Robert’s Thursday evening odd encounter(Robert)
Date: 2025-06-26 20:02
(Robert’s Thursday evening odd encounter(Robert):Robert)
[Thu Jun 26 2025]
In a cosy, sunless sitting room
Laden with comfortable furniture, this little sitting room strikes a fine balance between the sombre and the sociable. Plush chairs flank a low, carved table set with a crystal decanter and glasses, kept perfectly clean and polished. In fact, the room is kept entirely spotless, but it nonetheless retains that sense of having not been used for centuries. A faded damask wallpaper, rich with age, decorates the room, blocking out any light that might break through the sealed-up window frames.
It is about 60F(15C) degrees. The mist is heaviest At Elm and Blackstone/span
During Gwyndolyn’s daily strolls to fighting mist-monsters, she espies an ongoing yard sale dangerously close to those curling white wisps. It’s nothing but a few battered tables in front of a sagging suburban bungalow: Ceramic ducks, cracked books, sun-warped VHS tapes. One item in particular stands out, a small wooden box: walnut-dark, carved with roses now dulled and chipped. It’s delicate, old, and humming faintly on it’s lonesome.
“A music box, the elderly woman behind the table says, “Came from my mother’s house. Still works, I think,” The green-eyed old lady reaches for it, to crack it open, eager to show off the wares.
The melody is slow, tinny, but strangely mournful. A lullaby, of some sorts, melodic and pleasant. A porcelain ballerina twirls once, twice, and the box clicks. The sound crawls at the back of the skull, slowly elgonating on and on. It’s charming, to be sure, the pretty pink and flirty wink of the mechanical dancer. The elderly lady’s eyes droop slowly, sleepily, her hands lacing together over her stomach as she leans back in the old chair. And Gwyndolyn swears she can hear words, slowly forming from deeper in the music.
“Help me.”
Gwyndolyn looks to the elderly woman, tracing the outer layer of the box with her finger, as if asking for permission to do so, all the while doing it. She had never understood the appeal of music boxes. They were oddities, at best, and she never found them to be quaint or particularly cute. But the melody of this one was certainly strange, haunting, as if some deeper suffering was buried within.
“… Must be an antique. How much for this one?” She queries the old woman, a finger still delicately touching the edge of the box.
silence. Or, at least, silence intermingled with the melody that gradually builds in urgency and tempo, a certain trailing sorrow from it. And it’s punctuated by the gradual, nasally snore. And she’s not the only one. A nearby squirrel curls up for a nap, right there on the grass. Ants trecking across the ground slow and gradually halt, settling in. A cat sleeps… well, OK, that one was probably asleep before the music box even started playing.
Even Gwyndolyn’s own eyes droop heavy, and yet in contrast, the player in the box dances and moves with more intense urgency, while her finger finds some sort of etching that stands against the hard wood. A deliberate carving. Writing, of some kind.