Lloyd thinking again both of Hattie and of the body of the fierce black dog that had seemed to fall apart before his eyes.
Part 4 – A Quickening of Riddles
CHAPTER 1. Strange Languages
HEPHAESTUS AND RAPTURE PROPOSED A PAYMENT TO THE CLUTTERS that they felt they could afford for the time period they thought they would require (which the reformed inventor and drunkard optimistically estimated as a week). Once the older couple had nailed, sanded, and knocked these negotiations into an agreement that they could echo and be sure of, they took a handful of the green coffee Egalantine had browned in their oven in the back room, ground it in a mill, and boiled it up with some tin-tasting water and they all shared a bitter but celebratory cup.
Without children and but the coffinmaking and undertaking trappings and each other to keep them company, the Clutters seemed somewhat deprived of stimulus, and so quite delighted (in their own tapping, echoing, uncertain way) to have some live bodies under the same roof. How else would they have learned, for instance, that it was at all noteworthy that the two rooms that passed for their living quarters behind the shop were as crowded with music boxes as their official business space was with coffins?
The boxes were in themselves quite beautiful to look at, the size of snuffboxes and made of a variety of woods: burl walnut and elm, rosewood and bird’s-eye maple, while others had lids inlaid with tortoiseshell. Fascinated by anything mechanical, Lloyd asked if he could inspect them and found them to be disappointingly simple devices comprising a metal barrel of about three inches with a shiny-toothed steel comb inside. He understood the mechanics and the musical principles at a glance.
All the music boxes played the same tune for a little less than a minute, a rather pedestrian arrangement of the French children’s song “Au Clair de la Lune,” which was nonetheless quite engaging and ended with a gentle, invigorating flourish. Rapture, in particular, was taken with the contraptions, and after some sanding and tapping the Clutters were able to present her with one as a gift. But this just raised another question in the Zanesvilleans’ minds.
Given that small lovely boxes that could make music were ever so much more interesting than plain pine boxes big enough to house the dead, and given that the Clutters had so many of them, why did they not contemplate another kind of business, or at least a separate enterprise? It was clear from their humble standard of living that some extra money would come in handy. Surely, even out here on the frontier of Missouri, there would have been at least some demand for items that were so visually appealing, so charming to listen to, and so portable. Rapture put the question directly, as she always did.
“Dissuh hice de chune. Hoa comen ees doan graff de good-fashin? Fsuttin exwantidge!”
The result was such a commotion of gapping, filling, sanding, and knocking, it became uncomfortably apparent that a nerve had been touched. Finally, after another round of coffee and more half-finished sentences than the Sitturds had ever not heard, the truth at last came out.
Outside, the brick-kiln sun had set and pale watery stars had appeared, glinting down in rutted puddles of rain in the street before the whole of the story was thoroughly sanded, tapped, and echoed-but the gist was that a settler from the East had left the boxes with them a year before. He said he had found them in a crate floating in the river, stuck up under some tree roots five miles below. He had the idea of selling them himself, he said, but had left them with the Clutters for the time being in payment for their assistance regarding his dead little boy. He had never returned.
“So you made his child a coffin and he left you with all these?” Hephaestus queried.
After still more sanding and tapping, Mr. Clutter and Mrs. Clutter managed to convey that it was not a coffin that had been required. The man, whose name they had never learned, had asked for his child to be embalmed and he had taken the body with him. This admission led to yet another digression, this time regarding the broader spectrum of funereal services the Clutters felt it necessary to provide, and concluded with Othimiel Clutter producing a brace of jars that contained the embalmed cats he had practiced on (and, ostensibly, succeeded with).
Lloyd was excited by the embalmed cats and, coming so soon after the investigation of the innards of the music boxes, they threw him into a fit of inquiry that removed him for the moment from all other thoughts and doubts, except, of course, Hattie.
He rose from the slat floor where he had been sitting and began examining the room. That was when he found a music box that was different from all the others. Mr. and Mrs. Clutter were still gapping and filling about the cats they had come by-or, rather, how innocently they had come by them-when the boy’s attention fixated upon one of the music boxes, which was not housed in a wooden box but made of a sleek, almost wet-looking metal. It was a margin larger than the rest, but what caught his eye was the design on the lid. Neither inlaid nor etched, there was nonetheless the image of a candle-with the suggestion of a flame rising above it. A pair of crab claws extended from the candle. Lloyd felt the breath sucked out of him.
He had never seen such an emblem before, but he recognized it instantly as the mark of the Vardogers-and quite intriguing it was to look at, too. Whoever had designed it had suppressed any presence of the crab’s body, choosing instead to arm the candle with crustacean claws, a bold and striking abstraction.
While all the other boxes opened with a quiet but definite click that would set the music playing, the box with the Vardogers’ emblem remained steadfastly shut, no matter how much pressure Lloyd applied.
“Don’t fuss yourself, son,” Mr. Clutter said, shaking his head. “It twon’t ever open. We’ve tried.”
Lloyd turned the box over to examine its underside and discovered a row of precisely etched letters that were so small even he had to ask for a magnifying lens, to read the words YOU MUST SAY SOMETHING THE BOX UNDERSTANDS.
“It is curious,” Hephaestus agreed, noticing the intensity of Lloyd’s consideration.
“Witched!” Rapture decreed.
Lloyd, on the other hand, held the box up close to his mouth and said as clearly as he could the word “Something.” To the sheer dumbfoundment of the adults in the room, the smooth metal lid clicked open to reveal not a bright barrel cylinder and sharp-toothed comb, or even the more intricate componentry of a musical clock. Instead, what met their eyes was a detailed, miniaturized orchestra. It was impossible to tell what the figures were made of because they were so small, but a heartbeat after the lid had opened by whatever unseen mechanism, the exquisitely tiny artificial musicians began to play-and the music rose to fill the room with a volume and a depth of presence that exceeded all the other music boxes put together. It began like the fugue from Mozart’s
Lloyd noticed that he was no longer marveling at the exactitude of the mechanical innovation inside the box but drifting in his mind. Fabulous, half-formed scenes and visions came into his head, like his dreams of old. He could not say what he was seeing, but it made him feel woozy. With an exertion of will, he slapped down the lid and the music died. The expressions on the other faces worried him. They were each dazed in their own way and somewhat hostile, as if he had cut short their fun. There was an oppressive closeness to the atmosphere in the room, which was so pronounced that Egalantine Clutter went so far as to open a window all on her own initiative to dispel it. Hephaestus seemed to have slowed and turned a bit surly, as if someone had waved a draft of pungent-smelling
