Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online

precipitously.
    Used-to-be-Claude was waiting for them, leaning against a boulder and looking up. When the unlikely couple spilled down at his feet, he continued his surveillance of the sky.
    To Lorraine his countenance seemed less human than before. It was clear to her now that the man Claude Festerling was merely a husk for the Silver Box to communicate his desires to insignificant beings like herself and her murderer, Ronnie Bottoms.
    As if hearing her thought, Used-to-be-Claude looked down on her. His eyes had contracted the blue from the sky overhead. It was with this endless sky that he observed her.
    A full minute passed before he said, “I have made a terrible mistake.”
    “Saving us?”
    “What? No. Not at all. You and Mr. Bottoms are part of my destiny, partners in my trial.”
    “Like cour’?” Ronnie asked before grimacing in pain.
    Claude turned his gaze toward Ronnie. They were human eyes now, bloodshot and passionate.
    “Excuse me, Mr. Bottoms,” Claude said. He reached over, placing his right hand on the left side of Ronnie’s jaw while allowing the fingers of his left to sink into the stone wall like the red hot tines of a pitchfork into a vat of butter.
    The vibration coming from the dead man’s hand called up Ronnie’s mother’s humming when he was a child on her lap. At first he was sure that this memory was what dispelled the pain in his jaw. The release was so profound that he sighed and then opened his mouth to take in a deep breath.
    “What happened?” he asked, no longer restrained by threaded wires or broken bones.
    “Do you feel better, Friend Ronnie?” Used-to-be-Claude asked.
    “All you have to do is touch somebody an’ you could cure ’em?” Ronnie asked.
    “That and the power of one of your atomic bombs,” the elderly corpse agreed.
    “That much?” asked Lorraine.
    “What’s wrong?” Ronnie said.
    Claude smiled and looked upward again. He said, “While I was engrossed in your extraordinary feat, I lost concentration where it was most needed.”
    “What happened?”
    “Will you agree to come with me?” their benefactor said.
    “Of course,” Lorraine agreed.
    “Sure,” Ronnie added. He was rubbing his jaw, the pain now just a memory.
    “You must understand,” Used-to-be-Claude warned. “The journey will be within me and therefore a great distance, farther than any human has ever imagined existed.”
    “Inside you,” Ronnie said. “How?”
    “All humans are also machines,” Claude stated, “but not all machines are sentient. I was built for mundane purposes and then altered to map the limits of being for a race of scholars who wanted to understand the limits of existence. Those scholars became madmen intent on universal domination; but that’s another story.
    “In order to map the universe, I had to encompass it. In doing so, I became everything and everything is me.”
    “Like God?” Lorraine asked.
    “If God were a piece of driftwood and also the ocean that limb floated in. I am omnipotent and also helpless, destined to be and act and repeat the mistakes of my nature.
    “Will you come with me?”
    Ronnie and Lorraine agreed without speaking, and then all three disappeared from behind the blind of boulders.
    *   *   *
    T HE JOURNEY FOR Lorraine was a field of flashing colors revealing truths that she could not quite comprehend. A motion was exposed between that which exists and that which does not. For her, it was like an Escher painting where connections were both mathematically perfect and at the same time impossible. The nothingness beyond material impressions called to her. It was a doorway through which, if she passed that way, her deepest instinctual species’ desire would be attained.
    Ronnie’s passage was pedestrian by comparison. There was his mother and seven different men, any of whom might have been his father. There were his victims: men and women, black and white, even children that he’d hurt. And then there were a million