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