Nearby, Wil could hear the bustle of the divided highway and the complicated one-way system, so he struck out in that direction. Within seconds, he found himself at the corner of Mons Street. And it was here that things, unsurprisingly, took a slight turn for the weird.
As Wil approached the trash can he’d spotted earlier, he realized the fog was very quickly lifting. Or, to be more precise, he seemed to be headed toward an abrupt climate change just yards from where he’d been standing outside the museum. The trash can was now bathed in sunlight, and just beyond the end of Mons Street there seemed to be no evidence of residual frozen fog whatsoever. Wil was startled to realize the fallen snow had covered only the street he was on, while the traffic moving around the one-way system was moving at a steady pace through early-afternoon sunshine.
Wil peered down the length of Mons Street; some fifty yards away, the old cinema was now becoming shrouded in the very mist that had refused to make its way to where he was currently standing. If he scrunched his nose and looked just so he could see the Museum of Curioddity in his peripheral vision. But when he looked directly at the building, all he could make out was a white sheet of snow. He stood still for a moment, trying to get a sense of what this might mean. The envelope full of money seemed real enough in his coat pocket, and his thumb still hurt, so he didn’t feel he was likely to be dreaming. Even so, the hairs were beginning to crawl on the back of his neck, as if someone were still staring into it.
Wil stared at the nearby street sign. It stared back at him in block capital letters that continued to say MONS no matter how hard he looked at it.
Upside-Down Street. Wil suddenly had a very curious notion indeed; a whim of almost epic proportions seemed to come over him, replacing the awful sense that someone was staring at the back of his neck. Slowly, yet with an increasing feeling of self-confidence, Wil began to bend at the waist until his head was just about level with his knees. He turned his head upside down and peered toward the street sign once again.
Written upon the sign was the very message he’d been looking at the entire time, and it was now evident to Wil that his only mistake had been to look at it the wrong way. Perhaps instead of merely looking at the sign he should have been un-looking at it instead.
* * *
IN LARGE block capital letters the sign read, simply, SNOW.
CHAPTER FOUR
WIL NARROWED his eyes for a moment as he focused on the every-which-way sign at the end of Upside-Down Street. By sheer force of will, he managed to ignore the snow falling roughly ten yards from where he was standing. And by stubbornly sticking to this task for a few minutes, he found that the street, the old cinema, and even the Museum of Curioddity were slowly returning to their previous state, which was to say they now did not seem to exist at all, just as long as he refused to look at them. Or un-look at them, he supposed. He could hardly tell if by ignoring the buildings he had rendered them invisible, or if they had never existed in the first place, or if the excess of blood running to his head had given him one of his migraines.
Wil straightened, so that the fluids vacating his upper extremities sent a wave of nausea cascading through his inner ear. He steadied himself for a moment against the street sign. This entire episode was going sideways—or upside down—in a hurry. If he were going to straighten things out again, he realized, he’d have to think of something drastic. And so he concentrated his thoughts on the imminent arrival of his dad, Barry, which had the desired effect of bringing reality crashing down around him in much the same way a duck full of hunters’ buckshot might tumble unceremoniously into a swamp. Very quickly—with perhaps a quiet squeal of protest at the violation of its existential rights—Wil’s universe seemed to return to a state of normalcy. Perhaps not so normal, he realized, considering how he had just invoked the spiritual essence of Barry Morgan. Was it his imagination, or had thinking about his dad helped to rid him of his vertigo for once, as opposed to bringing on an attack?
Behind him, the sound of the cars careening along the one-way system had begun to dissolve into a sort of motorized hum. This would be a good time to take stock of the situation: a sensible approach one might expect of a college-trained chartered accountant as opposed to, say, a confused detective specializing in cases of insurance fraud who had just taken on a job he had no possible chance of completing. Thankfully, Wil’s prowess in the area of “taking stock” rivaled that of his ability to trudge around one-way systems and to start meaningless arguments with teenagers in coffee shops. All of this taking stock would doubtless put him in a more comfortable frame of mind, he hoped. And that might help him explain what the heck had just happened.
The first course of meaningful action, Wil decided, was that he was going to have to decide what to do first. Secondly, he was going to have a reckoning of the knock-down, drag-out variety with the Strange Feeling of déjà vu he’d been arguing with earlier. And finally, he was probably going to find a nice bench somewhere and have a quiet, feeble moment to himself, wherein he’d try to persuade himself that none of this particular Monday’s events had ever really happened. The envelope full of cash in his pocket was undoubtedly either a forgery or a mistake, which could easily be said for Mr. Dinsdale, the Museum of Curioddity, and the last of the snow melting from his lapels.
Wil rubbed his head for a moment, examining it for bruises. The most likely explanation for all of this nonsense was that he’d been battered unconscious at some point earlier in the day, and this had induced a bout of post-concussion syndrome. Though Wil had never been knocked senseless in his life, this convenient epiphany seemed both possible and—by extension—probable. Perhaps he’d tripped on the calico cat draped across the landing of Mrs. Chappell’s apartment building, and the resulting face-plant down the final flight of stairs had knocked him senseless. Perhaps his shoelaces were untied; he stooped to check their integrity, only to be confronted by two firmly tied and sensible double knots courtesy of his dad’s years of relentless training on the subject of footwear safety. Of course, Wil suddenly rationalized, Dad was coming to town! No doubt he’d fainted from the shock of listening to the message Barry Morgan had left on his demonic answering machine and was still lying, unconscious, on the nineteenth floor of the Castle Towers where he would have to wait until 7:00 P.M. for Mr. Whatley to discover his semi-lifeless body. Wil hoped the fall had been a particularly nasty one so that his dad might be forced to postpone his visit well into the next decade.
But no such luck; try as he might, Wil could find no evidence of bruises, scrapes, lesions, or lacerations beyond the obvious symptom of his soul having dropped through the bottom of his intestines. Somehow in the next few days he was going to have to craft the illusion he had been working for the last seven years as a chartered accountant.
As he knelt and stared at his shoelaces, trying to stifle the involuntary sobs working their way back to the surface, Wil glanced at his watch: five minutes past three. In exactly one minute from now, his mortal enemy—the repulsive Swiss edifice outside the Castle Towers that masqueraded as a giant clock tower—would attempt its daily sneak attack. But this was no ordinary Monday, and this time he would be ready. Summoning the imaginary advice of a certain imaginary curator named Dinsdale—a fanciful figure brought about by post-concussion syndrome, no doubt—Wil Morgan would attempt to un-listen to the awful monstrosity.
Five minutes and thirty seconds … Wil scrunched his eyes and tried to un-listen to the cars passing by on the one-way system. Not an easy task, he decided. Perhaps it would be better to un-listen to the street sign that was dutifully making no noise whatsoever as it monitored the progress of nearby traffic. Wil stepped back to concentrate on its smooth, metal edges. He considered Upside-Down Street’s proximity to the city’s one-way system, thinking it ironic that his recent experiences here had seemed to go in every direction at once. Everything about the museum was in complete contradiction to the conformity that surrounded it. But now that Wil was back on the main road running throug
h town, the metal sign simply said MONS once more, and the notion that a semi-visible street blanketed in snow existed nearby seemed—like the Curioddity Museum itself—ridiculous indeed. He waited for the hideous clock tower’s sonic assault to come from afar, which even from this distance would sound something like:
EEEEOOOOWWWW!
* * *
WIL JUMPED, startled, as a rusted old Ford Pinto plowing through the city’s one-way system at eighty miles per hour missed him by inches. The blare of the car’s horn was quickly replaced by the residual sucking sound of a nearby puddle of water struggling to refill itself after depositing most of its muddy contents over Wil’s clothing.
As he struggled to recover from the shock of this near miss, a fist emerged from within the rusted Pinto, shook itself angrily, and aimed what seemed to be a loud epithet in the direction of the suicidal lunatic it was leaving trailing in its wake. Not to be outdone by this inconsiderate and faceless maniac behind the wheel of half a ton of moving metal, Wil raised his own fist and readied a choice epithet of his own:
KLONNGG!
* * *
THE SUDDEN crash of the clock tower banging away like a maniacal monk in the distance instantly scrambled Wil’s thoughts like so many eggs across a busy one-way system. The clock was much louder at this part of the roadway than the scientific discipline of applied acoustics might have predicted. The klonnging sound caused Wil to stumble sharply sideways; or to be more precise, he stumbled abruptly sideways until his head connected painfully with something sharp: namely, the edge of a metal street sign that until now had seemed perfectly incapable of causing actual bodily harm. It’s always the ones you least suspect, thought Wil, as he staggered slowly to his knees.
Shocked by this sudden and stunning reversal of allegiance on the part of the street sign, he reached to his forehead. His fingers found a nasty, bloody gash hidden beneath matted hair. Wil briefly considered calling Washington, D.C., and reporting the Swiss clock to the immigration authorities in the hope that they might somehow be able to revoke its visa. But it was no use. Blood was now cascading down his wrist, and his forehead was beginning to swell. Wil could not possibly walk back toward his office—not against the flow of traffic, surely. There was only one thing for it: his first meaningful action in the search for Mr. Dinsdale’s missing box of Levity would be to stagger along the one-way system and go home.
* * *
WIL SET out with the flow of traffic, silently cursing anything that happened to enter the periphery of his awareness, or be remotely connected to the country of Switzerland. He cursed the clock, and the Castle Towers, and his pathetic sham of a life in particular. As he passed one of the city’s ubiquitous advertising boards, Wil cursed Marcus James and anyone stupid enough to make three easy payments of $19.95 for what looked to be, on the face of it, a large piece of tent canvas with a hole in the middle that supposedly doubled as a poncho. But he reserved his most passionate swearing for the cold and steady mist of rain that had now decided to make a comeback, and had reverted the city’s appearance to its usual variety of drab. The colder Wil’s skin felt, the more he was forced to concede that harsh reality had set in, and that most (if not all) of his day had actually happened the way he’d remembered it. Mr. Dinsdale’s envelope showed no signs of dematerializing from his pocket, which suggested that the money it contained was some kind of karmic payoff intended to soften the blow of the known universe being turned on its head. Wil knew that his post-concussion syndrome was simply an excuse he’d created to explain away all of the day’s curious events (though in light of his new head injury, the statistical likelihood of future post-concussion syndrome episodes was now rising exponentially). He refrained from glowering in the direction of the passing cars—they’d caused him enough trouble for one afternoon. Instead, he would head back to his apartment building and try to find a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which he would first apply liberally to his head and then drink until he was mercifully unconscious.
* * *
THERE WERE plusses and minuses to his day so far, he thought. The minuses followed vaguely similar themes such as general confusion, or utter puzzlement. The plusses, on the other hand, were more specific. For one thing, Wil had in his possession an envelope containing roughly five hundred dollars, which would be enough to stave off the debt collection agency representing the owners of the Castle Towers. He’d never met his landlords, having rented his office via a telephone call to a local real estate company. But he’d always imagined them to be of the nefarious and mustachio-twirling variety, modeled after an old Vaudeville performer one might see in a black-and-white comedy from the 1920s, perhaps. Given his landlords’ insatiable appetite for sending threatening letters, and their relative indifference to the noxious smells emanating from their own elevator, he’d always felt his mental picture was far too interesting to be spoiled by actually meeting these people. For some reason, he’d always imagined they might look like rats. Well, he thought, the rats were going to be getting a little cheese in the mail, which would prevent them from gnawing at his patience for at least a week or two.
Somewhere out in the electronic ether, Mr. Dinsdale’s banking representatives were no doubt informing Wil’s own bank that they were preparing to deliver the sum of a further five thousand dollars to Wil’s account, and this had probably created an automated alert of some kind that would prevent the transaction from going through. Wil imagined this would be brought to the attention of his local branch manager and then summarily ignored for a week as a clerical error. He didn’t mind: he’d already persuaded himself that Mr. Dinsdale, though eccentric to a fault, was not completely insane. During his first encounter with the old man, Wil had been mentally prepared to start negotiations in the general area of fifty or sixty dollars for whatever the curator had been preparing to throw at him. And during their later conversation at the coffee shop, Wil had daydreamed he might drive a hard bargain and ask for a full hundred, hoping Mr. Dinsdale might respect his chutzpah and actually fall for this obvious bluff.
Well, it couldn’t hurt to let the clerical error go unnoticed for a while. As an added bonus, Wil realized he was now well into the afternoon hours and quite far away in both time and space from anything likely to make a sudden klonnging sound in his ear.
For the next ten to fifteen minutes, Wil trudged painfully back toward his apartment building. He spent the first three minutes of his trudge engaging his Strange Feeling of déjà vu in a rather one-sided argument about the relative merits of keeping oneself to oneself and not intruding on another person’s day. To conclude the argument, he admonished the intrusive notion and banned it from occupying any more of his thoughts for a period of at least sixteen months. After that, he trudged in complete silence—both inwardly and outwardly—and tried not to think about how he was going to navigate the flea-infested waters of his apartment building’s lower floor. By the time he’d hit upon a solution to the problem of Mrs. Chappell and her cats—namely, to have them kidnapped by armed Venezuelan drug dealers and stored in the hold of a converted oil tanker—he found himself standing in front of the door to the lower lobby. The Venezuelan caper would have to wait. Wil was losing blood and he needed a shower.
Summoning every remaining ounce of his courage—and gripping his lucky penny so tightly that it threatened to carve a coin-shaped slot into the palm of his hand—Wil drew a deep breath and stepped inside.
* * *
INSIDE, THE lobby seemed warm and inviting in contrast to the savage fog floating across the city streets. For some strange reason, Wil imagined that the building purred, which was exactly the opposite of what he had expected. His grip on the penny loosened. Could it be that he was happy to be home?
This thought had never occurred to him in conjunction with the rusty old apartment building and its rusty old landlady—he’d usually associated the place with words like “godforsaken” and “tragic.” But in spite of—or perhaps because of—his gaping head wound, the lobby seemed to po
ssess a peaceful atmosphere very different from its usual appearance as the Atrium Where Tumbleweeds Might Go to Die. Mrs. Chappell’s old calico monstrosity had found a comfy niche near one of the old steam radiators and was no doubt dreaming kitty dreams of fish and milk. Two or three of its friends were eyeing a small hole in the far wall, each pretending they had inside information on the imaginary mice that lived within. An old metal teakettle hissed on a distant stove inside Mrs. Chappell’s office, and this made Wil think of cold winter afternoons spent outside with his elementary school friends, of Barry Morgan’s most excellent hot chocolate recipes, and of toasty warm fireplaces and being cuddled up under a blanket next to his mom as she read from The Hobbit while his dad listened to stock market reports on the family’s old-style radio.
Wil moved quietly across the floor of the lobby and headed toward the stairs where much to his surprise, a blob of scraggly brown fur moved to intercept. It was Mrs. Chappell’s green-eyed favorite, a creature that to this point had summarily refused to acknowledge Wil’s presence in its scraggly world in any way whatsoever. Odd, thought Wil, I wonder what it wants. The creature looked up at him, longingly.
On a whim, he bent to stroke the animal’s fur and was surprised to find the brown beast felt as soft as satin, and that it was pleasantly docile. The cat leaned into Wil’s leg and rubbed a little bit, just to let Wil know that he had officially been given permission to exist.