Curioddity (9 page)

“Are you not really a fan of lightning catchers, Wil?” asked the little curator, his expression betraying a genuine disappointment.

“On the contrary, I find them to be extremely compelling. Look, Mr. Dinsdale … I'm sure you're a very nice man. But at the risk of forcing the issue for a second time, I'd greatly appreciate it if we could get to the point. You said you had a job for me, and if it's all the same to you, I'd like to discuss that instead of admiring your lightning catcher, amazing though it may be.”

The little man brightened, seeming to feel relieved that Wil had demonstrated a genuine appreciation for his dirty old green bottle. “You're right, of course.” He chuckled. “Sometimes I let the splenditude of this place distract me from the tasks at hand. It's probably not a good idea to let the trail get too cold. Come on … it's over here.” With that, Mr. Dinsdale struck out toward an exhibit area farther along the hall. Finally, thought Wil, we're getting somewhere.

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A
T THE
end of the hall was a sign that read,
TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL ANOMALIES EXHIBIT
. Beyond this sign was another display area, inside which was yet another collection of assorted pieces of trash. At least, thought Wil, it was mercifully devoid of any wooden crates. As he entered, he could have sworn that for an instant he caught the image of the ghostly young woman out of the corner of his eye. He got the distinct impression the girl was pretty and cheerful, though quite how he arrived at such a conclusion he could not be sure. Whatever the case, when he turned to look directly at the phantasm there was nothing directly in front of him. He began to look rather puzzled, a fact that did not escape Mr. Dinsdale's notice.

“You've seen her, haven't you? The girl with the curly hair who appears in the corner of your eye.” This was more of a statement of confirmation than a question. Wil found the old man staring intently at him, waiting for a response to the affirmative. He was not immediately inclined to play along, though he had to admit this was an intriguing development.

“Is this another one of your exhibits?” he asked. “I mean, it's a test, or something, right? So people think the place is haunted. And then at the end you show them it's a projection, or a trapdoor.”

“Well, yes and no.” The little curator seemed genuinely puzzled himself by the happenings around the museum. “The thing is we're pretty sure the young woman everyone keeps seeing isn't a ghost. At least, she's not a ghost in the typical sense but she's most definitely real. After much analysis I've been forced to conclude that she's not haunting us. Unless I'm mistaken, it's most likely that we are haunting her. It's as if the museum has found a way to plug into her spiritual gestalt wherever she exists in time and space. It's probably a side effect of one of the temporal exhibits we have up here.”

“Lucky her,” replied Wil, trying and failing to contain his indifference. He studied the nearby exhibits in the hopes this might change the subject.

“This is my favorite part of the museum,” explained Mr. Dinsdale, who seemed happy enough to change the subject. “Everything here is a direct challenge to the laws of physics. Much of what you see in this room is counterpart to either time or space, and sometimes both.” Mr. Dinsdale motioned toward a nearby exhibit: a telephone answering machine that rivaled Wil's own for its primitive design. “This one's a particularly impressive piece.”

Wil nodded, hoping to give the impression that he was indeed awed by the fact that the demonic answering machine in his office might have an equally dysfunctional twin.

“It used to belong to Albert Einstein,” continued Dinsdale. “It's actually a remarkable piece. Einstein was experimenting with the anomalous properties of sound delivered across large distances. He felt there must be an explanation as to why, for example, answering machines so often malfunction when relaying important messages. In terms of quantum reality, answering machines tend to function with a kind of hyperawareness.”

“I have one just like it,” replied Wil, eyeing the answering machine carefully. “I think mine is possessed. It's going to strangle me the moment I turn my back on it.”

“That's quite possible,” replied Dinsdale, turning his attention to his own machine. “Our exhibit works counter to the flow of space and time. It records and plays back the next message in the time stream. So when you press it, it plays the next message you're going to receive in your future.”

Wil's cerebral cortex, which had previously been attempting to ignore most of what it had experienced on this particular Monday, now made it clear to him that it was indeed going on strike, and it promptly shut down into a kind of holding pattern until such time as things made sense again. Wil was forced to nod his head and look interested, unable to process the ridiculous nature of what he was being told.

“If it plays the next message, what about the previous one, the one you actually need?” asked Wil, trying to bring his occipital lobe into the fray in the hopes it might act as a temporary backup.

“Oh, it's not much of an answering machine,” replied Dinsdale. “But it comes in handy if you want to tell yourself yesterday what the horse racing results will be. Want to see it work?”

Wil nodded. He wanted to see it work not for its potential application but to determine if the really useful messages from the future would sound like they were being delivered in the same unintelligible fashion as that provided by his own fiendish machine.

Mr. Dinsdale pressed the Play button, and from the speakers came a distant yet familiar voice: Wil's own. “Mr. Dinsdale! Mr. Dinsdale, are you there? I need you to stay right there! I'm coming over! I'll be there in ten minutes!” called Future Wil from within a space that sounded suspiciously like a submarine.

Wil looked at the little curator, shocked. However the old man had created such a trick, he had to admit it was rather impressive. Proudly, Dinsdale motioned toward some of the other exhibits.

“As I said, most of the items here are of the temporal or spatial anomaly variety,” said Dinsdale. “Over at the back, we're displaying a periscope from a Civil War–era battleship. It possesses some curious properties that we don't fully understand. The higher you elevate the lens, the farther it sees below the floor. It must have come in handy against Civil War–era submarines.”

Wil looked toward the far wall, where what appeared to be a long copper tube was propped up against a hole in the plaster. Nearby, a second display case contained something that looked a lot like a child's toy magnet.

“Personal magnetism inducer,” said Dinsdale in a matter-of-fact manner. “Galileo felt it would be a boon to humankind if he could make it easier to speak to members of the opposite sex. They say he was quite a charmer with the ladies as a result of his invention. But I'm getting off track again.…”

Mr. Dinsdale stopped in front of an empty shelf set into a sturdy brick wall with some heavy brackets, where a small metal plate was inscribed with the words,
EXHIBIT NW1-M1M
. It was as if someone had gone out of their way to make the plaque as unremarkable as possible, and Wil couldn't help but wonder if it had been inscribed by the same genius who'd made such a mess of his office door back at the Castle Towers. To each side were a couple of frayed ropes tethered to some very thick metal hooks that had been bolted into the brick. The ropes looked as though they had snapped at some point. “This is what I wanted to show you, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale, furrowing his chin in that peculiar manner of his. “I have reason to believe one of our most important exhibits has been stolen. I'd like you to find it for me.”

Wil wasn't exactly sure how to respond. He kept his mouth shut and pretended for a moment to consider the offer just in case he could persuade his cerebral cortex to get back on the job and help him process the information. Certainly, he wasn't about to turn down a paying gig given the increasingly unhealthy state of his bank account; his current finances could be likened to a dehydrated hyena crawling through the Kalahari Desert in search of an oasis. The biggest obstacle he could see was that he had absolutely no experience whatsoever in tracking down valuable objects, much less Mr. Dinsdale's prized exhibit—an item that someone most likely tossed out with the trash by mistake. On the other hand, Mr. Dinsdale seemed to be implying that money might be involved, some of which stood a chance of flowing in Wil's direction.

Wil swallowed hard. He already knew in his heart that he was unlikely to avoid the fatal mistake he'd made numerous times in such situations: he was going to tell the truth, to be exact, and this was going to cost him yet another chance at resuscitating that parched hyena crawling through his imaginary desert. In order to give himself the illusion of participation for a few more moments, he pretended to ask a pertinent question. “What was stolen from this display, exactly, Mr. Dinsdale?”

The little curator described the shape of a rectangle in the air with his fingers. “A container of about these proportions,” he said. “A very unusual wooden box made of teak, and with mother-of-pearl inlay. It contains quite possibly the world's largest sample of levity.”

“Levity?”

“It's the opposite of gravity. You see, the universe is composed of many types of matter: there's matter, antimatter, dark matter—”

“What kind is levity?”

“Doesn't matter. The point is, levity is a very dangerous and unusual substance that works exactly opposite to the way things normally work. So rather than falling down, for example, a person holding a container of levity might be prone to falling up and hitting his or her head on the ceiling. It's the kind of thing that cannot possibly fall into the wrong hands.”

Wil realized he'd taken his illusion of participation about as far as he possibly could. He harbored no desire to take advantage of this nice (if somewhat delusional) old man. It was now time to come clean, he decided, before he dug himself a Karmic hole he'd be unable to climb out of. “Look, Mr. Dinsdale,” he began, “I'd like to help you—”

“Well I'm very pleased to hear it,” interrupted Dinsdale with a visible sigh of relief. “We'd better get started right away!“

“—I'd like to help you,” continued Wil, “but I'm afraid I can't. I wouldn't have the first clue where to look, and even if one of your employees or a museum visitor were responsible, there are people far better qualified to run through video surveillance footage and trace the whereabouts of suspects. I don't even have access to a forensics kit.”

“Why on Earth would you need a forensics kit?” asked Dinsdale. The look of confusion spreading across the old man's face indicated a strong possibility that he hadn't considered Wil might react in this manner.

“I don't even know what the box is supposed to look like!” exclaimed Wil, feeling more than a little exasperated as he tried his utmost to get through to the curator. “Even if you had a photo of it—”

“Not possible! Levity has an adverse effect on all cameras!”

“—even if you had a painting of it,” Wil persisted, “and even if you had video footage—which I'm going to go out on a limb and guess has the same statistical likelihood of me paying my rent on time this month—you're still better off using someone else. I'm sorry. I just don't think it would be fair for me to take on this job. You'd be wasting your money.”

Mr. Dinsdale took in a sharp breath, rolled it around in his lungs for a moment, and then exhaled slowly. It was as if he needed a little extra oxygen for a moment, just to feed his brain while he considered what to do next. The long breath seemed to have a calming effect on the strange old man, and within a moment or two he had reverted to his less manic persona. “I'm grateful for your honesty, Wil,” he said after a moment. “Most other people would have taken the job whether they felt they had something to offer or not. This is the exact reason you're the perfect man for this particular task.”

“Excuse me?” Wil hadn't expected to be so startled by Dinsdale's circular logic. Yet he had a distinct feeling that same logic was about to whisk him up and make him do a few laps around something he wasn't prepared to circumnavigate.

“An honest man demonstrates an ability to un-look at a situation, to consider a bigger picture rather than simply taking advantage of what is in front of him. My box of levity is not going to be found by a person who doesn't know how to un-look for it.”

“But that doesn't make sense! What if I'd told you I knew where to look for it?”

The old man smiled, and tapped his nose with his forefinger as if sharing a secret moment with a new best friend. “Then you would have been telling the truth,” he said. And with this odd response acting as his conclusion to the matter, the little curator turned on his heel and headed back toward the main foyer of the Curioddity Museum. “Come on!” he cried. “We should go downstairs and discuss terms!”

Wil stood transfixed for a moment. The negotiation had not exactly gone according to plan. In fact, he was beginning to sense a familiar theme cropping up in his interactions with Mr. Dinsdale: the moment he felt he was on any kind of reasonable path it seemed as if Mr. Dinsdale would suddenly be going in the opposite direction; and in the unlikely event Wil corrected course, he seemed to find himself headed in the very direction Mr. Dinsdale had intended for him in the first place. It was apparent that he was out of his league, and that the only way to compete would be to play along until everyone reverted to ignoring him. At that point, he'd probably be able to slip out the back door and return to his previously scheduled life. After a moment's pause, Wil headed off toward the foyer in pursuit of the now rapidly departing Mr. Dinsdale.

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