This short story first featured in my October 2023 newsletter.

Content warning: body horror, claustrophobic confinement

***

The sign at the entrance to Byrning Wood stands at a strange angle. It could almost be cowering, hiding its face from the moonlight threading down through the overhanging branches.

I hurry past it and push through the gate to the woods. My breaths come sharp and shallow, my feet on fire after my short run from the village. Running in heels is a pain — but a necessary one after I looked at the time and realised I was going to be late getting home from Nessa’s party. Or work at Moe’s Pizza Palace, which is where my parents think I’ve been.

Pausing as the gate squeals shut behind me, I rummage in my bag just long enough to lay my hands on the white server’s blouse with the MY NAME IS MELANIE badge attached to the tit pocket. With my silver cami top covered and tight black jeans on my bottom half, only my shoes will give me away when I get home, and they can be kicked off at the door. I’m about to shrug on the blouse, but a glance at the reaching, claw-like branches and thick mud patches along the path give me second thoughts.

If I turn up with my clothes all scratched and filthy, Mum and Dad will know exactly where I’ve been.

No, better to change when I reach the far gate, I decide. Then it’ll just be the whole broken curfew thing to deal with. But at least if my parents are still up when I get home — which they 100% will be — I can try to blag that there was some major mess at work and I offered to help clear up. A little bit out of character, maybe, but not that unlikely.

Leaves and twigs rustle with my footsteps. Now that the woods surround me, I can’t feel the breeze that chased me as I ran from Nessa’s. The air in here is so still, it makes every little sound a hundred times louder. Like there’s more than one set of footsteps hurrying along the path that will take me almost to my garden gate.

There’s nobody there, though. There’s never anyone else in Byrning Wood. I’ve only come this way once or twice myself, and then only during the day. Even the pervs are too scared to come here at night, though I don’t really get why. It’s just a few trees, the odd squirrel or rat scurrying about between them. Mum and Dad freak out whenever I mention using the woods as a shortcut home; apparently, I got lost in here for a whole night once when I was a kid. I don’t even remember it, so it can’t have been that bad.

It’s quite peaceful, once you learn to ignore that horror-movie instinct to look for monsters hiding in every shadow. I force myself not to look behind me. To keep my eyes on the path home.

I’m doing quite well until a sharp, metallic, grating sound snaps my gaze to a clearing on my right. The space is brightly lit by the full moon, like a spotlight shining down upon a stage. And in the centre of the clearing stands a red piano.

The sight of it is so strange and unexpected that I laugh, breath clouding the air in front of my face. As it clears, I almost expect the piano to have vanished ­— for it to be just a discarded red carrier bag or a lost coat that my agitated night brain twisted into a bizarre if recognisable shape. But no, it’s still there. Even from this distance I can tell its lacquered body is worn and peeling, but the instrument appears intact.

Who the hell put it here, though? It’s an odd place to want to dump something so heavy, and I can’t see any tracks to show where a quad or trailer might’ve hauled it in. It’s like the piano just grew from the forest floor like one of those red toadstools, familiar and impossible-looking all at once.

The grating sound comes again. It’s definitely coming from the piano. It’s harsh, discordant — not at all like a note being played.

My heels sink into the mossy forest floor as I step slowly into the clearing. I don’t even remember deciding to leave the path, but the strange sight is reeling me in, like I’m sleepwalking towards a cliff edge with no way to wake up.

The piano fallboard is down, covering the keys. Now that I’m closer, I see that the crimson outer casing is oddly pristine, despite the signs of age and wear. No fallen leaves lie scattered over its surfaces. There are no snails crawling over the body. But I still get a weird sense that it wasn’t left here recently; that it’s been years since this piano was played. How I’d know that, I have no idea. I don’t even play the piano, so it’s not like I have some musician’s sense about these things.

A breath of air passes over my nape, barely even a breeze. But it’s enough to wake my primal instincts, making me feel as though I’m not alone out here.

I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t safe.

My muscles tense, but I don’t run. There’s no danger here, I tell myself. I wasn’t scared walking through the woods at night, so why should a weird old piano freak me out?

Again, as though without any conscious thought from me, I find myself running my fingers along the smooth surface of the fallboard, reaching down to grip the edge and open it with a drawn-out creeeak.

It can’t have been touched in ages, yet the black and white keys glint in the silvery light, smooth and dirt-free like they’ve just been polished.

Impossible, I think, frowning down at them. But this whole thing is impossible.

I’m about to press down on one of the keys when that jarring, grating sound sends me flinching back. It comes again, and this time I notice one of the white keys has depressed ever so slightly.  I glance around, half expecting a phantom pianist to be hiding just out of range of the circle of moonlight, waiting to pounce on me for daring to touch his piano.

Maybe this is one of those old-fashioned pianos that plays all by itself?

My shoulders sag in relief as the thought comes to me. Yes, I can picture some rusty mechanism still struggling to play like an old clockwork toy wound one too many times. And while that’s not exactly un-creepy, it’s far less sinister than an unseen entity somehow moving the keys.

Look inside. See for yourself.

The words aren’t so much a thought as a whisper inside my head. I reach for the lid of the upright piano, my fingers lingering only a moment before lifting it open.

Instinct tells me instantly that I’ve made a terrible mistake. The sounds from before grow louder, harsher, like someone playing a violin with a serrated blade. It hurts my ears, makes me want to cover them with clenched fists and run, but there’s something stopping me. Something… familiar about what I’m hearing. About the piano, too.

An old memory stretches in its sleep, stirring in the darkest recesses of my mind.

I’ve been here before.

I feel it, like a deep, visceral warning. Yet I find myself leaning forward, craning to peer into the dark space I’ve just revealed by opening the lid.

Something is inside. Something moving.

Something alive.

Silver light cuts deep into the guts of the piano, and what I see there churns mine. A tangle of piano wire pulled taut around what at first appears to be a mass of hair. But it’s not just hair; a flash of pale skin, a blue eye, tells me that. It’s an animal of some kind.

An animal now, my voice whispers in my head, but not always.

That blue eye fixes on me, and I feel like I’ve been snared. Again, I want to run, to get away from this… thing, but I can’t. I simply stare at it, this creature shrouded by long, matted hair. My heart pounds a tattoo against my ribs, my tongue suddenly too thick to let me swallow.

That eye — it’s so like my…

Why am I just standing here?!

This thing… no, not a thing, a person… needs my help. I trace the lines of the piano wire snaring it, coiled around thin arms, wrapping around and around where a mouth ought to be like a metal gag. Where I see flashes of skin among the tangled hair, it looks like the wire has dug itself in — or the flesh has grown around it.

“Hold on,” I say, voice breaking as I force it out around the lump of fear in my windpipe. “I’ll get you out of there.”

I lean in to get a better look at how the wires are connected, thinking I might be able to disconnect the ends and not have to touch the thing inside, but I leap back as my hip presses against the piano keys, letting out a jarring discord. A muffled scream accompanies it a split second later, and I lean in — more carefully this time — and find the wires moving inside the piano. One of them, at least. The metal string coiled around the captive’s mouth begins to quickly unfurl, like some unseen fishing reel spinning its line back in. The person in there screams again, and more clearly this time as the gag is removed, coil by coil. Judging by the pitch of the voice, I think it’s a girl.

“Eff har!” she garbles.

“What? I’m sorry, I can’t understand you.”

But even as I speak the words, the last coil of wire releases from around her face. My stomach threatens to evacuate when I see that the end of the wire doesn’t simply wrap around her head like the rest; these last few inches criss-cross her mouth, weaving in and out of the skin surrounding her lips in horrific sutures. And now, seemingly of their own accord, they un-criss and un-cross, tugging free of her flesh, leaving behind small, jagged holes as her mouth unstitches itself. Finally, her face is free of the wire, though that filthy mass of hair still masks most of her features; all but her mouth and that one piercing eye.

Angry red lines mar the skin of her cheeks as though the metal has been pressing there not for minutes or hours, but years. Yet as I watch, her skin flattens out, becoming smoother. Paler. Like there was never a wire there at all.

“F sharp melody,” she rasps, much more clearly now, distracting me from my horrified staring. But her voice, too, sounds a note of fresh alarm inside me. She seems to sense my withdrawal; her eye widens as she shrieks at me. “F SHARP MELODY! PRESS IT, NOW!”

Hand shaking, I reach for the black key on the board in front of me. My finger presses on it before I even have time to wonder how I knew which key to press, and as the note rings out, the girl screams again. Inside the piano, another wire begins its process of unravelling — this time freeing the girl’s left hand. She dips her chin, hiding her face from me, and whimpers.

“G sharp,” she says as the wire finishes its withdrawal. “Hurry.”

That voice…

I press the key, and the wires inside the piano again start to writhe. Somehow, playing these notes is releasing her from her torture, but I can’t begin to understand how or why. I only know that with each note, the need to get away from her, from this instrument, from these woods, only grows stronger. Yet I can’t leave. I can’t. My feet refuse to turn and run back to the path, like something is compelling me to do as she tells me.

Just run. Get away from here and call the police, let them deal with this.

But my limbs ignore all commands except the ones she gives them — to play each note as she dictates.

“D. A. Play.”

This uncanny sequence of notes… I know it. I can’t know it, yet I do.

“C sharp.” Even without the finality of her tone, a part of me understands that this is it — the last note that will set her free.

Do I want to do this? No. With every cell of my being, no. But I can’t stop; I’m no more in control of my body than I am of the girl whose fingers now grip the edge of the lid as though readying to heave herself up and out of the wood and iron carcass.

I press the final black key. And it is final. I gasp as the last wire springs free of the girl inside the piano. And with that, she’s no longer inside it. Long-nailed fingers claw against wood as first her spindly arms emerge, then a rag-covered torso. Long ropes of black hair tangle grotesquely around her limbs as though trying to drag her back down, but she shoves the hair aside with an angry swipe.

And there she is, standing in front of me, her face now fully visible in the moonlight.

“How…”

I don’t manage to finish the question. Because my mind has stalled on the fact that the girl now staring at me has my face. My blue eyes. My pale skin. She appears half-starved and is caked in layers of dust and grime, but I can’t deny what I’m seeing.

“Melody,” she says, and yes — even her voice is my voice. And that name…

Melody.

That’s what she’s been saying. A name; not ‘F sharp melody’ but ‘F sharp, Melody.’

It’s… it’s my name.  Not Melanie.

Her pale eyes glitter with barely-leashed fury. “Return to your cage.”

My breath stills in my chest. No.

I look past her at the still-open lid of the piano, the yawning voice inside seeming now to whisper to me, summoning memories long locked away.

“We made a deal, and you lied,” the girl who isn’t me snaps, and I bristle. “An hour of my life for any wish I liked.”

“I did not lie,” I snarl, and am startled at the sound of my voice. Because it’s not my voice at all, but a hiss like wind forcing its way through a cracked windowpane. “You simply forgot to stipulate one mortal hour. Time is not so brittle for my kind.”

“It’s been SEVEN FUCKING YEARS!” the girl roars. “Melody, get back in your cage!”

Her hand slams down on the piano keys, the sound sending pain lancing through my skull like a lightning strike. It drives me to my knees.

“I can’t,” I whisper, cursing myself even as the words slip between my clenched teeth. But I can’t do what she’s commanding me, not even with her using my name. No more than I can lie now that she is free and my memory of who I am has been unleashed along with her. “Not until you make your wish.”

The wish that will complete our bargain, balancing a debt I never planned to repay.

“I wish to know your heart melody,” she says, chin jutting as her lips curve in a triumphant smile.

Her command hits me like a physical blow. “Please, anything but that…”

Not the one thing that will give her the power to lock me back in there forever.

“That is my wish,” she says. “Now give it to me.”

I’m powerless to do anything else. The binding magic of our deal forces me to stand and reach out with trembling fingers for the black and white keys.

With the first note of the tune that will again bind me to my dungeon, a wire snakes out from the piano’s innards and cinches painfully around my ankle.

“Please,” I whimper, even as I press the next key. Another wire lances out, trapping my other leg. It cuts into my skin without mercy, a burning pain I’d willed myself to forget.

How could I forget?

Another note, another wire. And as my limbs are snared, one by one, the metal wires tighten and begin to contract.

“Melanie,” I gasp. For years now I’ve used that as my name, but it was never truly mine. It was always hers. “Don’t do this, I’m begging you.”

But she has no pity for me. The kindness I once preyed upon in the young girl who wandered into my clearing has been strangled to death by the torment of the wires.

I’m dragged, inch by inch, into the dark recess of the piano. I can’t reach the keys to play the final notes myself, but I’m bound to give them to her. To hand her the keys to my prison cell, which I know she will never, ever reopen.

“B flat. G. C sharp.”

She plays each note, driving the wires around and around my body, tightening them until my blood coats the metal. I can’t move, only stare up at the silver moon, terrified in the familiarity of my situation. I thought I had freed myself for good. But I couldn’t keep away from the woods. Not forever. Not when I belong with the dark creatures that live here. I moan low in my throat, the sound muted by layers of metal thread.

Melanie’s head and shoulders appear above me. She’s now wearing the white blouse and nametag from Moe’s Pizza Palace, her hair pushed back from her face. Her scored flesh has begun to fill out already, the dirt flaking off her skin, leaving it pale and clean. The magic that held her captive is leaving her, removing the marks of what she’s endured. Soon she’ll walk out of the woods and forget she was ever here, ever saw me. She will fit back into her life — the life I borrowed — seamlessly.

She lifts one perfectly manicured hand, and for a moment I think she’s waving goodbye. But then Melanie grips the edge of the piano lid and slams it down, sealing me forever in the dark.

*

All rights reserved, Kat Ellis 2023

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