The Music Box: Chapter Thirty-Two

That was the last straw. Emily was on the verge of taking off from this madman (these madmen!) for good, when her ears pricked up.

“What did you say?”

“We were just saying, that although we weren’t quite sure how you get out, we know someone who might.”

“Who?”

“Oh, just someone. She doesn’t seem terribly fond of us mind you, for some strange reason.”

“Where is she?”

“Not a long way from here. She’s not easy to find though, you could walk right by her house and if you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for, you would miss it all together.”

“Well could you take me there?”

Mr Topkins and Mr Topkins fell into a hushed whisper, each drawing a hand up to the side of their mouth to keep Emily from hearing.

They seemed in some sort of argument, and as the whispering grew louder and she could catch snatches of it, picking up “midnight” and “never get out”, but the rest was too muffled. Finally their little conference ended and this time it was Bernard who addressed Emily.

We have decided to take you to see Minerva, on one condition.”

“And what might that be?”

“That when we get there, you tell her what a splendid representative of the forest we have been, that you could not hope to have come across a finer or more handsome rescuer and that she should see it in her heart to consider our long-standing offer of marriage.”

Emily stared in disbelief. The thought of another moment with this pair was enough to give her grave misgivings – the prospect of a lifetime in their company boggled the mind. But she knew not to say any of this, and noted with relief that they were conveniently overlooking the thoughts she couldn’t help but have thought.

“Agreed.”

They set off at once down a path Emily had not seen before, perpendicular to the one along which she had been travelling. She had wondered how the Mr Topkinses would go about travelling, whether there would be much bickering over who got to lead, but she saw the arrangement seemed fairly simple – one would lead while the other snoozed. It seemed the only thing they liked better than talking was napping at every opportunity that arose. She realised they must be very exhausting company for each other, given how exhausting she had found them already. But now that they were moving, her mood improved substantially and she felt much happier just walking along with her own thoughts, grateful that she was being led by Oscar, who was now giving Bernard a rest having had his most recently.

As they briskly manoeuvred their way through the dense forest, Emily saw it was inhabited by a whole host of plants and creatures she did not recognise, not even from the books she would pore through at night - her father’s prize set of encyclopaedia, his most cherished possession. She realised that while many of the creatures here were ones with which she was familiar, many must be the weird and wonderful inhabitants of her vaguest dreams, the ones she had in the depths of slumber that she would not remember by morning, awaking with only the most recent dreams teasing the edges of her memory.

For Emily had not forgotten what Mr Crouch had said about this place, or how it had come to be. With its vastness and the seeming reality of its detail, it could be easy to forget that it was all somehow contained inside the music box, and that it had been empty until her own thoughts had poured into it. She could not, however, understand how there was quite so much here, and how there seemed to be no realisation that this is what it was – Mr Topkins, for instance, seemed quite certain it was a world all of its own, with a past and a future and all the trappings of any kind of reality that could be said to exist in a self-sustaining form.

She wondered at how such a place could exist with such little self-awareness as to how it had come to be, without some sort of inkling about the genesis of its existence. Yet surely Mr Topkins wouldn’t have been so mean to her if he had realised that without her he would not even exist, without her visiting Mr Crouch and having her thoughts sucked into his chamber and crammed into the box, none of this would be here.

Emily wondered suddenly about ‘her own’ world, the one she had lived in all her life. How much was there she didn’t know about it? How had it really come about? Was she simply the figment of a young girl’s over-vivid imagination? What would happen if that girl suddenly woke up, or grew up, or went away, or died, or any number of things that could snuff out her existence in the blink of an eye?

But all this was too much to really get her head around. It also made her panic, to think she had such a tenuous grasp on her own existence.

Emily tried remembering what Mr Crouch had said about the world of imagination and the realm of the possible that existed around their world. The way he described it placed them at the very centre of things, with this ‘other’ world wrapped around them, encompassing them. She wondered if he was right. How would this fit in with the possibility that the world they both knew, the one he placed at the very centre, was merely a projection of someone else’s thoughts? What did that do to his understanding of things?

She felt the key to her return must lie in there somewhere and that it was going to be up to her to come up with her way out. Emily thought back to the rock she had pulled from her sock. She had caught a glimpse of it before placing it behind her back, and knew it had been as dull and lifeless as ever at that point. It was only after she had pictured it as something more that it had become something else, something she had projected or conjured. She wasn’t sure exactly how this helped, but knew that an answer was nearby, that she was getting closer than she had been since arriving here.