The Music Box: Chapter Five

The door closed noiselessly behind them, engulfing the two in utter darkness. After the brightness of the street it was a shock to have stepped into this inky abyss where she could barely tell up from down. Worse was the silence; so thick, so bottomlessly deep, she felt she would never be able to pierce it, that her tiny voice had no chance against its oppressive might – would be swallowed before it could even leave her chest. Yet both the darkness and silence were broken by the flinty scratch of a match being struck. The whoosh that followed as the phosphorous sparked, sucking oxygen to its nascent flame, seemed louder to Emily than she felt it should. Her relief at the flash of light quickly evaporated as she sharply sucked in a gulp of oxygen of her own, petrified at the way the shadows played across Mr Crouch’s sharply angular face, dancing demons who seemed to relish her despair.

The flame was tipped from the match to the head of a candle, where after a brief shadowy dance it settled into a gently wavering teardrop. It was brighter than it had been and Emily realised the match was still alight. She watched as it gobbled up the rest of the stick, seeming not so much to extinguish as to slip its way into Mr Crouch’s fingers.

“I don’t use this room here.”

Emily realised he was addressing her, although his back was now turned and he was walking away from the door through which they had entered.

“It’s too close to the street, too noisy, I work further back.”

Each time he stopped talking the deathly silence threatened to engulf her, wrapping its icy tendrils through her hair and around her shoulders, sizing her up like a tailor will when selecting how big a bolt of cloth he should cut off for his customer. But as soon as it grew so unbearable that Emily found herself wishing for it to break, the sound of Mr Crouch’s deep voice, as smooth and rich as drinking chocolate, had her wishing for the silence again. There was something about it that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He definitely wasn’t from around here, it was too lacking in that sharp, chipped delivery, but she could not place it in with any of the more common continental accents.

What concerned her most was the way it drew her in so closely, as though it was right there inside her head. It seemed not to be taking the usual path through the air to her ears, but sitting right there next to her own inner voice, the Emily she heard when she was merely thinking. She put this down to a trick of the dark, but not very convincingly.

They were most of the way across the room now she realised, seeing a door loom from the shadows. Emily saw Mr Crouch reach around his neck and lift something off, then heard a jangling that must have been keys. As he paused to select the key, Emily took the opportunity to glance around. There was little she could make out from the weak candle flame, and what she could see failed to tell her much at all. She could no longer make out the front door or where the blacked out windows must be. The few shapes she could make out were covered in heavy blankets that sagged with inattention. Their forms suggested they might have a counter or perhaps some furniture underneath, but they seemed not to have moved for years and years. A layer of dust stretching across the floor to where they stood supported this, with a few scuffed tracks around the doorway and leading back from where they had walked in the only signs that anyone ever passed through here anymore.

The jangling stopped as Mr Crouch found the key he was seeking. He slid it into the keyhole and her heart jumped at the sound of the bolt turning. Emily suddenly wondered why Mr Crouch had locked the door for such a short period as his trip to the front door, but then realised she had not heard the front door open so perhaps he had simply been returning to the shop from some errand or other.

The door creaked open and Mr Crouch ushered Emily through.

“Ladies before gentleman,” he said, gesturing with his free hand. The chain of keys returned to his neck, slipping under his collar. Emily stepped past him, realising for the first time just how tall he was. She barely came up to his belt, and there was plenty more of him above that as his long, tapered torso reached higher and higher, supporting a face that from where she stood looked like it might be almost as long.

His pointy chin was poking out and his sharp nose was held high, giving Emily the creepy feeling she was being sniffed as she passed. Above this his high forehead disappeared beneath his top-hat, jet black and very expensive looking. She caught a sudden flash in his eyes as she stepped through to the next room and a voice in her head shouted ‘run’ – not hers, not his, but one she had never heard before her. But then came another voice, pushing out the first.

“If you leave now you’ll never have another chance.”