Curioddity (14 page)

And this, he realized, was a momentous fork in his personal road. Wil had felt this trepidation once before: many years ago on one extremely cold winter's afternoon when as a little boy he and his mom had spent the afternoon sliding headfirst down a local Hill of Certain Death on the back of a tea tray, ululating like hillbillies at a monster truck rally. He could remember the terrifying sensation of ozone rushing through his nostrils that day, a heightened awareness, and his frozen hands clutching tightly to Melinda Morgan's thick coat as together, he and Mom braved the elements where not a single kid from his third-grade class dared to tread. That day, Melinda Morgan had stood at the top of the mountain with her son, encouraging him to take the hill on by himself while at the same time fearing for his structural integrity. “Go ahead, Wil,” she'd urged her little boy. “Keep your eyes on the path and you'll be fine.”

Wil hadn't been so sure. Halfway down the hill, an obvious fork led to two equally peril-fraught paths. The leftmost path was dotted with high moguls and snowdrifts, while the right path led through some thick underbrush that was covered with ice. “What if I go down the wrong way?” he worried aloud.

“There isn't a wrong way,” said his mother with a chuckle. “Whichever way you choose, that
is
the right way just as long as you make a choice! Go ahead—it'll be fun!

“But what if I end up upside down in a snowdrift?”

“That's how you'll know you've made the right decision!” his mom had called as she shoved him off the top of the slope.

Young Wil had suddenly found himself rocketing backward, plummeting toward the snowy fork at the relative speed of an Exocet missile, with Melinda Morgan receding in the distance, looking both proud of and terrified for her son at the same time. Halfway down the hill, he'd righted his ship, gripped both sides of the crumpled tea tray, and suddenly found all the joy there is to be had in an uncontrolled descent into an uncertain future.

Thirty seconds later—just as Wil had gotten the hang of steering the tea tray by pulling up on each side with as much strength as he could muster—the dreaded fork had appeared across the top of a snowy rise. Wil steeled himself against the possibility of an abrupt halt, and with his mother's words ringing in his frozen ears, he resolved to make a decision: left toward certain death or right toward a fate much worse? Left or right: the choice was clear.

At the very last moment, young Wil had chosen left. He'd pulled up sharply on the right side of the tray and dug his left side in the ground to carve a perfect turn in the ice-covered track.

Moments later, he'd gone accidentally down the middle and found himself upside down in a snowdrift, laughing like a maniac and crying like a siren.

*   *   *

N
OW, THESE
many years later, the way ahead seemed clear: Wil was going to cross the street and continue his journey into nowhere. He was going to follow the little girl on the bicycle, and even though he wasn't going to find Mr. Dinsdale's box of Levity, he was going to enjoy the ride, and he was going to laugh out loud when he found himself upside down somewhere.

For Wil had begun to realize, as he strode toward the cobbled unknown, that all of the unreasonable fears he had been harboring were nothing more than his imagination at work. And this was the first time his imagination had worked since his mother had died and his father had forbidden it to exist.

*   *   *

T
HE COBBLED
street was not so dark, as it turned out; indeed, it possessed a kind of Dickensian cheer, as if populated by now-generous moneylenders and street urchins who doubled as chimney sweeps. Wil moved through the thick blanket of fog that served as a teaser for the discovery of new delights ahead. He passed a store full of foreign antiques, and then a boutique store selling clothing for pets. Up ahead in the gloom, he could hear two small children playing a singsong game of some kind. The little street was apparently closed to automobile traffic, so that a number of happy customers of all ages and ethnic backgrounds could be seen cheerfully milling about in the center of the cobbled pavement as they crossed from one store to another. It seemed as though shopping was secondary to browsing, and the store owners didn't mind one little bit. Here, Wil passed a bountiful butcher's shop that displayed any manner of deceased fowl and blood sausage; there, a cooperative market selling organic fruits and vegetables. This was the kind of street that Wil might have wished to exist had he not already been standing in the middle of it. It was the kind of street he would have visited with his mother, all the while secretly hoping that he could show it to his dad.

At the end of one section, a small alley led into a circular cul de sac. Wil was startled to see that the alley was lit by old-style gaslights, and he had to stop for a moment and rub his eyes to see if the illusion might go away. Surely not, he thought to himself. Surely, the basic fundamentals of marketing dictated that one should attract customers by use of fancy neon signs and special offers advertised on the Internet. This particular shop seemed to say, “If you have the nerve to come down this alley and browse our storefront, you probably qualify as the type of customer we need.”

Intrigued, Wil made his way toward what appeared to be a dilapidated knickknack and trinket shop. A small, rusted sign above the window had once upon a time been emblazoned with the words
LUCY'S MAGIC LOCKER
. Nowadays, the worn letters looked as if they had reached retirement age and would have been better off emblazoning a shuffleboard court somewhere in Florida.

Wil chuckled to himself as he scanned the detritus that had collected over the years inside the shop window. He'd once read about a very large section of the Pacific Ocean that was, essentially, a floating pile of junk that had been trapped over the decades by various subaquatic currents. As Wil recalled, this junkyard of the sea was destined to simply grow and grow until it eventually reached land simply by the volume of its surface area. If he wasn't mistaken, someone must have discovered this floating pile of crud and deposited an arbitrary section of it inside the window of Lucy's Magic Locker. No doubt, Mr. Dinsdale would be delighted to learn that his Curioddity Museum was infinitely less dreadful than this place, although Wil suspected the old man would probably have an interest in turning it into some kind of exhibit overflow.

It would have been generous to describe the items on sale as “used,” and perhaps a little more accurate to describe them as “abused.” An old stuffed teddy bear looked as though it may once have entertained one of the crowned princes of Europe, assuming teddy bears had been invented at any point in the third century. Next to this, a stained black teakettle with a hole in it was propped against a single roller skate from the third Ming dynasty. Wil grimaced a little, imagining the roller skate's lost twin floating on a cardboard box somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. There was nothing for him in Lucy's Magic Locker save for a collection of rusted items and a possible respiratory infection. But just as his eyes began to move in the direction of the market street, and the rest of his Tuesday, he caught sight of something amazing, something completely unexpected: a particular item that he would never have imagined he'd see again in a million years. It was an old box with faded two-color graphics—an item he hadn't laid eyes on since he was a little boy—and it was the encapsulation of all that he had ever been, and all the things he had ever lost.

For there—hidden underneath an old newspaper and partly covered by some old socks—was the most exciting object in the history of all existence: a Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit!

*   *   *

W
IL PAUSED
for a moment, trying to understand his emotions. He felt big tears welling up in his eyes, and a lump in his throat that wanted to bring up a cry of joy. Was this really the very toy he'd always wished his father had kept instead of throwing it into the garbage along with all of the other bittersweet memories? Unable to take his eyes off the Tesla Kit—hoping beyond hope that no one would enter the store and purchase it in the few seconds he'd take to make it inside—Wil moved toward the slightly dodgy-looking door of Lucy's Magic Locker. He rather hoped Lucy would be a kindly old lady with a penchant for making people's dreams come true, though he was willing to admit to himself that he would pay for the Tesla Kit no matter the price.

Inside the store, a little bell tinkled like glass as Wil entered. It barely seemed like the kind of bell one might use to alert oneself to the presence of customers, and better suited to sending a person to sleep. The inside of Lucy's Magic Locker was—in terms of pure, unadulterated trash—a gold mine, a veritable cornucopia of stuff that nobody wanted. Bookshelves full of old, dusty tomes crowded into what might be mistaken for aisles. Next to the far-too-old sales counter was a damaged workbench covered in a thick layer of dust, which really didn't surprise Wil one bit since everything in the store seemed to be broken. But apart from the various layers of discarded junk, there was no sign of Lucy.

“Hello?” called Wil, nervously. “Is anybody there? Hello?” No answer. He wondered for a moment if he might not find the skeletal remains of poor old Lucy hidden under a pile of shoes at the far end of the store. “Hello!” he called again, this time more forcefully. No doubt the poor old dear's hearing device was of the same pedigree and epoch as the other contents of her store. Wil waited for someone to emerge from the back of the store, probably with a large funnel held to her ear. But no such luck: the only thing he could hear was the dripping of a tap in a sink somewhere.

For a brief moment, Wil considered leaving. Perhaps the store owner had gone next door to borrow a cup of sugar. Maybe she was taking a very early afternoon nap. But he quickly dismissed these notions of leaving in such cowardly fashion; perhaps someone was at the back of the store piling books. If so, he thought, they would probably do better to restack the ones up front and create a clear pathway though the aisles. Wil moved cautiously toward the back of the store, which carried the unmistakable musty smell of old, unread books and mouse droppings. This wasn't the sort of place you frequented to stock up on your antiques, thought Wil; it was more like the kind of place you nervously entered as a kid in order to retrieve your lost Frisbee.

At the back of the store was a mishmash of clutter that seemed to possess a kind of New Age theme, Wil thought, assuming that age had begun in, oh, say, the 1950s. The floor plan had clearly not been thought out very carefully since anyone with half an ounce of common sense would have brought all the bookshelves back here and put them against the back wall. While there was not a shelf in sight, Wil did find a strange collection of smooth, round rocks and a cracked crystal that had dropped a few shards along the way. A partially inflated beach ball waited forlornly at the base of a pile of old sporting equipment that would not have been out of place at the 1900 Paris Olympics. And just underneath an old persimmon golf club sat a battered wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that could have passed for the one Mr. Dinsdale had commissioned him to find. Not a bad candidate, thought Wil, as he picked the box up to examine it. Of course, it was blindingly unremarkable, which only added to its possible authenticity. Wil turned the box upside down, where the unmistakable legend
MA#E IN #####N
was revealed in faded capital letters. Wil chuckled to himself. Made in Taiwan, indeed. His search was narrowing by the minute.

As Wil flipped the box this way and that, wondering if he possessed the courage to try and pass it off as Mr. Dinsdale's coveted box of Levity, he felt the strange sensation of movement around him. Looking up, he could see nothing out of the ordinary, really. But he got the distinct
impression
that someone had just walked by. He waited a few moments for something to happen—something that must explain the strange sensation. He imagined what it must be like to close one's eyes and then stand in a room full of a hundred silent people; this is exactly how he felt, he determined. He looked back down at the wooden box, only for the sensation to occur again. This time he was not mistaken: someone had definitely moved by, and he had the strangest feeling he'd looked across to the back wall of the store and seen an open room, which had suddenly disappeared and been replaced by the wall just as he was looking up at it.

Another movement … this time in Wil's peripheral vision: Wil tried to think back about just how many of these strange incidents he'd encountered in the last day or so. Where had he felt this way before? He counted roughly four or five peripheral intruders over that time span, including the strange crates inside the Curioddity Museum and the apparition of the girl inside the featureless room. And because this kind of thing was now less unsettling and becoming slightly the norm, it took Wil just slightly longer than it might have otherwise taken to react.

As Wil looked up, he was astonished to see an attractive young woman with brown, curly hair moving rapidly toward him with her arms raised high above her shoulders.

He was equally astonished when she smashed him over the head with an oversized copy of Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace,
though he was forced to concede as he fell to the ground, stunned, that this was a novel approach.

 

CHAPTER SIX

T
HE FIRST
thing that struck Wil—or the
second
thing that struck him (since the first was, technically, a large book)—was that the ceilings of Lucy's Magic Locker were painted a very dark shade of green: Oxford green, he speculated, or perhaps something a little more synthetic, like army green. No matter the exact hue, he felt a special kinship with this color—and this ceiling in particular—since to concentrate on anything else at this moment in time would be to invite a state of unconsciousness. To Wil, the ceiling was the color of Heaven, and he would have smiled a satisfied smile and drifted off to sleep if the thought of waking up didn't make his head hurt so.