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 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