The air in the ruins thickened as the Debt Collector loomed over Lila, its piano-key teeth clicking in a slow, mocking rhythm. Moonlight sliced through the broken ceiling, glinting off the grooves of each ivory key, revealing names carved into them...tiny, desperate scratches.
"You want to know what I am?" The Collector's voice was a chorus, layered with whispers of a hundred artists. "I am the silence after the last note fades."
Lila's breath hitched as the world around her dissolved, replaced by a vision of 16th-century Florence:
A young man hunched over a canvas, his brush strokes feverish. His eyes....milk-white with blindness.....streamed tears as he painted a masterpiece he would never see. Behind him, a shadow with a mouth of quill tips whispered:
"Your sight for immortality."
The artist signed his name in blood.
The scene shifted.....a Parisian opera house in flames, a soprano's voice rising even as the ceiling collapsed. The Collector stood amid the wreckage, its form now made of burning sheet music, swallowing every scream.
Lila jolted back to the present, her lips numb. "You're not a demon. You're a..."
"Thief," it finished. "Of endings. Of legacies. Theo's music was too beautiful to let go."
Its fingers....long, jointed like piano hammers....brushed her cheek. "But you? Your art is... messy. Unfinished. That's why it frightens me."
The pocket watch in Lila's palm sprang open on its own, the gears twisting into a miniature stage. A ghostly Theo appeared, his hands moving over invisible keys as he played a dissonant variation of "Our Song."
"He tried to break the contract," Vincent's voice rasped from Holloway's throat. "Wrote this counter-melody into the music. If played completely, it unravels the Collector's power."
The vision sharpened:
Theo, mid-performance in 1927, his eyes darting to the door where Vincent lurked. He changed the song's key subtly, weaving in the forbidden notes. But then.....
Vincent's wire snaked around his throat, cutting off the final bars.
Theo's last act? Spitting blood onto the sheet music, the droplets forming the map to his grave.
Lila's tears splashed onto the watch. "You died to protect her. To protect me."
The Collector hissed, its keys clattering. "Silence!"
Her sketchbook vibrated in her pocket. She yanked it out, pages flipping to a half-finished drawing of Theo at the piano. The charcoal lines rippled, the figure turning its head to meet her gaze.
"You can rewrite the rules," Theo's ghost murmured. "But it will cost you."
Lila grabbed a broken pencil, her hand shaking. As she sketched a new contract over the old one, her fingers blistered, the skin peeling back to reveal ink-stained bone.
The Collector screeched, its form distorting. "NO! Flawed art has no power here!"
But the house trembled in response, the walls bleeding Lila's sketches to life:
A child's stick-figure family crawled from the paper, growing monstrous.
A smudged rose took root in the floorboards, its thorns snaking toward the Collector.
"You're wrong," Lila gasped. "Imperfect art is the only thing that's real."
The House's Betrayal
One more time....
Its Going to happen....
The floor split open, revealing a hidden staircase slick with mold. Lila stumbled down into a nursery frozen in time:
A crib made of piano keys, the slats warped into clawed fingers.
A mummified infant wrapped in sheet music, its hollow eye sockets trained on her.
The walls whispered in Vincent's voice: "The house needed fresh pain to survive. It told me to kill him. It promised me Eleanor."
A glint of gold—the infant clutched a tiny lion ring in its skeletal hand.
Lila retched. "You were its first victim."
The house groaned in agreement, the nursery door slammed shut behind her.
The choices...
made again....
The contract hovered between them, its ink rearranging into following two options:
1. Burn It
Theo's ghost smiled sadly, his form already fading. "Play the song backward, Lila. Finish what I started."
2. Sign It
The Collector offered a feathered pen, its tip dripping black. "He'll live. But will you recognize him?"
Lila plunged her bleeding hand into the crib's ashes, flinging them at the parchment.
"I choose neither."
The contract ignited with blue fire, the Collector's scream shattering every mirror in the house.
Theo's melody swelled from the walls, the notes rewinding time itself...
FADE TO BLACK.
But ...
In the deep dark.....
Somewhere, a piano played itself.....backward