270. The impenetrable safe

The impenetrable safe was recovered from the bottom of Lake Erie, door closed and lock unpicked, but with all contents missing. It had gone missing three days earlier, from the floor of a Chicago bank of some repute.

The police had received a phone call at five past midnight about the curious break-in. Nothing in the building had been disturbed, not even the unbalanced stacks of value papers on the counter. But where once stood the most uncrackable safe of the United States, now only a sea of white tiles and a huge void remained.

It would have been impossible for the thieves to carry the safe outside without demolishing half of the building or using big machinery, for when the bank came into being, the safe was installed first and the bank built around it. The vanishing safe was a conundrum, alright. But to find it at the bottom of the lake elevated the mystery to a whole new level.

The best detectives in the world could not crack the key to the enigma, nor could safety experts, mystics or TV viewers spurred on by huge rewards the bank promised in tacky commercials. For months the news dominated the headlines and it even inspired a tacky but wildly successful cash-in movie that proposed all kinds of improbable scenarios.

Meanwhile, in Venice, Italy, Carl Jurgen Sonnenfeld paid the bill of his afternoon espresso with a newly minted gold coin. Only he know how the safe disappeared, was emptied and ended up in Lake Erie.

He also knew that as long as the enigma was out there, nobody would observe that the safe contents were being spent in plain sight.

Correctly gauging the public’s appetite for impossible puzzles, the thief lived a long, unnoticed life.

 

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42. Songbook for the criminally insane

Songbook for the criminally insane.

The title hooked Maria so she flipped open the dusty cover. She was greeted by page after page of frenzied melodies, clearly the work of some 17^th century madman composer randomly dotting the note-bars with his quill.

Yet as she closer inspected the notes there appeared to be some method in the madness. These were dissonant notes but they were not trusted to paper by sheer luck. She suspected some hidden message lurking beneath the ink blots.

 

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32. The marble statues were silent witnesses

The marble statues were silent witnesses of the tragedy that had just occurred. On the grass the governess cradled the lifeless young boy in her arms. Her salty tears dripped on his closed eyelids. The rage that had slowly been building in her heart now escaped her mouth in full force.

“Show yourself, you demon! Show yourself!”

The woods surrounding the estate did not answer. The ghost of Glennis Aldershot, so vicious in ripping the life from the boy moments earlier, did not make himself heard or seen.

The governess stood up, still holding the boy in her arms. She shook his body, hoping to wake him from his sleep. But despair made way for resignation: his spirit had most definitely crossed the threshold to the afterlife.

How would she bring the devastating news to the boy’s little sister? It was her soul the ghost had seemed most intent on. Aldershot had been prying upon her, haunting her day and night, ever since the children had set foot into the mansion. Falling chandeliers had missed her by an inch. The runaway carriage had only bruised her. But it was her protective older brother who had now paid the ultimate price.

The governess consoled her aching heart with thoughts of all the preparations that the funeral would entail. Those would keep her occupied. Those would keep her mind off the death of an innocent child. Those would perhaps erase her own guilt.

As long as she stuck to the ghost story she had cunningly fed the children from the beginning, just in case something like this would happen.

 

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27. The time machine crashed halfway between Connecticut and the renaissance

The time machine crashed halfway between Connecticut and the renaissance in a muddy field amid the densest fog Alicia had seen since childhood. The hovering gray banks were playing havoc with her instruments, already damaged by the collision that had landed her in this slice of spacetime in the first place. Dragging herself out of this swamp was not going to be easy.

 

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19. So this priest tried to add me on Linked-In

So this priest tried to add me on Linked-In. He was 60-odd years, balding with grey temples and sporting a benign laugh not unlike the one the new pope shows off. He worked in a rural community, a long way from the suburb where I reside. So it was puzzling why he thought I might be interested in him as a ‘professional connection’.

Perhaps he stumbled upon one of my profile pictures on Google and – spurred on by the colour of my skin – was convinced I could be another joyful African in his growing army of black catholic souls.

Perhaps he had acquired a sexual appetite for Nubian boys during his time in the Congo?

Perhaps he was just in the habit of adding just about everyone to his Linked-In profile because he was gunning for a Guinness World Record: most connections on a social network site by a priest?

Perhaps if I hadn’t been so curious as to answer his request, I would now not be tied in a damp cellar, on all fours, naked and soaked in gasoline, surrounded by fat men in big pointy white hoods with huge flaming torches, led by the most unlikely KKK-member you could think of.

 

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