Read Chapter 9: The Voice in the Walls

The music wasn’t playing tonight. It was *singing*—a low, throbbing hum that vibrated through the floorboards and up into Elodie’s bones. The grand piano in the parlor had never sounded like this. This was something older, something that didn’t need hammers and strings but lived in the walls themselves.

She and Julien climbed the attic stairs without speaking. The air thickened, dust motes spinning in the beam of Julien’s flashlight like frantic spirits. The melody grew sharper as they rose, and Elodie realized it wasn’t coming from the piano below at all. It was coming from ahead.

“It’s not Clarisse’s song,” Julien whispered. “It’s the same notes, but… slower.”

Elodie nodded. The tune was familiar, but twisted, stretched like taffy. Wrong. “It’s coming from the attic,” she breathed. “Has anyone ever searched up here thoroughly?”

“Bastien did. Before he—” Julien stopped, throat working. “Before everything.”

They emerged into the attic’s gloom. The roof sloped low, the space cluttered with decades of dust-covered furniture and trunks. But the sound was unmistakable now, pulsing from the far wall—a stretch of paneling that looked newer than the rest, the wood a shade lighter where time hadn’t yet darkened it.

The melody pressed down on Elodie’s eardrums. “Here,” she said, running her fingers along the seam. Her gris-gris bag grew warm against her chest. “There’s a seam. Help me.”

Julien wedged his fingers into the crack and pulled. Nothing. He grunted and tried again, and this time Elodie saw a faint give in the wood. She worked beside him, both of them straining until something clicked and the panel swung inward on hidden hinges.

The music stopped.

Silence rushed in like a held breath finally released. Elodie’s ears rang with the absence of sound.

Beyond the paneling was a room no larger than a walk-in closet. A child’s piano sat in the center, its paint chipped and yellowed, ivory keys grinning like broken teeth. Beside it, a music box lay open, its tiny metal cylinder frozen mid-revolution. The same melody was engraved in its side—the midnight cadence, worn but unmistakable.

Julien stepped past her. His footfalls echoed strangely in the small space. He touched the piano’s lid, lifting it. Inside, a single sheet of paper rested on the strings, yellowed and creased. His hand trembled as he picked it up.

Elodie came to his shoulder and read over it. The handwriting was jagged, urgent, the pencil pressed hard enough to leave furrows in the page.

*I know what I saw.*

“It’s dated,” Julien rasped. “March 12. Twenty years ago.”

Elodie’s chest tightened. “Twenty years? But you said Bastien left when you were young—the stories always made it sound like he fled after the wedding night hauntings. That’d be what, 2001?”

Julien’s face had gone pale as candlewax. “He vanished in 1999. He was supposed to be at a university event in Baton Rouge. He never showed.” He swallowed. “I told our father Bastien had talked about leaving New Orleans. I made up a quarrel I’d overheard. It was the easiest story to tell.”

“You lied about his disappearance?”

“Father wanted a scandal suppressed. And I—” Julien’s voice cracked. “I was sixteen. He was my older brother. I was terrified if I told the truth, people would think he was crazy, or that the house had taken him. That they’d tear the mansion apart and find nothing but more ghosts.”

“What truth, Julien?” Elodie kept her voice low, steady, even as her pulse hammered.

He stared at the note, folding it along its creases with reverent fingers. “The night before he left, Bastien came to my room. He was shaking. Said he’d heard the music climbing up the stairs, not down. Said he followed it to this attic and found the wall humming.” Julien’s eyes met hers, and Elodie saw a grief twenty years old sitting there, untouched. “He said there was something inside the wall. Something with eyes that knew his name. He said it wore Clarisse’s face, but it wasn’t her. It was older.”

The gris-gris bag pulsed warm again, almost hot. Elodie pressed her palm to it.

“So what’s this?” she asked, gesturing to the child-sized piano. “Bastien tried to communicate with it? He was playing with it?”

Julien shook his head slowly. “No. This was mine.”

Elodie blinked. “Yours?”

“When I was small, I had a toy piano. I used to play the melody I heard at night—I thought it was a lullaby. Mother had it shipped to Bastien’s university dorm after I outgrew it. She thought he’d want the keepsake.” His voice dropped. “It never arrived. The package was marked undeliverable. Returned to sender eight months after Bastien vanished. I thought Mother had thrown it away.”

Elodie reached for the music box, careful, turning it over in her hands. The cylinder wasn’t dusty; it gleamed, freshly wound. “Someone’s been keeping this working.”

“No one’s been up here in twenty years,” Julien said. “I’d have known.”

“Then how is it wound?” Elodie asked softly. She raised her eyes to the walls, tracing the seams where the paneling had been fitted. A thin crack ran along the ceiling line, barely visible. Something moved behind it—a shadow with no source.

The piano let out a single note.

She froze. Julien grabbed her arm, pulling her back toward the open panel.

“We need to leave,” he said, urgency cracking his voice.

“Wait.” Elodie pulled the gris-gris bag from her collar, clutch it until the dried herbs bit into her palm through the cloth. “Odette said I’d know when to use it.”

“Is that now?”

The note repeated. Then a third time, harmonizing with a hum that seemed to rise from the floor itself. The child’s piano keys were moving—not pressed, but sinking on their own, as if invisible fingers walked the scale.

Elodie looked at the note still crumpled in Julien’s hand. “Bastien said he knew what he saw. What if he saw the music being made?”

The music box snapped shut with a click that echoed like a door locking.

The wall behind them was closing.