The Inheritance of Ivory Keys

My name is Mara, and I am 16 years old. I’ve always been drawn to old things, but this was different. It was April 2011, and I was staying at my great-aunt’s Victorian farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a place she called ‘The Pines’. The house was a museum of relics: faded daguerreotypes, a grandfather clock that chimed at odd hours, and a dusty vitrine full of porcelain dolls with cracked faces. My favorite was the grand piano in the parlor, a massive Steinway from 1923, with its ivory keys yellowed and worn. On the fallboard, a brass plaque read: ‘For my dearest Rosalind, with all my love, August 1924.’

Aunt Hester, a spry 80-year-old with eyes like wet slate, always insisted the house was ‘occupied’. She’d mutter about a woman in a white dress who wandered the upstairs hallway, and about a man who sat at the piano at night, playing a tune that made the windows rattle. I dismissed her as a lonely old woman with too much time and too many memories. I was a skeptic, a child of science, or so I thought.

On my fourth night there, I couldn’t sleep. The house was quiet, but the silence felt heavy, like the walls were holding their breath. At 11:50 PM, I walked past the parlor, catching a whiff of lavender and old paper. I glanced in and saw the piano, its keys glinting faintly in the moonlight. At the end of the hall, Aunt Hester’s room was closed, a sliver of light under the door. I went to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come. I tossed and turned, and around 2:30 AM, I heard it: slow, deliberate creaks from the parlor floor—like footsteps, but too heavy for a woman, too steady for a ghost.

I sat up, my heart thudding. The house fell silent. I held my breath, listening. Then, from the parlor, came a sound that made my blood run cold: the soft, hesitant plinking of piano keys, as if someone were searching for a melody. It was off-key, halting, like a child’s first attempt. I fumbled for my phone, the screen glowing blue. 2:30 AM. I took a deep breath and crept to the parlor, my bare feet cold on the hardwood. I pressed my ear to the door, but the music had stopped. Just the hiss of the old radiator.

I pushed the door open. The room was empty. The piano stood against the far wall, its lid closed. But on the bench, there was a small object glinting: a gold locket, tarnished with age. I picked it up, and inside was a faded photograph of a young woman with dark hair and sad eyes. The initials ‘R.E.’ were engraved inside. My aunt’s name was Hester, but her mother, my great-grandmother, was Rosalind. I’d seen her portrait in the upstairs hall.

Suddenly, a cold draft swept through the room, and the piano let out a single, resonant chord—as if a hand had slammed down on the keys. I dropped the locket and stumbled back. The portrait of Rosalind in the hallway seemed to be watching me, her eyes following my every move. I heard Aunt Hester’s voice from the top of the stairs: ‘She’s been missing that locket for fifty years. The man who gave it to her never returned from the war.’

I ran to my room, locking the door. For the rest of the night, I lay awake, listening to the creaks and groans of the old house. But now I knew: it wasn’t just the house settling. It was her. It was him. And the piano, that beautiful, cursed instrument, was the doorway. At dawn, I found the locket back on my nightstand, open to a new inscription: ‘I don’t rest until you find him.’ I don’t know who ‘him’ is. But the next day, I started looking.