switched off the music and the four figurines. He plucked out the small steel key that wound the mechanism, and put it in a pocket of his pants.
I said, “Are you taking that? Why?”
“So it can’t be played.”
“But, sir, then it can’t be sold.”
“All the better.”
“But isn’t that like stealing?”
“I’ll give the key to our friend.”
“What friend?”
“The one who lets us come here.”
“Is he our friend?”
“No. But he’s not our enemy.”
“Why will you give him the key?”
“So he can decide about the music box.”
“Decide what?”
“What to do with it.”
“The store needs money. Won’t he decide to sell it?”
“I hope not,” Father said.
“What do you hope he’ll do with the box?”
“Smash it. Come on, let’s find you those pants and sweaters.”
We chose a pair of dark khakis, blue jeans, and a couple of sweaters for me. Father rolled them and stuffed them in a gunnysack that he had brought for that purpose.
In the food bank, following his instructions, after he filled my backpack with light packages of dry pasta and crackers, and after I had filled his with canned goods and blocks of cheese, he said, “You want to know about the music box.”
“I just wonder why smash it.”
“You know those things we both see that others don’t.”
“You mean the Fogs and the Clears.”
“Call them whatever. I told you don’t look at them directly if you feel they’re looking at you.”
“I remember.”
“And I told you it isn’t wise to spend a lot of time thinking about them.”
“But you didn’t say why it isn’t wise.”
“You’ve got to figure that out in your own good time. What you need to know right now is that the Fogs, as you call them, sometimes hide in things like that box.”
“They hide in music boxes?”
“Not just music boxes,” Father said. “In all kinds of man-made things, in anything they want.”
“Only man-made?”
“I think only. Maybe it has to do with who made the thing, the character of the person. If the object was made by someone consumed by anger or envy, or lust, or whatever, then the Fog feels drawn to that thing, feels comfortable inside it.”
“Why do they hide in things?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know that hide is the right word. They go into things like that maybe to dream. To sort of hibernate. I don’t know. They’re dreaming away for weeks, months, years, decades, but time doesn’t mean anything to them, so it doesn’t matter.”
“One of them is dreaming in the music box?”
“Dreaming and waiting. Yes, I feel it. One day you’ll learn to feel it, too.”
“What is it waiting for?”
“Someone to see the box and take it home, to take the Fog home.”
“What happens when someone takes it home?”
“Ruination,” Father said. “Now we’ve talked too much about this already. If it’s dreaming, talking too much about it can wake it up.”
We went into the night again, where the man-made city bustled and slept, laughed and wept, danced and dreamed, and waited.
When we were safely below the streets, walking in the path of countless floods long past and floods to come, whispery echoes of our voices spiraling along the curved concrete, I told him about the marionette that, three years earlier, had disappeared from the shop window. He said that this was the very thing he meant when he told me about the music box, and I said but no one took the puppet home, and he said maybe one of the delinquents with butane torches scooped it up as they ran away or maybe, since it had legs, the marionette went somewhere on its own. He said we shouldn’t talk any more about it, that if it had been sleeping three years somewhere in the city, we didn’t want to talk it awake.
ONE THING WRONG WITH THE DARKNESS IN THE bedroom was the smell of it, which had been fresh and clean before. Now a spice cologne faintly seasoned the air. The Goth girl had not used or needed fragrances, and this was the very scent that I had first smelled the previous night at the library.
Another thing wrong was the intensity of the quiet, no clink or clatter of dinner preparations from the kitchen, no footsteps, no word of greeting though I had arrived precisely on the hour. Even the city had gone strangely mute, with no traffic noise or distant music or voices admitted by the open window.
I stood perfectly still, letting the darkness wind its silence around me, as breathless as if mummified in strips of gravecloth, waiting for a sound from her or from the man who had invaded her apartment. I felt alone. As an expert on solitude, I didn’t doubt my perception.
Afraid that my flashlight might reveal her body slashed and broken, I hesitated to switch it on, but then of course I did. The mattress had been pulled off the box springs, as if he thought that something might have been hidden between them. The nightstand drawer hung open, as did the door to the walk-in closet. The closet had been searched. The clothes and shoes had been thrown to the floor.
If I had met her only to lose her, this might be the equivalent of the death by fire that I had long expected. Loss can be an incandescent terror equal to any flames.
I hurried to her office across the hall. The drawers of the desk had been turned out, the contents scattered. Her computer was on, and I imagined that he might have tried to search hers as she had searched his.
In the living room, books had been swept from the shelves and tumbled in a pile as if for burning.
Shattered plates and glassware carpeted the kitchen. I startled when the wall phone rang, and then I clattered through the brittle debris to pluck the handset from the cradle.
Because I had never answered a phone before in all my twenty-six years, I didn’t think to say hello.
Gwyneth said,
