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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