Vinyl Diaries XV: C.W. Stoneking

photo by 1981 Adam

C.W. Stoneking
The Factory Theatre
December 15, 2007

Should a white man be singing the blues?

It depends, I think, but however you feel about it C.W. Stoneking certainly throws up a few more issues than your garden variety show.

More over at Mess + Noise

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Seven

Emily put the book down. So this was what Crouch was playing it. After all these years, he had discovered a way to be near her mother again. He had of course explained all this to Emily when first she arrived in the music box, but so overwhelming was the situation she hadn’t been able to understand what was really happening, the full ramifications of what he was saying.

And now, who knew how long later, he had been living in her own house – no doubt sleeping in her own bed – biding his time until he had a chance to do away with her father and... who knows what he planned to do with her mother? Clearly he had to get out of her form at some stage, but from what she had learned of Crouch at that point she would be highly expendable, from his point of view.

She had to act, and quickly. But there still remained the issue of how she could possibly get near the house while she looked like this, and what she could hope to achieve even if she were to try.

By now the day was growing quite warm, while the sea was picking up even more of a swell. Emily knew she had to revisit Crouch’s notes once more, to see what the final section might reveal. There was one more thing she needed to understand – the music box itself. How was it that Crouch had come to place himself in there? How had he learnt to come and go as he pleased, to treat it as a world into which he could pass and make anything he wanted happen – well almost anything, as he had clearly been unable to make her mother his own, even in there.

Loathe to pick the book up again just yet (it had once again grown very hot, threatening to burn her fingers as she touched it), Emily decided to have another look through the spyroscope.

Holding it up to her left eye – Emily was proudly left-handed, fondly wearing her ‘sinistrality’ as she had learned it was sometimes called – she saw her father leading her by the hand down the cobbled road just past Gould’s General Store. With a start she realised that they were only paces from the Pig and Whistle, and here she was, in full sight of anyone who might come around the corner.

Emily did not dare to take any chances and lowered herself over the end of the pier, hanging from its edge while her feet sought out something onto which they could latch. Thankfully her ankle knocked against a cross beam and she was able to gain a foothold and swing down. From here the sea spat angrily at her, white foam surging right up to Crouch’s boots, licking them as their peaks passed in a hissing froth.

Realising with a jolt that she had left the book up on the pier, she reached her hand up and poked about blindly until its cover heated her fingertips. Emily snatched it up, thrust it into her pocket and steadied herself, then looked around to appraise her situation. The beam on which she now stood ran from one side of the pier to the other. Worn from years of pounding by the sea, it featured deep grooves, where the weaker grains had been worn away sooner than the more resilient.

There was really no way to go other than back from where she had come, or down, into the rolling sea. Not enamoured with either scenario, Emily elected to stay put for the moment, at least until her sense of danger cleared.

Over the incessant hubbub of the sea, she began to make out voices. An incomprehensible murmuring to begin with, they grew a little more distinct. Two pairs of legs abruptly appeared from above and just to her left, and Emily almost lost her grip when she realised that the shoes sitting at the end of the smaller pair were hers.

Straining to hear over the fizzing and lapping of the water, the voices soon crystalised for her. Her heart leapt when she realised the man’s voice was irrefutably that of her father Percy. She could picture him as though he were right in front of her, his brow furrowed as he thought a little too hard. Her mother often told him he needn’t worry quite so much, but Emily knew he loved to think about everything there was to think about, to turn his mind to problems that others found too difficult, or never even thought to think about in the first place.

There had never been a question she had asked that he had not put his mind to working out. The simpler ones – why the sky was blue; why one never saw birds fall from the sky like stones, and where they must go to die – he would answer straight away, as though he had been thinking about that very matter when she asked and he was glad that she had taken an interest in where his thoughts were heading.

Others took a little more consideration, a little more thought, but he never shied away from providing some form of an answer. Emily had for some time suspected that these answers weren’t always, technically, the right ones, but she loved to hear him tackle them, cherished that twinkle his blue eyes gave, like the reflection of a campfire blazing back out at her, while he shared the secrets of what a dog was thinking about as it drifted off to sleep, how man grains of sand there were on a beach and what happened to us when, finally, we die.

As high as her heart had leapt when she heard her father’s voice – realised that he was alive and well and so close – is just how low it sunk when she heard her own voice, was reminded that Crouch was in total command of her and spinning his deceitful web.

From gas-filled balloon to lead balloon, she was brought crashing back to earth in an instant; cold and alone, so near to what she wanted back more than anything in the world, yet so far.


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to be continued

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The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Six

The water was like ice. The swift-running current grabbed at Isabelle’s body and sucked it into its racing flow. What it was running from, where it was going, neither Isabelle nor the river knew. For a long while it dragged her beneath its surface. Her open eyes knew she was still facing upwards for she could see the way the moonlight fractured on the top of the running water, split into silver shards like a shattered mirror. She lifted her hands towards them, half expecting the shards to slice them open, spill her hot blood into the cool water, but of course it was just a trick of the eyes and mind, an associative conceit.

Isabelle remained resolute in her decision to have plunged into the hungry river and felt, for the first time in as long as she could remember, at peace. A voice at the back of her mind reminded her that she could not stay underneath the water forever, so she calmly set about drawing herself closer to that dancing light above.

When she finally raised her head above its surface and took in air, the sudden rush of sounds reminded Isabelle of where she was. Still she refused to panic – in all her time, her tangled life, apart from Percy and Emily it was water that she most trusted. But it was a strange kind of trust. She knew it would ultimately look after her, but she was uncomfortable admitting just what a hold it had on her, what a pull it had on her heart.

This was the reason she could rarely bring herself to take Emily down to the sea, though they both loved it so. If she was to be honest with herself, it was a form of greed, a jealous protectiveness. She did not want to lose Emily to this love, for it to capture her daughter in the way it had captured her own young heart, filled a spot in her that for others family completed. She knew she was being selfish, but so important to her were Percy and Emily that she could not bear to think that something else could take the place she held for her daughter, could draw Emily in under its unmatchable spell.

The river, Isabelle realised, was starting to lose the edge of its frenetic pace. She had been tumbled this way and that for who knows how long, whereas now she was able to feel part of its rhythm, moving with it rather than it simply tossing her along. Resting on its surface, drawn along on its merry dance but now well and truly in step, Isabelle saw that the river had widened since she jumped in, but that up ahead there was a peninsula of jutting land, slowing the water as it had to squeeze past and around into its next bend.

Near the end of this peninsula, just above the water line, she saw a fire was burning. Shadows played in the treetops as the fire danced and twisted, drawing in new breath as deeply and appreciatively as Isabelle herself was now doing. She felt the loose folds of her dress drawn across her body as a cross-current pulled her towards the side of the river, and is it passed into the small bay that the peninsula had created, she felt her feet touch the stony river bottom. She stood and waded through the water, feeling it tugging her back but this time resisting. She was loathe to disappoint it, but knew she had been brought to this particular place for a reason.

As she reached the river’s edge, water streaming down the hair plastered to her head and dripping off the clumping ends, Isabelle pricked her ears to see if she could hear anything that would alert her as to what she should do next. But apart from the ceaseless, whooshing, rushing of the water and the dry, raspy crackling of the fire, there was no sound at all. The birds had curled up under a warm wing for the night, while the nocturnal army of creatures that came out after dark were perhaps hiding in the trees, eyes drawn in slits so as to not let the whites give them away, but none was uttering a peep.

Isabelle clambered up the river bank and walked slowly towards the fire. It was only small, taking up no more room than a small stool, and was burning quite low. Maybe she was too late? Somebody must have been here recently, but there seemed no sign of anyone at the present. And anyway, why would somebody be waiting for her here? How would they have known she might come by? She certainly had not planned anything of the sort, so there was no way anybody could be expecting her.

“Now that’s where you are wrong!”

Isabelle jumped near out of her skin, her heart racing at the shock of the voice coming from out of thin air. Dropping from a branch that was hanging from the tree just behind her, a small red-headed man gave a low bow to the startled, dripping lady before him. Isabelle’s mind raced, trying to work out whether she had ever seen him before.

“You don’t yet know me, but you will be very glad to have made my acquaintance,” he smiled, replacing a green felt hat upon his head.

“My name is Oscar, you might say I am an acquaintance of Emily’s.”

The Music Box: Chapter Fifty-Five

Emily pored quickly through more of Crouch’s notes, increasingly frustrated at not being able to find a solution to her dilemma. Muddling her thoughts was the dawning awareness of just how inhuman Crouch had become, the twisted experiments and the wild ideas he was spouting. She learned of how his chamber had been used to achieve all manner of frightful ends, reading with horror of his joy at chancing one day, in a walk through a distant forest, across a wolf that had wandered into a steal trap left by one of the local hunters.

The wolf had been there for days, unable to wrench its leg from the trap. Without food or water it had weakened dramatically, wasting away to skins and bones. It was left so weak that it could do nothing as Crouch dragged it back to his hidden laboratory in the dead of the night, securing it in a special cage he had built. Over the weeks Crouch tended to the wolf, feeding it and nursing it back to health.

Emily was nearly physically sick as she read a passage in which the wolf, nearing full strength, had been fed an old man Crouch had found slumped outside the Pig and Whistle early one morning. With a sadistic glee Crouch went into graphic detail about the way the wolf had picked the man apart piece by piece until nothing remained.

Once he was assured the wolf had returned to rude health, Crouch made his move. He had thought long about how he would be able to safely trade places with the wolf. If he was left in the cage, then Crouch wouldn’t be able to get out once the swap was made. But if he let the wolf out now, he was surely exposing himself to a danger that was too much of a risk. For though he had returned the wolf back to health, he knew (and admired) that the wolf would feel no debt, that there would be no regret or remorse if he did to Crouch what he had done to the old man.

While not perfect, he decided the only solution was to put the wolf to sleep, then open the cage. He could make the change while it was still under, then when he came to it would be he, Crouch, who was the wolf, with the wolf confined to one of his boxes.

Mixing up a sleeping draught, Crouch was shaking with anticipation. Emily read how he had never been so excited by the potential of an experiment, thrilling at the chance to finally achieve his ambition of running with the wolves. He mixed the draught into the wolf’s water and waited. It grew drowsy, closed its eyes and came to rest on the floor of the cage. Crouch made his move.

***

Much of the middle section of Crouch’s notes meticulously detailed his time in the forest, his experiences living as a wolf. From what Emily could work out, he spent years with them, and she wondered why, if he was so happy leading such a life, he had decided to return, to take up where he had left off in human form. Then she saw it:

She brought me back. I would, I believe, have never returned otherwise. I went in thinking I would learn their tricks, their ways, grow to think like them and then return to being Aloysius Crouch, with all I had learned. But the longer I lived as a wolf, the more I realised how perfectly their form was suited to this way of life, their sleek dark fur wrapped around pure, taut muscle, powerful jaws from which there was no escape.

Yet, deep within, as much as I was them, as much as I belonged, a trace of something else remained. I would never even have known if I had not seen her there, this beauty of the forest who appeared as though from nowhere one night and was to make the forest as much her home as I had made it mine.

I watched her, day after day. At first it was a balm, a soothing experience to lay my hot, hungry eyes on such a gentle, refreshing creature. But it grew too much – day after day I would draw near, but was unable to make the final step and reveal myself. It tore me up inside, these contradictory feelings when I was here to learn to let such thoughts go entirely.

It was no use. I had to meet her, discover who she was, what she was doing here. I should never have given into the temptation.

Shaking, Emily read on to discover how the wolves had, though Aloysius’ persistent arguing, taken her mother in. She experienced the scene she had witnessed in the music box, the confrontation in the Golden Grove where her mother and father had fled as one, through Aloysius’ eyes. Once he stood up to Jericho, taken him on directly in front of the other wolves, there was no future for him in their company.

Lucky to escape with his life, he fled the forest and resumed life as Aloysius Crouch, to all appearances an ordinary human being. But he burned inside with an uncontrollable fire. He was, as far as such a man could be, dangerously in love.