Damn piano

In the nineties, residents' meetings were held periodically in our cooperative house. Let me explain: a cooperative is a community in which all issues of placement and contacts with external organizations are resolved at a general meeting. It's like a communal apartment the size of a residential building. Residents talked about home improvement, made up schedules of subbotniks, exchanged numbers of familiar locksmiths and electricians. I was ten years old at the time. Sometimes my mother took me with her to such meetings. It should be noted that we moved into this house a few months ago and hardly knew anyone.

So, at one of these meetings, a beautiful woman with long black hair approached my mother. She asked Mom for a lighter. Mom shook her head.

"I still can't quit smoking," the stranger defended herself.

In general, a conversation ensued, the woman said that she lived in the fourth entrance (we lived in the sixth) and gave her name – Nelly. Against the background of Tracy, Rachel and Lena, who were very popular names at the time, the name Nelly sounded very unusual. That evening, a new neighbor invited my mother and me to tea. Mom was happy to meet new people and agreed.

The woman turned out to be very smart and literate, my mother and I listened to her with admiration. Besides, she was really pretty, well, you can't take your eyes off her. Long raven-colored hair, very well-groomed and shiny. Beautiful sharp cheekbones and skin tone. She moved her black eyes in the manner of ancient Egyptians, and this makeup suited her very well. She said she came from an aristocratic family, hence the name. She told about her dreams and plans to move abroad. I was very surprised when I found out that she had a daughter Ariana, who was eighteen at the time, because Nelly looked very young to have such an adult daughter.

Nelly was a pianist, taught at a music school. And then Mom asked her to play something. The woman sat down at the piano and started playing some sad sonnet. It took my breath away from how beautiful and pure that sound was. I asked her to teach me how to play this divine instrument. She just smiled back with her white-toothed smile.

We went to Nellie's a couple more times. And after a while she disappeared. She stopped appearing at meetings, there was no light in the windows. At the next meeting, Mom asked the man who lived in the pianist's entrance why Nellie was not visible and whether she had left the country. To which he replied that she was crazy. She sits in the dark and does not leave the apartment. And on other nights, on the contrary, she runs away from home like a madwoman. Mrs. Margaret, her neighbor in the playground, told me that in the morning she found Nellie in her nightgown on the floor at the entrance. She had crazy eyes, and she kept repeating: "He will find me, don't tell him, he will find me!" One of the tenants of the house saw her running around the yard at night. She quit her job and started drinking. The neighbors said that she sold and drank all the furniture from the apartment, only the piano remained, which for some reason she played only at night.

My parents divorced, and we moved to another apartment, literally a ten-minute walk from the former housing. I turned twelve years old. One morning my mom and I saw a woman in the grocery store, she was rummaging through the trash and pulling out glass bottles from under beer. She heard our footsteps and turned around. In a wrinkled, pale and half-gray-haired woman, we hardly recognized our former neighbor Nelly. She began to talk about her thinness and how bad her life was. Then she asked me how I was doing, what I was doing. And I said that she inspired me to become a pianist, and I started going to music school. She smiled broadly, and I noticed to myself that her once beautiful teeth had become terribly neglected. It's only been two years…

"Do you want to sell us a piano for a nominal price?"

"What is it?" "What is it?" she asked suddenly. "However, Ariana has the keys to the apartment, she put it up for sale for debts," the woman sighed heavily. "Take the piano, otherwise we wanted to sell it along with the apartment.

"The piano will be just right," I thought then. In the end, I had to practice playing the synthesizer, and we all postponed buying a real instrument.

Judging by Nellie's appearance, her dirty hands and torn clothes, the poor guy did not live in an apartment, but on the street. Mom gave her a hundred rubles, and Nellie said she could pick up the piano next weekend. Ariana opened the door for us, Nellie was not at home. The girl said something like, "Mom went crazy a long time ago." But she let me take out the piano.

The instrument was placed in my bedroom. It looked just like new. Light brown lacquered wood with the inscription "Ode". The first time I sat down at it, I played a beautiful melody on the move, although I was only finishing the first grade of music school. I was playing and couldn't stop, as if someone was moving my hands.

Two months have passed. One summer night, when I was sleeping with the window open (we live on the second floor), I woke up to someone calling my name. Yes, so loud and clear. I think: I will turn my face to the wall, trying to fall asleep, but sleep does not come. It's still creepy. And then I distinctly hear the piano lid open and hit the panel (the front wall of the piano). A pair of keys from the last octave rang. To say that I was scared is to say nothing. I was dying of fear. I just pressed myself into the headboard of the bed and remembered the prayer "Our Father", the only adequate explanation I found was the fact that someone had climbed through the window, and it was better to pretend to be asleep. I don't remember falling asleep.

In the morning, the night incident seemed like a dream, the lid was closed. And I didn't leave the window open anymore, and the next night I woke up to the sound of mice swarming inside the piano. Then there was a light tapping, reminiscent of Morse code, on a piece of wood from the inside. I flew out of the room like a bullet and went to my mother (she was sleeping in the hallway).

This story reached its climax when one day I woke up in the middle of the night and saw Nellie standing next to my bed. So real, dressed in a white nightgown, her long black hair was disheveled, and red lipstick was smeared on her lips. Then she went to the piano, opened the lid and just ran her palm over the keys. The woman was muttering something in a hoarse voice. "He's going to kill my daughter," she just blurted out.

"Nelly, what are you doing in my room?" I asked, not believing my eyes and ears, it seemed to me that I was dreaming, and everything that was happening in my room was just a dream. The appearance of the former neighbor was too incredible, unexpected and frightening.

The pianist turned to me, tilted her head and somehow laughed bitterly and hysterically. Again, I didn't understand how I blacked out and slept until morning.

And one night I woke up from a terrible cold. I hear someone crying. I turn my head: Nellie is standing by the window. I shut my eyes tightly and began to pray. Nellie was gone.

The next day, my mother and I went to church and brought holy water and candles. Mom performed a simple ritual in my bedroom. A candle continued to go out next to the piano. Then my mother and I came to the conclusion that Nellie was a witch. To be honest, I already wanted to get rid of this damn tool.

Nellie's visits stopped, but I noticed that my room was colder than the others. My brother's room was on the same side as mine, but it was always warm there. Despite the summer, my feet and hands were constantly freezing when I was in my bedroom. I insisted on putting the piano away. Moreover, an inner voice told me that it should be smashed into splinters with an axe or burned so that this "witch's gift" would not inadvertently get to some poor guy. My father came with his friend, they disassembled the instrument into all possible components and took it to some kind of landfill.

And a month later, my mother told me a terrible story about Nellie, which she heard from her neighbor Mrs. Margaret. According to a neighbor:

"Nelka will die before the summer anyway. She got drunk. She was not even forty years old. Daughter Ariana outlived her mother by only two months, her new roommate killed her with a blow to the head. I feel sorry for the girl, she has nowhere to live. The apartment is considered to have gone under the hammer. So she got involved with some drug addict, and he killed her when the withdrawal started. The musician's drinking companion had the keys to the apartment, and she arranged a night sabantuy there. I heard a noise in an apartment where no one else lives, and called the police. But these eagles were in no hurry to answer the call. Then I woke up Peter, my husband, and we knocked on the apartment. Nelka's drunk girlfriend got scared and offered to solve everything peacefully, without involving law enforcement agencies. She kicked out her friends and asked me for strong tea to sober up. Well, I felt sorry for her. She made tea and we sat down in the kitchen. She started telling terrible things. For example, Nelly sold her soul to the devil for her beauty and talent. She confessed this to her shortly before her death. Pray, he says, for me, Tracy. The devil himself comes for me at night. Duty demands. And I was afraid to go home, I was ready to sleep with the homeless, just not at home. She swore that the devil lived in her piano. In general, this friend of hers was talking nonsense."

But only I know that this is not nonsense at all, and all the events that happened to Nelly that touched me have merged together... This woman was hypnotically beautiful, intelligent and talented. She wanted a sweet life, wanted to shine like a star, and turned to the dark forces, not sparing her soul. Only now the reckoning has come too soon or something has gone wrong…

Read other stories as well The mistress of the cursed apartment, The husband who was replaced, The evil spirit from the painting.