The Left Hand Plays On

 In the twilight of his fame, Sebastian Virelli played only in candlelit rooms. Not for mood or aesthetic—though it gave the press something to chew on—but because shadows made it harder to see what the left hand was doing.

Sebastian had once been the darling of European concert halls, a prodigy whose right hand cascaded through Chopin with brutal elegance. But after the stroke—a small one, they said—his fingers twitched, and the left hand began to... disobey.

At first it was subtle. During warm-ups, a stray key pressed here, a glissando there. He assumed it was nerves, or some phantom signal misfiring. Doctors called it alien hand syndrome, a neurological rarity. Sebastian called it betrayal.

“It’s like someone else is playing,” he told his agent.
She laughed. “Then charge for two performers.”

But at night, alone in his apartment, the left hand waited. And when the room was dark and silent, it played.

Not just notes—pieces. Entire compositions he never learned. Baroque fugues with impossible tempo, jazz motifs tangled in atonal filigree. Sometimes the hand wrote its own music, scribbling on napkins, sheet music, walls. Once, he awoke to find a melody scrawled into the frost of his window.

The music was beautiful. Unsettling. Like something reaching in from elsewhere.

He tried gloves, restraints, hypnosis. Nothing stopped it. Worse—if he denied it the keys, the hand grew restless. It tapped, clawed, twitched. Once, during a lecture, it struck a child in the front row.

And so, in a quiet detente, he let it play.

Concertgoers noticed. The right hand carried Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” while the left danced off into something not Beethoven—something frantic and unfamiliar. Reviewers praised the “post-human duality.” A critic in Prague called it “haunting, like a duet between the living and the remembered.”

Sebastian didn’t remember composing anything.
But someone did.

The climax came in Warsaw, under velvet drapes and dead silence. As Sebastian began Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor, the left hand hesitated—then took over. Entirely.

What came out of the piano was not Rachmaninoff.
It was something older.

The audience sat motionless, spellbound, as the piano erupted into scales not of Earthly logic. Harmonies that bent perception. Sounds that echoed inside the head rather than the ears. Some listeners wept. Others fled. One woman vomited.

And Sebastian? He smiled, for the first time in years. Because for once, the music made sense.

Afterward, he disappeared.

The apartment was found empty, save for the grand piano and a recording device still running. The tape contains a final composition—untitled. Experts analyzing it report embedded patterns resembling whale song, radio bursts from pulsars, and, disturbingly, Morse code.

It spells two words: "LET ME."

No one knows who—or what—was speaking.

But every so often, a young pianist somewhere complains their hand is acting funny. That it moves in dreams. That it knows things.

And somewhere, in shadowed halls, the left hand plays on.