Evil Machines Read Online Free Page A

patent leather. They weren’t quite her size, but she looked around the
    store briefly, unzipped her big empty bag and dropped the shoes into it. Then she wandered towards the casual footwear section. A pair of espadrilles caught her eye. They were bright blue and had a white edging round the sole. Once again she glanced quickly round and then dropped the espadrilles into her bag.
    A little further on, she popped a pair of stiletto heels with ankle straps into her bag, then some ballet shoes, and she was just stuffing some expensive thigh-length boots in when all the alarm bells in the store started ringing, and a store detective put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Got you!’
    When Leanora finally appeared in her nephew’s office, she was accompanied by the store detective.
    ‘This lady says she’s your aunt, sir,’ said the store detective – clearly not believing a word of it.
    ‘Aunt Leanora!’ exclaimed Montague Du Cann. ‘You haven’t been shoplifting again, have you?’
    Aunt Leanora hung her head.
    ‘Caught her red-handed,’ mumbled the store detective, who was now beginning to feel he was in the wrong place.
    ‘I’ve told you time and time again never to go through the Shoe Department!’ exclaimed Montague Du Cann.
    The truth is that Aunt Leanora had suffered for some time from kleptomania, which meant she couldn’t stop herself stealing things – to be specific, shoes. I suppose you could say she was lucky she didn’t need to steal anything other than shoes, but she stole shoes whenever she saw them. She just couldn’t help it: brown shoes, black shoes, casual shoes, formal shoes, dancing pumps and fashion boots, slippers,
    slip-ons, high heels, low heels, flip-flops, sandals and wellingtons . . . and it didn’t matter whether they fitted her or not! She simply could not stop herself stealing anything in the Shoe Department.
    ‘I know! I know!’ sighed Leanora. ‘I pressed the button to come straight up to the Sixth Floor, but the lift took me to the Shoe Department and then wouldn’t budge!’
    Her nephew narrowed his eyes. ‘That lift?! No . . . it couldn’t be . . .’ he murmured, for he simply couldn’t get rid of the suspicion that somehow – just maybe – the elevator was doing all this deliberately.
    For a moment, a clammy feeling stole across Montague Du Cann’s chest . . . In fact it was the same feeling that his aunt had experienced earlier, though, of course, he wasn’t to know that. It was a feeling of being close to something truly evil.
    And that was when things began to get really weird – really, seriously and dangerously weird .
    ***
    Montague Du Cann had not always been a department store executive. In an earlier part of his life he had been a bandit. His name had then been Juan Gonzales, and he was the boldest and most desperate bandit in the whole of New Mexico.
    He had gone to the bad down in old Silver City, and his gang was called the Dos Hombres Gang – which means the Two Men Gang, although in fact there were four of them.
    They robbed the bank in Española, and then fled across the Rio Grande to Santa Fe. But in Santa Fe the most
    junior member of the gang, who was known as The Kid, but whose name was actually Antonio Gabriel Bernardino Martinez, got drunk and started bragging about what they had done.
    Someone informed the local sheriff, and the sheriff, along with twenty armed policemen, had surrounded the lodging house, where the Dos Hombres Gang was hiding out.
    ‘Juan Gonzales!’ called out the sheriff through a megaphone. ‘We know it was you robbed the bank in Española. Come out with your hands up or we’ll shoot you down like a dog!’
    It was at this moment that Juan Gonzales conceived the idea that life as a department store executive in England might be preferable to the life of a desperate bandit in New Mexico. So he said to the rest of the gang:
    ‘Keep ’em occupied. I’m gonna get help.’
    ‘Right!’ said Fernando