A Story Written by a Music Box

I should tell you right now that I don’t know everything, and that I don’t intend to make up what I don’t know. So don’t expect me to fill in the blanks with best guesses and probabilities. You should know that I’m only here to report the facts, and not even all of the facts. There were probably facts before this and there will most likely be facts after this, but I don’t know what they are. If you don’t like it, then you can put me down right now and go find yourself some lovely little story that makes perfect sense. As for this one, you can’t expect me to explain everything, since it’s being written by an uninformed music box at best.

The first time I saw Harmony was the first time I had seen anyone for a long time. She didn’t seem too interested in me, since she sat the box back down without even glancing at me, and before the song had even ended. I suppose she had other things to see to. I did get a good look at her over the next couple of hours, though. She had fair skin and her copper curls had a habit of getting in her way. At that point in time, and every time I saw her afterwards, she had a calculated desperation about her movements. Everything she did was evenly paced, but impatient and jerky.

Before she left, she had removed all the books from the tall book case, flipped through all their pages, rummaged through and emptied one of the dressers, and searched two cardboard boxes quite thoroughly. Swan Lake was long done playing by the time she crawled back out the window, and a good thing, too, because it was starting to annoy me. Something must have happened to the mechanism over the years, because there was a part of the song where the notes would barely scratch through.

Once she was gone, I spent my time studying my whereabouts instead of her. It’d been a long time since I’d seen anything other than a bedroom, although I don’t think my surroundings could be considered an improvement. The roof was peaked and beamed, and the walls were less than cared for. These observations, in addition to the lack of any door other than one near the center of the floor, lead me to the conclusion that I had run my course and that the rest of my days were to be attic-spent. It seemed odd to me that the attic had not been split up into rooms or given proper walls, but still had windows. It clearly was not designed for anything other than storage, but there the windows were. Whether the architect was a moron or the construction workers were slackers, I guess it worked out well for Harmony.

It was only a couple of days before she came back. Harmony’s rhythmic ransacking of the room continued without hesitation. She went straight from the window to a stack of crates against the wall and patiently started emptying and refilling them. After that, another dresser and half a vanity were explored. The intruder didn’t leave until her eyes watered from yawning.

The next night was her longest. She didn’t leave or even slow down until sunlight started to leak in, and when she left, there wasn’t a drawer in the room that hadn’t been vacated and inspected. Her frustration seemed to be increasing.

Her raid became less methodic after that. Previously, the older boxes and antique trunks had been left ignored, but now she was fumbling through their contents as well. Drawers were pulled out a second time so that she could look behind and below them. She even looked inside an old piano in the corner, which was probably a mistake on her part.

I couldn’t see what happened exactly, being on the other side of the room. The best I can figure is that she slipped while leaning into the instrument and hit several chords, because there was a tumultuous racket that sounded uncannily like someone falling into an out-of-tune piano.

She didn’t move for several moments. Her eyes were wide and I’m not sure she was even breathing. There was a sound downstairs, and she bolted for the window. A few seconds later, the door in the floor opened downwards and the ladder unfolded, creaking with annoyance. Some people might have thought the creaking would be from age or lack of use, but I know better. Nothing likes to be stepped on in the middle of the night.

It was fortunate for the man that came upstairs that there was no danger in the room, because I honestly don’t think he was awake enough to be able to handle anything other than an empty room. Honestly, he didn’t even handle the empty room with any impressive amount of intelligence. The missing drawers and empty bookshelves seemed to completely escape his notice. Harmony probably could have just stayed half in and half out of the piano and been just fine.

The man went back downstairs without even looking at the piano, but Harmony stayed away for about a week. Without Harmony to amuse me, the attic was growing increasingly boring. It wasn’t like some attics that I’ve seen since, where restless children will play dress-up or angst-filled teenagers will write poetry on the walls. It was an attic in the most useless sense of the word, a place where things went when no one wanted to bother with them anymore. I didn’t like being there.

Harmony did come back eventually. Everything she did was done with increased speed, and most of these things didn’t seem to make sense to me. Under and between the cushions of a chair, inside pockets of old clothes, between the folds of rolled-up rugs – nothing was left alone. Even I couldn’t think of anything left to look at, and so I figured that it was going to be the last of her visits.

She surprised me the next night by bringing a companion with her, a male with sand-colored hair and a relaxed demeanor.

“Where haven’t you looked?” he asked in a hushed voice once they were both in the room. He put inhaled his cigarette one more time before tossing it out the window.

“Behind the furniture that’s against the walls. That’s why you had to come, because I can’t move them on my own without making too much noise.”
“What if nothing’s there?”

“Then I guess I’ll just have to look through everything again. Help move this, please, Sean,” she whispered as she grabbed one end of a large dresser. He moved to the other end and together they heaved it a few inches off the ground and a few feet forward. The only sounds were some loud creaks and a light thud when they set the dresser back down.

They did the same to every piece of furniture around the room. At one point, Sean stepped back slightly, knocking over a couple of cans and the box that I was sitting on. The room spun and flashed in and out of complete darkness as the lid bounced open and shut, and finally landed half-open several feet away. Harmony and Sean didn’t move. The tension was nearly visible as they strained to hear any sign of movement over the sound of the distorted Swan Lake that was plinking its way through the room. The song ended and the vanity was set down without any consequences appearing.

“I’m sorry,” Sean whispered.

Harmony picked up the box up and the room was set to rights again. “It’s okay. No one woke up. I only wish you hadn’t made me listen to that poor music box again. Something’s wrong with it, and the music messes up at parts.”

“Here, let me see it.”

“We need to finish moving the furniture,” Harmony protested, although she didn’t do much to keep Sean from taking the box from her and turning me upside-down again. She probably wanted to be able to hear the song play all the way through without wincing almost as badly as I did.

I didn’t get to see much of what happened next, because all I could see was Sean’s upside-down shirt, but I suppose something good happened, because I heard was Sean saying, “Hey!” in a victorious voice, and Harmony’s excited, restrained laugh. The world turned right-side-up again, although at this point I was wondering how long it would be until it spun around again, and then everything was dark. That didn’t last long. When I saw Sean and Harmony again, Swan Lake was playing as smoothly as it ever had, and Harmony was putting something in her pocket. I can only assume that it had something to do with what had confused the mechanism so badly.

Apparently their job was accomplished, although they hadn’t moved all the furniture, because Sean handed me back to Harmony and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “I can’t believe you never looked in that music box,” he teased as he lit a cigarette and started smoking it.

“The music box was one of the first places I looked; I just didn’t think to look in the music part instead of just the box.”

Sean laughed quietly and glanced at me. “Well, if those screwed up notes hadn’t bothered me so much when we knocked it over, I wouldn’t have looked there, either.”

Harmony set me down on a chair near the window. “Well, you’re just quiet the mechanical genius,” she said, “but I think we should go.”

“Probably,” he agreed, flicking his barely-used cigarette to the ground. I wondered briefly at him, since most smokers couldn’t seem to get enough nicotine, why he so flippantly left so much unused, but I didn’t get to wonder long. Seconds later, the room was lit up in an eerie, flickering glow. The cans that Sean had knocked over earlier had cracked and spilled, and his cigarette had landed in whatever was in them, and now it was on fire.

Harmony cried out in alarm, her eyes and mouth turning into perfect little Os of surprise. Sean swore and started to try stomping the flames out before Harmony grabbed him by the arm and started dragging him away towards the window. “We have to go,” she hissed, pushing him out.

He resisted just long enough to make a protest that he wasn’t about to act on. “Harmony, the house is on fire.”

“So get out of it!” she insisted. He didn’t argue again. He climbed through the window, and she after him. I was just pondering the fate of being melted so soon after being able to accurately play Swan Lake when Harmony reached in, shut the box, and lifted me off the chair.

“What are you doing?” I heard Sean ask in a panic.

“I like Swan Lake!” came her defensive reply.

“Well, you know, the house is burning down, and we could be arrested for breaking, entering, and arson, so I guess adding theft to the list isn’t really a big deal, since you like Swan Lake,” he replied sarcastically.

“Fine,” she huffed. She dropped me and I fell to the grass, lid half-open, and Swan Lake plinking pathetically into the night. “We have what we need, so let’s just go.” That was the last that I ever heard of Harmony. Like her and Sean, I had what I needed, which was to be out of a burning attic, so I personally didn’t have a problem with not knowing where they went or what they did. And you shouldn’t either, because I don’t have anything else to tell you about the situation. I told you earlier that I was only here to report the facts, and that I wasn’t going to make up what I didn’t know. You were warned. Now, if you please, put me back down and go find yourself some story that makes sense. You know the kind – the ones that aren’t written by music boxes.