HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre Read online

  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, exotic, 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 whirring 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 legs 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 generation, 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 fantastic, 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 she 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-fashioned 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 sleep. 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 alley 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 some 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 of 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 waking 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 into 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 from 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 was 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 happened 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 available 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! And 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 into 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 past, 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 spoke 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.

  She put the box down, turned to go to the desk and her letter. A small boy stood in her way, having appeared without smoke, without fog. He stood on the flowered carpet, staring at her with incredibly sad eyes. “It’s my box, you must give it to me,” he said. He was blond and fair, a cherub.

  “Let me see, the box belongs to a wolf, a fo
reign woman, a bear, and now you. So which one does it really belong to?”

  “It’s mine. It isn’t supposed to be here. It’s going to cause…everything to…rip.”

  “Rip?” She approached the boy, going down slowly, painfully, into a crouch so as to be on eye level. “You're a shape-shifter. Where do you come from?”

  “The Far Back.”

  “So you're dead. You're a ghost.”

  “My world ripped and took me with it.”

  “We were told there were bombs.”

  “No, that's wrong. It was a rip. We had a box, too, that wasn't supposed to be there. It was that one.” He pointed to the small whirring object near her bed. “Now you have it.”

  A sudden ripple of fear shivered down Angie's spine. She had put on a dress today, giving up her pants and chaps, hoping to fit into the town and what people expected from a single woman. Now she felt the corset whale bones digging in under her breasts and into her shoulder blades. She stared hard at the child, willing him to take back that last revelation.

  “Give it to me.” He spoke softly and his voice enticed her to obey him.

  He shifted so rapidly her eyes hardly followed the transformation. He whirled until he was cloud and from out of that cloud came a dragon whose scaly head was bowed by the tall roof of the ceiling. It opened a great mouth and the roar that issued forth filled Angie's ears until she clapped her hands over them. She was uncontrollably yelling and cursing again. “You damned fool creature, shut your damned mouth!” She could not get to her feet. The dress tangled itself around her ankles and the high lace collar felt as if it were strangling her. “Stop!” she screamed.

  Minutes later, after the shape-shifter had thankfully disappeared, her door opened and the devil man entered, his hat cocked to the side, his hand on the gun holster at his waist. “You will be removed from this house right this minute,” he said. His eyes were dark and fierce, a brook-no-argument look settling in.

  Angie had clawed her way to her feet and stood now wobbling in the middle of the room. “I'm sorry, please tell the landlady I am extremely sorry...”

  “She wants you out. As an instrument of the law, I order you to gather your things and leave.”

  A wild low beeping filled the room. Both Angie and the sheriff looked over to the little box emitting the noise. “Is that one of those spy boxes that record your voice?” he asked.

  “No, it's just a...” She was going to say “music box,” but the room's temperature dropped several degrees and Angie's words trailed off. She knew something terrible was coming, something larger and more wondrous, more dangerous, than a dragon. She began to shake and she stared at the box with wide eyes. This was the first time she felt real fear.

  “What's...going…?” The sheriff frowned, looking at the wall where the wood panels began to vanish and smoke poured into the room. When seconds later the smoke dissipated, there stood a being of light, his features indistinguishable. He stood tall as the room and his shoulders were at least five feet wide. His menace was a palpable thing that filled the room and made it shimmer with cold light. “Give me the box or reap the whirlwind,” it said.

  Angie covered her eyes against the glare, quaking like a mouse caught in a house trap. Even the sheriff was frozen in place, hand on holster, squinting into the light. “What the hell is this?” he asked, dumbfounded. “What spell have you conjured?”

  Angie stood accused and knew there was no way she could explain the shape-shifter or what connection it had to the box on the table. How could she explain something she didn't understand herself?

  “There's a reckoning coming,” the light being said, its voice mechanical in origin. “Do you want to chance it?”

  Had Angie been more brave, her trepidation less overwhelming, she would have limped to the bed and taken up the strange box and handed it over. It seemed she must give it, rather than expect it to be taken. While she pondered the dire prediction, her fear escalating until she could hardly get her breath, her heart like that of an automaton clanking in her chest, the sheriff pulled his weapon and shot at the thing beginning to fill the room to overflow with its desperate light. There was the explosion of gun powder, the rank scent of cordite, and then the room was empty save for the two humans.

  It was too much. Angie hobbled to the bed and sat down heavily, clutching at her chest.

  “You're coming with me,” Dane Whitehall said. “We can't have the likes of you infiltrating our small town. We ran out a cabal of Magicks last year when they swarmed into town with their painted wagons and light spears and talk of contraband drugs. I'm taking you to the judge.”

  Before he reached for her, Angie managed to pocket the box, feeling its heat and life thrumming next to her thigh through the thin material of her cotton dress. Dane marched her straight to the court house and gave his testimony, swearing on the Digest of Socrates that she had engaged in conjuring a monster, such was her Magick powers.

  The judge wanted to sentence her to the gallows, she could see that from the disdain on his face, his mutton chops and pompadour shaking with rage. In the end, after her pleas of high innocence, he relented and sent her instead to Bakerwane Asylum where she would remain until judged harmless. That could take ten years. Or a lifetime. Neither of which was the least bit fair.

  This time she let self-pity overrun her sensibilities, so great was the injustice. Tears filled her eyes and lay against the lower lids without falling.

  She drifted around the cell, wringing her hands. She went to the mattress and withdrew the little wooden box. She unlatched it and lifted the lid to stare down into its mechanism. She had seen clockworks like this in a thousand objects from a saloon stage that rose out of the floor to a child's twirly-gig, but none had possessed the future. None were sentient and without mercy.

  “Are you the Bringer of Chaos?” she whispered. “Are you the Destroyer of Civilizations? Could it be that such a small, inconsequential box made of teak and gears could hold the world hostage?”

  She did not expect an answer. The box had been inactive for months now. The last shape-shifter that had come from it was the mind numbing light being in the boarding house.

  She tried to recall her school lessons and what she'd been taught about the Old Times, especially the theories of how it had ended. Bombs, they said, went off simultaneously all over, in every major city, in every hovel and hamlet. Monstrous bombs and small, they detonated together, synchronized to take out man and all his works in an instant. Only a few survived—those in aeroplanes and those in submarines. Those underground mining or excavating. Those in the three ships in space that had been sent out to do scientific experiments. Her own ancestors were supposed to have been miners, earthwork diggers, the Ignorant Ones.

  The child apparition claimed that theory was balderdash. There had been no bombs. There had been just this small annoying beast of a machine that spoke riddles and was haunted by spirits who clamored to take possession of it. How this diminutive man-made object would bring about total annihilation was an unknowable puzzle Angie feared she would never decipher. She would like to control the box, make it bend to her will, cause it to send a shape-shifter to the sleeping devil man one night to take his head on a platter, but she knew that was a fantasy of revenge she would never get to indulge.

  The winter came, bearing down on Hot Spring with an unprecedented glacial storm. Blue lightening zapped through the snowfall, triggering automatons all over town to shut down where they stood. The power from the steam plant ceased, throwing the valley into darkness. Even the dirigibles landed and the fast rail halted, overtaken by mountainous snow and fields of treacherous ice. In her room Angie shivered beneath three woolen blankets, the cold seeping with icy fingers past the board shutters over the outside of the barred window. The asylum's cells were quiet. The whole town was muffled with snowfall. An occasional horse rider clapped past on the street, but otherwise Angie might be on the desert moon.

  It was in the depths of that frigid night t
hat the mattress beneath Angie's ribs began to hum and she knew the box had woken. She pulled herself from the bed, holding the blankets around her shoulders with one hand, and lifted the mattress to look.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a plaintive tone. All her hopes had been shattered because of the otherworldly box. Her freedom had been snatched from her. She was marked a Magick, an accusation that would follow her all her days even if she managed to convince the doctors to let her go. She was destitute, the court having taken the last of her savings to pay for her asylum stay. Thanks to the superstitious sheriff and the crazy little whirring box, her life had been circumscribed by a small cell, the barred window, and little hope to change it all.

  “What do you want?” she hissed.

  Tiny sparks flew off the gears inside the box and the whirring noise increased. A voice that had never been human said, “Would you sacrifice yourself for your world?”

  Angie nearly dropped the box from her hand. For the first time it felt profane and evil; it felt like an abyss yawning, luring her into its dark depths. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “Those who came to take me from you, why do you think they wanted me?”

  “They want your power?”

  A ratcheting gear spun faster, the noise increasing. “You think it's about power? How dim can you be?”

  Angie let go of fear to embrace her anger. She had never liked it when men spoke to her as if she were an inferior sex. She had never let those above her station treat her with scorn. She would not let a simple mechanism insult her this way. She threw the box onto the mattress so that it tumbled against the wall. She turned her back, tightening the blankets around her throat. She stared into the near darkness, trembling and furious. She was not dim! She was not an inferior intelligence. How dare a machine call her names.