The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Three

Emily closed her eyes, just as Minerva had explained. Her heart thumped in her chest until she thought it would hammer a hole right through to the outside – and then what? She could picture it going on thumping until it burst, the pressure too much.

But of course it didn’t. She stood as still as she could, waiting. Minerva had explained what to expect, but she was still as nervous as could be. To settle her nerves she tried to picture her family, imagine being back with them, but every time she managed to see her mother and father as anything other than cloudy forms, Crouch popped up and leered at her with a frightful glint in his eyes that she could not bear.

Emily tried the last of her bag of tricks – counting backwards from 100. This, thankfully, seemed to work and distracted her just enough to keep her trembling under wraps. Standing back in the forest, she felt very vulnerable indeed – she was ashamed to realise she missed the presence of Bernard and Oscar. As infuriating as they had been, she had to admit the forest had been a lot less scary when they were with her, even if it was only because they tangled up her brain quite so.

A breeze tickled through the clearing and Emily realised it was not just any breeze. Even with her eyes closed, she realised it was a deep blue. From the other side came a red gust, followed by a green wisp of a wind. These looped and tumbled around at ankle level at first, then began filling the clearing as high as her knees. Soon swimming up past her waist, Emily allowed herself to relax back into their cushioning embrace. As they reached her shoulders, she felt a lightness in her feet as though she was resting on a blanket of air.

The blue streak was the first to reach her ears. She let out a shocked cry as she heard its song, a melding of the most beautiful string instruments ever devised but with a purity and joy beyond the ability of any mortal to ever hope to produce. Next the red gust arrived with its warm, woodwind tones, but again too hauntingly, achingly beautiful to be anything short of enchanted.

Emily had by now forgotten her fears – forgotten pretty much everything truth be told. The urgency with which she had awaited this moment was being replaced with an infatuation with the moment in which she found herself, a hope against hope that it would never end.

Yet this was just the beginning, the prelude to her journey. For rustling through the trees and drifting into the clearing now was the white light – the miasmic fog of angel song that had been Emily’s undoing all those days ago, but now had a counter role, serving as what could well be her only possible saviour.

Succumbing to this overwhelming of the senses and the joyful expression of her deepest wishes – for though she did not realise, it was these wishes that underpinned this musical flight of fancy - Emily let this white light in.

Bursting into her head in a blinding shock, the choir announced its arrival with a sonorous blitzkrieg, a thousand unearthly voices melding into one triumphant whole.

As she drifted into a blissful reverie, Emily faintly realised she was being lifted lightly by her elbows. Weightless, she was carried higher and higher. They took her off the forest floor, through the tree-top canopy and past the clouds that had been her outermost limit when last she tried to escape, higher and higher until white cloud turned to searingly blue sky, higher still until blue sky turned navy then black, then a place awash with a sea of stars twinkling like a million halos singing her home.

The celestial journeying continued apace, now at such a speed that the stars were curving streaks of white smearing across the black until even the black had disappeared entirely and all was white once more. But this was not the white of the clouds – it was too bright, too dazzlingly luminescent. It was pure light, the untainted and utterly complete expression of reflection and expulsion. Everything that was, that existed in all time, all space, was being sent to her in the form of light. It was all there – her past, present and future, every world side by side and placed before her.

Emily was still in the music box, of the box, but the box had found its own way to turn itself inside-out.

The world beyond the box was therefore now as much inside it as out, and vice-versa. Its walls, boundaries, ceased to exist in any true sense. The doorway was open.

With a pang of regret but her heart full of hope, Emily stepped through.