Sister Mary Louise was playing a fugue
on the convent pipe organ, while Father
Garret was polishing silver and tidying
up the chapel. Suddenly the music stopped
mid phrase during an especially nice
arpeggio, and everyone in the room looked
up at the organ loft to see Sister Mary Louise
looking rather baffled.
“The organ’s gone.” she said, and indeed
the organ was no longer in front of her.
“What did you do with it?” croaked the
elderly Sister Mary Gertrude.
“I didn’t do anything, the organ just
disappeared,” came the puzzled reply.
So we set about searching for the
instrument, looking behind doors,
in closets, under pews, trying to figure out
where a pipe organ would want to hide.
Eventually we became discouraged and sat down
in the chapel to rest for a while.
That’s when we heard the pipe organ
whistling away in the sacristy.
Father Garret jumped up and ran
down the hall towards the music
and we all followed. But the organ escaped
before he could get to it.
This continued for the rest of the week,
as the organ would pop up randomly
now and then, but always get away
before it could be captured.
Sister Laura almost had a heart attack
when the organ suddenly appeared
in the women’s bathroom while
she was adjusting her habit.
Father Mark nearly fell down the stairs
when it surprised him while he
was on his way to Vespers. He said
it chased him down the hall while
playing a Hornpipe, and that he had
to duck into a broom closet to escape.
The whole convent was thrown into
disarray as the rogue organ tootled
at all hours of the day and night
moving from kitchens, to chapels,
to confessional booths, often pausing
long enough to allow a pursuer to draw
within inches of it’s shiny black
and white keys and wooden pedals
before vanishing, or dashing away.
Then, one week after it began, the organ’s
flight around the convent stopped, and it
returned to the organ loft, docile and immobile.
Father Mark approached the organ slowly
and sprinkled it with Holy water,
and it voiced its displeasure with a low E,
but remained still.
Sister Mary Louise sat down cautiously at the
bench and began to play once more, and
the convent returned to normal.
No one knew why the organ had returned,
some attributed it to the Holy water and
others to St. Julian the Hospitaller,
patron saint of wandering musicians,
but I have a simpler theory:
it had seen all it wanted to see
of the convent, and was finally
satisfied.