Curioddity

by Paul Jenkins

  Wil rolled his eyes. No matter the weight of the circumstance, it was virtually guaranteed his father would be able to embarrass him in front of his peers at a moment’s notice.

  Lucy squeezed his hand. “Now what?” she asked, innocently.

  Wil thought for a second. “I have absolutely no idea,” he replied.

  * * *

  MR. DINSDALE stood, abruptly, and moved toward the office door. “That’s settled, then,” he said, eschewing the customary common sense that accompanied such statements. “Come with me, please.”

  “Wait! Mr. Dinsdale!” yelled Wil in response as he and Lucy moved to follow the old man. He grabbed his bag of kit and caboodle and headed quickly toward the office door. “And don’t you go halfway down the hall before I get there, you hear me?”

  Outside, Wil and Lucy found Mr. Dinsdale halfway down the hall. He was staring at the room containing the temporal and spatial anomalies, and rubbing his furrowed chin.

  “We must have a Phase Two, Wil,” said Dinsdale as Wil and Lucy approached his position. “Engelbert and your father will need time to crunch those numbers and prove that I don’t owe Marcus James’s bank all that money. Every asset in this museum is at your disposal but you’d better come up with something quickly. Our surveillance system has just detected a giant blue space marble turning onto Upside-Down Street, accompanied by a military-grade automated escort.”

  “Your surveillance system?” said Wil, unable to contain his skepticism.

  “Yes. That’ll be Bob up on the roof. He sees everything that comes and goes around here. That means we have mere moments before everything hits the proverbial fan. The Roberts have battened down the hatches and locked the front door but they’re too afraid to go near the revolving doors. So we’re about to get a visit from one very unhappy television pitchman, and it’s up to you to do something about it. After all, you’re the one who just broke into his offices.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?” complained Wil, feebly.

  “Oh, Wil! Haven’t you learned anything in these last few days?” Dinsdale moved off, abruptly, toward the temporal and spatial anomalies exhibit. “In the space of a week, you’ve had magic come back into your life, reacquainted yourself with your estranged father, dated a very attractive girl, and completed a suicide mission without actually dying! And do you know how you managed all of this?”

  “No! I’m so confused at this point I don’t even know how to tie my own shoelaces anymore!”

  “Then keep them untied. You managed it because you’ve relearned how to un-look. So now it is up to you to finish the job you started. What do your instincts say?”

  “I don’t know! They’re having trouble getting past my cerebral cortex—”

  “Wait! Look!” cried Lucy, suddenly. Wil turned to find her pointing at one of the displays near the wall, which was making a familiar beeping sound. In one of his pockets, his Lemon phone began to buzz. In the other, the Sequitur began to beep. And on the wall, Albert Einstein’s answering machine was flashing red.

  Mr. Dinsdale approached the machine cautiously. “That’s odd,” he said. “It wasn’t doing this when I got here moments ago. This must mean someone is going to leave another message.”

  “Aren’t we going to listen to it?” asked Lucy.

  Mr. Dinsdale pressed the Play function on the old device. Almost immediately, a familiar voice from the future came fluttering across the speakers, accompanied by the sounds of what appeared to be an electrical overload and some minor explosions. “Wil!” cried Barry Morgan from within a space that sounded suspiciously like a submarine. “If you can hear me, this is Dad! Uhm. Can you leave some of that blue clay on the counter at the front desk?” Another voice—garbled this time, and mostly unintelligible—yelled something from a distance. “Oh, and maybe loosen one of the gates?” continued Barry. Wil knew his father well enough to know that Barry Morgan was getting confused.

  “Not gates,” he heard Lucy cry from somewhere nearby, and in the not-too-distant future. “Crates!”

  “Oh, right. Crates! Also, tell Mr. Dinsdale to duck—”

  “Duck!!”

  Now came a roaring, thunderous sound from the answering machine—it sounded almost as if a giant explosion of some kind had occurred wherever the message emanated from. The sheer decibel level coming through the speakers caused Wil, Lucy, and Dinsdale to blanch a little and glance at each other. Then, there was silence.

  “Greetings, Wil Morgan,” came an all-too-familiar metallic voice through the temporal ether. “Kindly turn your attention to the far end of the perpetual motion section of the museum—”

  The second, unintelligible voice yelled again from a distance. This was followed by some kind of crackling sound, like static. Finally, a distant sound of quiet sobbing could be heard.

  “Oh, and make sure you bring the lightning catcher,” said Barry, just as the chaotic message from the future ended abruptly. Wil, Lucy, and Dinsdale could only stare at each other, nonplussed.

  “Well,” said Dinsdale, reacting the quickest, “that was a bit random. But it seems we have our marching orders, wouldn’t you say?”

  * * *

  THERE WAS a sudden, ominous shaking, emanating from the general area of the museum lobby, and the lights inside the entire museum flickered. Unless Wil missed his guess, that would be a legion of backup ninja-bots massing outside the front doors of the museum. If they managed to get inside, the unfortunate creatures were about to encounter a certain Miss Mary Gold, which would no doubt play havoc with their interpretive programming and buy everyone a little extra time. Wil had just moments to figure this out.

  “Come on, Wil,” said Mr. Dinsdale with an increasing urgency in his voice, “think!”

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to think! I thought we’d already taken care of this!”

  “Haven’t you ever seen that eighties movie about the man fighting terrorists from the office tower air ducts? The bad guys always come back to life right at the end—it’s a documented fact!”

  “Hey, we were just talking about that film!” interjected Lucy.

  “Yes, but it’s not a documentary! So with all due respect, would the two of you please knock it off?” cried Wil. “I’m having a crisis here and it’s not helping that we’re about to go off on a tangent about some Hollywood movie! I need to concentrate!”

  “You don’t need to concentrate, Wil. That’s the point,” said Dinsdale. “You need to un-concentrate. Go with the flow. Say whatever random thing comes in your head.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ninja-bots are very good at shooting things that behave in a predictable manner!”

  “Hot chocolate!” blurted Wil, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Hot chocolate! I don’t know … it just came out, and I felt I needed to say it out loud. Hot chocolate. And also, I think we should lay down some paper clips on the floor inside the revolving door. Why? I have no idea. But let’s do it anyway.”

  “That’s it! That’s the utterly random mental chaos I was looking for! No one’s going to predict that response! Anything else?”

  “Yes!” cried Wil as he warmed fully to the task. “Tell one of the Roberts to fetch that lightning-in-a-bottle exhibit and have it at the ready. Let’s get Engelbert and my dad out here on the double … and somebody fetch me a crowbar!”

  “I don’t think violence is the answer, Wil,” said Dinsdale. “I’d rather we tried diplomacy first. Even with someone as repugnant as Marcus James.”

  “I’m not going to hit anyone,” replied Wil with a flourish worthy of a British secret agent. “I’m going to open one of those crates.”

  Mr. Dinsdale seemed spurred into sudden and decisive action—the old man was suddenly overcome with a demeanor of lucidity and competence—one that Wil had experienced before. Dinsdale was getting his way, and now he meant business.

  “Lucy,” said the curator, “please go down to the lobby and ask Mary to spread
as many paper clips as possible by the revolving door. Then please fetch Wil’s father and my cousin, Engelbert, as requested. Robert’s on security duty inside the brown door at the back of the atrium; tell him to put on some hot chocolate and fetch the lightning catcher from its display shelf, and have him bring us a crowbar. Wil, do you still have the kit and caboodle?”

  Wil fetched the remnants from his pocket: half of his original lump of blue clay, a bent paper clip, and the beeping Sequitur. Two of the items seemed utterly useless, in direct proportion to the immensity of the Sequitur’s incredible powers. Nevertheless, if Wil had learned any lesson this week, it was that random and seemingly useless things always had the potential to do something amazing. Such as himself, for example.

  One of the tiny will-o’-the-wisps floated by Wil’s face. On a whim, he placed the slightly bent remnant of the paper clip inside it, and watched with amazement as the little creature floated away, clutching the small piece of metal within its plasma frame. He suspected this might be of later significance, simply because everything random that happened inside the museum was usually of some significance or other.

  * * *

  MOMENTS LATER, as Wil and Dinsdale moved back toward the atrium end of the upper hallway, Lucy came back into view ahead of Will’s dad and Cousin Engelbert. Barry and Engelbert huffed and puffed as they lugged the old Lemon computer and a dozen file folders. Behind them, a squadron of John Keely’s flying globes moved in formation, whereupon the flying machines formed into a line and took off in the direction of the Temporal Exhibit room. A couple of Roberts rushed by at the end of the hallway with a toolbox. Wil was astounded to notice a few of the empty wooden crates in the hallway shuffling out of the corner of his eye, as if with anticipation.

  “Wil!” cried Lucy. “Marcus James’s people have cordoned off the end of the street! There’s a glowing blue light outside the museum entrance! What do we do?”

  “Show my dad and Engelbert to the empty room that used to house the Levity box! It’s the one connected to Lucy’s Magic Locker! Hurry!”

  “Where are we going?” asked Barry, who was looking like a pensioner who’d just been introduced into a massive online video game and was trying to work out how to use the controls.

  “Don’t worry, Dad!” called Wil in response. “Just stick with Cousin Engelbert and get us those accounting reports as soon as you can! I’ll send you up some hot chocolate! We’re relying on you!”

  “Right-o!” yelled his dad as Lucy whisked him away toward the mostly empty room where Wil had previously seen her ghost. Looking rather pleased with this turn of events, odd little Cousin Engelbert set off in hot pursuit.

  Mr. Dinsdale paused for a moment, put his index finger to his nose, and gave Wil a knowing chuckle. “I see where you’re going with this, Wil. Bravo!”

  “Do you?” replied Wil. “Because honestly, Mr. Dinsdale, if you know where I’m going, perhaps you’d be kind enough to give me directions!”

  “It’ll all be clear very soon!” said Dinsdale, cheerfully. “Now, let’s see about those crates. I’ll go and find our Robert in charge of maintenance.”

  As the curator set off down the hallway, the building shook in alarming fashion. Wil looked first toward Lucy, to make sure she had led his father and Engelbert to a position of relative safety. While Phase Two was in the nascent stages of planning it was also—by necessity—in the early stages of implementation. Wil paused for a second. May as well head down to the main lobby, he reasoned. He’d later conclude it was the Sequitur in one pocket and his mildly astonishing Lemon phone in his other pocket that gave him a false sense of security. And he’d blame them both equally for what happened next.

  * * *

  AT THE bottom of the stairs, Wil was mildly amused to see Mary Gold standing calmly in her greeting booth watching with semidetachment as the two large goons Marcus had employed for his earlier visit to the museum struggled to extricate themselves from the revolving door. As instructed by future-Barry, Wil placed his remaining lump of blue clay on the end of Mary’s counter before turning his attention to the scene unfolding at the museum’s entrance. One of the goons seemed to have entered to the left of the door, while the second must have assumed it was an anticlockwise method of ingress. Either way, one of the two huge men had been wrong, and now they were both completely stuck. Outside, a giant blue light glowed and faded with a slow, dangerous pulse.

  Mary smacked her gum, sending out waves of invisible disdain that threatened to derail the men’s confidence entirely. Neither of these two massive specimens was taking her affront to their manhood very well at all.

  “Let us out of here!” yelled one of the goons. “I’m warning you, lady! This is gonna go bad for you!”

  “Badly,” said Wil as he sidled toward the door with as much fake disinterest as he could muster.

  “What?” replied the goon.

  “Badly. It’s not, ‘gonna go bad.’ It’s ‘gonna go badly.’ Even though ‘gonna’ isn’t really an acceptable contraction.”

  Wil had learned as a child that the best way to deal with goons—the more muscle-bound the better—was to confuse them. For while the human bicep was something anyone with a little patience could build up to an impressive size, the human brain was less a variable and more something a person was born with. Goons, in his experience, were rarely born with very large ones.

  A quick peek through the glass panes revealed a couple of large tank-like vehicles waiting patiently for the chance to blow something up. To one side, a few annoyed ninja-bots zipped about from side to side, as if pacing up and down. And at the very center of the massed forces outside the museum sat Marcus James at the command of his giant blue escape pod, which had sprouted large cannons on either side. The entire area seemed to be charged with dangerous energy—every so often, a small electrical discharge would crackle out of Marcus’s escape pod and flow across the attending ninja-bots, causing them to twitch and look even more agitated. As one of the bots passed by Genghis on the pavement outside, a small piece of metal from one of the Pinto’s wiper blades suddenly flew off the car and stuck to the creature’s side, as if drawn by a powerful magnetic force.

  Despite his inner terror, Wil waved a friendly hand toward the TV pitchman and smiled as sweetly as he possibly could, just so he could display the effectiveness of his own, competing brand of toothpaste.

  “Hiya, Marcus!” called Wil, sweetly. “We’ll be with you in a minute! We just have to help your two goons over here! They’ve gotten themselves into a bit of a sticky wicket!”

  Inside his giant blue globe, Marcus James glowered. Clearly, the pitchman was considering firing his cannons right there and then, and ending the conflict before it had really gotten under way. Luckily for everyone concerned, a couple of his assets were blocking a clear shot.

  However, Wil was alarmed to notice the back of one of the tank devices open to reveal a detail of slightly smaller-than-normal bots, which promptly filed into a line to await their master’s command.

  “Not sure what you’ve got in mind out there,” said Wil with as much artificial sweetener as his voice could muster, “but you might want to rethink whatever it is you’re about to do.”

  By this time, Marcus James had given up any pretense of trying to keep up appearances; he had developed an unreasonable loathing for Wil that threatened to bubble out of his semiplastic skin and clog up the controls of his escape pod. “You think you’ve won, Mr. Morgan. But you haven’t won anything at all. All you did was delay the inevitable, and cause me a slight headache on a Thursday evening.”

  “That’s good to hear. I’d hate to think you have any lawsuits coming your way because you just bared your backside—I mean literally and figuratively—on national television.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ve caused a blip or two on the radar, nothing more. The stock market is going to experience a slight downturn, and by the time the bell rings on Monday morning my paid speculators will have turned this awkward even
t into a profit. They’re good at what they do, and I pay them well for it.”

  “Also good to hear. What are you going to do about all those unsold golf clubs? Can I still have my upgrade?”

  “I’ll deliver it to you personally,” said Marcus James from within gritted and impossibly white teeth. Clearly, he was ill prepared to combat sarcasm, no matter the size of his cannons.

  The two goons were now so inextricably stuck inside the revolving door that it would take no less than a fire truck and the Jaws of Life to extricate them. Outside the museum entrance, confused ninja-bots wandered aimlessly. Wil felt slightly embarrassed for the poor automatons, as they seemed to be growing ever more morose by the second. Perhaps it was the effect of all the stray electrical discharge, he reasoned. If only his mother had been here to witness the chaos. This was exactly the kind of random and potentially explosive situation she would have loved.

  Wil moved back into the atrium, chuckling. Someone was going to have to make a decision.

  At the counter, Mary Gold was still busy smacking her gum. “Mary,” said Wil, “would you please go up and tell Mr. Dinsdale we might be expecting visitors in a few minutes? I think we should make a stand in the Perpetual Exhibit.” Mary smacked her gum in a manner intended to convey her disdain for menial tasks and floated off in the direction of the stairs. At the same time, one of the Roberts entered from a side door bearing a tray of hot chocolate. He carried a crowbar under one arm and the lightning catcher under the other.

  “Mr. Dinsdale said you might be needing these,” said the raspy-voiced Robert as Wil extracted the crowbar. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”