The Curious Case of the Cursed Spectacles

by Constance Barker

  I pulled the car to a stop outside the facility and jumped out, running through the open gate. A uniformed guard was running toward us. "He's crazy," the man said, pulling out his phone. "Stay clear, I'm calling the police. We need to evacuate the neighborhood."

  "I think that part has been taken care of," I told him, pointing at the people rushing away.

  "What are we going to do? How do we get the glasses?" Clarence asked.

  "Forget the glasses right now. Timothy is going to make the explosion happen," I said. "We have to stop him."

  "The whole place could go up at any moment," Clarence said. "We're too late."

  I tossed him the car keys. "I have to stop him. Tell me where the main shutoff valves are and get out of here."

  He pointed. "In the heart of the facility. Right in the center."

  "Thanks." As I started down a hallway, Clarence sighed. "You know I can't leave you. Right now I think I hate you, but I can't leave."

  "Then stay close," I said, as I started running. I heard his footsteps echoing in the concrete building as he followed after me. He was right that it was nuts, but there I was, headed straight for a madman with a gun.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On our way deeper into the gas-distribution facility we passed a couple of workers in coveralls on their frantic way out. "He's got a gun," one of them shouted at us as he ran by.

  "That's sort of why we are going in," I told him.

  "We know that," Clarence said.

  The man gave us a wild-eyed stare. "You're crazy too," he said and ran on. We kept going, finally entering a control room. "There he is," Clarence said. "Hi, Timothy. Long time no see. How have you been?"

  He didn't answer, but then he didn't run either. He was staring at nothing, peering through what had to be the cursed spectacles. They looked good on him. I wondered if that was part of the curse, part of what kept people from wanting to take them off.

  He turned and looked at us, waving his gun. "I have to stop it from happening!" he screamed.

  "He's lost his mind completely," Clarence said softly. "By coming in here, I'm not sure we haven't as well."

  "Maybe the police shrink will give us a group rate."

  "Everyone will die if I don't act," Timothy said. "I've seen the future."

  "A future," Clarence said.

  "What?"

  "You've seen a possible future—the one those glasses you found want you to see." I tried to speak calmly as I started to circle around him. Clarence picked up on the cue and moved in the other direction.

  "Don't play games," Timothy said and pointed his gun straight at Clarence's chest. "If you keep going behind me, I'll shoot him." It struck me that his hand was incongruously steady for a madman who'd worked himself up into a frenzy. "I don't want to be the one to shoot you," he told Clarence. "It isn't supposed to be me."

  "So someone else is supposed to shoot me?" Clarence asked. "Who?"

  "It's confusing," Timothy said. "The thing is I won't, I can't let you stop me from saving these people. They are my friends and neighbors."

  Clarence amazed me with his calmness. He stopped and put his hands up. "You know what? I'd rather you didn't shoot me either, so I'd say we have a consensus, Timothy. And we are after the same thing. We want to prevent the tragedy you saw."

  He laughed. "Sure you do."

  I spoke softly. "Timothy, the glasses, what they are showing you are intended to make you do the wrong things. They are telling you things to make you cause the tragedy. This place was safe before you came here. Shooting a gun in this space might make the explosion happen—it would kill a lot of people."

  "No," Timothy said. "That's stupid."

  Clarence smiled. "She's right. Did the vision show you shooting people? Of course, it didn't, because a gunshot could cause the explosion you are trying to prevent."

  "In the vision the pipe starts leaking," he said, waving the gun in the direction of a network of small pipes."

  "If you shoot it, the pipe will leak gas," I said. "If that happens, and if the spark from the gun causes a fire, even more people will die, as it would ignite the gas in the main pipeline."

  "Look, you can say what you want, but I'm here to stop a major tragedy. I need to shut off the main valve. If I just do that then it won't happen. There won't be any gas to ignite. So get out of here." Timothy looked around with a wild look on his face. I felt bad for him. He hadn't asked for this curse...he just happened upon it.

  I took a step toward him and he pointed the gun at me. "Think of the other tragedies you've seen since you found those glasses. You think they make you see everything so clearly, but still, you tried to prevent them. Didn't you, Timothy? You did everything you could to make sure that the terrible vision didn't come true. Yet, somehow, no matter what you did they still happened, didn't they?"

  His face darkened. "Yes, I suppose so."

  "Start with the first vision you had after you put on the glasses—the flood at home. It wasn't a tragic event and no one died, but you saw the broken pipe in your house. You saw the house being flooded. You felt you had to do something to prevent it from breaking. You tightened it, but that's exactly what broke it. There was nothing wrong with the pipe, Timothy. If you'd left it alone it would've been fine."

  "How do you know that?"

  "The times you saw events and didn't act—those happened far away, didn't they?"

  "Yes."

  "The glasses wanted you to think you had to act when you could."

  "Why?"

  "There is no real why. Those spectacles are cursed, Timothy. They aren't showing you a future so you can prevent disasters... they're showing you a future they want you to create, they are tricking you into making it happen."

  "But why?"

  "We don't know. We don't know who cursed them or what their intention was. What we do know is that they are cursed and that's how it works. If you fix what they show you is wrong, you'll be doing their bidding."

  I could see beads of sweat on his forehead and suddenly the hand holding the gun was trembling. I couldn't blame him. He knew what he was seeing. If you tell a regular person something is cursed they'll laugh at you, or think you mean it trivially. Timothy knew better. At some level he knew it was true. "You wrote that stuff in your journal, Timothy. You were figuring out that it was a trick, that the glasses were using you to do their dirty work."

  "It's a trick?" He sounded so sad. "It's all to make me do things to cause those tragedies?"

  "I'm afraid so. And the vision you saw that had to do with us showing up... that was just to keep you from listening to us. They don't want you hearing the truth."

  I could see that it was sinking in. He knew that what I was telling him had a ring of truth to it. "I was helpless," he said.

  "It isn't your fault," I told him. "You were trying to save people, but those glasses are evil things, Timothy. But you can stop them."

  "How?"

  "Take them off. Give them to me so I can put them in a safe place."

  "You don't understand. I don't want to give them up," he said. "I see so clearly with them on. Everything is crystal clear... not the way it was."

  "I have an idea. We can take them to your optometrist and get a pair made with the same prescription—a pair that aren't cursed," Clarence suggested.

  "Sure," I agreed. "Give them to me and I'll drive you over there right now. I'll buy you a new pair of glasses so you can see the world clearly and not have the terrible visions."

  "You are trying to fool me. I'm not supposed to give them up," he said, but he slowly lowered the gun. I knew what he meant. I felt the same way about the silly pen that Edgar haunted. Pressing the matter wasn't a good idea. At least with that ominous gun barrel pointed at the ground I let myself start breathing again.

  "We can help you, Timothy."

  "If I get the right glasses, ones that aren't cursed, maybe I can get my old job back," he said.

  "Who knows?" Clarence said. "Why not? We can he
lp you try."

  We watched Timothy visibly waffling, the power of the glasses fighting against his desire to be free of them. Fear and uncertainty were tearing him apart and whatever force the glasses exerted was fighting back too. "Maybe you are right..." he said. He blinked several times and then looked up at something behind me. I turned to see what he saw, but there was nothing there.

  I glanced at Clarence. He'd noticed too, and shook his head. Clearly, he had no idea what Timothy saw either. And the poor man stood there, transfixed, his eyes growing wide. I hoped against hope that it wasn't another vision. That could take him off on a tangent again just when we were calming him down a bit.

  My heart pounded in my chest as I waited to see what he would do or say next. For the moment he simply stood still, defiant, yet frightened.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I should have expected Clarence to do something. I'd noticed how he was poised, his body tensed for action. His eyes were fixed on Timothy, watching him closely. Still, when he moved, it surprised me. I suppose I just didn't think of him as a man of action, which was unfair as I barely knew him.

  At any rate, as Timothy started to go all starry-eyed, when his determined look faded and he began gazing into the distance, apparently oblivious to his surroundings, Clarence rushed him. It caught Timothy off guard; he stood frozen in place and Clarence tackled him. They fell to the ground in a heap, with Timothy waking to the threat and the two men grappling, struggling. I went over to help. Somewhere after that dramatic tackle, as they scuffled on the ground, the gun went off. I felt a whizzing that went past my head. I heard a great 'whack' from behind me. I turned and saw that the bullet had hit a pipe. At a bend in a small, relatively speaking pipe, a chunk was missing and a blueish flame flickered. It ghosted around the pipe in the spooky way the yellow and blue flames of burning gas have when dancing around.

  I heard the metallic sound of the gun clattering to the cement floor.

  At the shot, I'd stopped. Now my reaction was immediate and somewhat frantic, with me running toward the control panel before my conscious brain even knew what happened. I was desperately looking for an emergency shut off valve. The idea of that flame spreading was terrifying. Suddenly I found it. It was right in front of me on the back of the console amid a cluster of dials and gauges. It sat there looking big, beautiful, and clearly marked 'emergency shutoff.' What could be better?

  I reached for it and then froze in mid-motion, pulling myself up short. I sensed a wrongness in doing that. I started thinking it through and realized that shutting off that valve was exactly what Timothy wanted to do, what he thought had to be done to save the world from this disaster. But I knew he was being manipulated. If I shut it off for him, I'd be carrying out his wrong-headed mission and we might all die.

  But what was going to cause the explosion that Timothy saw? The gunshot hadn't and it didn't seem reasonable that the glasses would miscalculate that kind of thing. And if it wasn't the gunshot, then, it dawned on me, maybe turning off the valve was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  On the other hand, maybe us finding the note, knowing what Timothy wanted to do was intended to keep us from shutting it off.

  When you start second-guessing intentions you open a huge and rather icky can of worms. It was making my head hurt.

  The only way to get out of that dilemma was to do something else, something unexpected.

  I shook myself, then made an executive decision. And it was a tough one, mostly because it meant not doing something that I thought needed doing. I left the valve alone and went back across the room to where Clarence held Timothy in a bear hug. I saw the gun lying on the floor and I picked it up by the barrel, keeping it out of range of Timothy's hands.

  "Can you hold him a little longer?"

  "If I have to," Clarence said, his voice muffled.

  I went over to inspect the pipe. The flame still flickered, but the hole was small, just a chunk knocked out of the pipe. It made me think of a pilot light on a gas heater. They weren't dangerous—then it dawned on me. If I had turned off the gas, the drop in pressure would've sucked that flame into the pipe. That would have caused the explosion. The way it was the gas that was leaking out was burning off relatively harmlessly in the grand scheme of things. I still wasn't sure things wouldn't go south quickly, but I decided to take a chance and let it burn.

  I went back over to Timothy and pulled the glasses off his face. He shouted at me, sounding more terrified than angry.

  Immediately I felt a powerful urge to put the glasses on.

  "Don't even think about it," Clarence said.

  I smiled and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I helped Clarence and Timothy to their feet. Timothy was subdued now. Whether it was because Clarence had squeezed it out of him or just because I'd taken the glasses, the fight had gone out of him.

  I took one of Timothy's arms. "Let's get out of here. I want to let the workers know what's happened so they can deal with it."

  Halfway out we met two police officers, which I think was the sum total of the Koin police force, with one of the gas company workers.

  The policemen waved their guns, much to the consternation of the worker. "Put those away," he said.

  "He shot a pipe," I told the man. "One of the little ones got a chunk blown out of it. It started burning, but it doesn't look dangerous for the moment."

  "Thank goodness you didn't shut off the gas," the worker said. "The entire place could've been vaporized."

  Vaporized didn't sound good. My knees were weak and I tried to sound cavalier. "We wouldn't dream of doing that," I said.

  One of the policemen took charge of Timothy and put him in handcuffs. I handed the other one his gun. As he took it, the officer scowled. "What were you thinking of, lady? What possessed you to go in there after an armed man?"

  "We knew he wasn't a very good shot," Clarence said.

  The answer didn't seem to please the officer at all.

  They took us all outside. An ambulance was there and the paramedics checked out Timothy, pronouncing him healthy. Then, at my insistence, they took at look at some cuts and scrapes Clarence had gotten in the scuffle. "You can be a macho hero later," I told him.

  "I wrecked my blazer," he said. Hmmm....maybe macho wasn't the correct word.

  The police took our statements, which we kept pretty simple, just saying we'd met Timothy before and knew he was upset about the gas lines, but not why. The gas crew repaired the leak and told the police we'd done exactly the right thing.

  The police were trying to wrap things up. Even cops like to go home when their shift is over, so once they had gone through all the motions and warned us that we might be called to testify, they told us we were free.

  "I hope we don't have to go to court," Clarence said. "Our stories might have a hole or two."

  "I doubt that wild-eyed Timothy will go to trial," I said. "My guess is his lawyer will have him fail a psych evaluation."

  As they put Timothy in the back of the squad car, he began screaming. "You can't alter destiny," he said. "The world is on the brink and you can't bring it back. The great gears of destiny are grinding and you can't stop them. You'll never get near them."

  "I rest my case," I said.

  "I wonder if the glasses were too strong a prescription," Clarence said. "He's gone around several bends."

  "Any idea what he's on about?" An officer asked. "Seeing as he seems to be talking to you."

  "Not a clue," we said in unison.

  "Give me back my glasses!" Timothy screamed at us.

  "What glasses?" the policeman asked. "You weren't wearing any."

  "She took them."

  The officer looked at me. "Did you take the guy's glasses?"

  "Why would I do that?" I asked. "If he was wearing any, he must've lost them in the scuffle."

  Clarence nodded. "We were too focused on the gun and then the idea that we might blow up to steal the guy's glasses."

  "Tell him we'll look around for th
em," the officer told the other cop.

  "Well, we'd better get back to Destiny's Point," I said. "We have an antique store to run."

  "Right," the cop said. "When you aren't out chasing down lunatics and preventing gas explosions?"

  "Everyone needs a hobby," Clarence told him. "What's yours?"

  Ignoring the officer's scowl, I grabbed Clarence's arm and pulled him toward my rental car and pushed him into the passenger seat. "What do you think he meant?" I asked Clarence once I had the car headed homeward.

  Homeward. It seemed odd that I'd so quickly taken to calling Destiny's Point, the shop, and Uncle Mason's apartment home. And they weren't mine at all. This was a temporary, somewhat emergency digression from my life, from my real home. I was just doing what I had to for things to get back to whatever passed for normal. Then Uncle Mason could get well and take over things, and I, I could leave the surreal world of living and breathing the pursuit of cursed objects behind. I could get back to my real life, even if, for the moment that was the world, the life that seemed vague and indistinct.

  "You mean Timothy? I think what he meant..." Clarence said, bringing my thoughts snapping back to the present, "was that we dang well better get those glasses tucked away in a safe place real quick. If whoever it was that stole them from us once knows we have them back, they could come after them again."

  "Odd that they left them on a bench for Timothy to find. Why go to all that trouble, breaking down the door, stealing them, and then just leaving them out."

  "You're assuming they wanted to sell them, or use them for a purpose. But maybe that was the whole idea, passing them out, letting them be found to cause problems."

  That hadn't occurred to me. "You're right. I did assume they stole them for a purpose, or for profit but that's because I don't see the gain in just creating havoc."

  "Magical terrorism? I don't know. But it fits what we ran into. The purpose could be nothing more than having them out there, causing people to do exactly the kinds of things that Timothy did. Maybe it doesn't matter at all who has them. They are like poisoned candy. Whoever finds them doesn't know they are dangerous until the object has taken them over, and then they can't do anything about it."