the previous night’s supper to promote much of an appetite in anyone but Hephaestus (who had started to regain some healthy color and to put a bit of meat back on his pickled bones). After several false starts, she managed to make them all flapjacks and strong black coffee, as Hephaestus commenced working out a list of the supplies they would need, and Lloyd kept a surreptitious eye on the undertaker-coffinmaker and his wife.
He had a suspicion that there was some dispute that the couple was trying to stifle. Then he noticed Othimiel return one of the music boxes to its place on one of the shelves. It was the Vardogers’ box. Perhaps the Clutters had had another listen unbeknownst to his parents. It occurred to Lloyd that their disorientation and woolgathering might have something to do with further exposure to the beguiling music, and he recalled a remark from the night before that had struck him as queer at the time but which he had dismissed as just another example of their eccentricity. Egalantine had commented on the “choir” she had heard in the music. Lloyd was certain he had heard no voices, and at this point unclear how the impression of human voices could be mechanically achieved (at least with requisite precision).
Everyone had been so taken and distracted by the music, there had been no actual discussion of what they had heard—and the assumption had been that they had all heard the same piece. Now, in his sleepy, wondering post-Quist way, Lloyd asked himself the question What if they had each heard different music? How would that be possible, and what would it mean?
It was too big a puzzle to resolve without further study (and, ostensibly, more risky investigation of the music box, which he was reluctant to do), but in any case one would have thought that both of the Clutters were suffering the aftereffects of a laudanum binge or some kind of neurological trauma. And the matter worsened over breakfast, with Egalantine dribbling from her chin and making what passed for lewd gestures at her husband, while Othimiel rose from the table and returned a moment later wearing what was, fortunately, an empty chamber pot on his head.
Hephaestus, having done plenty of questionable things himself when soused, tried to be as tolerant and respectful as possible. (His hope was that the Clutters were showing themselves to be habitual tipplers and had been hitting the jug hard and early.) It helped explain their disjointed way of communicating, and the sorry, haphazard state of their business. However, he was stumped as to why they did not smell of alcohol.
Rapture, once she had convinced herself that they were not playing a perverse joke, became concerned for them, and earnestly wished that, whatever the affliction, it was not contagious. “Like the rapid onset of senility,” Lloyd remarked to himself, as his mother helped put the couple back to bed after cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Maybe a bit more rest would bring them back to themselves, as fuzzy and intermittent as that had been.
“I think we need to look alive this morning,” Hephaestus proclaimed as the Sitturds made their way past the coffins and out into the street. “Another couple of nights with those folks—and in this place—I may not get out of the box!”
“Time egen ta tek ’e foot een ’e han,” Rapture agreed. “Firss, we grub nuts an’ prospah liken a squirrel.”
“I think we need to look alive this morning,” Hephaestus repeated, and began whistling.
Lloyd did not like that his mother had dropped her plain white diction and was intermixing more Gullah phrases than he thought prudent, even with the Clutters. What was worse, his father seemed befuddled, and the discordant tune he began to whistle got on the boy’s nerves. Lloyd now had no doubt that the Vardogers were real—and therefore the Spirosians, too. Even though the Sitturds had escaped from St. Louis, he could see that they were in the midst of a broader, deeper, and darker mystery than even the one Mother Tongue had intimated back in the grotto. The Martian Ambassadors, whoever they were, were somehow involved. Amazing technologies. Deviant desires. He longed to rise above the details even for just a moment—to get some coherent view—but the thought of ascending, even metaphorically, brought back memories of the courthouse, the black man crying for the Angel of the Lord … and the lost brothers blown over the water and into the wall of Illinois