HIGH STRANGENESS-Tales of the Macabre Read Online Free PDF Page A

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