G H O S T    S T O R I E S N O C T U R N E by John Connolly I don't know why I feel that I must confess this thing to you. Perhaps it's because you're supposed to be objective. After all, I don't know you, and you don't know me. We have not spoken before, and it may be that we will never speak again. For now, we have nothing in common, except words and silence. Lately, I find myself thinking a lot about silence. There is an edge to it now, a constant threat of disruption. I keep waiting to hear those sounds again: the lifting of the piano lid, the notes rising from the vibration of the strings, the muffled echo of a false key being struck. I find myself waking in the darkest spell of the night, just to listen, but there is only silence. It was not always this way. I recall David waking me on that final night, the night I tried to destroy the thing that was luring my little boy away from me. I remember the fear in his voice, the trembling of his lip, the feel of his small hands upon me. "Daddy," he whispered. "Daddy, listen." And I listened, and I heard the first notes rising from the piano. "Daddy, he's back," said David. "The little ghost boy, he's back." Audrey and Jason died on August 25th, 1998. It was a sunny day, so the last time I saw her alive she was wearing a light summer dress - yellow, with green flowers - and sunglasses. Jason was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Audrey was taking Jason to swimming classes, and I remember kissing her goodbye and ruffling Jason's hair. Audrey promised to bring back something for lunch, and Jason waved to me through the rear window of the car as it pulled away. It disappeared between a gap in the trees, and then they were gone forever. Audrey was thirty five. Jason was eight, just one year older than his brother David. They died because a truck driver swerved to avoid a fox while he was coming around a bend, only a mile or two from our home. It was a stupid thing to do but, looking back, understandable. He ran straight into their car, and they were killed instantly. About a month ago, a new posting came up. I really had no choice but to go. It was temporary - just a year, maybe a little longer - but I thought that it might help. I mean, every day, on his way to school, David had to pass the place where they died. So did I. I thought that taking a break from it all might be good for us both. But it wasn't, of course. David's nightmares began about a week after we arrived at the new house. Or, rather, the old house, for it was a little dilapidated. The company was paying for some refurbishments, and a local man named Frank Harris had been working on it for some time before we arrived, but it was still a dark, claustrophobic place. It gave David bad dreams, or so it seemed. The first time it happened, I woke in darkness to hear the piano being played in the living room, the strains of a Chopin nocturne ascending from below. The agency responsible for the house had left a lot of the original furniture in place, including the piano. I got up and went downstairs to find David standing in the room alone. I thought that he might have been sleepwalking, but he was awake. He was always awake when it happened... I'd heard him talking to himself as I descended, but he stopped as soon as I stepped into the room. Still, I caught snatches of it, mainly "Yes" and "No", as if somebody was asking him questions and he was giving out answers in return. But he talked the way he talked to people he didn't know very well, or of whom he was shy, or wary. But the one-sided conversation wasn't the strangest part of it. It was the piano playing that was so strange. You see, David never played the piano. It was Jason, his lost brother, who played. David didn't have a note in his head. The next morning, David didn't want to talk about what had happened, despite some gentle questioning, and I didn't press him on it. I was always very careful with David, treading a thin line between respecting his need for silence and space in which to remember and grieve, and not allowing him to become so withdrawn that there was only that remembrance, and that grief. If he did not yet wish to discuss what had caused him to rise alone in the night and descend to the living room, then it seemed better to leave him be until he decided to broach the subject himself. But the next night, I woke to the sound of the piano playing once again, and the soft sound of David's voice rising towards me, answering "Yes" and "No" in a his quiet, careful way. When I reached the living room, I found that he was trembling, but the room was empty and quiet. He hugged himself tightly to me as I carried him up the stairs, and begged to be allowed to sleep in my room. For the rest of the night he lay beside me in my bed, and his hand gripped mine so tightly that my fingertips tingled. That morning, over breakfast, I asked David once again what he saw when he was in the room. For a moment, I thought that he would once again decline to answer, for he remained silent and still, his eyes staring down at the table before him. Then he raised his head, and the look on his face made me rise from my chair and kneel before him, his hands clasped in mine. "A little boy," David said. "I see a little boy. He has dark hair, and blue eyes and he's older than me, but only a little. He talks to me. He asks me to come and play with him. Sometimes, he asks me to sit beside him at the piano and help him to finish a song. Then he says we'll go away and play together. But I never go to him." "Why, David?" I asked. "Why won't you play?" "Because I'm afraid of him," said David. "He looks like a boy, but he acts...older." "David," I asked, "does he look like Jason?" David's face froze as he looked at me. "Jason's dead," he replied. "He died with mum in the crash." "But you miss him?" He nodded. "I miss him a lot, but the little boy isn't Jason. He looks like him sometimes, but it isn't Jason. I wouldn't be frightened of Jason." With that, he stood and placed his cereal bowl in the sink. He stayed at the sink for a time, then turned to me, as if he had decided something. "Dad," he said. "Mr Harris says that something bad happened in this house. Is that true?" "I don't know, David," I replied. And it was the truth. "Mr Harris says that you have to be careful with some places," David continued. "He says they have long histories, that the stones hold memories and sometimes, without meaning to, people can make them come alive again." I tried to keep the anger from my voice as I spoke. "Have you spoken to Mr Harris about your nightmares, David?" He nodded unhappily and I felt a sudden surge of jealousy. Why had my son turned to this man, a stranger, and not to me? "Why did you tell Mr Harris?" I asked. "Because I knew he'd understand," came the reply. "I don't know how, but I just knew." I turned away from him then, to hide my hurt, and spoke to him over my shoulder. "Mr Harris is employed as a gardener and a handyman, David, not as a professional frightener. I'm going to have a word with him. Now you'd better be off to school." With that, David nodded unhappily, picked up his coat and schoolbag from the hallway, and walked down the garden path to wait for the school bus. I was about to join him when I saw another figure kneeling beside him, obviously talking to David, his face serious and concerned. He was an elderly man with silver hair, and there were paint stains on his blue overalls. It was Frank Harris, and I felt that hurt bubble up inside me once again. He stood and patted David's head gently, then waited until the bus pulled up and whisked David away before turning and heading up the path towards the house. I intercepted Mr Harris as he opened the front door with the spare key. He looked a little startled, then confused as I asked him to follow me into the kitchen. He laid his paint pot down on the floor and took the seat which David had so recently vacated, as if he knew that my son had been sitting there and that, somehow, it was his duty to say what David had been unable to tell me. "I'm afraid that I have to talk to you about a serious matter, Mr Harris," I said. "It's these stories you've been telling David about the house. You know, he's been having nightmares, and you may be the cause of them. I really don't think you should be discussing such things with him." "Well, Mr Markham, I am surprised," he replied. "I haven't been telling David any ghost stories about that house, or any other." He regarded me evenly. "All I told your son was that he should be careful. All older houses have histories, some good, some bad. Strange as it may seem, I can still feel my wife in my own house, the house we shared together, though she was taken from me the best part of five years ago. I can even smell her scent sometimes. The memories of her are still there, and memories make people alive again. That's the way it is with houses. As new people enter them, and bring new life into them, the history of the house is altered and modified. That way, bad histories can slowly, over time, become good histories. It's the way of things. But the house where you now live, Mr Markham, hasn't had that kind of change. It hasn't had time." Now it was my turn to look confused. "I don't understand," I said. "Your company rented that property for you without checking on its history," said Harris. "It was just in the right area at the right price, and the agent was so happy to rent it he didn't see any point in spoiling a good deal by opening his mouth. Nobody from around these parts would ever have considered renting or buying this house, or even recommending it to a non-local. In fact, I was the only person who would agree to work on it. It's not a good house in which to be raising a child, Mr Markham. It's not good to allow a child to live its life in a house where another child had its life ended." "A child died in the house?" "A child was killed in the house," he corrected me. "Thirty years ago this November. A man named Victor Parks lived here, and he killed a local child in his bedroom. The police caught him trying to bury the remains down by the river." "Lord," I said. "I'm sorry, I didn't know. I've never even heard of Victor Parks." "Nobody told you, Mr Markham, so you couldn't have known," continued Harris. "By the time you'd rented the house, it was already too late. As for Parks, he's dead. He had a heart attack in his cell on the very night he was sentenced to life imprisonment. There were those who said that he couldn't bear to be separated from the house. He had lived there all his life, and the house had been in his family for two generations before that. Maybe the thought of life in a small cell, far away from what was familiar to him, was too much for him to bear." Something changed in his voice. It tightened, as if fighting off some familiar but unwanted emotion. "He was an unusual man, Victor Parks," he said. "He worked as a verger in the church, he served on the local council. In many ways, he was a model citizen. And people trusted him. They trusted him with their children." He paused, and those old eyes were filled with a remembered grief, as they stared back into the past. What he said next made my stomach lurch and caused my hands to tense involuntarily. "He gave piano lessons, Mr Markham. He taught piano to the children." For a moment, there was silence between us. It was I who broke it. "I've heard the piano playing," I said quietly. "At night. It's what draws David down to that room." I thought of all the children who had passed through that room, and the child that had met its end there, and I wondered, for an instant, if it might be that child whom David believed he saw. Yet I did not believe in such things and so I pushed the thought aside. After all, David said that the boy looked like Jason, and I still believed that, somehow, David's grief had caused him to conjure up visions of his dead brother. Mr Harris sighed gently, then bent down to pick up his paintpot. "There's one more thing you should know, Mr Markham," he said, as he stood. "David says he sees a little boy, but Parks didn't kill a boy. He killed a little girl. Whatever your son is seeing, Mr Markham, it's not the ghost of that dead child." I stood aside to let him pass, and the next question came so unexpectedly that I thought for a moment an unseen third person had asked it. "What was her name, Mr Harris, the name of the girl who died here?" But even as the words left my lips, I already seemed to know part of the answer, and I understood at last why it was that he had agreed to do the work on this house. "Lucy," he replied. "Her name was Lucy Harris." That night David came to me, and woke me to listen to the sound of the piano. Again, I heard the nocturne being played, expert fingers drawing the notes from the keys. "It's him," whispered David. I could see his tears glistening even in the darkness. "That's the music he always plays. He wants me to follow him into the dark place, but I don't want to go. I'm going to tell him to go away. I'm going to tell him to go away forever." With that, he turned and ran from the room. I leaped from my bed and followed him, calling to him to stop, but he was already racing down the stairs. Before my bare foot even hit the first step, he was entering the living room, following the sound of the piano, and seconds later I heard his voice raised. And a second voice answered. When I reached the bottom of the stairs and stared into the living room, there was a little boy seated on the piano stool. It looked like Jason, except it wasn't him. All of the good in Jason, all of the brightness, just wasn't there. Instead, there was the shell of a boy who might once have been mine, and something dark moved inside him. He wore the same T-shirt and shorts that Jason had been wearing on the day he died, except they didn't fit quite right. They looked too tight, and there was dirt and blood on them. And the voice: it wasn't a child's voice. It was a man's voice, deep and threatening. It sounded obscene, coming out of this small boy. It said: "Play with me, David. Come, sit beside me. Help me finish my piece, then I'll show you my special place, my dark place. Come to me, David, and we can play together forever." I stepped into the room then, and the spectre looked at me. As it did so, it changed, as if by distracting it I had somehow broken its concentration. Its form shimmered and rippled, like the reflection in a pool distorted by the impact of a stone, and when the disturbance ceased it was no longer a boy. It was no longer anything human. Instead, the thing was old and stooped and decayed, with a hairless skull and pinched white skin. Yellow teeth were revealed as it raised its hand to its mouth and licked its fingers with the remains of its tongue. The shreds of a dark suit hung on what was left of its body and its eyes were black and lusting. I knew that here, at last, was Victor Parks; that Harris was right: he had never left this house, not even in death. The essence of him still remained, coiled in some dark place, waiting, reliving again and again the killing of a child named Lucy Harris. And now my son had entered that place, and the old urge had come again on Victor Parks. I grabbed David and pushed him behind me, back into the hallway. I could hear him crying. The thing smiled at me, and touched itself as it did so, and I knew what I had to do. There was a sledgehammer in the hallway. Harris had left it there, along with his other tools. I reached for it, my eyes never leaving the thing on the piano stool. It was already fading away when I took the first swing, and I saw the hammer pass through it as it hit the piano. I struck at the wood and ivory, again and again and again, screaming and howling as I did so. I kept swinging the hammer until most of the piano lay in pieces on the ground, and my feet bled from the impact of the splinters. Then I took the remains outside and, in the darkness, I burned them. David helped me. We stood in the still night air and we watched them burn. And I thought, at one point, that I saw a figure twisting in the flames, a figure in a dark suit, slowly burning, its mouth wide in agony as it turned to smoke. Now it is I who have the nightmares, and I who lie awake listening in the dead of night. And in my dreams I see a thing with hungry eyes luring children into dark places, and I hear the sound of a nocturne playing. I call to the children. I try to stop them. Sometimes, Mr Harris is with me, and we try to warn them together. Sometimes they listen to us. And sometimes, they listen to the music. © John Connolly