Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [145]
“But how can it be?” Hephaestus gurgled, clasping his head in his hands for comfort.
“I don’t know,” Lloyd conceded. “But I am certain these … folk … were not born. They were made. Made to look like people and pass for people.”
“B-but Petrie!” Hephaestus stammered. “They’re his kin!”
“He may have had kin. He may think these are still his kin. But they aren’t,” Lloyd answered. “Unless he’s like this, too.”
“No!” his father insisted. “I worked with the man all day. He was straight, he was quick. He was—”
“Normal?”
“Y-yes.” Hephaestus nodded, working through in his own mind a host of associations and perceptions. “N-normal.”
“Then that raises the proposition that he doesn’t know about this,” Lloyd reasoned. “Which is supported by the fact that he recommended we try to stay here. Did he say anything about them? Anything that might hint at a change in them and their lives?”
Hephaestus had to turn and stroke his chin at this.
“Well, now that you mention it … he did let on something. Once he saw I could do a good day’s work for him, honest and expert-like, he did say something at the end. What was it? Ah … he said he was glad that we were about to keep a fresh eye on them. That’s what he said—a fresh eye.”
“What did you take that to mean?” Lloyd asked.
“I’m not sure,” his father mused. “He’d said earlier that there’d been a change in them—the both of them. But he didn’t say how or what.”
“Did he say when?”
“Hmm. Not directly. At least I don’t think. I was busy working then. I got the impression it was about a year or so ago. I don’t know why.”
“That would put it sometime around when the man with the music boxes and the child he wanted embalmed came past,” Lloyd put forth.
“What that mean ya be speaken now?” his mother demanded.
“I don’t know,” Lloyd admitted, shaking his young head. “But I know we must leave here as soon as we can. Within the hour. Whatever the Clutters were, they weren’t done in by men with masks and cudgels. But they were attacked, whether from without or within.” He deeply regretted that there would not be time to circulate through town and remove the reward posters for Hattie.
“But if they were just machines—” His father sighed.
“I don’t think we should ever use the word ‘just’ about machines anymore,” Lloyd replied. “They are—or were—not machines we understand, and there were other machines here that are not here now. The two issues must be connected.”
“What othern maysheens?” his mother asked, sobbing now.
“Don’t trouble about them now,” Lloyd consoled her. “We need to be on the move. As you said, Farruh, we need to look alive—to stay alive.”
“Is they after you—dem folks from St. Louis?”
This was the first time any such thing had been mentioned in Hephaestus’s sober presence, and his faced showed it. Lloyd spoke his mind.
“It may be, and it may not. I think not. If they were to come, whoever they are, I believe there would be no mistaking it—and they would come for me. This is something else. It may be connected by chance, if there is such a thing. But …” and then he could not think.
“What yer sperit voice say?” his mother asked at last, putting into her old and often suppressed family speech the same suddenly accepted confidence that Hephaestus had arrived at in his own way.
Lloyd felt the momentousness of the change in the family dynamic and paused to weigh his words in respect for the new weight that had been openly placed upon his young shoulders. His rarefied mind rummaged through the shattered dishware and gaping flesh for some answer that would satisfy his own flesh and blood enough to get them all out of there. Fast.
“We were not the intended victims of this—if it be a crime,” he said. “But there is something about our presence here, and our (and he really meant his own) ability to see this as something outside experience, that must be heeded. How, I’m not yet sure. There is something