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.
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, spun very fine? And what of that there? That’s no organ that we know. It’s not quite meat and it’s not quite metal. It’s something in between. And that’s what they were. Something in between.”
“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 larger happening in this country than we ever imagined back in Zanesville. Whether we can run from it, and truly get away, or come to understand it remains to be seen. But we can’t ignore it, and more than ever I feel we must get to our destination in Texas as quickly as we can. Uncle Micah has already warned and inspired us that something out of the ordinary awaits us there. It was our leaving Zanesville and our old lives that set in motion the wheels that have brought us here-to both this place and this new,
