The Music Box: Chapter Twenty-Five

Opening her eyes, Emily realised she was still sitting. Her back was against something sturdy but rough and she turned to discover it was an enormous tree, whose upper reaches were so high that no matter how she craned her neck it was still not enough to find them. They seemed, anyway, to be disappearing into the clouds, which had an almost impossible fluffiness to them, just asking to be jumped all over.

A gentle breeze wrapped its way around her, wandering through the forest as though looking for an old friend. “Have you seen her?” it seemed to ask, though Emily knew a breeze was not supposed to speak. It had all seemed quite peaceful – perhaps that’s how I came to be napping here Emily thought – but slowly the underlying life of her surroundings made itself known.

She was in the heart of a thickly wooded forest, with no concept of how she had come to be here. She had a teasing memory of a foggy room and a distant voice, but the more she tried to bring it into focus the more elusive it proved to be, darting behind a tree or slipping under a rock, only to shoot off when she went to inspect it again. So slippery was it and so impossible to grasp that she simply gave up, knowing that it would return, if it so wished, in its own time.

Emily was struck by a strange sensation that time was ebbing away at a rapid rate, but then suddenly skidding almost to a halt as well. Her ears were the first thing to become attuned to this, hearing the twittering of invisible birds lurking in surrounding bushes grow more urgent and higher pitched, with less time between songs. But just as she was trying to make it out it would drop to a low, drawn-out thrum that barely made any sense from a bird at all. But what else could it be, and where did the bird song go in the meantime of that was not it?

Her eyes soon picked up the sensation with the clouds, which one moment would skitter through what she could see of the sky beyond the canopy, but other moments hover overhead as though stopping to stare at this strange girl and try and find out what she was doing here. Though unsettling at first Emily soon grew used to this, falling into the rhythm herself as she explored the woods, darting here and there at times, stopping to closely examine a particularly intriguing flower or mushroom or claw-like fallen branch.

She was still unsure why she was here, what this was all about. But truth be told she was not particularly concerned with such matters, quite content to explore this place that was so unlike her home, with its cleared hills and windswept face, chapped and battered and crusted in flaking salt.

Here the air was a different type of fresh – the fresh of leaves and pine needles, a lived freshness rather than a scouring one. The ground underneath was also a pleasure, soft and almost bouncy, fallen leaves and needles returning to the soil so they could begin their long journey to the sky over and over, no less eager than a child on a slippery slide but far more patient.

A golden glow suffused a clearing into which she had wandered, the last rays of the day’s sun peering from behind a cloud and sneaking through a gap in the trees. Emily let the warmth caress her face, closing and softening her eyes so she could watch the silhouette show on the back of her eyelids, shadows of orange and black dancing and entwining in an ancient ritual. The black soon grew to outnumber the orange, although even after the warmth stopped tickling Emily’s face a resilient few golden trees of light still held their place. When she opened her eyes they were replaced with the solid black form of the real trees of the forest, the light having leached from them and spilt over the edge of the earth.

Something told Emily she should move on, so she set off to find somewhere safe to spend the night. It was growing cooler and she was pleased to be moving, sending warm blood through her body. She walked for some time more but could not really say how long or how far she had come. Spotting a small embankment with a large pile of pine needles collected up against it, Emily decided she would stop here for the night, then rested up she could decide on a plan of action at first light.

Just as she began smoothing the needles out to form a comfortable bed, Emily heard something crashing around in the woods nearby, emerging from the direction in which she had been walking. She sheltered behind the nearest bush and waited, emitting a small choked cry when she saw what it was. At first she had thought it was her father coming to have a stern word with her for being out after dark, but this man was far too young to be him. Yet he looked like him in so many ways, the lean body, the sandy hair, the serious look he acquired when deep in concentration.

Having deciding to stand up and reveal herself, asking this man who he was and what he knew about where they are, Emily was stopped in her tracks by the next thing she saw. Looming over the young man’s shoulder was an enormous black wolf, and he was heading their way! Riveted to the spot, Emily was unable to even cry out. Before she could find her voice the wolf was upon the man, battering him on the side of the head with a gigantic paw. He crumpled to the ground with hardly a noise, a look of shock frozen on his face.

The wolf scooped the man up in his front paws, rearing to his back legs. As he continued along the path in the direction from which Emily had earlier walked, she could have sworn the wolf had looked over his shoulder, straight into her hiding place, and smiled.