The Red Piano

A Gothic Fairytale

The room was a contrast of deepest shadows and cold, silvery moonlight, built on a grand scale. The grandeur of the place was undermined by its resounding emptiness; the floor and walls were bare, the air was dead, the silence heavy. Soaring stone buttresses supported a roof that arched far overhead to a height not clearly perceived in the darkness. The floor, a polished mahogany that had been bleached to black by the night, stretched away beyond and to either side of the double doors set into the stone.

High up on the far wall, large Gothic windows spilled the beams of the full moon down into the huge empty space. Frost glittered coldly on the windowpanes. There was a chill in the air here, a chill that was not only felt through temperature but in the surreal silence of this place, the ancient stone walls, the thick layer of grey dust which lay over everything and spoke of years of solitude and aching memory and locked doors without a key.

The double doors were huge, and unmistakably old. They were wooden, and their dark surface was carved with twisted gargoyle faces that peered from the flourishes of intricate vines, drooping with the weight of heavy wooden grapes and delicately carved leaves. They opened with a slight creaking that wailed their previous silence – no one had entered here for a long time.

There was a moment of ponderous quiet as the creaking died away, and then a figure stepped through the large carved doors and closed them behind her with a soft sound that nevertheless echoed around the room. The form was dwarfed by the proportions of the chamber. Cold, bare walls. A room of moonlight, shadow, ice, dust. The erosion of time locked in a single still moment, seemingly beyond the reach of time itself.

A large grand piano stood quietly in the centre of the room, lonely in its own pool of moonlight. Footsteps echoed across the large space, and the figure approached. Pale hands, almost white, caressed the ebony piano lid, cold to the touch, the moonlight glinting with an almost painfully sharp clarity on its surface. The heavy black material of her long dress trailed in the dust on the floor as she moved around to open the piano lid. She stopped.

A rose lay upon the piano, the deep velvety red seeming even darker in the shadow, the colour of an ancient bloodstain that has seeped into cold stone. She picked it up and sunk a thorn into her fingertip, and watched a drop of black blood trickle across her snowy skin. Her eyes were large, too large. They seemed to contain the darkness of the room within their depths. The heavy, rich scent of the rose seduced her.

She moved back and seated herself before the piano keys. The silence of the room was no longer sleepy, but brittle, expectant, watchful. Waiting to be broken.

A clear note, as pure and as cold as the moonlight, rang through the air.

It was a long piece, dark and intricate. She played until her fingers bled, and her blood seeped into the keys and stained them red. Her long dark hair fell down around her white face and lay upon the crimson keys, unique notes of their own. The music was made of her blood and flowed in her veins. Black music, midnight music, fire music. She seemed afire with creation as she played, and drops of blood fell on the keys like notes sounding through silent air.

The next morning, the pale sun hides behind the heavy grey clouds which peer into the room, incurious, detached.

Silence. Emptiness. Locked doors.

A withered black rose lies across bloodstained piano keys.