I have a story for you today — something I heard from someone over in Gwangju.
I can't say for certain it's true. I heard it from someone who heard it from someone else. It's just the kind of story that gets passed around.
On the outskirts of Gwangju, if you follow the slope up into the hills, there's a narrow dirt path — the kind that barely shows up on any map. About fifteen minutes up that path, there's a school. Weeds grown past the knee, thick moss swallowing the walls, nearly every window broken out. When people from the area are asked about it, they go quiet for a moment before finally saying: "That place shut down suddenly, thirty years ago." Ask them why it closed, and they just turn away.
Someone actually went inside. Last year, or maybe the year before — a young man, early twenties, the kind who wanders through abandoned places for the thrill of it. His name I don't know. He went in during the day, but the moment he stepped through the door, he said it was dark enough that he couldn't tell day from night. He passed the first-floor classrooms and started up the staircase, and when he grabbed the railing, something sticky transferred to his hand. Dust, maybe — he wasn't sure — but no matter how much he wiped it, he said he couldn't shake the feeling of it from his palm.
At the far end of the second-floor corridor, there was a music room. The door was half open, and the smell reached him before anything else. Not the usual damp, stale smell of old buildings. Something sweeter. Like wood that had started to burn and then stopped. A cloying, faintly sweet smell. That bothered him more than anything, he said — because it felt familiar, somehow.
Inside the music room, there was a piano. A black piano. The key cover was open, which struck him as wrong. A place no one had entered in thirty years, and the cover was open. He walked closer and pressed a single key — just to see if it would make a sound. It didn't. Not a sound came from that worn-out piano.
He turned to leave.
And then it played.
Not the key he had touched. From the other end — the far right of the piano, up in the high register. Slowly, one note at a time. Do... Re... Mi... Like a small child picking out notes for the very first time, hesitant and searching. He spun around. There was no one there. Nothing resting on the keys. The keys were simply pressing themselves down, one by one. He could see each one dip with his own eyes.
Do you know what he felt in that moment? He said it wasn't fear. Not at first. He said he just felt an overwhelming sadness. Couldn't explain why — only that his eyes were close to filling with tears. Doesn't that seem stranger than anything else?
He ran. Bolted down the corridor, and as he passed the wall beside the music room door, he caught a glimpse of something written there — dense, covering the surface. He was moving too fast to read it all, but one line snagged in his vision. Small handwriting, the letters uneven, as though many different hands had written it — but all of them repeating the same sentence, over and over.
"Teacher must not come."
He still doesn't know what that sweet smell was. And ever since that day, he says that just before he falls asleep, he sometimes hears it — the piano, picking out notes one at a time from the high end of the keys, very, very slowly.
