The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Five

Emily couldn’t see a thing. All was black as can be, an all-consuming darkness that allowed no sense of anything beyond the self. She realised that even the self wasn’t all that conceivable – she struggled to grasp any idea of where she was, what she was.

“I’ll start by touching my nose,” Emily thought, but there was no sensation of having done so, no matter how she tried. Trying not to panic, she thought through what might have happened. The last thing she recalled was the intensely white light that enveloped her inside the music box. She had heard the choir reach incredible heights of song, an incomprehensible cascading of the most beautiful sounds with which her ears had ever been caressed.

This black was as deep and dark as the white was rich and bright and although she was disconcerted at her inability to make head or tail of it, Emily felt she had at the very least escaped the confines of the music box, which was, she knew, the first step to getting home. A sudden thought struck her – her weightlessness and the ‘foggy’ feel, the lack of a sense of her own corporeality, suggested she had arrived back in the chamber in which she had been thrust into the box in the first place, the one in which Crouch first trapped her and then stole her body.

Now it was all coming back to her. Bernard or Oscar (she couldn’t remember which had agreed) were to arrive separately, and – using whatever technique it was with which they passed through from one side to the other, she had never really found out - with their bodies intact. They would then make sure Crouch’s body was still in the chair where he had left it and still unoccupied, then start the chamber up and get Emily fed from the chamber into his form.

With everything so quiet, Emily began to fear the worst. Who knew whether they were going to arrive as they should? Despite developing a bit of a soft spot for them, Emily was not so deluded that she credited them with any great deal of competence. For all she knew, they had got distracted along the way by a chance passerby, or perhaps came across a morning tea that they simply couldn’t resist.

She did not have to worry long, however, for she soon heard the sound of the chamber coming back to life. Although she still had no feeling of limbs or body parts as such, Emily still felt a surge throw her across the chamber, before squeezing her through a narrow opening. She was tossed about in a looping passage before coming to a sudden halt.

Everything was bright again - Emily could finally see. She looked at her hands to make sure, and almost fell over backwards when she saw the long, pale, slender fingers, the pale half moons at the base of each of the fingernails. Turning them over, the smooth palms were no less a surprise, but somehow less confronting. She looked past them and saw Oscar trying to hide on the stairway – failing miserably, as the railings really didn’t hide all that much and he was a most rotund little man.

“Oscar – you made it!”

Another shock as her voice came out in Crouch’s unmistakeable baritone, the rich tones that had put her at ease sounding decidedly out of place carrying her cry. Oscar seemed to be willing the ground to swallow him then and there, shying a little further back into the shadows. Emily realised he would be scared out of his wits, being addressed so by Crouch.

“Oscar, don’t be afraid – it’s me, Emily!”

Still he held his ground, although he did seem to be poking his head a little higher over the banister.

“Prove it,” he challenged, clearly ready to run (he would never get very far mind you) if need be.

“How?”

He thought about it for a little while.

“Tell me what riddle I asked when I met you in the forest.”

So much had passed since then, Emily was sure she wouldn’t remember. But she had been so annoyed once she realised the riddle was useless to her that it had somehow stuck. She first remembered the fawn, and the rest soon followed.

“What sleeps through a storm, rises afore dawn, shares thoughts with a fawn, is already torn and has never been born?”

Emily was relieved to see Oscar break into a smile.

“I don’t know – tell me.”

“Oscar! You know I don’t know.”

“Oh I know you didn’t, but I wondered if as Crouch you might have been able to tell me.”

Emily felt her temper rise, but then realised what Oscar had said. Perhaps he had a point. Although Crouch had left his body here seemingly empty, surely there was some way of accessing his mind. Whether it was getting into his memory or tapping into the part of his brain that calculated his dastardly little plans, there must be some way of making use of this opportunity to find out what Crouch was up to – and how she could thwart his evil intentions. She had been unable to do so from her dreams, but this was different, this was him, his body she was in.

Yet this was no time for sitting around – Emily had to get going and find out just where Crouch was and what on earth he had been up to since he crammed her in that box, mistakenly believing she would never get out.

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Four

“And where, pray tell, have you been young lady?”

Isabelle allowed into her voice a note of disappointment, one of anger, one of near despair, let them jangle uncomfortably and wash over Emily. She was her daughter and she loved her dearly, but she had to know there were rules and responsibilities and that they meant something.

“I was at Tabitha’s, helping Mrs Tibbits with her garden,” Emily said. Her stance was one of remorse, hands clasped behind her back, a pointed toe swivelling on the kitchen floor, her eyes downcast. She raised them briefly to gauge the look on Isabelle’s face, but the mother remained inscrutable. She didn’t want to draw this out too long, but felt Emily had to feel the weight of her disappointment if she was to lean that she could not simply come and go at any hour she pleased.

“I hadn’t realised it had gotten so late, we were very close to having all the planting done and the time just flew by.”

Isabelle loved her time in the garden, so knew how easily this could happen. One minute you’re there with a row of seedlings that need some attention and a few weeds peeking through to deal with, the next thing you know you have worked your way around the entire garden bed and the afternoon has turned to evening. But the fact was, Emily must learn to take responsibility for her actions and for their consequences.

“Well that’s all very well, but your father and I have been worried about you,” Isabelle said, looking right at Emily who still avoided her mother’s eye.

“What if something had happened? And out at this time of night in such a thin dress and no woollens – I will be most surprised of you don’t come down with a cold.” Isabelle realised her own hands were shaking. To steady herself, she went over to the stove, removed the lid from the pot of the stew and began to stir. This simple domestic ritual helped calm her nerves, which were more frayed than she had realised.

“Anyway, we’ll talk more about this later. Your dinner is growing cold and I don’t want you going to bed with an empty stomach, though you should know we are quite unimpressed at you being out so late, you’ve let your father and me down.”

Isabelle knew, and suspected Emily knew, that this talk of Percy being disappointed and unimpressed was a bit of a stretch. He was unlikely to be impressed if he had realised she had been out so late and walked home by herself in the near-dark, but it’s unlikely that he had even realised. He was a good father, it’s not that he didn’t care, but when he got involved in his writings, there was little that could distract him.

Feeling she had been about as stern as she could be and still be in a state where she could face dinner, Isabelle allowed some of her usual softness to return to her voice.

“Speaking of your father, how about you go and let him know that dinner is ready?”

“Okay mother.” Emily slowly turned and began to walk to the stairs. She stopped after just a step and turned back around.

“Mother?”

“Yes Emily?”

“Please don’t stay mad at me.”

Isabelle’s heart melted, and she caught herself about to tell Emily it was all okay. But she bit her tongue and regathered her composure.

“Let’s just get dinner happening shall we, we can discuss this more once we’ve all eaten.”

The Music Box: Chapter Forty-Three

Emily closed her eyes, just as Minerva had explained. Her heart thumped in her chest until she thought it would hammer a hole right through to the outside – and then what? She could picture it going on thumping until it burst, the pressure too much.

But of course it didn’t. She stood as still as she could, waiting. Minerva had explained what to expect, but she was still as nervous as could be. To settle her nerves she tried to picture her family, imagine being back with them, but every time she managed to see her mother and father as anything other than cloudy forms, Crouch popped up and leered at her with a frightful glint in his eyes that she could not bear.

Emily tried the last of her bag of tricks – counting backwards from 100. This, thankfully, seemed to work and distracted her just enough to keep her trembling under wraps. Standing back in the forest, she felt very vulnerable indeed – she was ashamed to realise she missed the presence of Bernard and Oscar. As infuriating as they had been, she had to admit the forest had been a lot less scary when they were with her, even if it was only because they tangled up her brain quite so.

A breeze tickled through the clearing and Emily realised it was not just any breeze. Even with her eyes closed, she realised it was a deep blue. From the other side came a red gust, followed by a green wisp of a wind. These looped and tumbled around at ankle level at first, then began filling the clearing as high as her knees. Soon swimming up past her waist, Emily allowed herself to relax back into their cushioning embrace. As they reached her shoulders, she felt a lightness in her feet as though she was resting on a blanket of air.

The blue streak was the first to reach her ears. She let out a shocked cry as she heard its song, a melding of the most beautiful string instruments ever devised but with a purity and joy beyond the ability of any mortal to ever hope to produce. Next the red gust arrived with its warm, woodwind tones, but again too hauntingly, achingly beautiful to be anything short of enchanted.

Emily had by now forgotten her fears – forgotten pretty much everything truth be told. The urgency with which she had awaited this moment was being replaced with an infatuation with the moment in which she found herself, a hope against hope that it would never end.

Yet this was just the beginning, the prelude to her journey. For rustling through the trees and drifting into the clearing now was the white light – the miasmic fog of angel song that had been Emily’s undoing all those days ago, but now had a counter role, serving as what could well be her only possible saviour.

Succumbing to this overwhelming of the senses and the joyful expression of her deepest wishes – for though she did not realise, it was these wishes that underpinned this musical flight of fancy - Emily let this white light in.

Bursting into her head in a blinding shock, the choir announced its arrival with a sonorous blitzkrieg, a thousand unearthly voices melding into one triumphant whole.

As she drifted into a blissful reverie, Emily faintly realised she was being lifted lightly by her elbows. Weightless, she was carried higher and higher. They took her off the forest floor, through the tree-top canopy and past the clouds that had been her outermost limit when last she tried to escape, higher and higher until white cloud turned to searingly blue sky, higher still until blue sky turned navy then black, then a place awash with a sea of stars twinkling like a million halos singing her home.

The celestial journeying continued apace, now at such a speed that the stars were curving streaks of white smearing across the black until even the black had disappeared entirely and all was white once more. But this was not the white of the clouds – it was too bright, too dazzlingly luminescent. It was pure light, the untainted and utterly complete expression of reflection and expulsion. Everything that was, that existed in all time, all space, was being sent to her in the form of light. It was all there – her past, present and future, every world side by side and placed before her.

Emily was still in the music box, of the box, but the box had found its own way to turn itself inside-out.

The world beyond the box was therefore now as much inside it as out, and vice-versa. Its walls, boundaries, ceased to exist in any true sense. The doorway was open.

With a pang of regret but her heart full of hope, Emily stepped through.

The Music Box: Part IV: Chapter Forty-Two

Isabelle Button heard the front door creak heavily on its ageing hinges. From where she stood at the stove, she couldn’t see directly through to the hall, but she could tell by the way the door was slowly being swung back into place that Emily was trying to keep as low a profile as she could.

And no wonder - it was well past the time she should have been home. Isabelle hadn’t been too worried, she knew Mrs Tibbits would send her off if she was too underfoot, but it wasn’t like Emily to stay out so long after she would have known her mother would have expected her back. Isabelle put the lid back on the stew she had been keeping warm over the stove and turned to face the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

She waited for Emily to appear in the doorway, but heard her footfall moving up the stairs.

“Emily Button, I would like to see you please,” she said firmly, flinching as she realised her ‘no-nonsense’ voice was not a long way from that her own mother used to use. This softened her slightly, for she prided herself on being nothing like her own mother in any respect. “Please come to the kitchen.”

“Yes mother, I’m just going to freshen, I’ve been helping out in the garden and I have just seen my hands are still quite dirty.”

Isabelle acquiesced, busying herself with the cutlery and plates on the table, rearranging them for at least the third time. She liked to think she was an easy-go-lucky, carefree kind of mother, but the truth was ever since her turn she had been drawing a protective wing tightly around Emily. She wasn’t sure if this was for Emily’s protection or there was more to it than that, as though she needed the weight of motherhood as an anchor to keep her grounded, stop her being spirited away by whatever malevolent influence was able to have its affect on her vulnerable state.

She had resisted going over to the Tibbits residence herself to check on Emily. While she may be fretful, she was also wary of showing her concern to the rest of the village. The last thing she or any of the Button family needed was for there to be more talk than there already must be.

Finding herself standing at the window, Isabelle gazed out into the darkening twilight. The bare trees were sending their long slender fingers clawing up into an indigo sky. Darker, bruised clouds hung near, in anticipation she felt - waiting to hear what admonishments she had in store for her only daughter. Lower, through the trees and sitting just above the horizon line, the pale liquid violet that marked the last of the day, fast scampering away, sat brimming with resistance to its banishment. But even as she watched the heaviness of the blanketing evening squashed it lower and lower until there was barely a trace to be seen, as though the very day itself had buckled under the sheer dense triumphalism of night.

The day had been a relatively fine one, enough sun to put a reddish rose into her cheeks and only the odd bright cloud lazily sweeping overhead, dancing beneath the sun but never really threatening its reign. Yet by the middle of the afternoon that warmish breeze that had rolled over the hill was in retreat, in its place the salted bluster of the sea. Short, sharp gusts that swept even the light away, for it was a tired, wan light that closed out the day, the sun tiring in its fight against the wind and bedding down. It sank silently behind the sea, which responded by lessening the violence of the wind it sent, not so much a graceful victor as one that simply lost interest once the struggle was over and won.

None of this escaped Isabelle’s notice. It didn’t sit there at the front of her thoughts, but registered at a deeper level, it was part of her make-up, the seasons and nature’s unpredictable dance in a way at the very centre of her own relationship with the world.

She had been a child of the sea and nothing had really changed. While she might not have spent her days out on the ocean, dropping nets into its invisible depths and rounding up what mysterious bounties could be divined, it was no less coursing through her veins than it had been of anyone else in her family.

Her childhood skin had been scoured with its abrasive promises. She would lie awake at night, picturing a life out on one of those boats such as her father’s, absent-mindedly tasting the salt crust on the back of her hand. One night she had stayed away at the home of a distant aunt and uncle and was terrified by the silence, the missing roar of the night ocean like a missing body part. Her thumping heart was terrifying her more, the blood in her ears making her want to cry out. It took all her will not to swing her legs out of bed and tear off into the night and for home.

She slept not a wink and vowed she would never return.

Though the wind had dropped, the sound of the sea was now carrying up through the stillness of the night. Isabelle listened to her faint lullaby, knowing it wasn’t to be trusted. There was something a little off-kilter in it tonight, a wisp of a warning, but Isabelle closed her thoughts to it so as to better concentrate on the tasks at hand. Her mind was brought back to the house by the sound of wood scraping on polished wood – Percival in the study upstairs moving his chair back from his desk. She knew, from experience, that this did not signal an impending arrival, but was the first in a series of little rituals that would eventually deliver him downstairs and to dinner.

First he would push back from the desk, his hard-backed chair sliding across the floor rather than being lifted. But it would be some time before he took advantage of the extra space to depart the chair.

He would twirl his quill lightly in his right hand, replacing it carefully in its stand. Next he would remove his glasses with his now free right hand, holding them by the arm while he rubbed his tired eyes with his left fingertips, which would move from his eyes up to his creased forehead where they would continue to rub.

He would close the book before him, the leathery weight of the binding producing a small whump as it pushed the pages together. He would run a hand over the cover, feeling its texture, its light rises and falls. Finally, he would replace it on its side at the end of the line of such volumes collecting at the furthest reach of his desk, then close his eyes.

Here he would sit for another few minutes, drawing his thoughts away from the front of his mind, where he had been juggling them and attempting to fit them together like a jigsaw, filing them away for next time.

Isabelle heard Emily’s light step coming back down from the top of the stairs, a pause after each left-right step to delay the telling off she knew would be coming her way.

Finally she appeared in the doorway, resting a small delicate hand on the doorframe, the flickering light of the lantern casting a strange shadow across her face.

“Hello mother.”


It's been a little while since the last chapter... jump back to July posts if you need a refresher as to what on earth is going on

Vinyl Diaries X: The scenic route to politics

This post began life as a look at politics and music, but, realising I was frowning a little too intently, is about to take a turn for the cheesy. It was going to be too big a leap in logic from the last vinyl diary anyway, so instead I'll see what babysteps can get us there.

Which means starting with Feist. After her airport shenanigans of a vinyl diary not so long ago, here she goes again. Her 1 2 3 4 video is even dancier, but was a little too technicolour for me even in this strange mood.

While there's nothing I like more in my music than a feel that it's balanced precariously on the cusp of gloaming, or toppling ever deeper into the glooming, sometimes there's a small window (usually around 4am) for some gleaming.

And while we're busy dancing in the streets, it's a rare gem that could offer a brighter gleaming than that found shining from Lavender Diamond, so monstrously sweet your teeth hurt for days with the guilty pleasure of it all. This pinker than pink fairy floss moment is pure, unadulterated joy, of a kind rarely admitted to by those who feel they should know better. I think if I had gone to school with Becky Stark I would certainly have pulled her pigtails, for reasons more complex than I would ever have understood.

Though not dancing as such, it's not a huge stretch to move from rollerskates to bicycles. Plus at least there are handclaps and synchronicity aplenty in the Bat for Lashes video for What's a Girl To Do?...populated by the evil bmx bandit doppelgangers of the Flaming Lips stageshow troupe.

Unable to take my eyes off that Frank-esque bunny, the Gary Jules take on Mad World from Donnie Darko seems the obvious next port of call. Here I get a bit stuck, but will throw in the fairly tenuous 'children' link as an excuse for wandering by Glósóli.

Which isn't really getting us much closer to the whole politics thing... so maybe a quick peek at Hoppipolla will help, as then we can ride the oldies' pirate-cut coat-tails over to Ant Music. I know this is his dandy highwayman period, but he's about as pirate as I can think of right now. How much deeper can this hole get...?

Well, Elastica did cover Cleopatra, so we can dip into Connection if we're so inclined.

And we best be, for that's as far as this little diary is going for now... the museum is closing its doors to catch a wee nap.

*

You get further as
I draw closer as
You whisper words
That I never thought
I’d hear again

You get closer as
Days grow longer as
You say to me what
I don’t want to know

I get further as
Night draws nearer as
Birds draw wings over
Tired eyes

I get closer as
Those wings draw nearer as
The night draws the curtain on
You

Vinyl Diaries IX: Feist

A little while back, in a vinyl diary not so long ago, I mentioned the physicality of music – music for the feet, the mind and the heart.

Well I’ve realised I overlooked something when I left out the shoulders; it seems there’s an artist for everything.

The music for the shoulders that’s been growing on me lately is one Leslie Feist.

The Calgary chanteuse has been around a while, but I only stumbled on her a few years back through her dalliance with the Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People, where she does a rather splendid job of cutting through the hazy shambles that is ’Almost Crimes’, an album highlight and jump-around-like-a-lunatic delight only topped by the banjo-plucked Emily Haines-driven ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’, which to this day never fails to steal the breath and cut to the quick.


It would be easy to file Feist away as a composite of ballpark fellow-travellers – ‘marked by specks of Dusty Springfield's soul, Björk's confrontational adventurousness, and Joni Mitchell's warmth’ as Pitchfork would have it, with a dash of the piano bar jauntiness of Catpower or an edge-roughened Regina Spektor.

But there’s more going on here than that… there's the shoulder thing for one.

Don’t take my word for it though, pop over here and try to sit still.


I kinda like the video too… even if there are certain shades of OK Go about it.

Regret

I dream of the flower
The bird on the bower
I watch as it takes nervous flight
I spin upside down
Begin now to drown
I wish that I’d wished you good night

Fade

Starved of sun
He fades to an echo
Of what she first thought she had found
His ruby red lustre
Shortly proved bluster
But it was a promise to which she was bound

Steam

The mist of her memory
Pooled on the mirror
Rendering reflection mute
Blocks of non-colour – shapes
Without edges

She wrote her name with a finger drawn
Awkwardly eking
Sudden squeaking
Where she pressed too hard and then slipped

She wrote his name in the space beneath
Had to squash the last letter in
She had not left enough room
Thought he might fit in the space
He did not