The Music Box: Chapter Ten

“People come here for many different reasons,” she heard Mr Crouch say, turning around to see him addressing the room generally, as though recounting a rehearsed speech of his own, setting in flow a prepared response to what he must have known she would say.

“Not everyone leaves with what they came here hoping to find. Others leave with their wildest desires, their keenest wishes and most heartfelt hopes thoroughly fulfilled. I will be blunt with you Emily Button,” he said quite sharply, pivoting on his spot and looking her straight in the eye, “it’s not a place where wishes should be made lightly.”

What could he mean? Emily’s pale skin crawled with an unpleasant sensation, as though spiders were weaving webs around her slender arms and tickling her fine hair in the process, although she couldn’t put her finger on what it was that most worried her. It wasn’t so much what Mr Crouch had said as how he said it – a sense that the ‘wishes’ to which he alluded were somehow a double-edged sword, like the jokes she had heard about genies in lamps or bottles and how the three wishes they granted their liberator always managed to go wrong.

But these weren’t real ‘wishes’, and Mr Crouch was no genie. He was just a person like her, Emily told herself, albeit one with certain peculiar ways. Nevertheless, she knew she had to be on the ball and follow everything he was saying very carefully.

“I assure you Mr Crouch,” she began slowly, measuring her words out with utmost concentration, “I would never lightly trouble you with anything. I can see that you are a very busy man, with much important work to do. I am here with the purest of intentions and I wish only to find out more about how such a music box as I see here in your book could become mine.”

With this she turned to the book to illustrate what she was saying, but found that although still open, not a skerrick of ink could be seen on the page. It must have somehow turned forward a page while she talked; perhaps there was a draft of some sort that passed by the bench. But, uninvited, she dared not touch it to show Mr Crouch the sketch.

Emily turned back to Mr Crouch and decided it was time to admit to the thing that she felt could be the biggest hindrance to her plan.

“The only thing is, Mr Crouch, I am not sure that I am able to pay you. I don’t know what sort of sum you would have in mind, and I can imagine it being rather princely, but I thought I had to at least find out.”

He looked right at her, as though trying to gauge whether to utter what he was about to say next. She sensed there was something he had been meaning to say and was ruminating on whether this was the point at which he should do so.

“There is no need to worry about such things, for there are always ways around them,” he began.

“For this to work Emily,” he said in a quiet, gentle tone, now not much more than a whisper, “I need to have your full trust. I need you to tell me something about you that nobody else knows.”

Emily bit her lip as she considered what she should do. She trawled back through her relatively short life, trying to think of anything that might suffice. She didn’t understand why Mr Crouch would need to know such a thing, and what it could possibly have to do with her music box (for she now thought of it as hers), but couldn’t see any real harm that could be done by just a story.

The main problem was coming up with anything at all. Emily felt she had led a fairly sheltered life, with no real secrets playing a part. Most of what she did was the kind of thing that any young girl would do – drawing, playing in her room or the garden, going to school with the other village children, Sunday picnics, having friends over for supper. She started to get agitated, wondering whether she should simply make something up. But she felt Mr Crouch watching her like a hawk and knew he would easily catch her out. She opted to be honest.

“But I don’t have any secrets Mr Crouch,” she forced out of her strangled, upset throat, “I’m just an ordinary girl.”

Mr Crouch gazed steadily at Emily. Looming so near he seemed twice the height he had before, all jagged edges and tapering angles, the daunting terrain of his long bony face, the grey, sallow skin that was drawn so tightly she was sure she could make out the stark whiteness of his bones straining beneath the fleshless face.

This close, her nostrils were flooded with his smell, a damp, musty stew of turned sods and peat; its ashy dankness reminded her of the chest of very old books she had found in the attic last winter, silverfish riddled and puffing up invisible but ever-so-tickly mould spores until she had a violent sneezing fit that meant she had to close the lid. She was so mesmerised by this sudden olfactory memory that it took her some moments to register that Mr Crouch’s lips had been moving. Some part of her must have caught it though for it was now fed from the back of her mind up to the front again, and although she hoped otherwise she knew she had not been mistaken in what it had heard:

“Tell me about what really happened with your mother.”