Curioddity by Paul Jenkins
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure I would have remembered you either way.”
Wil flushed, instantly regretting his response. It sounded like the very type of pickup line he was always trying to avoid, and he winced in expectation of Lucy scowling at him. To his surprise, she grinned.
“Why, thankyew, kind sir!” she exclaimed with a grin, and turned her attention to emptying her sponge of blood and refilling it with more botulism water.
* * *
LUCY FINISHED her mopping duties and moved a lick of hair from Wil’s eyes. “There, that’s better,” she said in the kind of twinkly voice usually reserved for people on television. “Now what can I do for you, Wil?”
Wil could think of a number of possibilities but he wasn’t about to blow this chance at impressing the girl. If memory served him right, the correct approach now would be to act in an aloof manner, then feign interest in anything but the pretty young woman who’d just mopped the blood out of his eyes. Wil had been given this advice in the school bathrooms by Billy Pinder when he was six years old but had never really questioned its effectiveness.
Lucy looked into Wil’s eyes, expectantly.
“Um. Uhh,” Wil began with practiced ease. “Wow. Um.” Her face seemed oh so within reach, her eyes more inquiring. If this were a daytime soap he’d probably lean forward and kiss her. (And she’d probably slap his cheek and demand that he leave.)
Lucy crinkled up her nose. “Something about a Tesla Kit?” she suggested. It was obvious that she was enjoying Wil’s discomfort but not in a nefarious way, he thought. Clearly, this was a two-way attraction, but Wil needed to act more like a magnet and less like a puddle of human jelly.
“Oh, yes. Sure. The Tesla Kit,” replied Wil. He could feel he was beginning to lose his entire train of thought, which was no mean feat. The only way to lose a train is to drive it off the tracks and take it for a spin in a forest somewhere. Wil was most definitely off track. “Is it for sale?” he asked, immediately regretting the question.
“Well, of course not!” Lucy laughed, playfully. “This is Lucy’s Magic Locker. We only accept trades and barters. Do you have something to trade?”
“I’m not sure. I finished my rhubarb pastry—”
“Bummer. How about dinner on Thursday night, then?”
Wil gulped, and nodded. Right about now his train of thought was steaming headlong into an underwater gorge full of neon electric jellyfish and bearded mermaids. This was not familiar territory at all.
“Cool. Okay. Do you like Korean?”
Wil nodded again. It had worked the first time, after all. Maybe this gorgeous girl—who Wil was perfectly capable of admitting was most likely clinically insane—liked the silent type.
“Okay.” Lucy chuckled. “You pick the restaurant and text me. I’ll come by and pick you up. Say, seven?”
“Seven. Text. Right. Absolutely,” muttered Wil in a half daze. He wasn’t sure he should mention that texting might be impossible on account of the fact he neither owned nor knew how to operate a cell phone.
“Awesome. Now about the Tesla Kit. That’ll be sixty bucks.”
“Sixty?” blurted Wil. “That’s a bit steep for an old toy, isn’t it?”
“Well, how else do you expect me to pay for dinner?”
“Well, I wasn’t—”
“I’ll go and get it for you.”
And just as suddenly as Lucy had busted her way into Wil’s awareness, she flounced off toward the front of the store, chuckling to herself. Wil stood in painful admiration, noticing how Lucy’s flowing gypsy-style skirt moved around her hips. He could hear a faint jangling sound coming from her many wristbands and bangles. And as she moved toward the display window, he could see that she was barefoot.
* * *
WIL FOLLOWED Lucy out of the small kitchen area, wincing a little as he imagined the blunt force trauma his head had endured over the last day or so. He was in for a long couple of days of searching for Mr. Dinsdale’s box if his brain was going to slosh like this every time he took a step.
As Lucy busied herself by clambering into a tiny space that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in thirty years, Wil tried to take stock of his surroundings and the situation at hand. Taking stock of the clutter in Lucy’s Magic Locker would be a long and arduous task requiring the services of a team of old Chinese men with abacuses and a second team of movers. He was more concerned with what might be happening between him and the pretty young woman, who was now singing happily to herself as she waded through a pile of dust in the store window. Wil had always been a hopeless romantic, with “hopeless” being the operative word. Most of the girls he’d ever been interested in were so far out of his league that they were, metaphorically, the National Football League while he was, metaphorically, a Middle School Girls’ Under-12 B Division.
As Wil pondered the ramifications and the possible outcomes, the bizarre feeling of people moving past him occurred again: he could feel the presence of others inside the store, yet there was no obvious reason for it. If he blinked, he imagined he could see an open space at the back end of the store just as his eyelids closed; and he’d see it again for a brief, flickering moment as they opened. He felt as though time had somehow spun sideways in two places at once, and this feeling was most disconcerting. Indeed, his vertigo was beginning to intrude. He attempted to prop himself up against the back wall only to discover the shelf he’d attempted to lean on had never been there in the first place. Wil’s hand slid down the painted brick and he righted himself quickly, hoping the pretty girl in the window hadn’t noticed.
Wil pulled himself together quickly, noticing the inlaid wooden box he’d been playing with just before Lucy had knocked him senseless: it was still wedged under an old baseball bat that had the words HONUS WAGNER hand stenciled into the side of the soft wood. Almost as an afterthought, he reached over and grabbed the box, thinking this might come in handy as a backup plan in the very likely event he did not find the actual box Mr. Dinsdale so coveted. Sadly, he realized, his Made-in-Taiwan backup plan was his only plan.
At that very moment, Lucy reappeared with the Tesla Kit tucked under her arm. She blew a large pile of dust from the top of the box. “I found almost all of the pieces.” She frowned as she rummaged through the soiled underside of the old cardboard container, which by now had almost completely disintegrated. “I think there might be a few more bits under all that crud in the window. I can look for them later and bring them to you when we go on our date.”
Wil wished suddenly for another cup of coffee so that he could snort some of it out of his nose in surprise. “Date?” he asked, incredulous.
“Dinner,” replied Lucy, handing him the Tesla Kit with a smile and keeping the one-word theme of the game going.
“Right.”
“Thursday.”
“Seven. Right.” Wil was beginning to get the hang of this. He waved three twenty-dollar bills in Lucy’s general direction.
“Groovy.” Lucy took the money and stuffed it in between the top buttons of her blouse, much to Wil’s incredulity. Clearly, this was a game not only of one-word answers but also of chicken. Perhaps he’d better change the subject before she caught him staring with his mouth open.
Wil held up the old inlaid box he’d just retrieved from underneath the baseball bat. He wasn’t of a mind to spend more than a dollar or two on the thing, since one side was partly cracked and the bottom panel seemed to have been sitting in a pool of sulphuric bouillabaisse for a few decades. Nevertheless, it vaguely fit the bill of what Mr. Dinsdale had asked him to find. “Any chance you could throw this old box in with the Tesla Kit?” he asked.
“Oh, that old thing? Sure. Maybe you can keep the extra pieces in it.”
Wil looked at the box, dubiously. The only thing likely to be kept within was some old collection of mold or fungus. He had half a mind to donate it to his landlady, Mrs. Chappell, rather than bring it to the Curioddity Museum. She would probably keep it between her
Lucy glanced at the back end of the store, and then at the front door to the store. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Sure. Did you steal it?”
“No, silly!” Lucy chuckled. “I found it at the back of the store.”
Wil blinked. For some reason, pieces were beginning to come together in much the same way two icebergs might crash in the middle of an Antarctic winter night. Wil was beginning to feel like a very lonely penguin, above whom an ominous shadow had just appeared. “I think there’s something weird about my store,” she continued, her eyes widening. “I think it’s haunted.”
Wil could agree that there were a number of weird things about Lucy’s Magic Locker—for example, its maniacal-if-cute proprietor—but his interactions with Mrs. Chappell allowed him to slough off such comments with practiced ease. He blinked, pretending Lucy’s response was entirely normal given the circumstances. “Uh-huh.”
“No, seriously. I keep thinking people are walking all around me and then I look up and there’s no one here.”
Wil was utterly tempted to admit he’d had the same feeling but he kept it to himself for the moment. If this was—as he expected—some kind of excuse to worm her way out of the dinner date, he wasn’t going to let her get off that easily. “So the box is haunted?” he volunteered.
“No, it’s just…” Lucy was having a hard time articulating, he could tell. “It just kind of showed up by itself. I found it on a shelf against the back wall.”
“You don’t have any shelves against the back wall.”
“That’s why it’s weird.”
* * *
AT THAT very moment, Wil blanched. He reached into his pocket and grabbed his lucky penny, hoping for all the world it might ground him back in the universe he was more familiar with. The room spun. He needed to get out before he became a metaphorical penguin sandwich between two large glaciers.
“I have to go,” Wil said, abruptly.
“Sure. Is everything okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Vertigo,” replied Wil, lamely. “I get it sometimes when I’m struck repeatedly over the head. I think I’ll go back home and take a nap.”
Wil could feel the hairs rising on the back of his neck, and his confidence being boosted and sapped in exact proportions. He hoped his sudden idiot behavior hadn’t made him seem disinterested. But more than anything, he needed to get out of Lucy’s Magic Locker as quickly as possible, though he was in no position to explain to this pretty young girl exactly what had made him suddenly feel this way.
Lucy crossed her arms again, and smiled. Perhaps she was used to conversations ending in such an impromptu manner, for she certainly didn’t seem to be offering up much resistance. “You’re an interesting one, Wil Morgan,” she said. “Are you always this random?”
“Only on Tuesdays,” replied Wil, hurriedly. “I’m usually a lot more predictable by Thursday. See you then?”
“See you at seven. Don’t be late.”
Lucy grabbed a business card from the counter and jotted down her cell phone number with a ballpoint pen. Taking the card quickly, Wil tucked the inlaid box and the Tesla Kit under his arm and made a beeline for the door, his head swimming like a dislodged penguin.
As he hurried out of the door, gripping his lucky penny tightly with his free hand, Will allowed himself a quick glance back toward Lucy, who was waving goodbye with a bemused expression on her face. As he blinked, he could imagine a vague impression of movement in the space where the wall behind Lucy should be. He felt a distinct sensation of movement, as if the wall was, in fact, more of a doorway to somewhere else that he couldn’t see with the naked eye.
Wil now remembered where he thought he might have encountered Lucy before: the moving boxes … the sense that Lucy’s store was populated by invisible entities … and a simple wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that had appeared on a shelf that didn’t actually exist. Wil’s heart raced as he headed back into the cold, damp broth of Tuesday with the Tesla Kit and the old wooden box tucked safely under his arm. His mind raced faster than his legs, and that old feeling of vertigo splashed inside his eyeballs with every step he took. His heart beat like the drummer for a seventies punk rock band and his lungs seemed to exhale twice for every time he inhaled.
What Wil Morgan didn’t know at the time—what he couldn’t possibly know as he raced back to the safety of the world he understood—was that he had just fallen head over heels in love.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NEXT morning, Wil Morgan awoke from a fitful night’s sleep and a rather disturbing variation of his anxiety dream in which he’d arrived too late to register for the World’s Biggest Failure competition and had been disqualified. As he opened his eyes and tried to adjust to his first challenge of the day (namely, not rolling over and going back to sleep), he speculated as to the significance of the dream. But his instincts were far too sleepy to tell him what that significance might be.
Outside his window, Wednesday was already spoiling for a fight—the frigid air looked brown and dangerous, as if composed of equal parts oxygen and petroleum. The noise of the cars and buses below seemed more subdued than usual, suggesting to Wil that the traffic was conserving its energy for when he eventually made his way downstairs. As usual, his apartment smelled of mushrooms. He rolled over and plodded toward the kitchen, just in case his imaginary roommate had been considerate enough to make breakfast.
Wil was beginning to wake up now. It took immense mental effort for him not to start grinning at the thought of how he’d scored a date the previous day with Lucy Price. He tried to imagine himself as an old man in a rocking chair sitting on a porch somewhere; in his mind, he saw a plaid blanket draped over his knees, and he pictured himself wielding a shotgun. This mental image of himself as an old curmudgeon seemed to do the trick, and he began to grumble in spite of his good mood; his lumpy bed had spent the entire night jabbing him in the ribs and he suspected spiders had been firing cannons inside his nostrils again—a sure sign he was coming down with a cold. Across the room, the bathroom sink seemed to beat rhythmically in time with the throbbing pain in his temples, reminding him that he had been attacked on two separate occasions over the previous two days. He glowered at the bathroom door, and at that exact same moment the rattling suddenly ground to an abrupt halt. No time for the usual distractions, Wil decided; he was going to have to demonstrate progress in case some nameless-yet-diligent banker found the money Mr. Dinsdale had deposited into his account and tried to return it to its rightful owner.
So much had happened since Wil had left his apartment on Monday morning. By his reckoning, he had spent most of Monday as the butt of some cosmic joke that involved a delusional old man, a museum full of useless space junk, and a fool’s errand of epic proportions. By the end of Tuesday morning, he had met a very pretty girl who—despite assaulting him with a large book—had seemed to like him. He had inexplicably scored a date with her just by being himself, or—most likely—by exhibiting symptoms of post-concussion syndrome. And quite by chance (though Wil was beginning to suspect it was by something approximating intelligent design), he’d chanced upon a likely candidate for Mr. Dinsdale’s missing box of Levity, all without actually trying. Or possibly without even looking, he couldn’t tell which. This fit with Mr. Dinsdale’s ludicrous notion of un-looking at things, and it did nothing to soften Wil’s mood, nor dull his painful headache.
Wil engaged in a silent argument with his brain, hoping to persuade himself that at least some of these experiences were real. The possibility that he’d scored a date with a girl named Lucy was enough to convince his brain to cooperate and join in for at least the rest of the day. Wil felt more than a little triumphant. No matter that he had been sent on a fool’s errand by a foolish old curator of a pile of fool’s gold. He was going to deal with Wednesday, and W
He glanced at the mother-of-pearl-inlaid box, which sat exactly where he’d left it—crammed underneath the lid of the Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit—the night before. From this angle, the faded “Made in Taiwan” sticker glared back at him. But Wil could not bring himself to remove the sticker, reasoning that if Mr. Dinsdale pointed out the obvious flaw in Wil’s strategy he’d at least feel he’d been honest about his dishonesty.
Strangely, pieces of the Tesla Kit were now arranged neatly on the kitchen counter, though Wil had no recollection of having actually woken in the night to place them in this position. If his unintentional, mushroom-loving roommate had been fiddling with his things during the night, then he was going to have to mark his property with yellow Post-it notes in the future. Despite himself, Wil smiled; the Tesla Kit was a wonderful connection to days gone by. However, the fact it had suddenly reemerged into Wil’s life so soon after he’d visited the Curioddity Museum made him feel like he was a puppet in somebody’s game. If, as Wil imagined, he was under the control of one of those Greek gods who liked to move people around like chess pieces on a board, then his particular player was likely to be the God of All Things Random.
Wil’s slight head cold was making him feel very peculiar, as though he might be forgetting something. His encounter the previous morning with Lucy Price had left him as love struck as it had left him dumbstruck. It had also left him with two types of headache: the headache that comes when a person is bashed over the head with a large work of literature and the headache that comes when a person has their universe turned upside down after witnessing a ghostly occurrence firsthand. With a frown, Wil grabbed the inlaid box and tucked it under one arm. On a whim, he shoved the pieces of the Tesla Kit into their box and brought that with him, too, just in case he might spare a few minutes later to refamiliarize himself with all of its working parts.
He thought it might be a sensible idea to buy some cold medicine. After that, he figured he might as well take the inlaid box over to the Curioddity Museum, just in case Mr. Dinsdale found it interesting. Wil could barely contain his curiosity as to whether or not the museum was, in fact, connected by some kind of random dimensional portal to the back of Lucy’s Magic Locker. He was most eager to put this cockamamie theory to the test. And so, without bothering to check his reflection, Wil donned whatever clothing he could find that didn’t look like it had fallen off the back of a homeless person and snuck his way out of the apartment building, making sure to pat the ubiquitous Chalky on the head as he passed through the lobby.