Chris Chapman was born in a coal town in eastern Kentucky, and has worked at various times as a news reporter and editor, government employee, teacher, and independent literary agent in Boston and New York. A U.S. Air Force veteran, he has a Master�s degree in English Literature and has written four novels (unpublished), all in different genres. His poetry has appeared in the Green River Review, Voices International, and other small publications. His current interests include Eastern philosophy, playing classical guitar and piano, and selling books on the internet. He lives in Cincinnati, is single, and has no dogs, cats, or house plants.

It was over lunch at the old Warburton Hotel that Scott told me his story. The Warburton is an antiquated jumble of brown stone and striped canvas on New York's upper west side, a particularly suitable setting for that sort of tale. It is steeped in its own peculiar amalgam of gloomy history and faded nostalgia, so the cosmopolite who finds himself on the premises had better be a resident, a chance traveller with a penchant for the bizarre, or simply (like myself) a fellow with a taste for Claude Benoit's odd blend of French and American cooking.

I had not seen Jeremy Scott since our college days in Philadelphia two decades ago, and I was surprised to find him looking so prosperous. He was no longer the pale, thin youth who had haunted the college library and sat up into the small hours in his room with the clavichord -- an instrument he played with more indulgence than passion, since his first love was the piano.

For those unacquainted with the characteristics of the various keyboard instruments that history has bequeathed us, I should perhaps explain that in Scott's case, the principal advantage of the clavichord was its quietness. Developed several hundred years before Christori's invention of the piano in the eighteenth century, this little instrument, with its small brass hammers directly striking the strings, is so soft as to be entirely unsuitable for any accompaniment whatsoever (even a flute would overwhelm it), and would scarcely be audible from an adjoining room, even with the door ajar. At any rate, it was open to question whether Scott's dormitory neighbors did not appreciate the instrument's qualities rather more than he did, since he had had to sacrifice the majestic bombast of his beloved Liszt in favor of the intimate confessions of Rameau and Couperin. And while this may have done his survey of the history of keyboard literature (and even his interpretation and technique) some good, he often grumbled about it and took more and more to hanging around Corbin Hall, where the music department's students practiced. Scott joked about living in "reduced circumstances" in the dormitory, and the length of the clavichord's keyboard (almost three octaves shorter than a piano) stood as a testimonial to the reduction.

"Sixty-six keys!" he would snort. "Even if the damned thing were suitable for Beethoven's sonatas -- which it certainly is not -- you could only play about half of them on it!"

My friends and I -- the little circle that cautiously included Scott among its members -- were mildly amused by his chafing, but we hardly understood the reasons that would compel a grown man to prefer an hour at a musical instrument to an hour at the rowlocks. Fortunately, though, Scott did his share of service there, too, claiming that his years of ivory-thumping had built up his stamina and his arms, which may have been the case. Anyway, our crew took three firsts that year. It came as no surprise to us the following year to find that Scott had opted for more private quarters in the Fairmount area near the Art Museum, nor that one of the principal reasons for his off-campus move was a fervent desire to scrap the powdered wig of Purcell for the wild, unruly shock of Paderewski. In other words, he had found a place where he could have a piano, and in fact the rooms he took came furnished with one -- not an unusual occurrence in those days. I recalled visiting him, either alone or with mutual friends or crewmates, on several occasions, but now could barely remember the place. Which was how we came to the subject of his strange experience.

"Well, it was on the third floor -- a row house, naturally, since there isn't much else in that part of the city. The landlady lived on the first floor, and was a little hard of hearing, so I suppose that accounted for her allowing the piano. Or maybe nobody had felt like moving it down the staircase. The second floor was inhabited by a young attorney, I believe, who was seldom in evenings, being all caught up in his fledgling career and the excitement of Philadelphia night life. And he was often away in Washington or New York, so really, with the exception of Mrs. Thomas, who seldom bothered me, I had the place pretty much to myself."

I settled back in my chair with a subdued, pleasurable belch, lit a cigarette and fiddled absently with my cup. "I remember there was a vague rumor that you were also involved in a romance at the time, and that the young lady might have paid you an unchaperoned visit or two . . . ."

Scott avoided my eye and took a sip of coffee. "Really? Well --" (with this he looked up) "-- that was true, Ben. But I hope you will excuse me if I don't tell you much more than that." Again he lowered his gaze, and for a moment I thought he was reconsidering. But then his mouth took on that determined set that I remembered so well from our rowing days, and I knew I would never hear the whole story from his lips. Later I often wondered what the truth of it really was, and

if the story of the girl's death and the tale Scott told me that night had any connection. And whether the connection was merely psychological or -- well, supernatural, to put it bluntly.

In fact, as he narrated the story I got the impression that he was only sketching in the shapes of those things he wanted me to see, as in one of those horrible paintings using numbers that have lately become so popular among the bourgeoise. The girl was conspicuous by her absence in the narration, so it was left to me to imagine their meetings in the old house and their year-long romance . . . . I wondered if it was true that Scott had got her with child and then hedged at wedding bells at the crucial moment -- not out of lack of character or a desire to do the right thing, but simply through a need to work it all out in his own mind first, like one of those titanic piano fantasies he used to play. And was it true that in a fit of guilt and despair, half-crazed with lack of sleep and lack of food, the girl had thrown herself into the Schuylkill just below the spillway? Or had it been an accident, as officially reported? Only our little circle of friends, classmates and crew whispered the first story, and to my knowledge no one ever had the audacity to question Scott about it.

But he did drop out of sight for a time after that, and we saw little more of him for the remainder of the year. By the beginning of the following term, his final year at the college, he seemed the same old Scott if you discounted a certain grimness about the mouth and eyes and a sort of vague, sad air that sometimes crept out when he was "in the wings", so to speak, and unaware that anyone was watching him. We speculated amongst ourselves, and for lack of any tangible evidence decided in Scott's behalf. For all that he was a Romantic smacking somewhat of the outre school, he was still one of our regulars, and we felt (or wanted to feel) that he could not be morally at fault. He was also a crackerjack oarsman, and in our eyes that did a great deal to redeem him of any suspicions.

All this and more came back to me over sherry at the Warburton. Scarcely in the time it took me to light another cigarette, all that long-buried residue of incomplete accusations and half-rumor resurfaced. I wondered if enough time had elapsed to allow me a gentle probe or two.

I plunged. "This girl . . . She was a musician, too, I believe."

Scott seemed to wince. "Well, yes. But a real one, not like me. I scrapped the music during medical school for the most part, you know. Med school takes a lot out of a person."

He seemed to be trying to change the subject. "So the fact that she was a musician had nothing to do with --"

"Of course it did!" he snapped. "After all, I'm human -- not just a diagnostician, Ben!"

"No, no . . . Sorry, Scott. I didn't mean to imply that you were overly analytical. I only meant . . ." I looked into his eyes for a moment, and what I saw there made me feel enough of an ass to apologize further. "Please forgive me. It's really none of my business."

He sat in silence for a long moment, left hand clenched beside his plate, staring at the tablecloth. Then, with that quick, decisive air I remembered so well, he signalled the waiter for another sherry and leaned back as if relaxing one muscle at a time.

"Anyway, you were saying something earlier about the house . . ."

"Oh . . . yes!" He glanced up, his mouth twitching, eyes bright. I couldn't be sure if that look expressed a sort of grim humor, or merely frustration.

"Well, you'll think I'm crazy, no doubt," he said at last. "But I'll tell you anyway." Scott took a long, slow sip of coffee and scratched thoughtfully at his underlip. His hands were long, slender, and I recalled once mentioning how they seemed perfect pianist's hands, only to have him demur with a soulful expression, informing me that most good pianists had rather squarish hands like mine.

"You see, I went back there a couple of years ago. I was at a conference at the university, and as I was staying downtown, I took to rambling about the city every evening. I would enjoy a leisurely early dinner at the hotel, then simply strike out alone -- see a play or a concert, perhaps. I was greatly struck by how much the old place had changed. It seemed almost as though I had never really lived there at all, but only knew it as we know a place from having read about it. Or from old photographs, or our own imaginings and dreams . . . ."

"You were staying alone at the hotel?"

"Yes. I . . . never married, you see." This bald statement, uttered so quietly, seemed to imply much, and I found myself again thinking of the girl, the musician (a great mass of lovely auburn hair, with dark, sensitive eyes, they said), and wondering if she had been the reason.

"One evening I found myself up near the art museum. It was still fairly early. We had finished our conference business late that afternoon because one of our speakers had cancelled at the last minute. Anyway, I was walking along Spring Garden Street in a sort of pleasant daze, not really thinking about anything in particular, when it suddenly occurred to me that I might be interesting to see the old house again where I had lived during those last few months of college."

I nodded. "The nostalgic impulse often leads us into strange byways."

"True. Well, it was just getting on toward dusk, and the street lamps began to come on. I wandered about all those little Fairmount back streets for the longest time. To tell the truth, I really couldn't quite remember where the place was; after all, it had been twenty-odd years." He paused for another sip of sherry. "I finally located it, though, and was standing out front on the sidewalk just looking up at it when an old lady came out of a little neighborhood grocery on the corner across the street and crossed over. I saw right away that it was Mrs. Thomas. She had changed very little after all those years -- just seemed a bit more stooped and worn, you know. And I was flattered that she did eventually remember me, although she didn't seem to until I mentioned my name and recalled my brief tenancy there.

"The upshot of it was, she asked me in for a cup of tea, so I went along. I suppose I felt I could use a cup of something at the time, because I had walked a long way from downtown and hadn't had my dinner yet, since we'd wound up the conference so early."

Scott leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette in a turquoise ashtray. Odd, I thought, how many physicians smoke. His eyes glittered almost feverishly. Somewhere in the depths of the big room a piano started up quietly, and his head jerked around. He went pale on the instant, and his hand trembled almost imperceptibly. He paused a moment before going on with his story.

"We had tea and some of those little Scottish crackers that taste so flat without butter, but seem so delicious with a good cup of Darjeeling. I really couldn't fathom what had prompted her to ask me in, you know. I had never been very close to her, apart from the routine courtesies that a lodger might share with a landlady. But we had been on good terms, and as I looked around her apartment I was rather pleased to notice how little the old place had changed. She was a widow, I believe, with no children or close relatives in the city."

"And still living in the same apartment."

"Yes. I felt a bit sad for her, in a way. You know how it is: you visit a place where people still live the same way they did when you knew them years before . . ." A distant look appeared in Scott's eyes. "Almost as if time had stopped for them there. Well, anyway, she told me my old apartment was rented, but that the young marrieds who had taken it were on vacation at the Jersey shore that week. Offered to show it to me, though, if I wanted to see it just for old times' sake. She seemed to understand my nostalgic whim."

"Did you go up, then?"

"No, I --" Scott looked away. "I didn't." He was silent for such a long time that again I felt sure he had mentally painted over something he didn't want me to see.

"Then she told me something strange," he continued at last. "It seemed the place was . . ." he chuckled grimly, "well, haunted!" He laughed. "Can you imagine a haunted house in the nineteen-twenties?"

My brows went up. "Oh, really?"

"Yes. 'You don't always hear it,' she said. 'Mostly in the winter, and only then when no one's about. Or in the apartment, I mean.' I asked her which apartment, because I thought she meant the second-floor one. 'Your old place,' she said. Mrs. Thomas had always struck me as a very down-to-earth sort, so I found this of more than passing interest. Of course, I imagined she must be getting a little peculiar in her old age."

"Old people do often seem to hear and see strange things," I put in.

"Yes. I thought nothing more of it at the time, and we went on to other topics -- the sort of impersonal conversation that people make when they are old acquaintances, but not, perhaps, old friends that you might see again. I was getting pretty hungry after the crackers and tea, which had affected me like an appetizer. But the tea had braced me up a bit, so finally I got up with thanks and apologies. It occurred to me that Mrs. Thomas was probably pretty lonely, and while she had never seemed very sociable in the old days, she was human, after all, and probably appreciated a little company now and again.

"She went into the outside hall with me, and we were just making our last goodbyes. I was speaking when she suddenly stopped me and raised a finger.

"I didn't hear anything at first. A bus was going past outside, so I wasn't sure what she meant, and I thought she must be waiting to speak until the bus had passed. But when the engine noise finally died away, I heard it."

At this point I was becoming a bit exasperated. "Heard what, Scott?"

"The sound of a piano!" He swallowed, licked his lips, took another sip of sherry. For some reason, I suddenly recalled how some of the rougher elements on our crew used to jokingly refer to him as "the Great Scott".

"We walked over to the stairwell and looked up. 'What is it?' I asked her. 'Just someone playing, Mrs. Thomas. It looks like your young marrieds are home, after all.'

"She looked at me with a sad sort of smile and shook her head. 'No, sir, Mr. Scott,' she said.

"I listened more closely then, and even went around the banister railing and a couple of steps up the staircase. I could hear the music much clearer now -- I could even identify it. It was a nocturne, a moody sort of piece the Romantics used to do. Most of them are very beautiful, particularly those of Chopin. But this was John Field, an Irish composer the musicologists say gave Chopin the idea for his own nocturnes." Scott smiled sadly. "'Nocturne' means 'night piece', you know. And I was very familiar with this one, because I had played it a lot myself in the old days."

"You mean, when you had lived there."

"Yes. But . . ." He laughed weakly, picked up an unused fork, looked at it, put it down again. "You must understand that a good pianist, even a barely respectable amateur like myself, can often identify another pianist if he's heard him play before. Joseffy, Paderewski, Gabrilowitsch -- they were all as different in approach and personality at the keyboard as they were in real life."

"I imagine it was none of those, however," I commented drily.

Scott smiled. "Well, naturally not! The nocturne was all arpeggios in the left hand -- a quiet, beautiful little thing, only a couple of pages, but quite difficult to bring off at the proper tempo. I had taken quite a fancy to it at one time . . . when I had -- had lived there. It seemed somehow to -- to sort of belong to the old place, you know, to fit in with the atmosphere and the . . . the events in my life at that time." With this somewhat lame finish he looked away, as if shifting into a minor key.

"So you recognized the pianist?"

"Well, I was still prepared to think I was mistaken. After all, hearing a piano from two floors down through a closed door isn't the same as hearing it close up. I felt . . . well, sort of chilled by it, if you know what I mean. Particularly since it was that piece. I'm sure you can imagine . . . But I thought it must just be a remarkable coincidence."

"And did you go up then?"

"No. I -- I didn't. I turned and went back down the staircase. Mrs. Thomas was still standing there listening. She looked at me oddly -- I suppose I must have been pretty shaken -- but said nothing."

"What did you do?"

"I told her it was probably just a radio or a phonograph somewhere, in a nearby house, maybe. Or that her tenants must be at home, and that she probably hadn't heard them come in."

"'No sir, Mr. Scott!' she told me. 'Many's the time I've heard that piece, these twenty years an' more.' She looked at me as if she'd made up her mind about something at last, and I . . . I didn't want to ask what it was. I suddenly felt that I had to get out of there.

"'See, Mr. Scott, I've heard it like that even when the whole building was vacant, and neither of the apartments rented, an' nobody in the old place but me,' she said. "Or just the two of us, in the old days."

"By this time I was fumbling with the door. I almost fell out into the street, all gaslight by this time. But even outside, I could still hear the music. It stopped for a moment, then started up again a bit louder. I remember wondering whether anyone passing by, anyone not connected with -- with the house, and with my days there, unlike Mrs. Thomas and me, would have heard it, too. I felt my scalp prickling, but I stopped for a moment to adjust my hat. And then she called down to me from the landing. I wish she hadn't, though!"

"Why? What did she say?"

Scott opened and shut his mouth twice, looked at me with a bitter smile.

"It was just . . . she said there was no piano in the place, you see. Hadn't been for ages. She'd sold it a couple of years after I had moved out, because of that same strange music." He shook his head, and the smile seemed to turn in on itself like a sort of painful grimace. "In my heart I knew it was true. I knew it couldn't be a radio -- I could hear it so clearly. I even knew who was playing -- It was impossible that I shouldn't know!"

I looked at him carefully. He seemed so shaken by his story that I hesitated to pry further, but I couldn't resist one last question.

"Then if you recognized the pianist . . ."

The Great Scott ran a hand through his thinning hair and looked at me for a long time, but not as though actually seeing me. Then he seemed to shake himself awake and his mouth settled into that determined line again.

"Well, I suppose I've gone on with this long enough! It's getting pretty late. Please excuse me, Ben. I should never have told you all this folderol. It's . . . a bit silly, isn't it?"

And with that he adjusted his expensive tie and looked around the room almost furtively. His gaze flickered briefly at the sound of the unseen pianist. Locating the waiter standing patiently near the door, the Great Scott called for the check.