Curioddity (7 page)

Wil looked behind him. Across the street was an old, abandoned cinema that looked like it hadn't seen a patron in decades. The building's façade was hopelessly crumbling, and through the falling snow it seemed to give off an aura that suggested it wished to be left alone. Most of the letters announcing the last movie it had ever housed had long since fallen away, and unless Wil was mistaken, he was sure that the arrangement of the remaining
G, W,
and
D
could be easily retrofitted to spell
Gone with the Wind
.

“Where am I?” he asked aloud as he turned back to find himself staring toward a large sign on the front of the building closer to him. It read
MUSEUM OF CURIODDITY
. This simple question came as a shock to Wil, even though he was the one who'd uttered it. It seemed like the kind of thing one might hear in a bad movie or read in a comic book. He looked through the mist and was astounded to realize that yes indeed, he was still fifty yards from the corner of Mons Street. There was the street sign and the trash can. The cold mist seemed to obscure the main road beyond but Wil fancied he could hear the cars going around the one-way system despite the blanketing effects of the snow.

“You're on Upside-Down Street, of course,” replied Mr. Dinsdale. “Welcome to the Museum of Curioddity. Please come inside, and try not to touch anything that doesn't have a sign on it that says ‘Touch Me.'”

With that, the little man began to ascend the huge marble staircase that led toward the foyer of what Wil was forced to admit seemed an extremely likely candidate to be the actual Curioddity Museum.

“We're on Mons Street!” cried Wil in the specific direction of the little man's rapidly departing back. “It says so on the street sign!”

“Does it?” asked Dinsdale, who had reverted back to his enigmatic persona. He moved slowly and purposefully up toward the Curioddity Museum's entrance. Wil could tell from the little man's steady course that he was expected to follow. “Or does it only say what you think it says?”

Wil looked at the street sign. It most definitely had not changed appearance during the last few minutes. Perhaps he was missing something. Or perhaps the old man was missing something instead. Like a few million brain cells.

By now, Mr. Dinsdale stood at the entrance to his museum, just next to a revolving door. He stopped for a moment to look back at Wil, and smiled. Before Wil could utter another sentence, the old man moved backward inside the revolving door of the museum, disappearing like some kind of enigmatic vampire into the bowels of a comfortable coffin.

Wil stood transfixed for a moment, knowing with absolute certainty exactly what he was going to do next. He was going inside the museum but not before one final protest aimed at the universe in general and Mr. Dinsdale in particular. “I don't get it!” he cried. “This doesn't make any sense at all!”

Mr. Dinsdale appeared for a moment, having taken the revolving door in a full circle so that he could briefly emerge and make one final comment on the matter. It was going to be a comment that would change everything, and in Wil's former life already had, once upon a time.

“That's because you're not looking at it properly!” said Mr. Dinsdale as he passed across the outside portion of the revolving door.

*   *   *

“
A
FTER ALL,”
he called out as he disappeared from view, “your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe!”

 

CHAPTER THREE

A
S
W
IL
stood on the steps of the Curioddity Museum, he began to feel overwhelmed by a Strange Feeling of déjà vu. For his part he tried to ignore the Strange Feeling, and between the two of them they agreed to revisit things a little later once the situation was better developed. What Wil could not possibly know was at that very moment his life was in the process of changing. Back, most likely: but also forward, too. Wherever the Strange Feeling of déjà vu existed in its own reality, it chuckled to itself, sensing it had already won half the battle.

Wil thought about Mr. Dinsdale's incredible parting statement as he slowly and carefully ascended the marble steps toward the revolving door that would lead inside. Could it be coincidence that the little museum curator had parroted Melinda Morgan's favorite saying, word for word? Wil's heart fluttered not for the fact that he was nervous about stepping into the unknown but because he had a bad habit of getting stuck in revolving doors. He'd always been the kind of person to approach such things as escalators and elevators far too cautiously, only to chicken out at the last moment and leave a foot dragging or a carelessly untied shoelace in such a position as to cause himself bodily harm.

He stared at the revolving door, silently daring it to go ahead and try something with him. He'd used this particular tactic a couple of times in the past but inanimate objects had only increased their bullying over the years. Summoning every square inch of his bravado, Wil pursed his lips in the direction of the revolving door and took hold of its outer glass pane with both hands. “Don't even think about it,” he muttered as he pushed the door forward and bravely made his way inside the museum.

Mr. Dinsdale was nowhere to be seen, which did not surprise Wil one bit. Everything else about the main foyer was exactly as unexpected as Wil expected it to be: it was ever so slightly unlike the outside of the building in one or two fairly alarming ways. Firstly, the interior seemed smaller and much less expansive than one might have assumed from looking at the outside. This was altogether an unsettling optical illusion, though not Wil's first of the day, to be sure. The act of stepping inside the museum seemed to immediately induce a mild claustrophobia, which Wil put down to an obvious lack of air-conditioning. The second noticeable difference was that the foyer's design resembled the exterior in exactly the same way a banjo-wielding hillbilly resembles the lead guitarist of a death metal band—in other words, only tangentially. Gone were the imposing and expansive Ionic pillars and tasteful marble steps; in their place, Wil noticed a particular fondness for yellow wallpaper, Escher-style carpeting, and the occasional stray wooden crate. He was immediately struck by the notion that if a tribesman from the remotest region of Peru were to be brought here for his first encounter with civilization, that tribesman might go away with the distinct impression he was from the more advanced culture, not to mention the more discerning. And speaking of cultures, Wil could not help but notice that whatever substance had been spilled onto the main desk of the foyer in some previous month, it must have contained a heretofore undiscovered bacterial strain because it had now formed a little forest of fuzzy growth halfway up the wall. This was either an impressive and detailed bonsai experiment, or Wil was witnessing a potential health hazard that the Centers for Disease Control might eventually classify as a pollutant.

Next to Wil, one of the stray wooden crates seemed to move of its own volition. He stared at the thing for a moment; then, satisfied that this was the work of neither a rat nor a trapped midget, he scanned the foyer once again for any sign of Mr. Dinsdale. The moment he looked away, the crate moved again. He looked down only for a different crate to move elsewhere in his peripheral vision. The moment he looked at the second crate it refused to move. Since most of the wooden crates Wil had ever encountered had also refused to move, he felt it was for the best to ignore the crates fully and reexamine the problem at the later time when he and his Strange Feeling of déjà vu were going to resolve their differences.

“Can I help you?” asked a nearby female voice.

Wil looked up, alarmed. Just moments before, there had been no one at the main desk inside the foyer. Now, a rather pale yet attractive woman in her mid-thirties was standing by the cash register, filing her nails and making a great point of smacking her lips as she chewed upon a large wodge of bubble gum. The woman looked bored, amongst other things. She also looked very much like a backup singer from an all-girl fifties vocal group with her beehive-style “do” and ruby-red lipstick completing the look. Wil felt compelled to comment that the woman's bright-orange hair suited her complexion but he resisted the temptation. He'd never been very good at talking to members of the opposite sex, and whenever he attempted a genuine compliment it usually led to either a slap across the face or worse, an angry and enormous boyfriend approaching from the opposite direction.

“Can I help you?” the woman repeated.

“I was looking for your curator, Mr. Dinsdale,” explained Wil.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I mean I was just with him a moment ago but he came inside ahead and I don't know where he went. He seems to have this thing for disappearing even when you're looking right at him.” Wil hoped the woman might agree, and that she and he might quickly become friends so that he might ask any one of the fifty or so questions he'd already formulated about Mr. Dinsdale. The woman merely stared at him, disdainfully, and chewed her gum even louder.

“Mr. Dinsdale isn't accepting guests at this time. If you'd like to leave a name and number where you can be reached, I'll pass on your information,” she said in such a way that Wil took it to actually mean, “If you'll please remove yourself from the premises, I'll be sure to alert security never to let you back inside.”

Wil thought this was rather odd, partly because the entire point of museums was to welcome guests and hope they are well enough entertained to bring about a return visit, and mostly because there was no sign of any security guard whatsoever.

The woman moved to one side to retrieve a small note card. Perhaps
glided
would be a better description, Wil thought, as the woman certainly seemed to move in the unusual manner of a clockwork marionette. For the life of him, he couldn't quite work out what was so different about her. He was suddenly overcome by that strange feeling usually reserved for when one is asked the capital of the former Republic of Upper Volta, only to realize that everyone else in the room clearly knows the answer and is biting their tongue while you have absolutely no idea whatsoever.

“I don't mean to be confrontational,” said Wil as he belied his statement by confronting the woman, “but I promise you, I was following Mr. Dinsdale. He came in just ahead of me.”

“Why were you following him?” asked the woman, sharply. “Who are you with?”

“It's okay, Mary!” came a welcome voice from a balcony above. “This is Mr. Morgan, the gentleman I was telling you about. He's the one from the detective agency.”

Mr. Dinsdale was now descending the nearby balcony staircase. For the first time during his entire Monday, Wil felt grateful that the little man was actually present. His encounter with the pale woman had gone entirely according to plan, as long as that plan was devised by Wil's worst enemy during a moment of extreme vindictiveness.

“Wil Morgan, I'd like you to meet my assistant here at the Museum of Curioddity, Miss Mary Gold!” said Mr. Dinsdale with a broad smile. “Mary runs all of our bookkeeping and catalogues most of the exhibits. She's truly indispensible.”

Despite this warm introduction, Wil could not help but feel that Mr. Dinsdale had said “indispensible” accidentally, and what he'd really meant to say was “confrontational.” Mary Gold stared at Wil, smacking her bubble gum so loudly that it sounded like a rubber inner tube being pumped full of air. But Wil decided that with Dinsdale now backing him up it might be worth taking another shot.

“I'm pleased to meet you, Miss Gold,” said Wil, proffering his hand in the woman's direction and smiling his best genuine fake smile. “This is quite the place you have here.”

“Uh-huh.” Mary Gold's hand felt clammy, and Wil was slightly unnerved by the fact she applied no pressure to the handshake greeting whatsoever. His lifetime of reading women's disdainful body language told him that Mary Gold's “uh-huh” could roughly be translated as, “You're off the hook for now but one false move and I'll call the nearest security guard employment agency and hire one just so that I can have you thrown out on your ear.” Quite a mouthful, Wil thought, considering so little had actually been said.

Mary Gold now returned to her duties, which as far as Wil could tell involved gliding around and rearranging more note cards, filing her nails, and ignoring him completely. It was odd, thought Wil, that she seemed to move with absolutely no effort whatsoever, as if she were skating. Mr. Dinsdale motioned for Wil to follow him back up the staircase. As they moved away, Wil could have sworn he noticed the nearest wooden crate move once again but he was too busy watching Mary Gold On Ice to pay any particular attention.

“I'm sorry I had to pop off for a few moments, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale. “I was just putting Mozart's First Clonecerto back in its case. I'd like to show you around the place, if you're amenable, so that you can get the lay of the land.”

“Is she always that friendly?” asked Wil, nodding his head in the direction of Mary Gold, who was now gliding from the back to the front of the main desk and yelling “Don't come back anytime soon!” in body language.

“Oh no,” replied Dinsdale. “Mary generally isn't too friendly with new arrivals. I don't know what you said but it must have been very charming, you sly dog.”

“Maybe she felt sorry for me because I was confused,” mused Wil, meaning every word of it. “I'm just glad I didn't get my throat ripped out. You show any sign of weakness to someone like that and you're lunch meat.”

“Yes, that's about it!” said Mr. Dinsdale, chuckling. “Woman frightens the life out of me, too, but she's a darn good typist! Come on!”

With that, Mr. Dinsdale picked up his pace and bounced up the next flight of steps two at a time. Wil followed suit and found himself slightly breathless on the upper landing of the museum, staring down a wide corridor. On either side were empty glass cases and more wooden crates, suggesting that someone was in the middle of setting up a new exhibit. Out of the corner of his eye, Wil noticed one of the wooden crates wobble slightly, like a Mexican jumping bean.