The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Nine

Emily sneezed. She was shocked to hear the sound it made, a rough, deep noise far from the dainty ‘atchoo’ to which she was accustomed. It reminded her of the task at hand. Alone, her thoughts twisted and tumbled and she found it difficult to put them into order. She looked around, her eyes now accustomed to the gloom, settling on the bench across the room. Striding over, Crouch’s coat billowing behind her with each step, she reached the bench before knowing quite what drew her. There, lying closed once again, was the book she had earlier spied:

Metaphysical Marvels and Unlocking the Unknown:
A study by Aloysius Crouch

Reaching out, her fingers softly traced the hard leather cover. She lifted it, her nose catching its musty, inky, bookish smell. Opening to the first page, her finger tracing the curve of Crouch’s neat looping script, she began to read.

It is here that I begin. Until now, there is nothing. After now – everything. The past is already forgotten. It never happened. It belongs in the dustbin of history, so much rotting horse-flesh, a broken vase that cannot hope to hold even a semblance of life, for the decay of its own demise has already overtaken the living, already stamped on each and every one of us the foul stench of defeat. Defeat at the hands of time, of the unswerving march of the flesh’s weakening.

I will not allow this to happen to me. I have too much to do to allow this pre-ordained defeat to diminish my grand plan.

There is, in this life, one chance given to us all. Most never truly grasp the moment when it arrives. But not me. My moment has arrived and I have taken it. I have the will, the need, and now the means to reshape this seemingly unbendable trajectory.

I will bend time to my own will. I will dictate how it moves, where it goes, what it allows to happen. No longer will it shape me, tell me what I am. I am in command. I will prevail. It is here that I begin.

Emily had to stop reading. The forcefulness of the passage had left her winded, a powerful blow that stopped her breathing. She wasn’t really sure what Crouch was on about, but more unsettling than the content was the sheer, naked vociferousness of its thrust, a brutal and unflinching hunger that felt distinctly at odds with nature.

Crouch was clearly determined to go to any lengths to pursue whatever twisted plans he had in mind and Emily was unsure as to how she could possibly hope to have any chance of coming up against such a man, of triumphing in the face of such a single-minded and calculating foe.

Forcing a deep breath, she read on.

I deny history but I hold on to what I have learned. That is this: Man is the greatest contradiction. So powerful. So weak. So capable. So inadequate. King of the jungle. At the mercy of all beasts.

It needn’t be this way. This weakness can be stripped away, this inadequacy banished to the pyre. Man can learn much from the beasts that show no mercy. Mercy is for the weak, the foolish, the misguided. To do so, Man must turn to the beasts that hold the secret of what he can be. There is much to admire in the lion, the jackal, the panther. But there is one beast above all that can open the door to understanding for Man, that can unlock the answer of how to be everything he intends to be.

Emily knew what must come next. She cast her mind back to what she had seen in the forest, the encounter between her parents and the wolves, the way her mother had saved her father all that time ago. An image of Aloysius burned brightly in her mind, quite literally – rimmed with fire, his very fur glowed with the intense heat of unbridled passion, aflame with his hunger.

She saw now what she had not seen the first time, the way he looked at her mother, the way the whole show seemed to be for her benefit. If he had thought she would be impressed he was severely mistaken – this brutality and blatant flaunting of power against the prone figure of her father had instilled in her mother an icy regard for Aloysius, while further cementing her love, care and affection for Percy.

Forced to risk everything to protect him, their hearts held so close to each other against a common threat, they began to beat as one. From that moment forward, there was no question of their separation. To be apart was to attempt the impossible – to be without their own heart.

Though she knew what was to come, Emily returned to the book. She hoped to glean at least some idea of how Crouch’s mind worked, to draw from his writing a hint of the man beneath the mask. The more she read, the more worried she became, but she knew she must go on.

The wolf has no contradiction. It is only what it is. It is power, hunger, need. It can be trusted for it holds no store in trying to be anything but what it is. The fox will wile, the hyena wait. The wolf will be itself, at all times, acting in its own immediate interests and answerable to nothing but its own hunger.

There is much to admire here, much to learn. Man, so distracted by notions of morality and social acceptability, has buried his true self. He is much closer to the wolf than he is prepared to admit. Man and wolf are born almost the same, yet from there everything is done to change Man from what he truly is. The wolf has no such shackles put on him and is free to be what he was born to be. Man, meanwhile, is made weak, compliant, shaped to believe that he is no better than his fellow, need want nothing more than what it is decided he should have.

I will change this. I will make Man everything he can be. I will learn to be Man from his closest cousin, I will run with the wolf and relearn how to be what I know, deep inside, I already I am. I will be reborn as myself, as who I was always supposed to be.

Robbed of this self for so long, stripped of my true being, I denounce all that has come before. History is dead. It is here that I begin.