The Music Box: Chapter Sixty

Isabelle came to with this final vision of the laughing wolf dancing before her eyes as clearly as if he was standing there right now, making himself at home in her own kitchen. She felt as one does after swimming up from the fathomless depths of an impossible dream, but there was also the niggling sense that it was no dream at all; that she had been somewhere and seen something that although it could not be easily explained, was as real as the chair on which she still sat.

Tilting Percy’s hat back above her brow, Isabelle gazed around, hopeful of anchoring herself with the familiar. Powdered ash, a chalky dull gray, sat in the grate on the far side of the room, remnants of last night’s distant warmth, of which there was now not a trace. It reminded her that she should have relit it by now, lunch would be quite late by the time it was ready for cooking. Before it sat the table, reassuringly solid and worn, its wooden top scoured smooth by a thousand plate scrapes, arches of blunt cutlery ends leaving tiny little pocks that slowly wore each other away in greeting.

The shadows of the morning had swung around, giving Isabelle the troubling impression that things were now leaning away from her, distancing themselves from her plight. She rose unsteadily from the chair and walked to the window, three measured steps across the wooden floor – feeling how it dipped in the middle, reaching for a hold on the walls. She must think. What could it all have meant? Who was that strange little man doing coming to her like that? What danger where they all in?

Isabelle cast her mind back to her last conversation with Emily, the question about the woods left hanging in the air between them, thick with meaning. Something had already started to change, and she knew it was not for the better. She felt a little bad she had not been paying more attention to her only daughter, did not show her enough just how much she was cherished. But now was not the time to worry about such things, she had to focus on what to do from here. Isabelle wondered how long Emily and Percy had been gone, where they might have been all this time.

A creaking floorboard sent Isabelle spinning around, her left hand catching on a cup and sending it crashing to the floor. It was Emily’s favourite, bearing a picture of a rabbit and an owl in close discussion about something they both seemed to find quite mirthful. Isabelle looked up from the cup to see Emily standing before her. They both looked back at the cup, Isabelle waiting for Emily to say something about it, let out a whimper or a sob – anything. But Emily simply looked back up at her mother and shrugged.

“Not to worry mother, it’s only a cup.”

Isabelle’s hands wrung the edge of her apron, pulling it this way and that absentmindedly, her fingers suddenly feeling thick with clumsiness, little sausages with a mind all of their own.

“Yes dear, I suppose you’re right,” she said, her voice catching a little but smoothing towards the end.

“I’ll just have to sweep it up. And how was your walk?”

“Oh, it was fine,” Emily sighed. “Percy – I mean father – has just stopped in at the baker’s, so I ran ahead.”

“I see. Well then – let’s not dally. You can help me make lunch. Go wash your hands and then you can come back and help with the potatoes.”

Emily looked down at her hands, Isabelle noting she was peering at her upturned palms, rather than holding up her nails for inspection as she might have expected. Without a word she spun on her heel and disappeared back through the doorway through which Isabelle had never heard her arrive.

An unpleasant shudder ran up her back. What had that man said again?

“Trust what you know,” she mouthed to herself. She knew there was something very, very wrong.

It had worked.