De Muziekdoos

By Ava Lauren Grayson

AMSTERDAM 1857

Ash impersonated the falling of snow as night wrapped its overbearing arms around Amsterdam. This shouldn’t have been happening.

Flowers should have been blooming. Tourists, strolling the marketplace. Festivals, lighting up the city. But none of that was happening.

All because I’d opened that music box.

And now, I had to close it before its song destroyed everything.

Shouts echoed throughout the city, lit up with recluse fires sprouting like weeds in and between buildings. Citizens ran in every which direction as though they could escape the danger imploding around them. And it was all my fault.

Meneer Meijer had taken me in as his woodworking apprentice. One day, he let it slip that he had access to the one thing nobody was allowed to have. Music.

When I was a child, my mother told me the tale of her final performance as a ballerina before the forbiddance of something called music. Hearing how fondly my mother spoke about it, it became my dream to hear a song. So naturally, I was desperate to know exactly how Meijer possessed something I wanted but could not have.

My mistake.

The heavy crashing of collapsing buildings—mimicking the weight of guilt on my chest—reached my ears as I raced deeper into the city. I hiked up my crimson skirts and hurried through a panicked crowd. My almond-colored boots crunched over shattered glass in the streets. I was almost—

Boom. Everyone, including me, stopped dead in the street. Boom.

They were coming.

A woman shrieked as an enormous golden metal foot demolished a building in the distance—flattening the structure as though it were merely crushing an ant.

Standing twice the size of a house, the mechanical man shone like gold armor, fastened together with nuts and bolts. It moved with stiff joints, and while it looked like a man, it lacked any humanistic qualities—no feelings and no remorse.

And there were six of them.

The automaton turned its head and took a step toward us.

“Hurry, over the bridge!” I yelled at the crowd and gestured to an untouched road behind me before I sprinted toward Meneer Meijer’s wood shop.

The wooden “Closed” sign hung dead in the window—the only window on the block unbroken.

I patted the exposed pockets on the front of my skirt to feel for the small box. Still there. Wiping my sweaty palms on my corset, I reached for the knob.

The shop was dark. Empty. Meneer Meijer had left. Of course he had. But while I held myself responsible for foolishly unleashing the forbidden chaos safely trapped within the music box, I wasn’t the one who’d made it.

“I know you’re here, Evi,” I called into the shadows. Nothing but the faint familiar churning of mechanical music responded. As I slowly made my way into the back room, the tinny, poisonous music crescendoed, and I stopped before Evi and two towering mechanical men. Their heads nearly reached the tall ceilings, but were they to step outside, they would have sprouted like beanstalks.

With her porcelain arms folded over her ivory ballet dress, her brown hair glazed into a bun on top of her glass head, her pointe shoes and feet permanently on relevé, and her scarlet painted lips in a flat line, Evi stood firmly between me and the music box. The very music box I’d opened, despite Meijer’s warning, because I desperately wanted to hear music for the first time. The very music box that had come to life to destroy us.

I had to fix this.

“Amberjill,” Evi stared me down. “Come back to listen to the show?” My eyes shifted from Evi to the music box, magically winding itself on the table behind her. As long as that music played, Evi and her mechanical men would assume impossible life. I needed to shut it down. For good.

But there was no way I was getting past her or her men. Not alone, anyway.

“It’s only just begun after all,” Evi finished.

“Yeah.” I looked her straight in the eye. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

Quickly reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the music box I’d crafted and opened it up. I wound the handle so frantically that Evi did not have time to react. The music from my box began to sing, and the three porcelain ballet dancers in the center rotated in a circle. Evi reached for the box. But it was too late. An amber glow emanated from the box and my three mechanical dancers broke their imprisonment and grew to the size of their competitors. My two male dancers sprang into action against Evi’s automatons. They swung their fists at one another—metal clashing on clay. Evi hesitated a moment before spinning into a deadly fouetté, kicking my dancer in the stomach.

As the two fought, the enormous men knocked one another into the walls of the building. Wood splintered around me, and paint chips rained down.

I had to make my move quickly before the entire building crumbled around me.

I wound my way through oversized limbs to the work table behind Evi and reached for a hammer, then turned to Meijer’s music box.

“No!” Evi yelled as I brought the hammer down hard.

Once. The box cracked. The music distorted. Twice. The mechanical men began shutting down. Thrice. The song stopped ticking. Evi and her automatons fell lifeless.

Everything in the world fell refreshingly quiet. Except for my own music box, which I gently closed. The melody ceased, and my dancers became inanimate objects once again.

For someone who desperately wanted to hear music, I’d never been so relieved to relish in silence.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ava Lauren Grayson is a fairytale writer and director based in Los Angeles. With a portfolio of clean and faith-based fantasy and historical fiction YA books, screenplays, and short stories, Grayson has published three flash fiction stories with Havok Publishing and is a Junior Editor at Quill and Flame Publishing House. If Grayson is not writing, you can probably find her with a set of watercolors or rewatching The Lord of the Rings.

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