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

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 indistingui shable. 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 voic e 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 take n. 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 wit h 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,” Da ne 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.”
    Befor e 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 Socr a tes 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 i nto 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 tha t 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 ov er, in every major city,