Inside a Silver Box by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online Page A

faces appearing one after another across a crystal screen that surrounded him; this procession of images passed over, under, and beside him without taking the slightest note of his existence.
    Ronnie understood that this was why he lashed out: No one ever saw him when he was standing there. His hunger was the emptiness of his being, and theirs. Only other people’s blood and pain made him into reality.
    *   *   *
    S UDDENLY THE JOURNEY inside the never-ending Silver Box came to a halt. Ronnie and Lorraine were standing on a wide silver disk that floated in a chamber larger than Ronnie or Lorraine had ever seen. The walls were jet and silver. The ceiling was black, and the floor, as far away as any sky, was white.
    At the edge of the silver disk lay a big dead bug. It was the size of a rhinoceros Lorraine had once seen on a vacation when her parents took her and her brother to the San Diego Zoo. Its round head consisted mostly of a desiccated, dark yellow eye. It had seven arms and three legs, all curled up in death. The trunk of the dead bug was rounded like a ladybug, red and gray and orange.
    “It’s so ugly,” Lorraine groaned.
    “But it’s like somethin’ is missin’,” Ronnie added.
    “That is correct,” Used-to-be-Claude said from behind them. He was standing tall and regal, dressed only in a loincloth.
    “What is?” Lorraine asked.
    “I can’t explain it,” Ronnie said, “but I know where the missin’ piece is at.”
    “Where?” Claude asked in a voice that filled the impossibly large chamber.
    “That man,” Ronnie said. “That Vietnamese man that Lorraine took ovah. Somehow a piece’a this bug got into him. I heard it hissing sound when he talked.”
    “He’s been waiting for all these ages,” Claude said in that celestial voice.
    “Who has?” Lorraine asked.
    “Inglo, the last repository for the despicable Laz.”
    “He got outta that body and into Ma Lin like you did with Claude?” Ronnie asked.
    “Only a tiny little sliver did. A piece of him—and therefore, because of our relationship, a piece of me—has burrowed like a parasite into a living man’s flesh. It has been billions of years since a Laz has been freed upon the universe.”
    “What does it mean?” Lorraine asked.
    Ronnie could see a blue aura around his victim, his friend. He wondered at this new way of seeing.
    “Have a seat,” Used-to-be-Claude said, and silver chairs appeared beside the two new friends. “Let me tell you a story of that creature and me.”

 
    TEN
    “S O THIS DUDE Inglo and his people made you kill and torture all them others and then one day you just came to your senses and realized that you was wrong,” Ronnie said, feeling a certain sympathy for the old black man with a silver box in place of a heart.
    When the three of them sat down on silver chairs, the cavern shrank to the size of a normal room. The white floor still seemed like open sky, and Lorraine had to keep herself from looking down. Where the dead alien bug, Inglo, had lain, there was now a door.
    “Yes,” Used-to-be-Claude said, agreeing with Ronnie’s interpretation of his epochal existence. “That’s why I allowed Lorraine to convince me to give you a chance at redemption. That way she might redeem herself also.”
    “Me?” Lorraine said, feeling that cold shiver in her heart. “What did I do wrong? He murdered me, tried to rob and rape me.”
    Used-to-be-Claude smiled a very human smile. “There are many Laz souls that reside behind that door,” he said. “Most of them were convinced over the eons of their existence that they were gods, omnipotent and beneficent deities born under the long-dead Laz star and destined to control the fates of all other beings. They were taught since before they could remember that sin was impossible for them. Does this make them less evil?”
    Lorraine sat back in the oddly comfortable silver chair and stared. Ronnie wondered what she was seeing.
    “Are we really here?” she