Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [144]
It was possible, he reasoned, that some external agent had come in and absconded with the miniature mechanical orchestra, but he felt that anyone who would have known about the contents of the box would not have needed or bothered to violate all the others. And why would they leave the box? Still more curiously, such a robbery—if that was how it could be described—did not explain the barbaric fate the old people had endured. Nothing he could think of did. He had half-formed theories and intuitions, but nothing that would stay fixed.
“We must separate and examine the bodies,” he said, more to himself than to his parents.
Hephaestus felt his partially digested food rise into his throat again. It was discomfiting enough to have their young son witness such depravity—there was, of course, no way to keep it from him now—but to have him so rationally investigating the matter was almost more than he could take. Then something in the wayward blacksmith’s mind clicked over. It was in the boy’s tone of native authority, but it was also an internal conviction of his own. His son knew and understood things he did not. There could be no pretending anymore. All his life since the boy’s birth had been in some way spent denying his offspring’s special intelligence, fearing it, resenting it, feeling proud about it—or worrying where it would lead. Hephaestus saw that, if nothing else, it had led to this. This was where they all were, still together as a family, still alive—and, with any luck, able to extricate themselves from this gruesome predicament and get back on their way. If Lloyd’s intellect was a means to that end, then so be it. As peculiar as he was, he was flesh and blood.
The lame blacksmith found a new personal strength with this recognition and, without any sense of humbling himself or taking an order from his own son, he did just as the boy instructed. He rose and respectfully but firmly wrenched the two rigor forms apart, laying them down on the floor beside the chair for further investigation. That pieces of the bodies burst apart at this maneuver was not pleasant to observe, but still he kept his tongue, even as the Clutters lost theirs.
Then something happened that even Lloyd was not prepared for. Portions of flesh peeled away to reveal not only organ and bone—not even organ and bone—but something truly unexpected. The inner anatomy the separation of the corpses revealed was not human. It was not animal. It was not organic. Nor was it mechanical—or like any machine he had ever seen.
If the Sitturds had gasped before, they swooned together now, for what they beheld was absolutely alien to everything they knew and counted on. The dithery older couple they had met the previous night, who seemed incapable of normal conversation and had such unusual notions about food—who had, in the time the family was gone, undergone such a dramatic transformation, becoming both mindlessly violent and lustful—were not people at all.
Rapture cawed. Hephaestus reached up to seize locks of hair on his head that were fifteen years gone. Even Lloyd’s mouth dropped.
“They’re … some kind of …” his father tried.
“They’re music boxes,” Lloyd replied, after a moment’s aching silence. “They looked like people. They acted like people—to a point. But they were really music boxes in disguise.”
“Music boxes!” his mother moaned. “How ya bee speaken that?”
“I don’t mean like the others.” Lloyd waved, indicating the mess of combs and needles pouring forth from the ruptured boxes on the floor. “I mean more like the one that so confused us last night.”
“Which one was that?” his father huffed.
Lloyd’s right eyebrow rose at this.
“The one it may be fortunate that you don’t remember. What I mean is that they were—or are—machines. Not like machines we have ever seen. But not human. See those fibers there? What are they? Glass,