Labels: Crucial Blast
Review by: Alex Deller
It was a cold day when I first discovered the box. Chill enough that one could see one’s own breath in the air even when the sun had risen in the grey November sky. To be frank with you I cannot even recall what took me up to the attic that day. Some strange, nagging reason that seemed ever so important at the time, but has since been entirely forgotten. It must have been important, for ordinarily I cannot abide going up to the attic, and certainly not alone. But go I did, and with not another soul in the house “” not even the cook, who had taken ill all of a sudden, or the boy, who was away in town on some small errand or other. Even though I had been up in the attic several times I had never so much as noticed the box there before, despite its prominent place on the shelf with little more than a scattering of porcelain doll heads and a small arrangement of rather fine Victorian medicine bottles for company. But this time it was the very first thing that caught my eye, and I went to it as though drawn. At first I just gazed at it there on the shelf for a time. It was roughly hewn but had a certain charm about it: clearly put together with care by a promising young craftsman who had yet to fully master their art. The wood was smooth and dark, the hinges and clasps of a simple brass of good enough quality that time and age and the air of that damp upstairs room had not yet begun to take its toll upon them. I lifted it from the shelf and it seemed to weigh strangely heavy in my hands, possessed also of an unnatural coolness that I can still feel in my palms when I think too deeply of it. As I tested its weight something seemed to shift inside. A fragile, papery sound. As though of tiny bones or the rustling together of quills. But there was life in that noise. Vague and barely there, but life nonetheless. I was struck by a feeling part way between dread and wonder, and setting the box down on father’s workbench I had to take a breath before doing what I knew I had to do next. I am not ashamed to admit that my hands shook no small amount as I made to lift the lid, and I think even then, in my heart, I knew that what I was doing might well be a mistake. And so, indeed, it was; for it was precisely at that moment that all of our troubles began.