The Music Box: Chapter Twenty-Two

“I don’t know what happened with my mother,” Emily told Mr Crouch, staring him square in the eye. “What do you mean by ‘what happened’?” she went on. “Why do you want to know? What has that got to do with anything?”

Emily was truly puzzled and her confusion had made her more querulous than she had perhaps intended. She didn’t like being uncertain about anything, so would often turn it around to put somebody else on the back foot; it was a good way to buy time while she put her mind to work.

But Mr Crouch simply curled his lip into that disarming smile and Emily realised she had been quite rude. He didn’t need to say anything, but she realised it so keenly she broke out in a hot blush.

“What I mean to say, Mr Crouch, is that I’m not quite sure I know what you mean. I had thought you must have realised why I came here, but we seem to be talking about all sorts of things other than the music box.”

Still he simply watched her, as though waiting for something. Emily felt compelled to continue.

“I certainly don’t mean to seem impatient or anything such as that, I was just wondering whether, perhaps, you might have forgotten after all.”

Although a statement, Emily inflected the end so it opened out as a question. She was unnerved by the way Mr Crouch was looking at her, again experiencing that feeling he was reading something behind her face beyond the words she was uttering, perhaps hidden thoughts of which even she was unaware.

She was therefore quite relieved to see him take a breath and begin to talk again.

“No Emily, I most certainly have not forgotten why you are here. I am well aware what has drawn you, no doubt without your mother’s permission, and what has kept you here despite your worries and fears.”
Emily hardly had time to digest this shift in tone and conversation before he continued.

Emily hardly had time to digest this shift in tone and conversation before he continued.

“You will learn, Emily Button, as you grow older, that there is a reason for everything. Nothing happens without a reason; in turn, nothing can happen without then triggering a correlating reaction. There is no instance that can be acted out or even so much appear somewhere as a thought without some form of mirror effect occurring.

“Your visit today, which you may believe to have been on a whim, is a case in point. You may see it as emerging out of the blue, as an idea of your own formulated in your mind, then transmitted to your feet to get you here. Yet it, like anything else, cannot be said to have come into being so simply. It is an occurrence with precedent and antecedent, significance and consequence.

“Each of these elements has its place in a vast yet balanced system, a system at once numbingly chaotic and beautifully ordered, seemingly random yet always falling into place.”

Once again Emily experienced that feeling that Mr Crouch was talking as much to himself as to her, that he was musing aloud in a way that he would continue to do regardless of whether she were to stay or vanished into vapour.

As he talked, Mr Crouch walked over to the bench. He casually picked up the book which had earlier caught Emily’s eye. He flicked through it distractedly, but seemed not to be looking for anything particular. Emily's head was spinning as she tried to keep up with his speech, but she knew she must pay attention as she felt she was now closer to her music box than ever. As she expected, he picked up his loose thread and carried on.

"The seemingly unexplainable is merely the misunderstood; the realm of mystery is nothing other than the realm of the yet-to-be-determined. As true as it is that nothing can occur or be created in isolation, so it is also the case that outside of the admittedly immense world of the known and verifiable there exists a far vaster world of the unknown.

"This, Emily Button, is the world of the imagination, the maligned world of the daydreamer, the whimsical, the crackpot - and the visionary. Now everyone knows about this world of course - but what nobody seems to realise is that far from standing off to the side, somehow separate to and detached from the world we know so well and go about our dreary day-to-day lives in, it is in fact wrapped snugly around the one we call home.

"It both embraces the known world and exists far beyond its furthest reaches, stretching on into infinity in any direction one cares to look. The known world is nothing but a seed hidden in the heart of a greater existence, one which most people are too afraid to discover.”