The Music Box Winds Itself the Night Before Bad News

I bought it for two coins from a charity shop because my daughter liked the little ballerina inside, chipped and one-armed as she was. A cheap old music box, the wind-up kind, playing some tinkly public-domain waltz when you turned the key. Utterly ordinary. It sat on my daughter's shelf for a year being ordinary.

The first time it played itself, we assumed a mechanism fault — a wound spring slipping, a few notes escaping in the night. We found it in the morning with its lid open, four or five notes' worth of the waltz apparently having played, the ballerina turned to face the door. My daughter, spooked, put it in a drawer. That afternoon my wife's father died, suddenly, three hundred miles away.

We didn't connect it. Why would you. It was months before it happened again — the box, now in the drawer, its lid found open in the morning, those few notes reportedly heard by my daughter in the night, the ballerina facing the door. My uncle, that day. Heart.

By the third time we were connecting it, whether we wanted to or not, and dreading it, and the third time was my wife's aunt, and the fourth, six weeks ago, was our elderly neighbour whom my daughter adored, and each time the sequence was identical: the box, wherever we'd hidden it — and we hid it further each time, the drawer, then the loft, then a taped box in the garage — is found in the morning with its lid open, a few notes spent, the one-armed ballerina turned to face the nearest door, and within a day or two, the phone rings with a death.

My wife wants it destroyed. She's past frightened into angry, and I understand her, and every rational cell I have agrees with her. And yet I can't do it, and my reason is the thing that frightens ME, so I'll just say it plainly: the box has never been wrong, and it has never been cruel. It doesn't cause the deaths — the people it warns of are old, or ill, or simply mortal; the box only seems to KNOW, the night before, and to spend a few notes telling us to brace. And some cowardly, calculating part of me would rather have the warning than not. Would rather come down to an open lid and a facing ballerina and know to phone my mother today, while there's a today, than have the calls come with no herald at all.

So the box stays, taped in the garage, and every morning one of us checks it, the way you'd check a barometer in a place where the weather kills. My wife thinks keeping it is what's killing them. I think destroying the one thing that warns us is a bet I'm not brave enough to make. We haven't resolved it. We check the box. We wait for the waltz.