Chapter 21: The Cursed Piano

Lao Yao took his time doing what I asked him to do, eventually completing it when it was already noon. When Dali and I walked out of his room, we nearly collapsed with exhaustion. I’d much rather examine a corpse that had been rotting for two months than endure Lao Yao’s obscene verbal and physical teasing.

Then, I received a call from Huang Xiaotao, who invited us to lunch. So, we walked to the front gate of the college where we found Huang Xiaotao leaning against a black BMW sedan. This combination of a stunning woman and equally beautiful car turned quite a few heads, but it seemed that Huang Xiaotao was used to being stared at and took no notice of it.

“Xiaotao-jiejie,” said Dali with a saccharine tone, “is this beauty your car?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ll take both of you out sometime. Come on, let’s find a good place to eat! My treat!”

We finally settled on a grilled seafood restaurant. Dali and I ordered a huge pile of food that filled the whole table: grilled fish, fried shrimp, and some drinks too. Dali and I had been busy for the whole day, so we were both starving. The second we sat down with our food, our chopsticks flew and we wolfed down the food like there was no tomorrow.

Huang Xiaotao, on the other hand, almost didn’t touch any food. She merely drank her glass of milkshake and smiled at us. I noticed and suddenly felt terribly self-conscious.

“You must be thinking that we’re eating like pigs, aren’t you?” I asked.

“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I’m just a little envious of how big both of your appetites are, and how much joy good food brings you. We police officers lead hectic and stressful lives, which quite often causes the loss of appetite and insomnia.”

“Why would you choose to be a policewoman if it makes your life so difficult, Xiaotao-jiejie?” asked Dali. “You look like you come from a rich family, so it can’t be money, can it?”

“You don’t make a lot of money as a police officer,” said Huang Xiaotao. “But I’ve always dreamed of becoming a policewoman ever since I was a little girl. You might not believe it, but I used to be a shy, introverted kid. It’s only when I get to wear this uniform that I become much more self-assured and confident.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed it!” I said.

“Well, I guess the work we do can change us drastically,” said Huang Xiaotao. “Enough about me. I just visited the plastic surgery clinic you mentioned, and would you know it, you were right again! Deng Chao did indeed undergo a plastic surgery there.”

“Did it have something to do with his hands?” I asked.

“Bingo!”

“Who did what now?” asked the perplexed Dali. “I don’t follow you guys at all!”

I then roughly explained the whole situation to him, especially about how the biggest question that I puzzled over, namely the feminine-looking handprints that appeared on both of the corpses, had now been answered, because it was clear now that those handprints belonged to Deng Chao. His roommate even said that he’d been wearing gloves all the time lately, most likely to hide the fact that he’d had surgeries done to change the way his hands looked.

“But I’ve never heard of hand surgeries before,” said Dali. “Is that even possible? Aren’t the hands of a man completely different from that of a woman?”

“That’s not always the case,” I said. “A man’s hand can be small, and a woman’s hand can be big. I’ve seen a picture of Deng Chao, and I noticed that the bone structure of his hands aren’t that big at all. With plastic surgery, he could remove the fatty tissues in his hands and cut off parts of his hand muscles. Then he could easily be left with slender feminine hands.”

“That’s right,” said Huang Xiaotao, raising her fair and delicate hand in front of us. “Look, my fingers are only slightly thinner than both of yours, and they’re not shorter than yours at all.”

“Holy shit, that’s awesome!” exclaimed Dali. “I’ve only ever heard of damaging your fingertips to prevent leaving fingerprints, but who knew you could just change the shape of your hands with surgery? Where do you reckon he got the money to do it anyway?”

“Probably the scholarship he won,” I said. “His roommate did say that he received about twenty thousand yuan of scholarship money recently. If he didn’t use this money to pay for college tuition, that’s more than enough for a surgery.”

“Life is so unfair,” said Dali, bowing his head so low it almost went into his bowl. “Vicious people like this murderer gets to have scholarship money, while good old me never sees a dime.”

Dali’s lamentations cracked me up. It’d be interesting to see how scholarships awarded based on one’s kindness would be like.

“There’s one thing that’s still bugging me, though,” said Huang Xiaotao while biting her straw. “If Deng Chao went to such lengths as changing the shape of his hands to be more woman-like, then that means that he planned to divert the suspicions of the police towards that ghost with the cursed piano from the start! But isn’t that too risky? There’s no way the police are going to believe that ghosts would really kill people!”

“It’s probably a lapse of judgement,” I said. “Even the smartest people are bound to make mistakes. And his was to underestimate the police.”

“No, dude! You’re wrong!” Dali suddenly said. “The cursed piano is real!”

“You think I’d believe something as ridiculous as that?” said Huang Xiaotao.

“But it is real!” Dali insisted as he wiped away the grease around his mouth. “I had nothing to do at Lao Yao’s place earlier, so I searched for the cursed piano legend in the school forum just to see if anything would come up, and would you know it, tons of people said they’d seen the ghost of a girl with long hair wearing a white dress in that music room! Some people have even heard the piano playing Moonlight Sonata from that building! Think about it. Why would that building be sealed off for ten years? It must be haunted!”

“Come to think of it,” said Huang Xiaotao, “what’s the story behind this legend anyway?”

“Let me enlighten you, Xiaotao-jiejie!” said Dali.

Ten years ago, explained Dali, there was a pair of lovers, both students of this college. The guy was a handsome young man who was also the president of the student’s council; and the girl was famed for her beauty, and she was also a talented pianist. Everyone agreed that they were the perfect match for each other.

But what they didn’t know was that the girl came from a broken home, and she was incredibly reclusive and insecure. Because of that, she regarded her boyfriend as her everything and became overly protective and possessive of him. The boyfriend, however, was socially active and frequently participated in numerous activities connected to the student’s council. For a charismatic and not to mention attractive young man like that, it was no surprise that he made many friends, including those of the opposite sex.

But the girl felt threatened by those girls who befriended her boyfriend. She would often control his every movement and social interactions and act out on her jealousy.

When the guy didn’t answer her call immediately, for example, or when he talked to someone else just a minute too long, the girl would always lose her temper cause a huge scene. She even threatened to commit suicide to get her wish.

Unsurprisingly, her behaviour suffocated the guy. When he finally felt he’d had enough, he wrote her a breakup letter. But before he could give it to her, the girl somehow procured it secretly and read it herself. To her, it was as if her whole world had collapsed and broke into a million pieces.

She assumed that her boyfriend had met someone else, or that he never loved her in the first place, so she planned to kill him that night and follow him to the grave by committing suicide.

And so she told him to meet her in the music room because there was something important that she must tell him. Then she waited for him there with a knife in her hands.

That night, when the boyfriend arrived, he saw the girl playing piano with tears in her eyes. He knew immediately that something was very wrong. The girl stood up suddenly and demanded him to come clean about the breakup letter, so he confessed that he did indeed intended to break up with her. She completely broke down and asked him why, so he finally revealed all of his bottled-up feelings and how her behaviour had made him feel.

Before he could finish, the girl pulled out her knife and was about to stab the guy. He managed to stop her, but they were both locked in a struggle, until the guy gained the upper hand due to his greater physical strength. He shoved the girl away from him, not realizing that the force of that shove was so strong that when she was pushed back, her head hit the piano behind her, and the impact killed her instantly.

The guy panicked. He knew that even though he acted in self-defence he would still be imprisoned for what happened—and that meant that his future was ruined!

No, he wouldn’t let this girl destroy his whole life! This relationship had been a curse to him. Even now that the girl was dead, it felt as if she was still cursing him from beyond the grave!

Thus, he picked up the knife and chopped the girl’s body into pieces, feeling an inexplicable sense of relief as he did it. Perhaps there was some truth in the saying that love and hate are two sides of the same coin.

The guy then stuffed the butchered pieces of his girlfriend’s body into the housing of the piano. As he did so, the piano suddenly made a sound. He thought he might’ve struck the piano wires, so he made sure not to touch anything the next time he stuffed the body parts into the piano’s belly. But despite not touching anything, the piano would play a note each time the guy stuffed one body part into the piano, and when the guy listened to the notes carefully, he realized that they were those of Moonlight Sonata – his dead girlfriend’s favorite music!

The guy almost collapsed in shock, but he managed to keep his calm and continued to stuff all the body parts into the piano, cleaned all the blood in the room and fled the scene. As he was leaving, he could still hear the faint sound of the piano playing Moonlight Sonata coming from the music room…