the place looked as if it had not been open for business all day, which was probably not an unusual occurrence. If the back door was still bolted and all the windows were unopened, he thought it likely that no one else had intervened. And why would someone come to call with such intentions, and arrive in either calm or stealth and then wreak such destruction? Given the dismantled state of the rear interior, it seemed a telling point that the opportunities of exit and entry were still intact.
Then there was the inescapable matter of the two old folk having bitten each other’s throat out! Even the most ruthless and bloodthirsty of invaders would not have been able to force the couple into the position in which they were found. What threat could have been used that would have been worse than the result? It was not as if the Clutters had been bludgeoned or even tortured in some conventionally murderous way. On every level, this seemed to him an intimate matter and, however demented and bestial, there was some dark, inner logic at work.
The more he looked around, the more immune to the horror Lloyd became. Patterns began to form. He saw that the crockery and the kitchenware had not been piled or pounded apart for their own sake. It looked …
“It looks like the plates and pots were used … as weapons,” he said to himself.
That suggested that the Clutters had been attacked—whether from without, in some as yet unknown way, or in the form of some delusion that had taken hold of them.
An intruder of the mind had been floating in his thoughts ever since the family returned. After all, the couple had been strongly affected by their exposure to the music box. And the white-dressed women in the street …
Lloyd started pawing through the wreckage, searching for the Vardogers’ box. It was altogether possible, he granted, that some malevolent presence had chosen this particular moment to return and retrieve this strange treasure. But no, it, too, was on the floor. Alone of all the music boxes, it was unopened and on the surface unharmed. He knew what he had to do.
Very quietly, so that his parents could not hear, he spoke the password and waited, steeled to snap the lid shut before the sinister, enchanting music could start. To his amazement, when the lid opened no music began and he saw that the tiny artificial musicians were all gone. The box was as bare as one of the Clutters’ overturned kitchen drawers. He ran his right index finger along the edges and across the floor of it just to make sure there were no tricks—but the box was empty.
It was possible, he reasoned, that some external agent had come in and absconded with the miniature mechanical orchestra, but he felt that anyone who would have known about the contents of the box would not have needed or bothered to violate all the others. And why would they leave the box? Still more curiously, such a robbery—if that was how it could be described—did not explain the barbaric fate the old people had endured. Nothing he could think of did. He had half-formed theories and intuitions, but nothing that would stay fixed.
“We must separate and examine the bodies,” he said, more to himself than to his parents.
Hephaestus felt his partially digested food rise into his throat again. It was discomfiting enough to have their young son witness such depravity—there was, of course, no way to keep it from him now—but to have him so rationally investigating the matter was almost more than he could take. Then something in the wayward blacksmith’s mind clicked over. It was in the boy’s tone of native authority, but it was also an internal conviction of his own. His son knew and understood things he did not. There could be no pretending anymore. All his life since the boy’s birth had been in some way spent denying his offspring’s special intelligence, fearing it, resenting it, feeling proud about it—or worrying where it would lead. Hephaestus saw that, if nothing else, it had led to this. This was where they all were, still together as a family, still alive—and, with any luck, able to extricate themselves from this gruesome predicament and get back on their way. If Lloyd’s intellect was a means to that end, then so be it. As peculiar as he was, he was flesh and blood.