The Music Box: Chapter Six

The voice wasn’t Emily’s, it was that of Mr Crouch. He knew why she was there then, he must have known all along. The butterflies in her tummy had turned into little starlings now, thrashing about as though desperately seeking a way to break free. She had never been so terrified in her life, but nor had she ever hungered so deeply. Her need for the music box unsettled Emily, she knew she had got into something far bigger than she could comprehend. But a part of her was also thinking ‘I’ve done it – I’ve come to Mr Crouch’s store, where nobody else dares come – me, Emily Button!’.

This sense that she must be braver than the rest of them was helping to carry her through. For too long she had stopped herself from taking risks, from having as much fun as she wanted, let the voice of reason that came to her in her mother’s warning tone tell her what to do. Well not this time, not when she was this close. She took a few steps into the next room, just enough that there was room for the door to swing back in place and for Mr Crouch to step through. She watched as he carried the candle over to a table and waited for him to light the lantern. He kept the wick very short, but even in this feeble light whose splayed fingers spilled across the room she was able to make out more than she had at any stage since she had been out on the street – how long ago that now seemed!

Mr Crouch stood silently, Emily guessing it was to give her time to take in her surrounds. Along the wall on her left ran a long workbench, as far as she could see, above which hung shelf upon shelf of bottles and flasks with various coloured liquids, the largest ones on the bottom shelf and smaller ones each step up. The top two shelves were then taken up by little jars full of powders. On the bench itself were a few more of the bottles, some beakers and test tubes, a burner and clamps and stands of various sizes, and a few books. A writing book sat open, arching up as though it couldn’t wait for the next splash of ink, reaching for the quill that sat just out of its reach.

Along the right hand wall Emily saw Mr Crouch kept row after row of important looking books, uniformly sized leather-bound volumes. From where she stood none of the titles could be seen, but their gold-lettering shone back at her quite fiercely. They ran all the way along the wall until stopping abruptly at a staircase, its steep wooden steps disappearing into the ceiling in a very thin, miserly thoroughfare.

Beyond Mr Crouch, towards the back of the room, she saw them. Stacked almost floor to ceiling were hundreds upon hundreds of small wooden boxes. Emily’s heart suddenly soared but almost as quickly dropped when she realised that though the right size, none were anything like the music box Tabitha had; they were bare, unadorned wooden boxes whose purpose she could only put down to some form of storage – they certainly weren’t pieces of which anybody could be proud, or be moved to envy. As her eyes drifted across, Mr Crouch glided to the right.

Looking past where he had been standing, right down the back of the room, Emily saw a vast glass chamber. She couldn’t believe she had not seen it before. It sat perched upon a large metal structure that must be a machine of some sort, for it had a large panel with a dizzying array of buttons and switches. Emily’s eyes traced the chamber almost as far as the ceiling, noticing that a number of rubber tubes led out from the top. Her eye followed them to their ends, where they reached what she now saw was a metal helmet, held in place in mid-air by a sturdy looking frame. Beneath the frame sat a plain wooden chair, facing the chamber.

“Welcome, Emily Button, to my life’s work.”