Curioddity

  Time now seemed to slow down for Wil. Inside his left pocket, the Whatsit beeped in such a fashion that Wil took to mean it was either pleased with itself, or it wanted more action. In his other pocket, SARA glowed. He pulled her out for a moment or two and was amazed to discover a hitherto-undiscovered function playing across her screen: somehow, SARA had tapped into the Shopping Network and was able to replay the greatest moments from Marcus James’s evening of shame, which seemed to be already making its way across the World Wide Web. Marcus James was about to discover that “going viral” was much like being attacked by a large fleet of pillaging Vikings. Wil had no doubt Marcus would be out on bail by Friday afternoon. But he’d wake in his opulent satin sheets come Saturday morning and feel as though he had been overrun by metaphorical Swedes with a penchant for foul-smelling clothing and violent drinking games.

  “Greetings, Wil Morgan,” intoned SARA. “You have eighty-seven incoming messages from Lahore, Pakistan. Would you like to respond?”

  “No thank you, SARA,” replied Wil, happily. “Please just tell everyone over there I’ll get back to them in a couple of years once the excitement has died down.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “And SARA?”

  “Yes, Wil Morgan?”

  “I’m glad we finally understand each other. Thank you.”

  * * *

  SARA SWITCHED off her screen and remained inert all the way back to Upside-Down Street—no mean feat considering the exotic set of maneuvers Lucy attempted to execute on the way there. At the museum, Genghis marauded across the recently replaced street sign and left his signature tire marks in the street outside the revolving door. Wil exited the vehicle quickly, and waited a few moments for the blood to rush out of Lucy’s ears and back into her heart before attempting to make eye contact.

  “Lucy,” he said, breathless, “I want you to know that was the most amazing, terrifying, exhilarating experience I have ever had in my entire life.”

  “Really?” Lucy seemed both entranced at the notion and mildly concerned that he was referring only to her driving.

  “Really. That was completely nuts.”

  “And also completely groovy.”

  “Exactly.” Wil moved to Lucy’s side of the car and took her half of the caboodle pile gently away from her. He set the items down on the sidewalk, held both of Lucy’s hands, and looked deeply into her eyes. “I wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true. That was utterly ridiculous. Especially for a first date.”

  Lucy flashed the kind of smile that would sink ships, if she meant it to. “So does this mean you want to do it again?” she said, coyly.

  “If it involves certain death, imminent danger, or just plain bubble tea, I’m your man.”

  “Except ninja-bots?”

  “Especially ninja-bots.”

  “Groovy,” she said. “And awkward. I think we just took out the last of them.”

  “Come on,” said Wil with a grin spreading across his face. He grabbed as much of the pile as he could, checked his inner pocket to make sure the electricity bill was secure, and headed for the revolving door. “We need to get this stuff back to its rightful owner.”

  He had taken no more than two steps toward the revolving door before it whirled suddenly, and Mr. Dinsdale emerged with his hands in the air, looking for all the world like a psychotic evangelist.

  “Wil!” yelled Mr. Dinsdale. “Lucy! Come quickly! Hurry!”

  “Mr. Dinsdale! We got the piece of paper you were looking for!” cried Wil.

  “Yes, yes! I know you did! SARA sent us an electronic copy from the cloud! Just hurry!”

  As quickly as he had appeared, Dinsdale vaulted backward into the path of the revolving door and was whisked instantly inside. Wil and Lucy glanced at each other, impressed at the neatness by which he had managed the maneuver. They quickened their pace and, laden with a huge pile of unlikely items—all of which had proven unerringly useful in the evening’s proceedings—they moved in on the revolving door and navigated it as easily as the Lord of the British Admiralty might navigate a bathtub.

  * * *

  INSIDE THE museum lobby, Mr. Dinsdale clucked and fussed. “Ah! There you are!” he called as Wil and Lucy entered. “Upstairs! We don’t have much time! Follow me!”

  To one side, Mary Gold stood with her arms folded, smacking her gum loudly in an apparent attempt to set a world record at gum smacking. As Wil approached, she winked at him, and moved to the far side of the register to pretend she was annoyed about something. Wil resolved to keep this moment a secret between them.

  Holding hands, he and Lucy followed Mr. Dinsdale toward the staircase. By the time they reached the base, he was standing at the top balcony and looking impatient. “Hurry!” he said again. “Both of you! Up here!”

  “But Mr. Dinsdale—”

  “Just hurry! They’re going to be here within the hour!”

  “Mr. Dinsdale!” yelled Wil at the top of his lungs. “We’ve just cracked a safe, been attacked by robots, attempted to communicate with a pair of no-legged conjoined twins from another dimension, and narrowly avoided being flattened by a giant globe that shot out of the top of the Castle Towers! So we’ve had a bit of a day!”

  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.”

  * * *

  AND 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!”

  * * *

  WIL 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?”

  * * *

  AT 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.”

  * * *

  WIL 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.