Curioddity (10 page)

A
S
W
IL
descended the stairs into the foyer, he caught sight of Dinsdale at the main desk, talking in animated fashion with Mary Gold. At the far end of the counter, a wooden crate appeared to poke out for a moment, as if listening to the conversation. The moment Wil looked at it, the crate seemed to duck back in behind the back end of the counter. Being a polite sort of man, Wil tried to slow his advance so that Mr. Dinsdale and his assistant could know he was coming and adjust their argument accordingly. He caught the tail end of something Mary Gold had been saying to the little curator.

“… it doesn't matter if you think he's the one—I don't trust him!”

Wil coughed, partly because he was still trying to be polite and partly because Mary Gold was beginning to rub him the wrong way and he wanted to make it clear he was on to her game. At the sound of the cough, Mr. Dinsdale turned and tried to quickly compose himself by producing a fake smile, which he aimed in Wil's direction. Mary Gold frowned at Wil, just so he'd know she was saying something mean to him in body language.

“Wil!” cried Dinsdale. “We were just discussing your fee. Weren't we, Mary?”

Mary Gold smacked on her bubble gum to make it clear she was feeling in a disdainful mood in general and venomous toward Wil in particular. “Sure we were,” she replied in plain English. “And the moment I get an opportunity I'll expose you as a fraud and run you out of town,” she continued, silently.

“We were hoping five thousand dollars might be sufficient to get you started?” inquired Mr. Dinsdale. “I can have more transferred to your bank account should you need it for expenses. And the final five thousand will be payable upon retrieval of the exhibit. Would this be acceptable?”

Wil felt rather like a man in a casino who just accidentally bet on red when he'd meant to bet on black. He could see the croupier shoving a pile of money in his direction but he wasn't yet sure if he should reach out and pull it toward him. Lacking any kind of coherent response he merely nodded, sheepishly, and lowered his gaze toward his shoes so that he wouldn't have to meet Mary Gold's piercing stare.

“Wonderful!” cried Mr. Dinsdale. “I'll have Mary transfer the money into your account just as soon you provide me with your banking details. In the meantime, here's something to cover immediate expenses, and I'd like you to review this artist's rendition of the Levity box.”

Mr. Dinsdale handed Wil an envelope containing ten or twelve crisp fifty-dollar bills and a crumpled piece of paper he'd been scribbling on. The paper depicted a simple cube, which Dinsdale seemed to have hastily drawn in the few moments before Wil had made his way downstairs. The image was box-shaped, to be certain, but it hardly seemed like the starting point Mr. Dinsdale believed it to be. To Wil, events were now flashing by like a pudding-filled Lamborghini Gallardo that had been driven off the edge of a cliff. The whole thing was moving too fast, and while everything appeared to be headed directly toward a very damaging conclusion, he reasoned the experience might at least be fun in the few moments it would take to arrive.

“I guess there's no harm in taking a look,” Wil said with as little enthusiasm as he could muster. “Do we have any clues or witnesses?”

“Not a one,” replied Mr. Dinsdale, happily. “But we do have Wil Morgan, Crack Detective, on the job! I'm sure the moment you leave this building our levity thief will be quaking in his or her shoes at the very thought of such a tenacious professional nipping at their heels.”

“I'll do my best, Mr. Dinsdale,” replied Wil, feeling utterly embarrassed at the notion he might do anything other than wander aimlessly around for a couple of days sorting through the city's ten billion cube-shaped candidates. “Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be on my way. I'll contact you the moment I have anything to report.”

With that, Wil and the old man shook hands, and Wil began a hurried trudge in the direction of the nearby revolving door and the freedom that beckoned beyond it. Out of the corner of his eye he imagined he could see a pretty, curly-haired young woman bustling around one of the wooden crates but he chose to ignore the ghost and kept on walking. Wil could feel Mary Gold's eyes burning a hole in his back just below the shoulder blades. But he stiffened his resolve and kept his eyes focused on the street outside, which was now blanketed in a heavy dusting of snow.

Don't look back, Wil silently instructed himself as he grasped one of the revolving door's free panels. Don't feel bad about this, and most definitely do not get stuck in this revolving door and look like an idiot in your first two minutes on the job. He pushed on the panel and surprised himself by moments later making it through the door without damaging any of his appendages.

Outside, the wind was bitter cold. Wil could imagine Mary Gold standing at the main desk inside the Curioddity Museum behind him and screaming silent threats in the direction of his shoulder blades. Rather than confirming these fears, he strode quickly down the marble steps of the museum and out onto Mons Street. Wil felt slightly disoriented by the dense fog and snow, so it took a moment to get his bearings. A freshening wind seemed to take great delight in pelting him directly in the face with large snowflakes. It would probably be necessary, he decided, to hurry back to his apartment and find a couple of extra layers of clothing.

Nearby, Wil could hear the bustle of the divided highway and the complicated one-way system, so he struck out in that direction. Within seconds, he found himself at the corner of Mons Street. And it was here that things, unsurprisingly, took a slight turn for the weird.

As Wil approached the trash can he'd spotted earlier, he realized the fog was very quickly lifting. Or, to be more precise, he seemed to be headed toward an abrupt climate change just yards from where he'd been standing outside the museum. The trash can was now bathed in sunlight, and just beyond the end of Mons Street there seemed to be no evidence of residual frozen fog whatsoever. Wil was startled to realize the fallen snow had covered only the street he was on, while the traffic moving around the one-way system was moving at a steady pace through early-afternoon sunshine.

Wil peered down the length of Mons Street; some fifty yards away, the old cinema was now becoming shrouded in the very mist that had refused to make its way to where he was currently standing. If he scrunched his nose and looked
just so
he could see the Museum of Curioddity in his peripheral vision. But when he looked directly at the building, all he could make out was a white sheet of snow. He stood still for a moment, trying to get a sense of what this might mean. The envelope full of money seemed real enough in his coat pocket, and his thumb still hurt, so he didn't feel he was likely to be dreaming. Even so, the hairs were beginning to crawl on the back of his neck, as if someone were still staring into it.

Wil stared at the nearby street sign. It stared back at him in block capital letters that continued to say
MONS
no matter how hard he looked at it.

Upside-Down Street. Wil suddenly had a very curious notion indeed; a whim of almost epic proportions seemed to come over him, replacing the awful sense that someone was staring at the back of his neck. Slowly, yet with an increasing feeling of self-confidence, Wil began to bend at the waist until his head was just about level with his knees. He turned his head upside down and peered toward the street sign once again.

Written upon the sign was the very message he'd been looking at the entire time, and it was now evident to Wil that his only mistake had been to look at it the wrong way. Perhaps instead of merely looking at the sign he should have been un-looking at it instead.

*   *   *

I
N LARGE
block capital letters the sign read, simply,
SNOW
.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

W
IL NARROWED
his eyes for a moment as he focused on the every-which-way sign at the end of Upside-Down Street. By sheer force of will, he managed to ignore the snow falling roughly ten yards from where he was standing. And by stubbornly sticking to this task for a few minutes, he found that the street, the old cinema, and even the Museum of Curioddity were slowly returning to their previous state, which was to say they now did not seem to exist at all, just as long as he refused to look at them. Or un-look at them, he supposed. He could hardly tell if by ignoring the buildings he had rendered them invisible, or if they had never existed in the first place, or if the excess of blood running to his head had given him one of his migraines.

Wil straightened, so that the fluids vacating his upper extremities sent a wave of nausea cascading through his inner ear. He steadied himself for a moment against the street sign. This entire episode was going sideways—or upside down—in a hurry. If he were going to straighten things out again, he realized, he'd have to think of something drastic. And so he concentrated his thoughts on the imminent arrival of his dad, Barry, which had the desired effect of bringing reality crashing down around him in much the same way a duck full of hunters' buckshot might tumble unceremoniously into a swamp. Very quickly—with perhaps a quiet squeal of protest at the violation of its existential rights—Wil's universe seemed to return to a state of normalcy. Perhaps not so normal, he realized, considering how he had just invoked the spiritual essence of Barry Morgan. Was it his imagination, or had thinking about his dad helped to rid him of his vertigo for once, as opposed to bringing on an attack?

Behind him, the sound of the cars careening along the one-way system had begun to dissolve into a sort of motorized hum. This would be a good time to take stock of the situation: a sensible approach one might expect of a college-trained chartered accountant as opposed to, say, a confused detective specializing in cases of insurance fraud who had just taken on a job he had no possible chance of completing. Thankfully, Wil's prowess in the area of “taking stock” rivaled that of his ability to trudge around one-way systems and to start meaningless arguments with teenagers in coffee shops. All of this taking stock would doubtless put him in a more comfortable frame of mind, he hoped. And that might help him explain what the heck had just happened.

The first course of meaningful action, Wil decided, was that he was going to have to decide what to do first. Secondly, he was going to have a reckoning of the knock-down, drag-out variety with the Strange Feeling of déjà vu he'd been arguing with earlier. And finally, he was probably going to find a nice bench somewhere and have a quiet, feeble moment to himself, wherein he'd try to persuade himself that none of this particular Monday's events had ever really happened. The envelope full of cash in his pocket was undoubtedly either a forgery or a mistake, which could easily be said for Mr. Dinsdale, the Museum of Curioddity, and the last of the snow melting from his lapels.

Wil rubbed his head for a moment, examining it for bruises. The most likely explanation for all of this nonsense was that he'd been battered unconscious at some point earlier in the day, and this had induced a bout of post-concussion syndrome. Though Wil had never been knocked senseless in his life, this convenient epiphany seemed both possible and—by extension—probable. Perhaps he'd tripped on the calico cat draped across the landing of Mrs. Chappell's apartment building, and the resulting face-plant down the final flight of stairs had knocked him senseless. Perhaps his shoelaces were untied; he stooped to check their integrity, only to be confronted by two firmly tied and sensible double knots courtesy of his dad's years of relentless training on the subject of footwear safety. Of course, Wil suddenly rationalized, Dad was coming to town! No doubt he'd fainted from the shock of listening to the message Barry Morgan had left on his demonic answering machine and was still lying, unconscious, on the nineteenth floor of the Castle Towers where he would have to wait until 7:00
P.M
. for Mr. Whatley to discover his semi-lifeless body. Wil hoped the fall had been a particularly nasty one so that his dad might be forced to postpone his visit well into the next decade.

But no such luck; try as he might, Wil could find no evidence of bruises, scrapes, lesions, or lacerations beyond the obvious symptom of his soul having dropped through the bottom of his intestines. Somehow in the next few days he was going to have to craft the illusion he had been working for the last seven years as a chartered accountant.

As he knelt and stared at his shoelaces, trying to stifle the involuntary sobs working their way back to the surface, Wil glanced at his watch: five minutes past three. In exactly one minute from now, his mortal enemy—the repulsive Swiss edifice outside the Castle Towers that masqueraded as a giant clock tower—would attempt its daily sneak attack. But this was no ordinary Monday, and this time he would be ready. Summoning the imaginary advice of a certain imaginary curator named Dinsdale—a fanciful figure brought about by post-concussion syndrome, no doubt—Wil Morgan would attempt to
un-listen
to the awful monstrosity.

Five minutes and thirty seconds … Wil scrunched his eyes and tried to un-listen to the cars passing by on the one-way system. Not an easy task, he decided. Perhaps it would be better to un-listen to the street sign that was dutifully making no noise whatsoever as it monitored the progress of nearby traffic. Wil stepped back to concentrate on its smooth, metal edges. He considered Upside-Down Street's proximity to the city's one-way system, thinking it ironic that his recent experiences here had seemed to go in every direction at once. Everything about the museum was in complete contradiction to the conformity that surrounded it. But now that Wil was back on the main road running through town, the metal sign simply said
MONS
once more, and the notion that a semi-visible street blanketed in snow existed nearby seemed—like the Curioddity Museum itself—ridiculous indeed. He waited for the hideous clock tower's sonic assault to come from afar, which even from this distance would sound something like: