Caveat Emptor

Flash Fiction February Day 24

“It’s just a music box, Mag.”

“Nothing is just anything in our line of work, darling.” Mag set the mahogany box on the examination table with the reverence of a bomb technician. “Besides, did you see Mrs. Tangerly’s face when we asked about it? She practically threw money at us to take it.”

Felix adjusted his lead-lined gloves and leaned closer. The music box was Victorian, probably 1880s, with mother-of-pearl inlay depicting a carousel. Twelve horses frozen mid-gallop, their painted eyes following him as he moved. He’d collected seventeen haunted mirrors, a telephone that called the dead, and a teapot that whispered recipes for poison. He knew when something was watching back.

“The horses are moving,” he said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the light.”

“Mag. The horses are moving.”

She looked. The carousel was rotating, infinitesimally slow, though neither of them had touched the key. Her expression didn’t change, fifteen years of marriage to Felix had given her an impressive threshold for the impossible, but she did take three steps backward.

“Right,” she said. “Protocol Seven?”

“At least Protocol Seven. Possibly Eight.”

Protocol Seven meant salt circles, iron filings, and a recording of Gregorian chants played backward. Protocol Eight added holy water from three different denominations and Felix’s grandmother’s rosary, which had survived two exorcisms and a house fire.

They’d been collecting cursed objects for twelve years, ever since Felix’s uncle died and left them a storage unit in Newark containing forty-seven items of historical and supernatural significance. Most people would have called an estate sale. Felix and Mag had called it a calling.

Their brownstone in Brooklyn now housed the world’s most dangerous collection of supernatural ephemera, each item carefully catalogued, contained, and monitored. The weeping portrait in the guest room (never make eye contact). The telephone in the basement (never answer after midnight). The umbrella in the hall closet (never open indoors, or outdoors, or really at all).

They’d never lost control of an acquisition.

Until now.

---

The music box opened by itself at 3:33 AM.

Felix woke to the sound of a tinkling melody, something between a lullaby and a funeral march. Mag was already sitting up, her hand reaching for the iron poker they kept beside the bed.

“That’s not possible,” Felix whispered. “We used the Kensington Lock.”

“The Kensington Lock has held a screaming skull for six years.”

“Exactly.”

They crept downstairs in their pajamas, armed with the poker, a spray bottle of holy water, and a profound sense of professional embarrassment. The examination room door was open. Inside, the music box sat on the table, lid raised, the tiny carousel spinning faster now. The painted horses had changed positions.

There were only eleven.

“Felix.”

“I see it.”

“Where’s the twelfth horse?”

A whinny echoed from the kitchen. Not a music box whinny—a real one, full-throated and furious. They looked at each other.

“Protocol Nine?” Mag suggested.

“We don’t have a Protocol Nine.”

“Then we’re making it up as we go.”

The kitchen was destroyed. Cabinets hung open, their contents scattered across the floor. Flour dusted every surface like snow. In the center of the chaos stood a carousel horse the size of a Great Dane, painted in chipped pastels, its pole extending impossibly from its back into nothing. It turned its wooden head toward them and smiled.

Carousel horses shouldn’t be able to smile.

“Good horsey?” Felix tried.

It charged.

They dove in opposite directions. The horse crashed through the kitchen table, and wheeled around for another pass. Its hooves struck sparks against the tile.

“The music box!” Mag shouted. “Close the music box!”

Felix ran. The horse pursued, its painted eyes wild, its wooden teeth snapping at his heels. He could hear Mag behind them, chanting something in Latin she’d learned from a priest in Prague. The horse stumbled, slowed, but didn’t stop.

He reached the examination room and slammed the music box lid shut.

The horse vanished mid-gallop.

Felix collapsed against the table, breathing hard. Mag appeared in the doorway, poker raised, hair wild.

“Is it—”

“Gone. Back in the box.”

They stared at the music box. The carousel was still again, all twelve horses in their proper places. Innocent. Dormant.

“We’re getting rid of it,” Mag said.

“Absolutely.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“Without question.”

Neither of them moved.

“Although,” Felix said slowly, “it is a remarkable specimen.”

“Felix.”

“I’m just saying, we’ve never encountered anything that could manifest physically before. The research potential alone—”

“It destroyed my grandmother’s table.”

“We hated that table.”

“That’s not the point.”

Felix picked up the music box, carefully, and carried it to the vault in the basement—the climate-controlled room behind three locked doors where they kept the truly dangerous items. He placed it on a shelf between a mirror that showed your death and a book bound in something that definitely wasn’t leather.

“Triple locks,” Mag said from the doorway. “And we check it every four hours.”

“Agreed.”

“And if anything else manifests, we’re calling Father Murphy.”

“Absolutely.”

They sealed the vault and trudged back upstairs. Dawn was breaking over Brooklyn, painting their disaster of a kitchen in shades of gold and rose. Felix put on coffee. Mag started sweeping up flour.

“You know what this means,” she said.

“What?”

“We’re going to need a Protocol Nine.”

Felix smiled and handed her a mug. “I’ll add it to the manual.”

From the basement, very faintly, came the sound of a music box playing. And beneath it, if you listened carefully, the thunder of eleven horses running in circles, waiting for their twelfth companion to break free again.

Felix and Mag looked at each other, sipped their coffee, and said nothing.

Some acquisitions, they were learning, you didn’t contain.

You just learned to live with them.

Stay Weird. Love You. Mean It.

Check out more cursed objects.

Photo by Daniil Zameshaev on Unsplash