The Music Box: Chapter Twenty-Seven

“So Emily, I hope you’re pleased. I’ve shown you exactly what you most wanted to know,” he spoke down to her.

Emily was too stunned to utter a thing. This turn of events was proving too frightful for words. The wolf put a paw on her tiny shoulder and Emily saw a flash of hurt in his eye when she shrugged it away.

“Have you worked out where you are yet Emily and what you have just seen?”

She shook her head. It was getting to be all too much.

“You are in the woods where I first met your mother, and where she first met your father. I’ve done exactly as I promised and fulfilled your wishes – your dream to know about your mother, your desire to discover where you came from and how it all began.

“But now; now it’s my turn. I explained to you that each choice we make will have an outcome, a concomitant consequence, and this is yours.

“The music box I promised you has been created. It is as you hoped, a most beautiful and wondrous thing, a revealer of hidden secrets. Everything I told you and promised you is true, although I left out one small detail. If you are wondering where this music box is, simply look around.”

Emily glanced around the clearing, looking for her box. A smile danced over the wolf’s lips, but was then extinguished.

“Oh Emily, do think. You seem quite unable to see the forest for the trees.”

At this, the penny dropped. The wolf must have seen the dawning surprise on Emily’s face.

“That’s right Emily, you clever little girl. Welcome to your music box, a most magical place.”

Her mind raced as she tried to figure out how this was all happening, what he could possibly mean.

“But if I’m in the music box, then what are you doing here, and why do you look like this?”

“Well Emily, that is a long story. What I will say is that everything you have seen up until now all took place a short time before you were born. As you saw it was indeed I who brought your father to this clearing after finding him in the forest, who first brought your parents together. It was I, too, who enabled their escape. Since that day, I have been unable to get out of my mind how beautiful your mother looked when she went to your father’s aid. I already loved her with a passion, but that look of utter defiance and her willingness to die rather than lose her love shattered my aching heart into a million pieces, each a broken mirror shard that to this days reflects my hurt over and over everywhere I go. I should never have let her out of my life then and I shan’t make the same mistake again.”

“But how can you be standing here now, as a wolf, when I know you are a man with a shop in a street in a village?”

“Well we are what we are Emily, and for some of us that is more than what it seems. I told you that I was never one to shy from following things through to their outer limits and beyond. Early on, in my studies and experiments, I discovered that we all have dormant tendencies and abilities waiting to be untapped. These lie deep inside us; most never discover them. Most never even look. But I looked Emily, I found mine. I discovered that I have within me the ability to take on a lupine form, to convince even the most suspicious wolf that I am one with them.

“You’ve no doubt heard of werewolves, people who turn into wolves when there’s a full moon and things like that? Well I have far more control over my transformations than that, and I have spent some time living among the wolves to discover their secrets, I have run with the pack to further develop my own latent potential.”

He smiled again. “That’s the answer to the question I know you meant to ask, but your query was a little different. You asked how I was standing here now, as a wolf, whereas I explained how I had been here all those years ago. As for now, well I’m not actually here at all. You will have noticed everything around us has stopped. This will all return to normal again and your music box will play out drama after drama, a little world of wonder for you to explore at your leisure. I have projected this little speech into it knowing you would reach this point, but I – the Seaforth shopkeeper Aloysius Crouch - am not actually in here with you as such.

“While you have been here opening doors on questions you have longed to have had answered, I have not been idle. I am still back in my shop but so are you, the other you. But not for long.

“You see while you are here in this box, the one my machine projected you into when your thoughts were taken into my chamber, I have taken over your form, as this is the form that will take me closest to my own wish and desire. I needed you to visit me so I could gain that exact form – your mother is such a wise, intelligent woman that I can leave nothing to chance. I needed to bring you to my shop to do this and I knew the best way of doing that was to play on your one weakness – your dream to know more about your parents and their past.

“This is what the music box meant to you, although you most likely did not fully appreciate that that is what its promise was. You were dazzled by its superficial beauty, but it was the promise that lay within that really drew you here. Your friend Tabitha, on the other hand, was easily pleased – she just craved something sparkly and indulgent. I provided her with that, and she provided me with you. It was all simple enough really.


“But how long will I be in here?” Emily forced herself to ask, not knowing what more she could say.

“Until I win your mother back.”