by Paul Jenkins
“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.
“What’s inside the crates, if you don’t mind me asking?” Wil blurted out.
The little curator stopped short for a moment. He seemed to find Wil’s question amusing. “What do you think is inside them? You’re entitled to one guess. There are no wrong answers.”
“I don’t know. Every time I stare at one it stops moving and another one moves in the exact place I’m not looking. I feel like they’re all working together, or something. Are they remote controlled?”
“I really wouldn’t be able to say. They were part of a large consignment that came in from Venezuela a few years ago. We decided not to open them up because they were so stupendously interesting just as they were. As a matter of fact, they work well as an exhibit. They help distract new visitors to the museum so that people can un-look properly at the items on display.”
Wil and Mr. Dinsdale were now moving along the corridor, headed for one of the main upper display areas. Wil did his best to ignore the moving crates, and they did their best to distract him out of the corner of his eye. He stared ahead, fixated on the end of the hallway.
“What did you mean by what you said outside?” Wil had been thinking of asking Mr. Dinsdale that question since the moment he’d entered the museum but he’d been distracted by some wooden crates, not to mention the combative Miss Gold.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” replied Dinsdale as they entered the first display area, which looked suspiciously like a historical reenactment of Hideous Junkyards Across the Ages.
Wil stopped abruptly, forcing the old man to stop, too. He wasn’t going to proceed unless he had his question answered with the due care and attention it deserved. “‘Your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe,’” Wil said, refusing to allow Mr. Dinsdale to ignore the question or wander away from the moment. “Where did you get that from?”
“Did I say that?” replied Dinsdale. Like all older men, he possessed somewhat of a twinkle in his rheumy old eyes, and Wil could not be sure if that twinkle was intentional at this very moment. “Well, that was quite a clever phrase, don’t you think? I really should write that down somewhere and copyright it.”
Mr. Dinsdale wandered off toward the nearest exhibit. Wil watched him move away as he took stock of what he might do next. He decided to file this exchange in the back of his mind, to be addressed later after his unresolved confrontation with his Strange Feeling of déjà vu.
The nearest exhibit was composed of a series of cogs and pulleys that really didn’t seem to do very much at all except move around in a little circle. Around and around … Wil found himself mildly intrigued by the fact that this machine reminded him of an old model railway kit he’d owned as a kid. Mr. Dinsdale stood before the thing with his hands clasped behind his back, smiling that enigmatic smile of his. Wil noticed that a similar machine nearby also demonstrated some of this machine’s traits, such as possessing a lot of moving parts and generally seeming to have little purpose. Looking around the entire area, Wil realized the place was full of these contraptions, all of which were whirring and humming like electric transformers. They all seemed remarkably well oiled, yet for the life of him Wil couldn’t figure out what each machine might be for.
“You’ll notice,” said Mr. Dinsdale in a hushed tone, “that there are no power supplies.”
“What do they do?” asked Wil as he duly obliged and took pains to note the lack of power running into the machines.
“Well, they don’t do anything, really. They’re all perpetual motion machines—nothing all that special, to be honest. It’s a bit of a generic exhibit but I feel it’s the sort of thing people need to get themselves warmed up.” Mr. Dinsdale began to wander along the rows of whirring, vibrating machinery of all shapes and sizes. “There are hundreds of these things across the world. One of ours was invented by the Comte de Saint-Germain when he was imprisoned in England on espionage charges. I’ve heard it said, though, that the original design came from a Mr. Harry Braddock, who was one of his prison guards at the time. This one was
invented by an Ottoman sultan by the name of Mehmed.… This was one of Archimedes’ early pieces.…”
Wil began to tune the old man out as he perused the various cogs and levers of each perpetual motion machine. He’d heard of perpetual motion when he was a little boy, of course, but everyone knew that such a machine could not possibly exist by the very laws of nature. One always had to put in more energy than one got out, mostly as a result of friction. Anything to the contrary would violate the first law of thermodynamics. Thus, the machines on display were obviously just a trick. And not a very good one, Wil decided.
At the end of the display area stood a more complicated piece of machinery that drew Wil’s attention for the fact that it was blue, seemed very old, and sparked with electricity ever so slightly. At the front of this particular machine was a ten-inch-wide hole from which most of the sparks emanated. Wil felt the machine possessed a familiar sight and smell, and he could not help but smile at the thought of his mom’s probable reaction to it.
“Ah, now this one,” said Mr. Dinsdale with no attempt to contain his enthusiasm, “this one is very special. I’m not surprised you found your way right to it, Wil.”
“What’s so special about it?” asked Wil.
Mr. Dinsdale took on the proud look of a French art gallery director. “The world’s first and only Perpetual Emotion machine; it was designed by none other than Maestro Leonardo da Vinci himself, sometime after he perfected his first solar power cell. It’s said this machine once entertained the crowned heads of Europe by inducing a perpetual state of happiness into anyone willing to put their hands into the receptacle at the front. Would you like to try?”
Wil hesitated and scrunched his nose in a painfully transparent attempt to indicate he most certainly would not like to stick his hand into the depths of the sparking monstrosity before him. He hoped to avoid responding to Mr. Dinsdale’s invitation for as long as it took to get out of the line of fire. Mr. Dinsdale looked a little disappointed.
“You really shouldn’t worry so much about getting in touch with your feelings, Wil,” said the little curator. “It’s not healthy to avoid your emotions.”
“I’m not worried about getting in touch with my feelings,” said Wil. “I’m more afraid of being electrocuted by them. It looks a bit haphazard. Are you sure it’s safe?”
“There’s nothing to worry about. Look!” Mr. Dinsdale thrust his hand into the hand-shaped receptacle, which promptly sent out a massive shower of sparks that covered him from head to toe. Wil was alarmed to realize the little man looked like a welder who’d suddenly lost control of his blowtorch, and he thrust up his arm so that he could identify Dinsdale in the blinding light.
“Mr. Dinsdale! Are you okay?” The Perpetual Emotion machine was now beginning to judder loudly, and Wil thought he could hear Mr. Dinsdale over the sound of the grinding gears and the shooting sparks. If he wasn’t mistaken, the curator seemed to be making loud sobbing noises. “Mr. Dinsdale! Hold on tight! I’ll find the off switch!”
“There is no off switch!” howled Dinsdale. “It’s not fair! We’re all going to die someday! And then the universe will end and I won’t have had enough time to say goodbye!”
Wil could only assume this series of bizarre statements meant that poor Mr. Dinsdale had suffered some kind of spark-induced concussion. He lurched forward and with a mighty heave grabbed hold of Dinsdale’s mustard-yellow jacket and yanked the old man backward for all he was worth. At the very moment he made contact with the jacket’s fabric, Wil felt a crushing despair fill every fiber of his being, and for the half second or so before he managed to extricate the little curator from the receptacle of the Perpetual Emotion machine, he suddenly wondered if he shouldn’t just find a dark hole and bury himself in it. Life seemed meaningless, and he was far too often lonely inside his apartment building, despite all of Mrs. Chappell’s cats. There really seemed no point to creation, Wil realized, and God probably didn’t care.
Moments later, Wil and Mr. Dinsdale lay in a heap on the floor. The sparking machine next to them had immediately returned to its previous state, and there was an uncomfortable moment between the two men. Wil felt mildly ridiculous to find himself at ground level, and wrapped around the little man for the second time in the space of half an hour. Worse, he felt a terrible emptiness in his soul, which seemed to be a residual effect of the Perpetual Emotion machine.
Mr. Dinsdale got to his feet first. He brushed himself off with one hand and stared at Maestro da Vinci’s gruesome death trap, scratching his chin as if to indicate a reaction of mild interest as opposed to one of sheer terror. Wil painfully scrambled to his feet; he felt far less suicidal than a moment or two before, but he’d jammed his thumb during the takedown.
“What the heck happened?” asked Wil, incredulous. “I had the weirdest feeling when I tried to pull you out of that thing.”
“I think it’s stuck on melancholy,” replied Mr. Dinsdale. “I’ll have to write to the people at the da Vinci Institute to see if they still have the manual. We should probably cordon it off until we can reset it.”
“You should probably cordon it off until you can get in a bomb disposal expert to blow it to kingdom come.” Wil rubbed his injured thumb and stared daggers at the Perpetual Emotion machine, which had now gone back to merely looking dangerous as opposed to actually being dangerous.
Mr. Dinsdale narrowed his eyes as if he were carefully considering Wil’s suggestion. He glanced at the Perpetual Emotion machine as if determining its fate once and for all. Wil half-expected the little curator to raise or lower his thumb, Nero-style, and consign the sparking monstrosity to a retirement procedure that would involve more than a little carefully placed TNT. No such luck, unfortunately: Mr. Dinsdale suddenly turned away and began to head toward the next display area.
Will followed, slightly exasperated by Mr. Dinsdale’s arbitrary behavior and his apparent indifference to the city’s safety codes, not to mention its explosives ordinances. “Mr. Dinsdale,” he cried out after the departing curator, “don’t you think you’d better switch it off? Mr. Dinsdale?”
By the time Wil turned the next corner, Mr. Dinsdale was now standing directly in front of an exhibit at the far end of the adjacent room. Unless Wil was mistaken, the old man had covered a hundred and fifty feet in about two seconds. Wil decided not to react to this since his own cerebral cortex had now come to the independent decision it would be better off discounting the curator’s ability to randomly teleport. Ignoring the old man, Wil reasoned, was the first step to figuring him out. Wil began to head toward Dinsdale’s position. As he moved closer, he realized he was actually walking with quite a spring in his step, and with a sense of purpose that usually escaped him. He slowed back to an indifferent trudge just to make it clear that teleporting curators and Perpetual Emotion machines were no big deal, really.
Wil’s trudge took him past an entrance to a completely empty display area contained inside a closed-off white room. For a split second, he imagined he saw movement out of the corner of his eye: a young woman with dark, curly hair walking toward his position. He turned, thinking this might be a visitor to the Curioddity Museum. While he hadn’t yet run into any paying customers, he expected at the very least to come face-to-face with a wooden crate. Instead, the room was completely featureless and empty, and the illusion of movement within was gone. Wil narrowed his eyes, only to realize he probably looked exactly as Mr. Dinsdale did just moments before. Feeling quite disconcerted by this turn of events—as if the museum had somehow affected him to the extent he was acting like a crazy old teleporting man in a mustard jacket—Wil hurriedly moved away from the featureless room and began to trudge as quickly as his legs could carry him toward the curator.
Mr. Dinsdale stood in front of a shelf, upon which was a single green glass bottle. Nearby were various items of trash that might just as easily have been found inside, say, a junkyard or around the back of an abandoned trailer on a pig farm. Inside a glass display case, Wi
l noticed a little watch device fashioned out of wood. A legend inscribed at the base of the glass read, simply, “Sequitur.” And next to this stood an empty display case with the words “Non Sequitur” written upon it. Up against the wall, someone had propped an old-style throwing spear. A nearby wooden plaque described this item as the “Spear of Density,” which was either an understandable typo or yet another attempt by the museum’s curator to generate interest in something that didn’t deserve it.
As Wil approached, Dinsdale seemed to be studying the green bottle as intently as one might study a chalkboard covered by complex mathematical equations, though for the life of him Wil could not see anything about the dirty old thing that might explain such scrutiny. He decided to remain quiet in the hopes Mr. Dinsdale might be forthcoming with something that actually explained things for once, as opposed to complicating things even further.
“It’s a lightning catcher,” explained Dinsdale in a reverent tone. The little curator seemed to be looking directly at the green bottle, which looked very unlike a receptacle for electricity and much more like a receptacle that once contained a soft drink. Wil looked behind the shelf, just in case there was an actual lightning catcher somewhere in the immediate vicinity that he hadn’t noticed earlier.
“Are all your museum exhibits this impressive?” asked Wil, gesturing to the various items of scrap around him. He hoped the obvious sarcastic tone of his question might make his point: he was beginning to tire of being led around an elaborate thrift shop in search of an explanation regarding a job that he was getting more and more inclined to refuse in advance.
“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.”