HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre (4 page)

She had examined the box, admiring the nice mahogany sheen of the wood. A copper latch held
it closed. When the lid was open the inside lay behind glass and the movements were splendid. It looked for all the world like a music box. Tiny gears meshed perfectly, pins and wheels and chains moved in synchronization. “
What
’
s its purpose?”
she had ask
e
d the surgeon. Only then did she see he had backed away clear across the room, his hands in his pockets, sweat breaking out on his brow.

“
I don
’
t rightly know---that
’
s the thing. I just thought it was a fine handcrafted piece. You can have it. It belongs t
o a woman.”

She bit down on her retort, but when she looked down at the box working away in her hands, she was so taken with it that his claim of haunting left her mind entirely. “
I
’
ll take it,”
she said. She looked up quickly and held him with a hard star
e. “
But I
’
m not going to pay you. Not for what you
’
ve done to me.”
She lowered her legs over the side of the bed, her maimed leg encased in clear crystal, the knee held with brass pins. She painfully came onto her feet and now she really glared. “
You shou
l
dn
’
t be cutting on people, Doc. Anyone ever tell you that? I have no idea how I
’
m supposed to throw this leg over a horse
’
s back and get myself into a saddle again. I figure I
’
m ruined for the Barbary Express.”

“
Maybe you can get a job on the new high spee
d rail, like hosting in the salon or something…”
His voice trailed off at her sneering face.

“
I wouldn
’
t get on one of those rail cars blasting across the plains if you broke my other leg!”

She had taken the box and left the hospital, trundling down the wooden sidewalks while people stared. That was the first time the box spoke.

“
Don
’
t mind them. Thugs, the whole lot.”

She halted in her tracks, swaying a bit on the balls of her feet to stay u
pright. She needed a crutch, or at the very least, a cane. She looked down at the strange little box and held her breath. “
What kind of thing are you?”
she asked.

“
Just the best thing ever happened to you.”

“
What are you meant to do?”

“
Give advice.”
Then
it was silent and would speak no more no matter how she tapped it and shook it and rattled it around.

How she
’
d wound up in an asylum for the insane had some to do with the box
’
s talking and the giving of advice, but it had more to do with the shape-shifte
r who kept coming from…
somewhere…
and trying to take the box back. She had heard rumors of shape-shifters, but had never seen one before. It formed from out of the air, like fog or smoke, twirling madly. She had been in the hotel, resting in her room, worr
y
ing about what she was going to do with her ruined life when suddenly the air chilled to freezing and twirling in the center of the room the shape-shifter came shrouded as a giant wolf. She scooted up in the bed until her back was against the carved headb
o
ard. She might have shrieked.

The wolf came to the bedside and reached up with a paw to the nightstand, pulling the box toward it.

“
Oh no you don
’
t.”
Angie snatched the box from its grasp and rolled across the bed, swinging both legs painfully to the floor.

“
Give it to me,”
the wolf said with a deep gravelly voice. “
It
’
s mine.”

“
It is not. Now be gone with you, devil.”

The wolf tattered into smoke, reformed, and stood in the center of the room as a woman standing at least seven feet tall. She was foreign, e
xotic, her skin dark honey, her hair black and shiny with oil. She had coal dark eyes and wore barely enough clothes for modesty
’
s sake. A sheer length of crimson cloth was wrapped around her breasts, crossing her back, and then down around her groin. The
hands on the woman figure were covered with chain mail gloves that went up to her elbows. Embarrassed by the other woman's nakedness, Angie trained her eyes on the creature
’
s face. “
Go away,”
she said.

“
Give it to me,”
the woman said.

“
I will not.”

A whirr
ing loud enough to wake the comatose or the dead sounded outside the room indicating room service was on the way. The shape-shifter fell into ribbons of smoke and was no more.

The automaton came into the room without knocking. It was one of the old ones, a
decrepit looking pieced together machine without a face. It whirred on steam-driven wheels, bringing a tray heaped with baked quail, parsnip chunks bathed in butter, corn fritters in triangle shapes, and a sliced red apple to her bed. Angie lifted her le
g
s back onto the bed with great effort and accepted the tray. The automaton stood rooted to the spot, whirring away. She could see the gears inside the glass-enclosed chest and that was what made all the noise. It must have been a second or third generatio
n
, since it had no facial features, not even proper ears.

“
What are you waiting for, permission to leave? Leave then.”

The automaton obeyed instantly, rolling in a circle and going out the door, shutting it behind him.

The food looked good and smelled fant
astic, but it was costing her too many credits. She
’
d have to telegraph the Express and ask them to send her savings. If she recalled correctly, she had two thousand credits tucked in the company vaults. It had taken her five years to get it.

She ate with
relish, tearing the quail apart with her hands and nibbling at the meat right down to the small bones. All the while she kept her eye on the little box until she had finished every morsel. Wiping her hands on a cloth napkin, she took up the box and said,
“
Why is the shape-shifter after you? You can
’
t belong to that bunch. They don
’
t usually keep material objects. So what
’
s the nub of this conundrum? Why won
’
t you tell me what
’
s going on?”
The little box held its silence as if locked in a tomb.

Days later sh
e received her savings and moved to cheaper rooms in a boarding house across from the bridge. Here were no automatons to bring her trays of food, no elevators, or floors that cooled themselves when the temperature outdoors rose too high. Here was an old-f
a
shioned room in the corner of the first floor with white paneled walls featuring mold in the corners and a dreadful red velvet bed cover. Beggars, she realized, were not choosers because she would never choose red for any room meant to inspire restful sle
e
p. Her fate had come to this. A few thousand credits to her name, a busted-ass leg that would never get better, no job and no prospects. For all her work to make a future without a man, she had ended up in Hot Spring, South Dakota in a room facing an alle
y
reeking of urine. It was not a fair ending, but Angie wasn
’
t one to wallow in self-pity. She shrugged off the mood and tried to read one of the bulletin booklets that were published and distributed widely by the South Dakota governor. She needed to buy s
o
me real books. All she had was the bulletin or the prayer book left in the room by the Calvary Baptist church at the south end of town.

That night the shape-shifter returned. Angie had fallen dead asleep once her leg stopped aching. She woke only because o
f the cold. She wondered if a norther had blown in, but when she sat up in bed she could see in the moonlight a great bear stood hovering over her bedside. This time she yelled bloody murder, telling the shifter to get the hell out of her room, thereby wa
k
ing the entire boarding house. The bear thing clawed the air, roaring the command, “
GIVE IT TO ME.”

The landlord, an elderly woman with blue glass eyes that were operated by a circuit box of gears attached to her back with polished metal straps, rushed int
o the room just as the smoky apparition departed.

“
What
’
s happening?”
the landlady asked, the impossible blue eyes swiveling and rolling. “
Why are you screaming?”
She looked around the small room in pure fright, her sleep-tousled gray hair standing out fro
m her temples.

“
There was…
there was a…”
She clamped shut her lips. She could not tell this woman about the shape-shifter. Only batty people claimed to see them. No one really believed there was such a thing except in the mind of a crazed person.

“
There wa
s a
what
?”
The landlady appeared to be angry now that fear stepped away from her and she was reminded her sleep had been disrupted and her house woken in the middle of the night. Especially angry that this young crippled woman couldn
’
t tell her what happen
ed to cause all the noise and cursing.

“
I…
I…
it was a nightmare, I guess. I
’
m sorry…”

“
You
’
re sorry? Pluff! If you do it again, I
’
ll call the sheriff and you
’
re out. I run a quiet establishment, I told you that
when you signed in.”
She flounced her long, yellow-striped house robe as she turned to leave, slamming the door as punctuation.

For some weeks things went fine. Angie made herself get out and about the town to learn what small opportunities might be availa
ble for a crippled woman. She would either have to find work, or go on the dole, and her parents would turn over in their graves if she ever did that.

Once more the box came alive, beeping and tinkling, drawing her attention to it. It was a lazy afternoon
and Angie had been writing to her sister back in Kansas. She turned from the small desk near the window and saw the lid on the box raise automatically. “
Hello, Angie,”
it called.

“
You know my name?”

“
I know so much--you have no idea.”

“
What does that mean
?”

The beeping started up again, then a grinding of gears, and finally the tinny voice replied. “
There was a time that was so much better than this one, you know. There were machines that flew through the air all the way to Europe
—
all the way to Africa! An
d not unmanageable dirigibles like we have today. These were sleek hollow tubes with wings like angels. There were machines you could talk into and converse with people on the other side of the country. There were moving pictures in machine panels built i
n
to the walls and an information network you accessed with personal machines that connected the world
’
s millions so they communicated at light speed. It is all gone now…
all gone. So tragic.”

“
I studied those Old Times in school. So you
’
re from that gray pas
t, is that it?”
she asked, rising and going to the bed to sit next to the little box on the side table. Now they were getting somewhere. Now she might discover the secrets of the box.

The sounds ended so that the room was as silent as the bottom of the sea
. Angie waited. Then she picked up the box and shook it. She swore at it. She pleaded. Silence enclosed her and left her wary. What did this mean if the box could speak at will or was there someone somewhere speaking through it? What did it mean that it s
p
oke of the Old Times most of them never really believed? None of them liked to talk about that, even the teachers who were forced by law to do so. It had been a golden age and sorely missed by her great grandparents. For her, of course, it had never been
a
part of her life so she had no real affinity for those things lost.