Piano Lessons Can Be Murder

  I couldn’t tell. This dark hallway looked like all the others.

  Maybe Dr. Shreek is right. Maybe I can’t get away, I thought, feeling the blood throb at my temples as I turned another corner.

  I searched for Mr. Toggle. Perhaps he could save me. But the halls were empty. Piano music poured out of every room, but no one was out in the hall.

  “Come back, Jerry! There’s no use running!”

  “Mr. Toggle!” I screamed, my voice hoarse and breathless. “Mr. Toggle — help me! Help me, please!”

  I turned another corner, my sneakers sliding on the smoothly polished floor. I was gasping for breath now, my chest heaving.

  I saw double doors up ahead. Did they lead to the front?

  I couldn’t remember.

  With a low moan, I stuck out both hands and pushed open the doors.

  “No!” I heard Dr. Shreek shout behind me. “No, Jerry! Don’t go into the recital hall!”

  Too late.

  I pushed through the doors and bolted inside. Still running, I found myself in an enormous, brightly lit room.

  I took a few more steps — then stopped in horror.

  The piano music was deafening — like a never-ending roar of thunder.

  At first, the room was a blur. Then it slowly began to come into focus.

  I saw row after row of black pianos. Beside each piano stood a smiling instructor. The instructors all looked alike. They all were bobbing their heads in time to the music.

  The music was being played by —

  It was being played by —

  I gasped, staring from row to row.

  The music was being played by — HANDS!

  Human hands floating over the keyboards.

  No people attached.

  Just HANDS!

  My eyes darted down the rows of pianos. A pair of hands floated above each piano.

  The instructors were all bald-headed men in gray suits with smiles plastered on their faces. Their heads bobbed and swayed, their gray eyes opened and closed as the hands played over the keyboards.

  Hands.

  Just hands.

  As I gaped, paralyzed, trying to make sense of what I saw, Dr. Shreek burst into the room from behind me. He made a running dive at my legs, trying to tackle me.

  Somehow I dodged away from his outstretched hands.

  He groaned and hit the floor on his stomach. I watched him slide across the smooth floor, his face red with anger.

  Then I spun around, away from the dozens of hands, away from the banging pianos, and started back toward the doors.

  But Dr. Shreek was faster than I imagined. To my surprise, he was on his feet in a second, moving quickly to block my escape.

  I skidded to a stop.

  I tried to turn around, to get away from him. But I lost my balance and fell.

  The piano music swirled around me. I looked up to see the rows of hands pounding away on their keyboards.

  With a frightened gasp, I struggled to my feet.

  Too late.

  Dr. Shreek was closing in on me, a gleeful smile of triumph on his red, round face.

  “No!” I cried, and tried to climb to my feet.

  But Dr. Shreek bent over me, grabbed my left ankle, and held on. “You can’t get away, Jerry,” he said calmly, not even out of breath.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” I tried to twist out of his grip. But he was surprisingly strong. I couldn’t free myself.

  “Help me! Somebody — help me!” I cried, screaming over the roar of the pianos.

  “I need your hands, Jerry,” Dr. Shreek said. “Such beautiful hands.”

  “You can’t! You can’t!” I shrieked.

  The double doors burst open.

  Mr. Toggle ran in, his expression confused. His eyes darted quickly around the enormous room.

  “Mr. Toggle!” I cried happily. “Mr. Toggle — help me! He’s crazy! Help me!”

  Mr. Toggle’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “Don’t worry, Jerry!” he called.

  “Help me! Hurry!” I screamed.

  “Don’t worry!” he repeated.

  “Jerry, you can’t get away!” Dr. Shreek cried, holding me down on the floor.

  Struggling to free myself, I watched Mr. Toggle run to the far wall. He pulled open a gray metal door, revealing some kind of control panel.

  “Don’t worry!” he called to me.

  I saw him pull a switch on the control panel.

  Instantly, Dr. Shreek’s hand loosened.

  I pulled my leg free and scrambled to my feet, panting hard.

  Dr. Shreek slumped into a heap. His hands drooped lifelessly to his sides. His eyes closed. His head sank, his chin lowering to his chest.

  He didn’t move.

  He’s some kind of robot, I saw to my amazement.

  “Are you okay, Jerry?” Mr. Toggle had hurried to my side.

  I suddenly realized my entire body was trembling. The piano music roared inside my head. The room began to spin.

  I held my hands over my ears, trying to shut out the pounding noise. “Make them stop! Tell them to stop!” I cried.

  Mr. Toggle jogged back to the control panel and threw another switch.

  The music stopped. The hands froze in place over their keyboards. The instructors stopped bobbing their heads.

  “Robots. All robots,” I murmured, still shaking.

  Mr. Toggle hurried back, his dark eyes studying me. “You’re okay?”

  “Dr. Shreek — he’s a robot,” I uttered in a trembling whisper. If only I could get my knees to stop shaking!

  “Yes, he’s my best creation,” Mr. Toggle declared, smiling. He placed a hand on Dr. Shreek’s still shoulder. “He’s really lifelike, isn’t he?”

  “They — they’re all robots,” I whispered, motioning to the instructors, frozen beside their pianos.

  Mr. Toggle nodded. “Primitive ones,” he said, still leaning on Dr. Shreek. “They’re not as advanced as my buddy Dr. Shreek here.”

  “You — made them all?” I asked.

  Mr. Toggle nodded, smiling. “Every one of them.”

  I couldn’t stop shaking. I was starting to feel really sick. “Thanks for stopping him. I guess Dr. Shreek was out of control or something. I — I’ve got to go now,” I said weakly. I started walking toward the double doors, forcing my trembling knees to cooperate.

  “Not just yet,” Mr. Toggle said, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “Huh?” I turned to face him.

  “You can’t leave just yet,” he said, his smile fading. “I need your hands, see.”

  “What?”

  He pointed to a piano against the wall. A gray-suited instructor stood lifelessly beside it, a smile frozen on his face. There were no hands suspended over the keyboard.

  “That will be your piano, Jerry,” Mr. Toggle said.

  I started backing toward the double doors one step at a time. “Wh-why?” I stammered. “Why do you need my hands?”

  “Human hands are too hard to build, too complicated, too many parts,” Mr. Toggle replied. He scratched his black, stubbly beard with one hand as he moved toward me.

  “But —” I started, taking another step back.

  “I can make the hands play beautifully,” Mr. Toggle explained, his eyes locked on mine. “I’ve designed computer programs to make them play more beautifully than any live human can play. But I can’t build hands. The students must supply the hands.”

  “But why?” I demanded. “Why are you doing this?”

  “To make beautiful music, naturally,” Mr. Toggle replied, taking another step closer. “I love beautiful music, Jerry. And music is so much more beautiful, so much more perfect, when human mistakes don’t get in the way.”

  He took another step toward me. Then another. “You understand, don’t you?” His dark eyes burned into mine.

  “No!” I screamed. “No, I don’t understand! You can’t have my hands! You can’t!”

  I took another step ba
ck. My legs were still trembling.

  If I can just get through those doors, I thought, maybe I have a chance. Maybe I can outrun him. Maybe I can get out of this crazy building.

  It was my only hope.

  Gathering my strength, ignoring the pounding of my heart, I turned.

  I darted toward the doors.

  “Ohh!” I cried out as the ghost woman appeared in front of me.

  The woman from my house, from my piano.

  She rose up, all in gray except for her eyes. Her eyes glowed red as fire. Her mouth was twisted in an ugly snarl of rage. She floated toward me, blocking my path to the door.

  I’m trapped, I realized.

  Trapped between Mr. Toggle and the ghost.

  There’s no escape now.

  “I warned you!” the ghost woman wailed, her red eyes glowing with fury. “I warned you!”

  “No, please —” I managed to cry in a choked voice. I raised my hands in front of me, trying to shield myself from her. “Please — let me go!”

  To my surprise, she floated right past me.

  She was glaring at Mr. Toggle, I realized.

  He staggered back, his face tight with terror.

  The ghost woman raised her arms. “Awaken!” she wailed. “Awaken!”

  And as she waved her arms, I saw a fluttering at the pianos. The fluttering became a mist. Wisps of gray cloud rose up from each piano.

  I backed up to the doors, my eyes wide with disbelief.

  At each piano, the dark mist took shape.

  They were ghosts, I realized.

  Ghosts of boys, girls, men, and women.

  I watched, frozen in horror, as they rose up and claimed their hands. They moved their fingers, testing their hands.

  And then, with arms outstretched, their hands fluttering in front of them, the ghosts floated away from their pianos, moving in rows, in single file, toward Mr. Toggle.

  “No! Get away! Get away!” Mr. Toggle shrieked.

  He turned and tried to flee through the doors. But I blocked his path.

  And the ghosts swarmed over him.

  Their hands pulled him down. Their hands pressed him to the floor.

  He kicked and struggled and screamed.

  “Let me up! Get off me! Get off!”

  But the hands, dozens and dozens of hands, flattened over him, held him down, pushed him facedown on the floor.

  The gray ghost woman turned to me. “I tried to warn you!” she called over Mr. Toggle’s frantic screams. “I tried to scare you away! I lived in your house. I was a victim of this school! I tried to frighten you from becoming a victim, too!”

  “I — I —”

  “Run!” she ordered. “Hurry — call for help!”

  But I was frozen in place, too shocked by what I was seeing to move.

  * * *

  As I stared in disbelief, the ghostly hands swarmed over Mr. Toggle and lifted him off the floor. He squirmed and struggled, but he couldn’t free himself from their powerful grasp.

  They carried him to the door and then out. I followed to the doorway to watch.

  Mr. Toggle appeared to be floating, floating into the deep woods beside the school. The hands carried him away. He disappeared into the tangled trees.

  I knew he’d never be seen again.

  I spun around to thank the ghost woman for trying to warn me.

  But she was gone, too.

  I was all alone now.

  The hall stretched behind me in eerie silence. Ghostly silence.

  The piano music had ended … forever.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, my life had pretty much returned to normal.

  Dad put an ad in the newspaper and sold the piano right away to a family across town. It left a space in the family room, so Mom and Dad got a big-screen TV!

  I never saw the ghost woman again. Maybe she moved out with the piano. I don’t know.

  I made some good friends and was starting to get used to my new school. I was thinking seriously of trying out for the baseball team.

  I’m not a great hitter, but I’m good in the field.

  Everyone says I have great hands.

  “Hey — put that down!”

  I grabbed the comic book from Wilson Clark’s hand and smoothed out the plastic cover.

  “I was only looking at it,” he grumbled.

  “If you get a fingerprint on it, it will lose half its value,” I told him. I examined the cover through the clear wrapper. “This is a Silver Swan Number Zero,” I said. “And it’s in mint condition.”

  Wilson shook his head. He has curly white-blond hair and round blue eyes. He always looks confused.

  “How can it be Number Zero?” he asked. “That doesn’t make any sense, Skipper.”

  Wilson is a really good friend of mine. But sometimes I think he dropped down from the planet Mars. He just doesn’t know anything.

  I held up the Silver Swan cover so he could see the big zero in the corner. “That makes it a collector’s item,” I explained. “Number Zero comes before Number One. This comic is worth ten times as much as Silver Swan Number One.”

  “Huh? It is?” Wilson scratched his curly hair. He squatted down on the floor and started pawing through my carton of comic books. “How come all your comics are in these plastic bags, Skipper? How can you read them?”

  See? I told you. Wilson doesn’t know anything.

  “Read them? I don’t read them,” I replied. “If you read them, they lose their value.”

  He stared up at me. “You don’t read them?”

  “I can’t take them out of the bag,” I explained. “If I open the bag, they won’t be in mint condition anymore.”

  “Ooh. This one is cool!” he exclaimed. He pulled up a copy of Star Wolf. “The cover is metal!”

  “It’s worthless,” I mumbled. “It’s a second printing.”

  He stared at the silvery cover, turning it in his hands, making it shine in the light. “Cool,” he muttered. His favorite word.

  We were up in my room, about an hour after dinner. The sky was black outside my double windows. It gets dark so early in winter. Not like on the Silver Swan’s planet, Orcos III, where the sun never sets and all the superheroes have to wear air-conditioned costumes.

  Wilson came over to get the Math homework. He lives next door, and he always leaves his Math book at school — so he always comes over to get the homework from me.

  “You should collect comic books,” I told him. “In about twenty years, these will be worth millions.”

  “I collect rubber stamps,” he said, picking up a Z-Squad annual. He studied the sneaker ad on the back cover.

  “Rubber stamps?”

  “Yeah. I have about a hundred of them,” he said.

  “What can you do with rubber stamps?” I asked.

  He dropped the comic back into the carton and stood up. “Well, you can stamp things with them,” he said, brushing off the knees of his jeans. “I have different-colored ink pads. Or you can just look at them.”

  He is definitely weird.

  “Are they valuable?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He picked up the math sheet from the foot of my bed. “I’d better get home, Skipper. See you tomorrow.”

  He started for the door and I followed him. Our reflections stared out at us from my big dresser mirror. Wilson is so tall and skinny and blond and blue-eyed. I always feel like a dark, chubby mole next to him.

  If we were in a comic book, Wilson would be the superhero, and I would be his sidekick. I’d be the pudgy, funny one who was always messing up.

  It’s a good thing life isn’t a comic book — right?

  As soon as Wilson left, I turned back to my dresser. My eye caught the big computer banner above the mirror: SKIPPER MATTHEWS, ALIEN AVENGER.

  My dad had someone at his office print out the banner for me for my twelfth birthday a few weeks ago.

  Beneath the banner, I have two great posters tac
ked on the wall on both sides of the dresser. One is a Jack Kirby Captain America. It’s really old and probably worth about a thousand dollars.

  The other one is a Spawn poster by Todd McFarlane. It’s really awesome.

  In the mirror, I could see the excited look on my own face as I hurried to the dresser.

  The flat brown envelope waited for me on the dresser top.

  Mom and Dad said I couldn’t open it until after dinner, after I finished my homework. But I couldn’t wait.

  I could feel my heart start to pound as I stared down at the envelope.

  I knew what waited inside it. Just thinking about it made my heart pound even harder.

  I carefully picked up the envelope. I had to open it now. I had to.

  R.L. Stine’s books are read all over the world. So far, his books have sold more than 300 million copies, making him one of the most popular children’s authors in history. Besides Goosebumps, R.L. Stine has written the teen series Fear Street and the funny series Rotten School, as well as the Mostly Ghostly series, The Nightmare Room series, and the two-book thriller Dangerous Girls. R.L. Stine lives in New York with his wife, Jane, and Minnie, his King Charles spaniel. You can learn more about him at www.RLStine.com.

  Goosebumps book series created by Parachute Press, Inc.

  Copyright © 1993 by Scholastic Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, GOOSEBUMPS, GOOSEBUMPS HORRORLAND, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, November 1993

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-91039-2

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