Enigmatic Pilot (32 page)

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
Magic Flute
overture, but then evolved into a kind of marching rhythm, and then gradually shifted once more into a bell-like tune or a blend of tunes like nothing the Zanesvilleans had ever heard before. The effect was hypnotic. Transporting. And also disturbing.

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 rum under his nose and then pulled it away. But Lloyd could see that his mother had regained her alertness, and was agitated, as if the coffee was just kicking in. He felt convinced that they had experienced something unwholesome.

As pleasing as the box was to look at, as satisfying as it was to fondle, and as badly as he wanted to speak to it and have the lid open, to have the microscopic orchestra perform again, he sensed a presence that was not benign. Beguiling, perhaps, but not benign. His own curiosity and need were so great, it turned around on itself and stared back at him.

Then he noticed the clock on the Clutters’ crowded mantelpiece and the breakout of sweat on his hands made him drop the box. Unless by some infernal magic the music had tampered with the operation of the clock, more than half an hour had passed since he had spoken the password and opened the lid. The other music boxes with straightforward mechanical means had played for forty-five seconds or less. No one had noticed the time that had passed.

“How did you know how to do that?” Othimiel Clutter demanded, when at last the spell had lifted.

“It was easy,” Lloyd answered. “What you were reading as one sentence is really two, so the direction could not have been
clearer. Those are often the most difficult riddles to solve—the ones you mistakenly make for yourself.”

This observation, coming from one so young, provoked much discussion among the childless Clutters and the other two adults, although, of course, Rapture and Hephaestus were long inured to Lloyd’s perspicacity. While the older folk nattered on about what seemed transparent to him, Lloyd was more interested in the fact that, despite the amazing mechanico-musical phenomenon they had witnessed, no one now seemed at all eager for him to open the box again, not even himself anymore, Lloyd realized, which he could not account for logically but only in terms of the disquieting intuition he had had before. It seemed like such an elaborate folly to be listened to but once. Already the sense of the music was slipping away. Only a faint memory remained, like a dream.

The prolonged distraction had upset the Clutters’ normal dining schedule. On this evening, with “guests” in attendance, Egalantine insisted on laying out “a spread.” Said spread consisted of a large plate of cold small meats (which, of course, was a rather sensitive choice, given the surrounding jars of embalmed cats and the coffins), an exceedingly odd-textured goat cheese, hunks of shack-smoked bullhead, and a mound of jellied offal, which bore an unappealing resemblance to trifle. Unexpectedly, all the food on the platter soon disappeared, and Lloyd remarked on how hungry everyone seemed, eating with an almost mechanical urgency, verging on trance. He missed his mother’s fresh corn bread, but he, too, hoed in.

Seeing that the spread had been enjoyed (engulfed was more like it), Egalantine set about reheating a cast-iron pot of mutton-and-vegetable stew. This was how the dish was described at any rate, but the aroma that rose from the coals of the hearth, where the pot sat farting like a petulant mud pool, strongly suggested something else (for instance, the renderer back in St. Louis). Indeed, the atmosphere that filled the room was such that Rapture even wondered if the Clutters might not
be inclined to create their own customers. Amid chunks of parsnips and what looked to be some highly suspect carrots were bits of bonelike knuckles and a film of what might have been a long-soaked doily but which Mrs. Clutter insisted had recently been red cabbage. A bowl of wax beans with a fine fungal fuzz brushed off at the last minute rounded off the repast. This, too, was consumed. We must be very hungry, Hephaestus told himself. We must be foolish proud, thought Rapture, hoping they would not become ill. What if this all has something to do with that music box, Lloyd puzzled?

Normality of interaction returned come cleanup time and the Clutters resumed their eccentric stop-start mode of conversation. Once some order had been restored to the kitchen area and the cooking fire damped down to embers, the Sitturds were shown to their grim beds in the main shop (with visions of the embalmed cats curled in their jars and the music boxes lined on shelves in the other room). General comments were made regarding plans for provisioning the next day and reassurances given that their stay would not be long, and that they would do all in their power not to disrupt the Clutters’ day-to-day lives and business. Then the candles were extinguished and the Zanesville refugees were left to themselves, each in a coffin packed with old mothball-smelling bedding.

Lloyd found it hard to sleep. Thoughts of Hattie filled his mind, and even without a lid on it was impossible to forget where he was lying. His restlessness set him floating back down a dark river of memories … to the trunk in Miss Viola’s cabin … to the trapdoor graveyard that Schelling had led him to the night that he met Mother Tongue … to the box of the Martian Ambassadors … and the secret hold where he had hidden in Hattie’s arms, making the love a child his age should not have understood. Then there were thoughts of the man who had brought the music boxes—his embalmed child—and the box with the Vardogers’ symbol, which seemed to contain an unnaturally suggestive music embedded in the workings of
the miniature metal orchestra. It was a lot for him to think about. Just missing Hattie was enough.

Rapture had similar problems getting adjusted, but after a couple of dozy nightmares that startled her sheer exhaustion took hold and she collapsed into a deep slumber, grateful not to have been seized by stomach cramps. Hephaestus, who in his time on the bottle had grown accustomed to blacking out and waking up in unusual places, gave himself over to sleep with the peace of a baby after the satisfaction of the nipple—every so often releasing a pop of flatulence.

Lloyd listened for a while to his father’s regular snoring and fluffing, his mother’s shallower but soothing respiration, and he began to be aware of faint strains of music. The sadness he felt at losing Hattie—the need to know where she was and if she was all right—would not let him alone. And then, the very moment he experienced any reprieve from his pain, some wriggling other anxiety sneaked in—like music he did not want to hear.

At first he had a bizarre fear that the music boxes in the next room had opened of their own accord, but then he realized that the melody he was hearing came from outside, somewhere down the mud-and-plank streets, and was familiar to him. He picked out a banjo, a fiddle … and a squeezebox … folks singing. He recognized the song “The Pesky Sarpent” and then “Rosin, the Beau.” He crept out of the coffin and tiptoed to the window to listen.

A tall hatted figure passed outside, then a thin white cat. In the starlit space between two buildings across the street, he glimpsed the reflected shadows made by a small fire. He was seized with curiosity to explore the night town—as much to escape the stultifying atmosphere of the coffin room and the lingering smell of supper as anything—but he had trepidations about the safety of venturing out alone in the dark without a lantern or any definite idea of who might be abroad. He would have resigned himself back to a stiff attempt at sleep in the
wooden box, when he heard a song that made his hair needle up on his neck.

It was a female voice coming in on a cooling night breeze, which even through the plate glass carried with it the odors of charred wood and burned beans—but it was not, his keen ears told him, the voice of Viola Mercy. The poignancy of the melody made his head swim, though, wondering where the chanteuse might be. Louisville? Memphis? New Orleans? And what of St. Ives, his first business partner? Or the professor, the partner he had lied to and cheated? Or proud, scarred Hattie, his partner in a deeper way. His mind and soul reached out to them all, and through them to the phantom at the far edge of his field of inner vision: His sister, Lodema. Stillborn in Ohio and still being born inside himself.

No, it was not the steamboat entertainer he heard singing in the storm-rinsed, clearing Missouri night. Still, it seemed an omen that he could not ignore, and so he unlatched and unbolted the shop front door, unsure why anyone would break into an undertaker and coffinmaker’s place of business, anyway (unless, of course, it had something to do with the music boxes). He stepped lightly out into the gloom, leaving his parents breathing in their open coffins.

He glanced up and down the hog trough of the dark street. The moon was almost full and cast a spectral glaze over the town and the skeletons of buildings in the works. Most of the
folk sheltered within the limits of Independence were either already abed or struggling by lantern and hearth light to repair ruptures, rips, and leaks, pluck weevils from biscuit flour, air out sodden fabric, comfort squalling infants, pack tobacco in a pipe, or take another slug from a fired earth jug. The church believers, the diligent, the indigent, the exhausted, and anyone whose guts were clogged with beans and salt pork had called it a night. But others, and there are always those, had different ideas. It was to these sounds and shadows that Lloyd was drawn.

Silhouettes fluttered over plank walls, and in the distance a hound howled, which made Lloyd think again of poor Tip, buried back in Zanesville along with their old life. Lodema.

He stepped between the ruts and puddles, moving in the direction of the music, remembering the evil that had befallen him in that laneway in St. Louis at the hands of the man with the harelip. Hattie had cured him of the shame, but the anger remained. And the wariness.

Squishing through the mud, which his mother would no doubt be angry about, he reached the shelter of a buckboard leaning down on its hitch across the street. Then in between the buildings. Somewhere he could hear horses jostling and whinnying in a stable.

The music, however, proved to be elusive. Where he had thought to find people gathered around a fire with their instruments, a couple of wagons and oil lanterns propped on casks, there was but an empty lot and the skeletal frame of a building going up. The camp where the music was coming from, and now beginning to die out, lay farther on, behind a row of makeshift sheds and a cluster of willow trees. The shadows he had seen earlier must have been made by other people and had melted away. Yet there were still some lights. The nearest and brightest came from a crude brick storehouse on the other side of a drenched pea patch. Someone had taken a spade and dug several runoff trenches to direct the water into the lumpy garden,
and he had to mind his step. The light in the storehouse grew dimmer as he approached, as if the building were beginning to doze.