Curioddity (37 page)

True to his arbitrary nature, Mr. Dinsdale completely ignored everything Wil had said and darted back into the hallway. As fast as their legs could carry them, Wil and Lucy barreled up the main stairs, where they found Mr. Dinsdale at the door to his office. “Quickly!” he called. “Everything's coming into focus! We have to marshal our forces!”

“What forces?”

“You'll see!” exclaimed Dinsdale before slipping through his office door. “Come on!”

Intrigued, Wil rushed to the door and followed Dinsdale through, where he abruptly stopped in his tracks. For the sight that awaited him was perhaps the very thing he had least expected to see. To one side of the table sat a strange man with unkempt hair who wore the kinds of clothes that would have made a fashionable accountant resplendent in the early nineteenth century. On the table in front of the man sat an ancient Egyptian abacus, and a printed piece of paper that looked exactly like the missing bill Wil and Lucy had recently retrieved. Wil intuitively knew this man to be Mr. Dinsdale's cousin, Engelbert. He knew it with a certainty that defied logic. But it was the identity of the person across the table from cousin Engelbert that really threw him for a loop.

“Hello, Wil,” said Barry Morgan as he held up the Perpetual Penny. “I wanted to return this to you.”

*   *   *

A
ND IN
his eyes, Wil's father held the look of a man who had just rediscovered a magic he thought he had lost forever.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A
NUMBER
of possible questions flashed through Wil's mind at the very same time, like eager shoppers let loose inside an electronics store on a tax-free weekend.

These competing questions immediately ran into the bottleneck of his cerebral cortex, which had been dealing with a number of issues over the last few days and was in no mood to open itself up to more trampling. He opened his mouth, involuntarily, and made a couple of embarrassed gurgling sounds. This was exactly the opening the questions in his head had been looking for: within moments they had sorted themselves into an orderly line along one of his synapses, voted for an appropriate representative, and allowed said representative to the front of the line to make its case.

Wil settled upon the most predictable question possible, given the circumstances: “Dad,” he blurted out in spite of himself, “what are you doing here?”

Barry Morgan blinked, evenly. “Well, I was hoping for something a little more welcoming, son,” he said with a smile. “If I'm not mistaken, you invited me here. Or at least your mother did.”

“What? How?”

Calmly, Barry balanced the Perpetual Penny on the table in front of him and set it spinning with a flick of his finger. He fixed his son with a gaze that seemed equal parts melancholy and accepting, never allowing his eyes to go back to the spinning penny.

“I'm not going to look down, Wil,” said Barry, “because I don't want to believe in the rules anymore. I want to believe in something else.”

“I don't understand.”

“I want to believe that Mom has a hand in this—that if I don't look down, the old penny you two were always messing around with is going to keep on spinning forever. I haven't been letting myself think things like that since she died.”

Like a man traversing a one-way system on a cold, foggy morning, Wil felt his heart emptying of all its joy. Tears welled up at the mention of his mother, and he felt years of longing and loneliness wash over him. Suddenly, he felt a hand on his: Lucy was falling in love with every inch of her antiboyfriend's great big sentimental heart.

“Dad,” Wil said quietly, “I'm sorry I lied to you. I don't have any money and I'm not an accountant. I specialize in low-profile divorce surveillance—”

“And high-profile artifact retrieval!” interrupted Mr. Dinsdale, happily.

“—and high-profile artifact retrieval, yes—”

“Not to mention righting the wrongs of a hundred-year-old bogus electricity bill and bringing about at least half the downfall of a man who is himself the downfall of society!” continued Dinsdale, oblivious to the context of the moment.

“Along with his groovy assistant, minus her trained detective cat!” added Lucy with a flourish, as she tried to get into the spirit of things.

“Right,” said Wil. He was determined not to lose his train of thought. “All of those things, yes. But honestly, Dad, only since Monday. Before that, I wasn't much of anything except a little morose and a lot caffeinated.”

“I understand, Wil,” said Barry. “And I think it's probably me who should be apologizing to you. It hasn't stopped spinning, has it?”

Wil looked down briefly toward the smooth tabletop, where the Perpetual Penny was still happily twirling in place. “Not yet.”

“Good. Then I'm going to ask that you accept my apology for all of the pressure I must have put on you all these years. Not to mention all the times I threw aside your inventions, and your imagination in the process.”

“He accepts!” exclaimed Lucy. Embarrassed by her involuntary outburst, she bit her bottom lip and scrunched her nose. “That is, if you're okay with it, Wil?”

There was a momentary shift in the direction of time, space, and the course of the conversation. Lucy winked at her new boyfriend in a delicious way, as if challenging Wil to extricate himself from this predicament.

“Dad, I'd like you to meet Lucy Price. I think she might be the best thing that's ever happened to me, even though I've only known her for a few days—
waitaminnit
!”

*   *   *

W
IL SUDDENLY
scowled at Mr. Dinsdale, who was watching the heartwarming family reunion from across the table, a look of eager anticipation on his face.

“What do you mean, ‘They're going to be here any minute'?”

“Hmm?” mumbled the old curator with as much fake innocence as he could muster.

“Who's going to be here any minute? And for that matter, what forces are we marshaling? And what do you mean by ‘half' of somebody's downfall?”

“Did I say that?”

“You said it when we were coming up the stairs! Hurry up, you said. They'll be here any minute. And I'm inclined to think, Mr. Dinsdale, that if this person who's going to be here any minute was of the friendly variety, we wouldn't be needing to marshal any forces, would we?”

“Yes. Right, well … I suppose when you put it like that, no.”

“Yes or no?”

“No. No, we wouldn't. You are correct.”

“Who's coming?”

Mr. Dinsdale pondered for a moment—it was the kind of moment where Wil had learned the old man was at his most arbitrary and dangerous.

“That giant globe you mentioned, Wil: the one that shot out the top of the Castle Towers—”

“What about it?”

“It wasn't red, was it? Please tell me it wasn't a giant, glowing red globe, for the sake of all humanity.”

“No. It was blue.”

“Well, that's a relief!” said Dinsdale, looking relieved. “Marcus James is a notoriously poor loser. If it had been red, the globe would have contained a twenty-megaton thermonuclear device.”

“Well, what if it was blue?”

“That'd be his escape pod.”

“What?” replied Wil with a level of disbelief entirely in keeping with the rest of his week so far.

“I tried to tell you the job is only half-completed. So that would be Marcus James, getting away scot-free, as usual. He'll be coming here, and probably with some reinforcements—”

“Whaa-aat!?”

“I said ‘Marcus James! And probably with s—'”

“I know what you said! Why didn't you say it more forcefully?”

“I didn't want to spoil the moment! Family disentanglements are of the most monumental importance, Wil!”

“Not if all the family members are dead at the hands of a titanium-reinforced ninja-bot!”

“Really? Do they make them from titanium these days—?”

Wil shot Mr. Dinsdale a glare of the type that could neither be ignored nor misinterpreted—not even by a strange little museum curator dressed in a mustard-yellow jacket. “How long,” he asked between gritted teeth, “before they get here?”

*   *   *

A
T THIS
moment, Mr. Dinsdale's diminutive cousin, Engelbert, decided to make his first foray into the conversation. “No more than ten or eleven minutes, tops! We've had one of our Roberts posted on surveillance just outside the Castle Towers; he spotted a couple of troop transporters rolling out past Pan's statue at high speed just after you left. If I know Marcus James, he's unleashed his army of lawyers on our assets, and he'll be slapping an injunction on the use of our evidence in court! We must hurry or all will be lost!”

The odd little lawyer had a voice like two breadfruit falling off the back of a rhinoceros. Wil was astonished both by the strangeness of the pint-sized attorney's vocal delivery and by the precise way in which he was able to liken it to two breadfruit falling off the back of a rhinoceros. For one thing, he had absolutely no idea what kind of noise a breadfruit might make if it fell. Whatever the case, he was not going to allow himself to be disoriented inside the museum by any more of Mr. Dinsdale's weird associations, relative or otherwise.

“What do we do?” Wil asked aloud, and to no one in particular. “I was just getting used to the idea we'd beaten Marcus James into submission.”

“I'm afraid people like Marcus James don't submit very easily, Wil,” replied Dinsdale. “I'm going to guess with his army of lawyers, he already has those injunctions in order. That escape pod of his is a fully functioning military exoskeleton. But we're not going to fret about that—not when we have Wil Morgan, Crack Detective, on the case!”

“What about the police? They were massing around his exits when we drove away!”

“Mmh. That sort of technology can easily avoid police radar. We're going to have to put Phase Two of our plan into action.”

“Phase Two? We don't have a Phase Two!”

“Of course we do!”

“What's Phase Two?”

“You tell us. This was your idea, wasn't it?”

“It wasn't my idea! It was yours!”

“Oh dear.”

*   *   *

W
IL GULPED,
realizing that all eyes were on him even though he hadn't asked for the attention, nor done anything remotely excellent enough to warrant it. His manic week had been a series of adventures and misadventures, to be sure—but he hardly felt like he had been in control of any of it. In fact, Wil felt more like a weekend rafter who'd inadvertently paddled down a class 5 series of rapids and was now headed backward at high speed, unable to turn to face his imminent demise at the hands of a rock.

He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined himself trudging. He was good at trudging. It calmed his thoughts. Wil imagined himself going along the city's one-way system. He thought of his mother, and his newly unestranged father. He thought of the beautiful girl holding his hand, and of the Curioddity Museum. He thought of all the things he had gained in a single week of doing everything he wasn't supposed to, and at that moment he realized what he now had to do. The worst that could happen had already happened; if he lived another thousand lifetimes he would never, ever go back and ride the Rat Vomit Comet. So what would be the point of protecting what he'd already decided to throw away? Besides, the more he thought about it, he wasn't so much headed backward down some class 5 rapids as he was hurtling down a metaphorical Hill of Death on the back of a tea tray. And that just so happened to be one of the greatest memories of his life.

Wil opened his eyes to find the Perpetual Penny quietly whirling on the tabletop, and Barry Morgan looking slightly eager, and ever-so-slightly pained. He sighed, knowing he was going to do something irrational and ultimately life threatening, in spite of his better judgment.

“Tell you what, Dad,” Wil whispered to his father. “We'll take this up when everything blows over. I'll deal with Marcus James. How about you take a look at that old electricity bill of Mr. Dinsdale's? Someone's going to have to recalculate a hundred and fifty years' worth of interest payments and overages. We could use a good accountant right about now.”

“I thought you'd never ask, Wil,” replied Barry. He cracked his knuckles for effect, and turned his attention to a digital copy of the ancient electricity bill displayed upon Engelbert's Lemon computer. “You buy me some time and I'll do the rest. Never fear: Barry Morgan is here!”

“And his trusty assistant, Engelbert!” said Engelbert with a very specific vocal inflection that sounded like sandpaper rubbing against the landing gear of a Westland Lysander Mk III reconnaissance plane.

With that, Barry and Engelbert turned their attention to the Lemon computer. Barry began to flip beads on the museum's ancient Egyptian abacus, while Engelbert busied himself perusing a copy of the long-lost original United States Constitution, complete with margin notes and ink blots, and a little doodle of a dinosaur drawn by Benjamin Franklin. Barry hardly turned a hair as a tiny will-o'-the-wisp floated past his head and collided with one of John Keely's antigravitic globes that was heading in the opposite direction—he had more pressing matters at hand.

Wil rolled his eyes. No matter the weight of the circumstance, it was virtually guaranteed his father would be able to embarrass him in front of his peers at a moment's notice.

Lucy squeezed his hand. “Now what?” she asked, innocently.

Wil thought for a second. “I have absolutely no idea,” he replied.

*   *   *

M
R.
D
INSDALE
stood, abruptly, and moved toward the office door. “That's settled, then,” he said, eschewing the customary common sense that accompanied such statements. “Come with me, please.”