The Lullaby of the Ashwood Clock

The first time I noticed them, I thought I’d bumped into a bramble bush in the garden. Thin, angry lines scored across my left calf, as if I’d been raked by thorns. But I hadn’t been near the garden that week. When I mentioned it to my wife, she just shrugged, said I was clumsy in my sleep. I let it go.

Over the months, the marks multiplied. Small, superficial scratches on my ankles, my knees. Then, a few weeks ago, a set of three deep gashes appeared on my right shoulder, perfectly parallel, evenly spaced, like a claw mark from something with three fingers. I couldn’t have done that myself; my own hands, my nails, were too blunt, too short. The track marks of a long-forgotten trauma, but I had no such memory.

That Saturday night, we came home from a dinner party, slightly tipsy. The house was dark, except for the moon casting silver rectangles on the floor. My wife tossed her clothes into the hamper, and I heard her shut the closet door. Then she flicked off the bedroom light.

In the silence that followed, we both heard it. A delicate tinkling, like a music box playing a lullaby. Five or seven distinct notes, high and sweet, then nothing. We froze, staring at each other in the dimness. My wife asked, ‘Did you hear that?’ and I whispered back, ‘Yes.’ We searched the room, the hallway, the entire house. There was no music box, no phone notification, no wind chime. The sound had come from inside our own bedroom.

Last night, I had a dream. In it, I was a child, five years old, sitting in my grandmother’s attic. The air was thick with dust, and the only light came from a small, round window. There was an old, carved wooden box on a shelf—a jewelry box, I think. I reached for it, my tiny fingers stretching, but I couldn’t quite touch it. Then I heard the same tinkling melody, but slower, sadder, as if time itself was stretching the notes. I woke up gasping.

I didn’t tell my wife about the dream. Instead, I inspected the scratches on my shoulder. They were fading, but the skin around them felt cool to the touch. A strange thought surfaced: What if the scratches weren’t from something in the waking world, but from something in my dreams? What if the music box was a doorway, and something was trying to get out?

The next night, I kept a notepad by the bed. I wrote: ‘If I hear the music, I write down the melody.’ I fell asleep. At 3:33 AM, the music came again, faint but unmistakable. In my half-dream state, I jotted down something—I don’t remember writing it. When I woke, my hand ached, and there on the notepad were seven notes, scrawled in a jagged child’s handwriting. That was not my handwriting.

I showed the note to my wife. Her face went pale. ‘My grandmother had a music box with that exact same melody,’ she said. ‘She played it for me when I was little. But she gave it away years ago, before we met.’ I asked where it went. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She said it brought bad luck. She threw it into the river.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, listening. The room was still. But then I felt a cold spot, a pressure on my shoulder, as if a hand was resting there. And I heard a voice, small and distant, like a child whispering through water: ‘You found my song.’

I turned on the light. There, on my shoulder, were three fresh scratches, welling up with tiny beads of blood. And on the dresser, where I knew nothing had been, sat a small, dust-covered wooden box. I hadn’t heard it fall. I hadn’t seen it appear. But there it was, its lid slightly ajar.

My wife was asleep, her breathing soft. I reached out and touched the box. The wood was cold, so cold it burned. I opened the lid. Inside, there was a tiny porcelain dancer, pirouetting in slow, jerky circles, and the music started to play—that same lullaby, but now it was wrong, slowed down, each note stretched like a scream. And I felt something tug at my shoulder, drawing blood, pulling me towards the box.

I slammed the lid shut. The music stopped. I stood there, trembling, my shoulder throbbing. I knew, with a sick clarity, that the scratches had been there all along, because I had been the one making them, but not in this life. In my grandmother’s attic, in a dream, a child had opened that box, and something had come out. It had been waiting for me all along, and now it had found me.

I picked up the box to throw it away, but it was gone. Disappeared into thin air, leaving only a faint scent of mothballs and dust. My wife stirred, mumbled something, and turned over. I lay back down, my heart hammering.

Now, every night, I hear the music. And every morning, I find new scratches on my body, always in sets of three. I know the lullaby by heart now. It’s the song of something that was never buried, only forgotten. And it wants me to remember.