Never let anyone lead you astray.- Michelle Liew
🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰
Dance steps still echoed through the halls of Encore Dance Studio, flowing with the eerie rhythm of the chandeliers.
Only shadows moved beneath them, synced to the charming, yet poignant chorus of the Blue Danube. It flowed through the vacant halls, a tune drenched in memory, donned like a ghost's lullaby.
From a forgotten music box in the corner, the tune whispered, a shattered musical promise, fragile as glass. It whispered, not a melody, but a beckoning.
Young Johann discovered it carefully buried beneath a loose floorboard. He wound it---he believed it offered comfort.
Curiosity won- it spawned Johann's tune, its notes a web of silk threads winding around him in a cocoon.
A dark shadow danced with the blissfully unaware Johann, shifting and stretching, ever-changing.
And she appeared--pale, gaunt, hollow eyes filled with yearning. She extended a frail hand.
Thinking it would lead him to a land of wonder, he took it.
Her grip was ice, hard, fastidious.
It wouldn't let go.
So he danced with her--and danced, passing between light and dark, slowly fading as he moved.
As they danced, she told him his name.
She bore his surname.
She had been a top dancer at Encore--bright, graceful, envied.
But she had vanished beneath the floorboards---they say he had pushed.
The three shared the same surname.
The two flowed with the melody, without stopping---until Johann no longer existed.
Just his movements. Only his memories.
He had taken her hand without question. He trusted it--they shared the same surname.
Now a mere shadow, he lurked beneath the floorboards. All because he followed, without asking where.
The music box still waits under the floorboard, waiting to be opened.
Not every hand leads the right way.
🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰🩰
About the Creator
Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin
Hi, i am an English Language teacher cum freelance writer with a taste for pets, prose and poetry. When I'm not writing my heart out, I'm playing with my three dogs, Zorra, Cloudy and Snowball.
Keep reading
More stories from Michelle Liew Tsui-Lin and writers in Fiction and other communities.
Pax Imperialis
Every empire tells a story about itself. It claims to be a reluctant hegemon, a civilising force, a guardian of order in a chaotic world. Edward W. Said captured this imperial self-mythology with ruthless clarity when he wrote: ‘Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.’ The promise is always peace, stability, progress. Yet behind this language of benevolence stands an apparatus of overwhelming violence. Empires do not rule through persuasion alone. They require an ultimate weapon, a technological embodiment of terror that transforms domination into inevitability and resistance into madness. From the atomic bomb to the Death Star, from clone armies to genetically engineered super-soldiers in The Mandalorian, the logic remains unchanged. Universal peace, or Pax, is purchased through the threat of total annihilation.
By Peter Ayolovabout 18 hours ago in Fiction
Comments (6)
Creepy, eerie and I so love music boxes, now I want a few ghostly ones. Not from under floorboards though.
Music boxes have always seemed creepy to me. Poor Johann. Loved your story!
Odd fact: I don't like hand touching. So I'd be safe from this, lol
Oohhh this is brilliant buddy! The music box is 100% cursed. But I'd still be tempted to open it... just to hear the first note lol. 💖
That is me never picking up a random music box haha. Awesome story and I loved the suspense of it.
I loved this line: "It flowed through the vacant halls, a tune drenched in memory, donned like a ghost's lullaby."