shadow.” She half closed her eyes for a moment. “I can still see it clearly. There were candle holders on the piano, with unlit candles in them.” She opened her eyes again and shook her head lightly. “I either saw the whole thing or hallucinated it all, but no mistake is possible.”
“Have you seen it more than once?”
“No. But I haven’t lived there for very long.”
“Then maybe it won’t show up again. Maybe it wasn’t really anything.”
“Is that the scientist speaking? If the experience cannot be reproduced under controlled circumstances, then it doesn’t count?” He didn’t answer, but something must have shown in his face, for she leaned over and placed her hand on his, briefly. “I was only teasing,” she said. “I just wish that you could have seen it. It was extraordinary. And beautiful. Not at all frightening.” She looked like she was searching for the words to describe it. “I felt … privileged to have watched it.”
He still felt worried, but he managed to smile.
Cecilia looked at the clock. “I should go now,” she said. “Catch the next bus.”
He watched her from the window as she left.
Christoph was at a bar, having a beer with a couple of fellow students. The conversation had turned to an upcoming movie they were all looking forward to see. Christoph wasn’t taking part in the conversation, he was just nodding and making grunts at the right places, when his phone rang. He fumbled it out of his pocket and read Cecilia’s name in the display. He answered the call. “Hi, Cecelia!”
“Hi! Could you turn the music down, pleace?”
“I’m at a very noisy bar. I’ll go outside.” He squeezed himself through the throng of people until he reached the door. “I’m outside now.”
“Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“I won’t tell you what to listen for. I just want to know if you can hear it.”
He strained his hearing and thought he could hear music. “Music?” he asked.
“Yes!” The word sounded very loud in contrast to the low music, he had just been able to pick out. “You can hear it too! You can hear the ghost.”
Christoph felt a shiver run down his spine at her words. He listened even more carefully. Yes, it really was a piano playing. “It doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “It could be a recording.” A long silence followed his words, broken only by the soft tones of the piano, playing a lovely little tune, he didn’t recognise.
Finally, Cecilia said: “Are you suggesting that I’m sitting at home, playing a record for you, trying to trick you into believe in the ghost?”
“No, of course not. I’m just saying, that is what other people might say, if you try to tell the public about the ghost.”
“Is it, really?” He could hear her smile. “That is very forward-looking of you, Christoph. I’m just trying to convince you; I hadn’t even begun to think about the general public. But I think you should see the ghost for yourself. Come on over tomorrow night.”
Christoph had been hanging out in Cecilia’s apartment every evening for a week now. It was nice. They would talk and watch movies and drink lots and lots of tea. But the ghost hadn’t shown up and Christoph could tell, that it was bothering Cecilia. When they talked, she wasn’t all there and when they watched movies, she didn’t turn the sound up too high. He noticed how her hands sometimes seemed to grip the handle on her tea cup a little too tightly, as if she was suddenly struck by an unpleasant thought.
This evening started out the same. They drank tea and was talking a bit about one of Christoph’s teachers, when Cecilia tilted her head. “You hear that?” she said.
It took Christoph a moment to even remember what she was talking about, but then he did notice it. The faint sound of a piano playing. Before he could say anything, she had gotten up and walked into the hallway. He followed her. She was standing in the hallway, one hand on the wall, looking through the open door to the bedroom.
He felt a prickling sensation in the back of his neck. There, right inside the door, was the piano and the man playing it, exactly as she had described it, down to the unlit candles in the candle holders. He blinked and noticed how he could also clearly see the shape of Cecilia’s bed through the piano and the man. The melody being played was the same as the one he had heard through the phone, a lovely, little piece and now that he could hear it more clearly, it struck him as a bit sad.
The ghostly figure played for a couple of minutes and when the melody was at an end, it closed the lid on the piano carefully, stood up and … faded away.
He slowly tore his gaze away from the place where the ghost had been and saw Cecilia looking at him. Her expression wasn’t triumphant, but instead worried, even pleading. Like she was afraid, that he even now would deny the evidence of his own eyes.
“I’ll admit that I can’t explain what I just saw,” he said. “Not within the boundaries of existing science anyway. Maybe it’s a wormhole in time, but they are theoretical …” He was babbling, but that was okay. He saw her smile.
“You can explain it with science fiction if you want. As long as you don’t try to come up with a completely mundane explanation.”
“Well, I can’t, can I?”
“Did you also feel sorry for it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. Though, now that you mention it, it was a sad melody.”
“In the stories, ghosts often stay behind because they have unfinished business. Do you think that is the case?”
Christoph thought about this for a moment, then said. “It plays the piano, and it is not a melody either of us recognise. Maybe it composed the music, but died before it could play it for anyone. Maybe it wants the the music to be known. Does that sound too far fetched?”
“Considering we’re dealing with a ghost here, ‘too far fetched’ can take a hike. I think it sounds reasonable enough. But if you’re right, then what can we do to help it?”
Christoph thought again. Getting the music published properly seemed impossible, but there was another possibility. “We could record it and post it on youtube,” he said.
Cecilia tilted her head, a puzzled look on her face.
“I mean, if the ghost just want its music to be known, “ he continued, “maybe getting a few thousand views will be enough. And if it turns out it is not, we can always think of something else.”
She nodded. “Yes, maybe it will be satisfied with that. We should try it.”
They were still hanging out in Cecilia’s apartment every evening. She had studied the dates that the ghost had appeared on, but hadn’t been able to work out a pattern, so they just had to wait. They had moved their chairs out into the hallway and had a camcorder on a tripod pointing at the door into the bedroom. The ghost had so far appeared at a quarter past midnight, so at fourteen minutes past midnight, Christoph would turn on the camcorder and they would wait with baited breath. The time until fourteen minutes past midnight they spent talking, but now Christoph was also absent-minded and always had one eye on the door.
Five days after they had first seen the ghost, Christoph once again turned on the camcorder and they waited. But this time, when a minute had past, the ghost appeared, faded into appearance along with the piano. They barely dared to breathe as the ghost began to play.
Seconds rolled by along with the lovely melody. Christoph was watching the recording and was glad to see, that they seemed to be getting a clear and sharp image – well, clear and sharp for a recording of something transparent – when he was stuck by the thought, that this was too boring. If they ever were to get people to watch this video, as was the point, they needed to make it more exciting. The needed to film the ghost’s face.
He got up and lifted the camcorder from the tripod. He saw Cecilia give him a confused look, then her expression changed to worry as she guessed what he was doing. She didn’t speak, so as not to ruin the recording; instead she tried to grab his arm, but he easily avoided her.
He had to time it just right. He remembered the melody and knew that it was coming to an end soon, so he couldn’t waste any time, but he wasn’t in a hurry either. He zoomed in on the back of the ghost’s head and started to move around it. This, he thought, would look so cool. He didn’t care if people thought is was a fake ghost, as long as they also thought that it was a cool shot.
He moved around the ghost, getting the side of its head in frame, inch by inch. He got a crawling sensation on the back of his neck. Something was off, but he didn’t know what. As he took another step to the side, he realised what was wrong. The ghost didn’t have a profile.
He looked through the viewfinder and a whimper escaped him. The ghost had no face. There was a black hole where the face should have been, a dark hole that seemed to go on forever.
At the sound of his whimper, the ghost stopped playing and turned its faceless head towards him. His horror must have been obvious for now he heard Cecilia whimper as well, but he was unable to turn and face her. He started going backwards, still holding the camcorder between himself and the ghost as if it was a sort of talisman. The ghost got up and the piano faded away, but the ghost remained. It reached out and tried to grab the camcorder. Christoph stepped backwards and into Cecilia’s bed. He tried to get around it, but the ghost had caught up with him. He struck out against it with the camcorder, but it grabbed it and wrestled it from him. It hands briefly touched his, the fingers cold and clammy.
Then the ghost held the camcorder and for a moment Christoph thought it would finally disappear. Instead, in turned the camcorder on him, and everything went dark.
When light returned, he was somewhere else. A dark room; or so he assumed since he couldn’t make out the walls or even the floor. He tried to get up and found that his hands didn’t touch anything. There wasn’t a floor at all. Yet, he didn’t have a feeling of falling either. He turned towards the light, a big square, like a TV screen. As he looked at it, he saw Cecilia’s face. It was huge, filled the whole screen. He could see that she had been crying, her eyes all red and puffy. He realized where he was. He was inside the camcorder; the ghost had caught him in here.
As he looked at Cecilia, she tried to smile and failed miserably. She placed a finger on the screen, a huge orange-pinkish circle and ran it down. As he was wondering what she was doing, she drew a ‘W’ and he realised that she was writing him a message. I W I L L G E T Y O U O U T. How, he thought, but he tried to smile back at her, without a doubt failing as badly as she had done, and waved a little. Then the light disappeared as she had apparently either turned of the camcorder or, perhaps more likely, placed it in its back to keep it safe.
He curled up in the darkness, unable to do anything except waiting. He tried to whisper her name, but there was no air and he didn’t make a sound. Instead he said it in his mind. “Cecilia.”
There was a moments silence after the Radioactive Moss Creature had ended its story.
Then someone asked: “But what happened afterwards?”
“Yes,” someone else said, “did she get him out or what?”
“What about the ghost?” a third person asked.
“I actually don’t know,” the Radioactive Moss Creature admitted. “I had to leave in a hurry and I never got to hear the rest of the story.”
A disappointed murmur followed these words, but the Radioactive Moss Creature turned to the person sitting next to it. “Now its your turn to tell a story,” it said.
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RC#170 