by Paul Jenkins
Near the exit to the building the magnificently incongruous Chalky waited, eyeing Wil in a noncommittal fashion. Perhaps the little ruffian intended to claw Wil’s leg as he passed, or perhaps it merely wished for some of his attention. On a whim, Wil leaned down to scratch Chalky’s furry chin, drawing an immediate purr of gratitude. Couldn’t hurt to be nice to the little fur bag, he thought, just in case Chalky was of a mind to report his demeanor to the authorities.
Wil stood at the front door and watched the cold wind whipping outside. He looked back down at the now-ecstatic cat rubbing up against his pant leg. “That’ll do, Sergeant Major,” he said to the cat, throwing it a quick military-style salute. “Carry on.”
Chalky licked a paw—which Wil interpreted as a positive response to his genial instruction—and sat down to survey the lobby in case of attack by a foreign power or enemy rodent. Much to his own surprise, Wil then did the one thing he hadn’t done during the last seven years of exiting Mrs. Chappell’s apartment building: he smiled.
And with that, he stepped outside into a brand-new day.
* * *
OUT ON the street, the fog was bitter cold and thick enough to be spread with a knife. Wil stood at the edge of the passing traffic, making a mental choice: he could turn his face to the ground and pull his coat around him—he could trudge toward the Castle Towers and make quiet, grumbling noises to himself as he complained about the weather—or he could pretend to be from Iceland where this would be a fine, fresh midsummer morning, and he could go about his daily business with a smile. This unorthodox thinking would have made his mom proud, Wil thought, as he moved into the teeth of the cold wind with a forced smile on his face that looked more like a grimace.
Melinda Morgan had always told her son that if he kept his chin up and looked at the buildings around him, he might see all manner of interesting things such as gargoyles, UFOs, and sale notifications for brand-name sneakers. Sadly, local gargoyles seemed conspicuous by their absence, and aliens capable of interstellar travel were no doubt far too intelligent to be caught outside on a day like this. However, a few of the nearby walls seemed to be covered with moderately garish graffiti. “Close enough,” said Wil to nobody in particular. And with his eyes firmly affixed to the various billboards and empty storefronts that littered both sides of his street, he set off in search of Mr. Dinsdale’s box of Levity.
Though just to be on the safe side, he went in the same direction as the flow of traffic moving through the city’s one-way system.
* * *
WIL MOVED along slowly, thinking of his mom and slowly turning his lucky penny around in his pocket with one gloved hand. Presently, his journey took him to the old stone bridge that fronted the decrepit railway crossing at the center of town. He had been so absorbed with the task of keeping his eye line on the same plane as the horizon that he’d barely been aware of his own surroundings. The supreme effort required to face the teeth of the gale was beginning to take its toll, since those teeth appeared to be inordinately pointy and fierce. Wil’s eyeballs were beginning to freeze; he wouldn’t have been able to pick out a single gargoyle on a single building unless the statue in question was somehow capable of playing the electric sousaphone.
At the entrance to the railway bridge, a set of stone steps led down on each side to what Wil had always supposed to be a river. Truth be told, he’d never ventured that way, nor had he even considered looking down to see what lay beyond. He’d always supposed that the steps led to some twilight area of the city lined with cardboard boxes and homeless people, where unsuspecting civilians were press-ganged into service on pirate ships and the local alehouses still served mead and strumpets by the gallon. Here at the bridge, however, Wil faced a choice: He could continue along with the flow of the one-way system and eventually descend upon the Castle Towers and, most likely, a dearth of box-shaped candidates. Or he could descend the stone steps to see what lay beneath the city, thus avoiding the painful rattling of his loose fillings in the event of a passing train. As an added bonus, he would probably get out of the direct line of fire of the bone-chilling breeze that had turned his Icelandic midsummer into a less-than wintry wonderland.
Wil paused for a moment at the top of the steps and tried to summon the courage to descend, knowing such an impulsive action would be completely against his instincts. Perhaps these feelings of trepidation were not actually his instincts, he surmised. Perhaps they came as a result of his father’s incessant harping on the perils of being spontaneous. And if Wil was going to stand a chance in the search for his metaphorical needle in a million haystacks, what better approach than to descend into a dark and mysterious abyss with no hope of survival? As if these strange and conflicting notions were not enough to convince him, Will suddenly noticed a large gargoyle built into a pillar halfway down the first flight of steps. The stone creature glared back at him in suitably demonic fashion, yet such was the oddity of Wil’s previous twenty-four hours that the gargoyle seemed less like a harbinger of doom and more like an invitation.
What’s the worst that could happen? Wil wondered, as in one fell swoop he violated every single rule his father had instilled into him since the age of ten and stepped off the beaten path in favor of a quick descent into certain death.
* * *
THE STONE steps leading to oblivion felt worn and concave. Wil imagined himself about to be accosted by a band of Romanian brigands armed with torture devices possessing such exotic names as Tongue Twister or Wench Grinder, or something equally despicable; these imaginary bandits would probably rip off his kneecaps and sell them to a local hospital for profit. But as he rounded the first flight of steps under the withering gaze of the gargoyle, he was immediately struck by the complete absence of pirate-themed accordion music coming from the bottom of the stone stairs. Gone were his imagined rivers of molten lava and Hieronymus Bosch–like scenes of human torture. Instead, Satan seemed to have set up shop in the middle of what appeared to be a thriving farmers’ market. If there were demons here, they looked remarkably like a Chinese fishmonger, a cheerful-looking man who sold all kinds of fresh-cut flowers, and a large and beautiful African lady with perfect skin who sold local honey and facial cream made from imported shea butter.
People young and old milled around the busy stalls, quite impervious to the freezing fog that drifted through the marketplace in clumps. For the life of him, Wil could not find a single person who looked the way he usually felt during his Tuesday-morning trudge to the Castle Towers. Had this vibrant and chaotic marketplace really been hiding under his feet all these years, while he’d been trudging across the railway bridge and preparing himself for arguments with teenaged coffee shop baristas? The place smelled like a mixture of peppered beef and fruit pastries, with a perfect hint of lilac underneath. And as Wil stepped, amazed, from the bottom step and into the center of the bustle, he realized this place was full of the very types of people he’d spent the last seven years avoiding on his way to work.
At the end of a market aisle, a young man hooted happily in the direction of a pretty young girl and tossed her a large, green apple. For her part, the girl smiled coyly and batted her eyelids in such a way that Wil had to check to see if he’d accidentally wandered onto the set of an old French movie with Italian subtitles. At the end of one aisle was a purveyor of homemade wind chimes, all of which created beautiful, intertwined melodies for the benefit of bustling passersby. And near this endcap stood a floating booth adorned with strange carvings and knickknacks from across the world. Wil stopped to study some Mayan hieroglyphics on a piece of carved stone, though he quickly realized he stood as much chance of deciphering them as a merchant banker might stand of understanding a nineteen-year-old tattoo artist—in other words, no chance whatsoever. On a whim, Wil tilted his head first to one side, then completely upside down. He covered one eye with his right hand, just to see if Mr. Dinsdale’s unorthodox methods might work on fake reproductions of ancient carvings.
* * *
“WATCHA DOIN’?”
Wil was suddenly aware of eyes boring into the back of his head in an upside-down fashion. It was at this exact moment that he realized two things: (1) the eyes in question belonged to a little girl, aged about six or seven years, who was perched upon a cute pink bicycle adorned with rainbow streamers, and (2) he was about to be confronted with the genuine honesty of a kid whether he liked it or not. He felt frozen in place, mildly aghast at the notion the child probably thought of him as slightly creepy and more than slightly nuts. Wil glanced in the girl’s direction and was met with the cute-yet-steely gaze of a precocious little prizefighter with freckles and pigtails. The girl smacked her lips on a piece of bubble gum and surveyed Wil as if he were an errant circus performer. He looked hurriedly away and quickly ran through a series of possible excuses for his eccentric behavior. Perhaps he should consider waiting the little girl out, he thought, or merely pretending that staring at things upside down in the middle of a farmers’ market in broad daylight was the kind of thing that grown-ups do all the time. For her part, the girl stared at Wil, and then blew a large and loud bubble that Mary Gold would have been proud of.
Wil realized he needed to make a move because his back was beginning to ache. He’d had some experience with the concept of Pretending Not to Look Stupid after observing Mrs. Chappell’s cadre of moth-eaten cats over the years. He’d noticed that cats are experts in the Art of Recovery, and that on the rare occasions when one of the overweight or flea-ridden creatures would tumble down the stairs or run smack-dab into a wall while chasing its reflection, said creature would immediately sit on the floor as if nothing extraordinary had happened and begin to lick its paws. Wil had always suspected Mrs. Chappell’s cats were onto something: if one can act as if everything is right with the world while all around clowns dressed in snorkels, flippers, and tutus are throwing bowls of neon-green custard at each other then, by golly, everything is right with the world.
Wil straightened, rubbed his back, and yawned. The little girl stared at him, while the streamers on her pink bicycle began to flutter in the morning breeze.
“Soccer injury,” said Wil, thinking quickly.
“Boogers,” said the little girl, thinking even quicker. And with that, she pedaled away across the cobbled marketplace and disappeared into a small side street across the way. Wil peered over at the dimly lit street but could make out nothing from within the shroud of fog.
“Okay,” Wil muttered quietly to himself, “that was unexpected.”
* * *
AS WIL stood alone in the crowded marketplace and wondered what to make of this encounter, a most delicious smell of coffee assailed him from a small kiosk nearby. He headed directly for it, hoping beyond hope that the seven years he had spent walking right over the heads of the merchants in this vibrant market could be replaced by a halfway decent cup of something. From behind the coffee kiosk, a small, Arabic man with a very large nose greeted Wil with a grin.
“Hello, friend!” called the man with the nose. “Praise be to God that you have found our market this day. What can I get for you?”
“I’d like a large, regular coffee, please,” replied Wil. “And could you put in extra cream?”
“Certainly, sir. Also, I have fresh rhubarb pastries this morning. Please … this coffee cannot go without pastry. I give you one for free and you pay me for two the next time you come by!”
With that, the man with the nose shoved a truly massive rhubarb pastry into a paper bag and handed Wil an even more massive cup of coffee that contained just the perfect amount of extra cream. Ignoring Wil’s polite protests, the man summarily refused to take any extra cash for the pastry and simply turned to another customer who seemed to have arrived in the nick of time.
* * *
WIL WANDERED the marketplace, bemused; his coffee tasted like real coffee—the kind his mother used to hand him for those cold bus stop mornings. The pastry tasted exactly as Wil expected, in that it seemed to have been imported from a Turkish bazaar, and ferried to this location on an air-conditioned luxury jet with Wil in mind as its target customer. And as he moved farther from the bridge and back into the world he’d long since abandoned, Wil Morgan began to sense that the beaten path of conformity was rapidly in danger of being usurped by this marketplace below the railway bridge. Such excellence had been under his nose every day for the last seven years, and all he’d needed to do was un-look for it.
As if to prove his point, a train clattered overhead. Usually, the carriages would shake Wil’s teeth and patience to the core, and the resulting pain in his fillings would make him long for the relative safety of the Castle Towers. But from this vantage point below the bridge, the train’s rattle seemed appropriate and quaint, as if adding a subtle room tone to the exotic equation of the market.
To Wil’s left, the cobbled market street moved around a corner and off into what seemed to be a garment district. To his right, a street performer enacted a highly unusual break dancing routine to prerecorded bagpipe music. But across the street from his position lay another dark and dangerous passage: the small, dimly lit street that the little girl had just ridden down. If she were just a small child, the street would probably be harmless enough. But if she were a spawn of the underworld come to live aboveground and study human ways, then Wil was in for a rough afternoon should he decide to follow her.
And this, he realized, was a momentous fork in his personal road. Wil had felt this trepidation once before: many years ago on one extremely cold winter’s afternoon when as a little boy he and his mom had spent the afternoon sliding headfirst down a local Hill of Certain Death on the back of a tea tray, ululating like hillbillies at a monster truck rally. He could remember the terrifying sensation of ozone rushing through his nostrils that day, a heightened awareness, and his frozen hands clutching tightly to Melinda Morgan’s thick coat as together, he and Mom braved the elements where not a single kid from his third-grade class dared to tread. That day, Melinda Morgan had stood at the top of the mountain with her son, encouraging him to take the hill on by himself while at the same time fearing for his structural integrity. “Go ahead, Wil,” she’d urged her little boy. “Keep your eyes on the path and you’ll be fine.”
Wil hadn’t been so sure. Halfway down the hill, an obvious fork led to two equally peril-fraught paths. The leftmost path was dotted with high moguls and snowdrifts, while the right path led through some thick underbrush that was covered with ice. “What if I go down the wrong way?” he worried aloud.
“There isn’t a wrong way,” said his mother with a chuckle. “Whichever way you choose, that is the right way just as long as you make a choice! Go ahead—it’ll be fun!
“But what if I end up upside down in a snowdrift?”
“That’s how you’ll know you’ve made the right decision!” his mom had called as she shoved him off the top of the slope.
Young Wil had suddenly found himself rocketing backward, plummeting toward the snowy fork at the relative speed of an Exocet missile, with Melinda Morgan receding in the distance, looking both proud of and terrified for her son at the same time. Halfway down the hill, he’d righted his ship, gripped both sides of the crumpled tea tray, and suddenly found all the joy there is to be had in an uncontrolled descent into an uncertain future.
Thirty seconds later—just as Wil had gotten the hang of steering the tea tray by pulling up on each side with as much strength as he could muster—the dreaded fork had appeared across the top of a snowy rise. Wil steeled himself against the possibility of an abrupt halt, and with his mother’s words ringing in his frozen ears, he resolved to make a decision: left toward certain death or right toward a fate much worse? Left or right: the choice was clear.
At the very last moment, young Wil had chosen left. He’d pulled up sharply on the right side of the tray and dug his left side in the ground to carve a perfect turn in the ice-covered track.
Moments later, he’d gone accidentally down the middle and found hims
elf upside down in a snowdrift, laughing like a maniac and crying like a siren.
* * *
NOW, THESE many years later, the way ahead seemed clear: Wil was going to cross the street and continue his journey into nowhere. He was going to follow the little girl on the bicycle, and even though he wasn’t going to find Mr. Dinsdale’s box of Levity, he was going to enjoy the ride, and he was going to laugh out loud when he found himself upside down somewhere.
For Wil had begun to realize, as he strode toward the cobbled unknown, that all of the unreasonable fears he had been harboring were nothing more than his imagination at work. And this was the first time his imagination had worked since his mother had died and his father had forbidden it to exist.
* * *
THE COBBLED street was not so dark, as it turned out; indeed, it possessed a kind of Dickensian cheer, as if populated by now-generous moneylenders and street urchins who doubled as chimney sweeps. Wil moved through the thick blanket of fog that served as a teaser for the discovery of new delights ahead. He passed a store full of foreign antiques, and then a boutique store selling clothing for pets. Up ahead in the gloom, he could hear two small children playing a singsong game of some kind. The little street was apparently closed to automobile traffic, so that a number of happy customers of all ages and ethnic backgrounds could be seen cheerfully milling about in the center of the cobbled pavement as they crossed from one store to another. It seemed as though shopping was secondary to browsing, and the store owners didn’t mind one little bit. Here, Wil passed a bountiful butcher’s shop that displayed any manner of deceased fowl and blood sausage; there, a cooperative market selling organic fruits and vegetables. This was the kind of street that Wil might have wished to exist had he not already been standing in the middle of it. It was the kind of street he would have visited with his mother, all the while secretly hoping that he could show it to his dad.