Reflected sorrows

Chapter 9

The last gate closing was a gunshot in the eerie silence; she could've heard a pin drop among the veil of melancholy that had fallen upon this place. It was a lurking fog and a constant, incessant sound that echoed for miles, its cries of desperation heard for miles and remaining as potent and unrelenting; like a child calling for help and getting only steely glares. So she only watched as the fog parted and the menacing figure was revealed, its mask of tyranny peeled off, leaves on a wet, black bough, only to reveal a deeper evil within the brooding figure and foreboding silhouette that had been seen mocking her from a distance with an insidious glare. Something about this place was ancient and crumbling, and yet... No one ever seemed to talk about it; she wasn't quite sure why- the thought was a match near her feet that she scampered away from and still leaned toward, and in every conversation, it would almost slip out from her careless tongue, only to halt and gaze at her from a distance and return into its eternal abode. It danced in front of her; this place called her forth with every nook in its brooding windows and every crack in its shattered glass. It had apparitions of joy within every window frame, the marble columns veins through the cold, bleak stone that contained blue, unrelentingly icy blood; she could smash them, shatter them into tiny little pieces that had no mouth with which to cry for help. And yet even with the brooding eyes, just barely awake, she couldn't bring herself to harm it. It was the eyes of a young child, so innocent yet so uncanny. Her hand willed her to move the lock, unleashing the apparitions of the mansion into the world with a crash and a melancholy silence to follow, echoing into the dull rain. They willed her to take it by the hand and shake the hand of the strange mansion and admire every brick and how it was so intricate so that a touch of a hand could make it fall to the ground. She pushed away the adamant cries, but they always came back stronger, so she held the cold, wiry fingers of the lock, the metal piercing the warmth she still had inside despite the thunder.

The door smashed against the stone wall, its wood almost falling away in planks and spreading decay over the floors, revealing the basement beneath- she leapt over the plank of rotting wood on the floor, leaping back at the curdled stench. She hadn't seen that before; she searched the holes opening one by one as it was devoured by this place- but she could not see a single one in all her memories of this place. All was empty of meaning and memory, and she couldn't bear to breathe the potent stench any longer, so she walked up the steps, seeing a strangely well-preserved carpet pathing the way towards a single piano in the centre of the room, a hand calling her toward it with a stare hard enough to freeze a thousand mountains in a single breath. She ran toward it as fast as she could, knowing that it knew her; she had a feeling deep down that there should be paintings. There should be mirrors. There should be more than this, but something had fragmented her memories, or perhaps she had imagined her previous visit, and burning all those letters, she viewed everything through a hazy, dreamlike lens, and some was forgotten under that same fog, creeping over her skin even as she gaze upon the single figure, poise unwavering under her curious gaze; she tentatively moved toward it, its wood glinting under the stormy light from outside. As the sun set, she placed her hand onto the keys, their sounds unfamiliar and dissonant to her sleepless mind- she was reluctant, but something needed her to press the keys and feel their weight fighting her, letting out screeches of terror as her steady hand approached. No piano she had ever heard sounded like this. It was the voice of some twisted creature, cackling with a rasping, raucous laughter that wanted only her discomfort and nothing else. It was the hand of a cold kind of love on her shoulder and creeping over her entire corpse as the first note was played; her hands seemed to move on their own, dancing by a strange rhythm and always continuing no matter how much she tried. She didn't know this music- she couldn't recognise its strange melodies and understand its piercing notes. Why was it so uncannily familiar?

She might've played for hours or days; she might've played for weeks or months. She might've had her hands bleeding by the end, crimson accumulating in rivers around the melancholy red carpet. She could've played for years but the piano was a leech sucking away the blood from her body and replacing her joy and comfort with dread, draining her body of all it knew and all its colour. Exhaustion cut her chains, shattering the monochrome curtain and slicing the chains that held her to the puppet master's chains. The strings were frail to the overwhelming lassitude she felt. And at once a silence fell upon the room. It was relentless, unbearable every second and she did not hear even the echoes of her footsteps; she did not smell the stench of potent perfection as she had once before as she entered; even the paintings, which she remembered so well, seemed to be there again. She cast her gaze around, the room swelling into a looming mass of walls that writhed within a world she did not recognise. They stretched and contorted into towering figures that held her in a cruel grasp of fear. She saw a single hallway through a door that was ajar, and the unnerving length set its length before her- why was it so intimidating? It was just a long hallway, she told herself- it may have been a little plain, having only a shattered picture frame at the end, but it was just a hallway, right? No need to be afraid. She looked back, considering whether to walk onward, but there lay now no piano, instead only an apparition of rotted carpets and the melody ringing through the halls, woe tracing its every echo. Where had it gone? Everything was just an apparition now, so how was she to remain calm and sane among a labyrinth of swirling walls? Who was she to become?