The Box: Uncanny Stories

  Boston, Mass. April 13, AP—Last rites were held today for Mr. Abner Scrounge who was shot after being found in his garage attempting to remove the top of his Rolls Royce with a can opener.

  The history of the gallant battle of Boston to retain its essential dignity would, alone, make up a large work. The story of how the intrepid citizens of this venerable city refused to surrender their rights, choosing mass suicide rather than submission is a tale of enduring courage and majestic struggle against insurmountable odds.

  What happened after the movement was contained within the boundaries of the United States (a name soon discarded) is data for another paper. A brief mention, however, may be made of the immense social endeavor which became known as the “Bacon and Waffles” movement, which sought to guarantee $750 per month for every person in Los Angeles over forty years of age.

  With this incentive before the people, state legislatures were helpless before an avalanche of public demand and, within three years, the entire nation was a part of Los Angeles. The government seat was in Beverly Hills and ambassadors had been hastened to all foreign countries within a short period of time.

  Ten years later the North American continent fell and Los Angeles was creeping rapidly down the Isthmus of Panama.

  Then came that ill-fated day in 1994.

  On the island of Pingo Pongo, Maona, daughter of Chief Luana, approached her father.

  “Omu la golu si mongo,” she said.

  (Anyone for tennis?)

  Whereupon her father, having read the papers, speared her on the spot and ran screaming from the hut.

  1 John Gunther, Inside U.S.A., p. 44.

  2 Henry G. Alsberg (ed.), The American Guide, p. 1200.

  3 Symmes Chadwick, “Will We Drown the World?” Southwestern Review IV (Summer 1982), p. 1 ff.

  4 Guillaume Gaulte, “Les Théories de l’Eau de Ciel Sont Cuckoo,” Jaune Journale (August 1982).

  5 Harry L. Schuler, “Not Long for This World,” South Orange Literary Review, XL (Sept. 1982), p. 214.

  6 H. Braham, “Is Los Angeles Alive?” Los Angeles Sunday Examiner, 29 Oct. 1982.

  7 “Ellieitis: Its Symptoms,” AMA pamphlet (fall 1982).

  8 Fritz Felix DerKatt, “Das Beachen Seeken,” Einzweidrei (Nov. 1982).

  9 The Los Angeles Manifesto, L.A. Firster Press (Winter 1982).

  10 L. Savage, “A Report on the Grand Teton Drive-In,” Fortune (Jan. 1983).

  11 “Gulls Creek Gets Its Forty-Eighth Theater.” The Arkansas Post-Journal, 1 March 1983.

  12 Maxwell Brande, “Altercation at Deadwood Spa,” Epigram Studios (April 1983).

  Shock Wave

  I tell you there’s something wrong with her,” said Mr. Moffat. Cousin Wendall reached for the sugar bowl.

  “Then they’re right,” he said. He spooned the sugar into his coffee.

  “They are not,” said Mr. Moffat, sharply. “They most certainly are not.”

  “If she isn’t working,” Wendall said.

  “She was working until just a month or so ago,” said Mr. Moffat. “She was working fine when they decided to replace her the first of the year.”

  His fingers, pale and yellowed, lay tensely on the table. His eggs and coffee were untouched and cold before him.

  “Why are you so upset?” asked Wendall. “She’s just an organ.”

  “She is more,” Mr. Moffat said. “She was in before the church was even finished. Eighty years she’s been there. Eighty.”

  “That’s pretty long,” said Wendall, crunching jelly-smeared toast. “Maybe too long.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” defended Mr. Moffat. “Leastwise, there never was before. That’s why I want you to sit in the loft with me this morning.”

  “How come you haven’t had an organ man look at her?” Wendall asked.

  “He’d just agree with the rest of them,” said Mr. Moffat, sourly. “He’d just say she’s too old, too worn.”

  “Maybe she is,” said Wendall.

  “She is not.” Mr. Moffat trembled fitfully.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Wendall, “she’s pretty old though.”

  “She worked fine before,” said Mr. Moffat. He stared into the blackness of his coffee. “The gall of them,” he muttered. “Planning to get rid of her. The gall.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Maybe she knows,” he said.

  The clock-like tapping of their heels perforated the stillness in the lobby.

  “This way,” Mr. Moffat said.

  Wendall pushed open the arm-thick door and the two men spiraled up the marble staircase. On the second floor, Mr. Moffat shifted the briefcase to his other hand and searched his keyring. He unlocked the door and they entered the musty darkness of the loft. They moved through the silence, two faint, echoing sounds.

  “Over here,” said Mr. Moffat.

  “Yes, I see,” said Wendall.

  The old man sank down on the glass-smooth bench and turned the small lamp on. A wedge of bulb light forced aside the shadows.

  “Think the sun’ll show?” asked Wendall.

  “Don’t know,” said Mr. Moffat.

  He unlocked and rattled up the organ’s rib-skinned top, then raised the music rack. He pushed the finger-worn switch across its slot.

  In the brick room to their right there was a sudden hum, a mounting rush of energy. The air-gauge needle quivered across its dial.

  “She’s alive now,” Mr. Moffat said.

  Wendall grunted in amusement and walked across the loft. The old man followed.

  “What do you think?” he asked inside the brick room.

  Wendall shrugged.

  “Can’t tell,” he said. He looked at the turning of the motor. “Single-phase induction,” he said. “Runs by magnetism.”

  He listened. “Sounds all right to me,” he said.

  He walked across the small room.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing.

  “Relay machines,” said Mr. Moffat. “Keep the channels filled with wind.”

  “And this is the fan?” asked Wendall.

  The old man nodded.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Wendall turned. “Looks all right to me,” he said.

  They stood outside looking up at the pipes. Above the glossy wood of the enclosure box, they stood like giant pencils painted gold.

  “Big,” said Wendall.

  “She’s beautiful,” said Mr. Moffat.

  “Let’s hear her,” Wendall said.

  They walked back to the keyboards and Mr. Moffat sat before them. He pulled out a stop and pressed a key into its bed.

  A single tone poured out into the shadowed air. The old man pressed a volume pedal and the note grew louder. It pierced the air, tone and overtones bouncing off the church dome like diamonds hurled from a sling.

  Suddenly, the old man raised his hand.

  “Did you hear?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “It trembled,” Mr. Moffat said.

  As people entered the church, Mr. Moffat was playing Bach’s chorale prelude Aus der Tiefe rufe ich (From the Depths, I Cry). His fingers moved certainly on the manual keys, his spindling shoes walked a dance across the pedals; and the air was rich with moving sound.

  Wendall leaned over to whisper, “There’s the sun.”

  Above the old man’s gray-wreathed pate, the sunlight came filtering through the stained-glass window. It passed across the rack of pipes with a mistlike radiance.

  Wendall leaned over again.

  “Sounds all right to me,” he said.

  “Wait,” said Mr. Moffat.

  Wendall grunted. Stepping to the loft edge, he looked down at the nave. The three-aisled flow of people was branching off into rows. The echoing of their movements scaled up like insect scratchings. Wendall watched them as they settled in the brown-wood pews. Above and all about them moved the organ’s music.

  “Sssst.”

  Wendall turned and moved back to his cous
in.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Listen.”

  Wendall cocked his head.

  “Can’t hear anything but the organ and the motor,” he said.

  “That’s it,” the old man whispered. “You’re not supposed to hear the motor.”

  Wendall shrugged. “So?” he said.

  The old man wet his lips. “I think it’s starting,” he murmured.

  Below, the lobby doors were being shut. Mr. Moffat’s gaze fluttered to his watch propped against the music rack, thence to the pulpit where the Reverend had appeared. He made of the chorale prelude’s final chord a shimmering pyramid of sound, paused, then modulated, mezzo forte, to the key of G. He played the opening phrase of the Doxology.

  Below, the Reverend stretched out his hands, palms up, and the congregation took its feet with a rustling and crackling. An instant of silence filled the church. Then the singing began.

  Mr. Moffat led them through the hymn, his right hand pacing off the simple route. In the third phrase an adjoining key moved down with the one he pressed and an alien dissonance blurred the chord. The old man’s fingers twitched; the dissonance faded.

  “Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

  The people capped their singing with a lingering amen. Mr. Moffat’s fingers lifted from the manuals, he switched the motor off, the nave re-murmured with the crackling rustle and the dark-robed Reverend raised his hands to grip the pulpit railing.

  “Dear Heavenly Father,” he said, “we, Thy children, meet with Thee today in reverent communion.”

  Up in the loft, a bass note shuddered faintly.

  Mr. Moffat hitched up, gasping. His gaze jumped to the switch (off), to the air-gauge needle (motionless), toward the motor room (still).

  “You heard that?” he whispered.

  “Seems like I did,” said Wendall.

  “Seems?” said Mr. Moffat tensely.

  “Well . . .” Wendall reached over to flick a nail against the air dial. Nothing happened. Grunting, he turned and started toward the motor room. Mr. Moffat rose and tiptoed after him.

  “Looks dead to me,” said Wendall.

  “I hope so,” Mr. Moffat answered. He felt his hands begin to shake.

  The offertory should not be obtrusive but form a staidly moving background for the clink of coins and whispering of bills. Mr. Moffat knew this well. No man put holy tribute to music more properly than he.

  Yet, that morning . . .

  The discords surely were not his. Mistakes were rare for Mr. Moffat. The keys resisting, throbbing beneath his touch like things alive; was that imagined? Chords thinned to fleshless octaves, then, moments later, thick with sound; was it he? The old man sat, rigid, hearing the music stir unevenly in the air. Ever since the Responsive Reading had ended and he’d turned the organ on again, it seemed to possess almost a willful action.

  Mr. Moffat turned to whisper to his cousin.

  Suddenly, the needle of the other gauge jumped from mezzo to forte and the volume flared. The old man felt his stomach muscles clamp. His pale hands jerked from the keys and, for a second, there was only the muffled sound of ushers’ feet and money falling into baskets.

  Then Mr. Moffat’s hands returned and the offertory murmured once again, refined and inconspicuous. The old man noticed, below, faces turning, tilting upward curiously and a jaded pressing rolled in his lips.

  “Listen,” Wendall said when the collection was over, “how do you know it isn’t you?”

  “Because it isn’t,” the old man whispered back. “It’s her.”

  “That’s crazy,” Wendall answered. “Without you playing, she’s just a contraption.”

  “No,” said Mr. Moffat, shaking his head. “No. She’s more.”

  “Listen,” Wendall said, “you said you were bothered because they’re getting rid of her.”

  The old man grunted.

  “So,” said Wendall, “I think you’re doing these things yourself, unconscious-like.”

  The old man thought about it. Certainly, she was an instrument; he knew that. Her soundings were governed by his feet and fingers, weren’t they? Without them, she was, as Wendall had said, a contraption. Pipes and levers and static rows of keys; knobs without function, arm-long pedals and pressuring air.

  “Well, what do you think?” asked Wendall.

  Mr. Moffat looked down at the nave.

  “Time for the Benediction,” he said.

  In the middle of the Benediction postlude, the swell to great stop pushed out and, before Mr. Moffat’s jabbing hand had shoved it in again, the air resounded with a thundering of horns, the church air was gorged with swollen, trembling sound.

  “It wasn’t me,” he whispered when the postlude was over, “I saw it move by itself.”

  “Didn’t see it,” Wendall said.

  Mr. Moffat looked below where the Reverend had begun to read the words of the next hymn.

  “We’ve got to stop the service,” he whispered in a shaking voice.

  “We can’t do that,” said Wendall.

  “But something’s going to happen, I know it,” the old man said.

  “What can happen?” Wendall scoffed. “A few bad notes is all.”

  The old man sat tensely, staring at the keys. In his lap his hands wrung silently together. Then, as the Reverend finished reading, Mr. Moffat played the opening phrase of the hymn. The congregation rose and, following that instant’s silence, began to sing.

  This time no one noticed but Mr. Moffat.

  Organ tone possesses what is called “inertia,” an impersonal character. The organist cannot change this tonal quality; it is inviolate.

  Yet, Mr. Moffat clearly heard, reflected in the music, his own disquiet. Hearing it sent chills of prescience down his spine. For thirty years he had been organist here. He knew the workings of the organ better than any man. Its pressures and reactions were in the memory of his touch.

  That morning, it was a strange machine he played on.

  A machine whose motor, when the hymn was ended, would not stop.

  “Switch it off again,” Wendall told him.

  “I did,” the old man whispered frightenedly.

  “Try it again.”

  Mr. Moffat pushed the switch. The motor kept running. He pushed the switch again. The motor kept running. He clenched his teeth and pushed the switch a seventh time.

  The motor stopped.

  “I don’t like it,” said Mr. Moffat faintly.

  “Listen, I’ve seen this before,” said Wendall. “When you push the switch across the slot, it pushes a copper contact across some porcelain. That’s what joins the wires so the current can flow.

  “Well, you push that switch enough times, it’ll leave a copper residue on the porcelain so’s the current can move across it. Even when the switch is off. I’ve seen it before.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “She knows,” he said.

  That’s crazy,” Wendall said.

  “Is it?”

  They were in the motor room. Below, the Reverend was delivering his sermon.

  “Sure it is,” said Wendall. “She’s an organ, not a person.”

  “I don’t know anymore,” said Mr. Moffat hollowly.

  “Listen,” Wendall said, “you want to know what it probably is?”

  “She knows they want her out of here,” the old man said. “That’s what it is.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Wendall, twisting impatiently, “I’ll tell you what it is. This is an old church—and this old organ’s been shaking the walls for eighty years. Eighty years of that and walls are going to start warping, floors are going to start settling. And when the floor settles, this motor here starts tilting and wires go and there’s arcing.”

  “Arcing?”

  “Yes,” said Wendall. “Electricity jumping across gaps.”

  “I don’t see,” said Mr. Moffat.

  “All this here extra electricity gets into the motor,” Wendall said
. “There’s electromagnets in these relay machines. Put more electricity into them, there’ll be more force. Enough to cause those things to happen maybe.”

  “Even if it’s so,” said Mr. Moffat, “why is she fighting me?”

  “Oh, stop talking like that,” said Wendall.

  “But I know,” the old man said, “I feel.”

  “It needs repairing is all,” said Wendall. “Come on, let’s go outside. It’s hot in here.”

  Back on his bench, Mr. Moffat sat motionless, staring at the keyboard steps.

  Was it true, he wondered, that everything was as Wendall had said—partly due to faulty mechanics, partly due to him? He mustn’t jump to rash conclusions if this were so. Certainly, Wendall’s explanations made sense.

  Mr. Moffat felt a tingling in his head. He twisted slightly, grimacing.

  Yet, there were these things which happened: the keys going down by themselves, the stop pushing out, the volume flaring, the sound of emotion in what should be emotionless. Was this mechanical defect; or was this defect on his part? It seemed impossible.

  The prickling stir did not abate. It mounted like a flame. A restless murmur fluttered in the old man’s throat. Beside him, on the bench, his fingers twitched.

  Still, things might not be so simple, he thought. Who could say conclusively that the organ was nothing but inanimate machinery? Even if what Wendall had said were true, wasn’t it feasible that these very factors might have given strange comprehension to the organ? Tilting floors and ruptured wires and arcing and overcharged electromagnets—mightn’t these have bestowed cognizance?

  Mr. Moffat sighed and straightened up. Instantly, his breath was stopped.

  The nave was blurred before his eyes. It quivered like a gelatinous haze. The congregation had been melted, run together. They were welded substance in his sight. A cough he heard was a hollow detonation miles away. He tried to move but couldn’t. Paralyzed, he sat there.