It was a bright and sunny day, the last ever time Anne went to her piano lesson.

Anne wasn’t the sort of girl that simply played ‘Chopsticks’.  Any baby can play ‘Chopsticks’.  (“I’m not a baby!” retorted Annabelle)  Anne went to proper piano lessons at a proper piano lesson house.

Anne hated the piano.  Not in the way that you might hate carrots, say.  Or the way you hate kissing Aunty Joan, who has whiskers and smells of old cats.  Anne hated the piano in the ‘murder with an axe then bury in the back yard’ way.  Anne hated having to stretch her fingers.  She hated having to practice the same stupid tunes over and over again.  She hated it when she hit the wrong note, which was too often.  She hated the piano and everything to do with it.

But most of all, more than anything else in the whole world, Anne hated her piano teacher: Miss Johnson!  Every Sunday afternoon Anne would be dragged to Miss Johnson’s house by her mother, music book clasped under her arm.  She would have to sit in the dark hallway, swinging her feet and staring at the framed embroidery hanging on the wall, which said, ‘Bless This House’ in faded wool.  Ha!  That hadn’t worked, had it!

Then it would be her turn.  She would be pushed gently but firmly into the room by her mother.  Then she would spend half an hour that seemed like all the boring bits of an entire lifetime, all rolled up and stuffed into Miss Johnson’s small parlour room.

Anne hated Miss Johnson for all the boring misery she poured into Anne’s Sunday afternoons.

And so it was a bright and sunny day, the very last time that Anne visited Miss Johnson.  But Anne didn’t notice.  It could have been a dark and stormy night, for all the joy that was in her heart.  Maybe, if Anne had known that Miss Johnson was going to be horribly murdered later that same day, maybe then Anne would have been happier.

Miss Johnson didn’t seem to be herself, that fateful afternoon.  She still winced when Anne hit a wrong note, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it.  And she forgot to give Anne any homework to practice, which was unheard of.

But Anne thought no more of it, happy only that she had got a welcome escape that week.

But the next day, the neighbourhood was full of gossip.  Had you heard the news?  Miss Johnson had been murdered!  Strangled in her own home.

But that was not the worst of it.  Oh, no.  Not by a long chalk.  The undertakers came and took the body away, but later, when they came to put the lid on the coffin, they were greeted by a sight that … that … No!  It’s too awful, I can’t say.

When they came to put the lid on the coffin, they weren’t prepared for the grisly sight that they beheld.  Men hardened to dealing with dead people all day went white as sheets.  For there, lying in the coffin, was Miss Johnson, her arms crossed over her chest.  In her left hand she held a butcher’s knife, dripping with congealed blood.  Of her right hand there was no sign.  It was totally missing from the blood-soaked stump of her right arm.

But even that, horrible as it is, is still not the worst of it.  Oh, no.  I wish it were so, but there is even worse to come.

A few days later, little Johnny Thompson was asleep in his bed.  He had been a pupil of Miss Johnson.  He awoke to hear their piano playing in the dead of the night.  He crept downstairs to investigate the noise.  They found him there the next morning, in his pyjamas, strangled to death.

The next week, the same thing happened to little Amy Cartwright.  Then to Billy Martin, and he could only play ‘Chopsticks’.  The police never found the murderer, but everyone knew who it was.  It was the ghostly hand of Miss Johnson, blood clotted at the wrist, creeping through the night on its fingers like a ghostly crab.  It was taking vengeance on all those children that played the piano badly.

Even now, in the dead of night, it scurries around in the dark, looking to fling itself around the throat of some unsuspecting person, and strangle them to death.