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.