The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  Wheaton’s face grew stern. “If it’s putting a bullet in my head, then yeah, I’m in agreement that sounds not so hot.”

  “Our other option is for you to tell us how you came upon the device, and then my lovely wife is going to administer something to assist you with your memory,” Wilbur continued.

  “Assist me?” Wheaton laughed. “You mean assist it out of me? That’s what they were going to do back at the agency in the first place.”

  “This one is a little different.” Alison withdrew a hypodermic needle from her pocket and took the cap off its end. A bilious yellow liquid resided inside. “It goes back a little further than what the agency would have given you.”

  “How much further?” Wheaton asked.

  “It’s this or I have to dispose of your body,” Alison said, “which is so not what I went to school for.”

  Wheaton squirmed. “How much further?” he repeated. He tried to force his chair to jump away from her approach. “Are we talking vegetable or are we talking last week?”

  Alison tilted her head from side to side. “Eh, somewhere in between, I’d guess. I don’t really know. I’m not the scientist.”

  Wheaton, now panic-stricken, looked at Wilbur.

  “Different sort of scientist,” Wilbur said. “But I put a keen amount of trust in those who are better at these things than I.” He stepped aside, allowing Alison better access to Wheaton. “Go on, my dear.”

  The scream Wheaton emitted as Alison hit the needle’s plunger was deafening. Wilbur wished for a rag to put in the poor man’s mouth. When it was over, Alison took the weapon, and Wilbur removed the bonds from Wheaton’s limbs.

  “Are we going to the circus?” Wheaton mumbled against Wilbur’s shoulder.

  Oh, dear.

  “I suppose, sir.” Wilbur glanced up at Alison. “I can’t leave him here like this.”

  “Put him in a taxi,” she said. “Give the driver his home address. I have things to take to the agency.”

  Agreeing to reconvene at their own home after both errands, Wilbur deposited a kiss on the back of his wife’s hand and hoisted Wheaton up, wrapping the heavier man’s arm around his own shoulders.

  “Where’s my mommy?” Wheaton asked.

  “You’ll be all right, sir.”

  But Wilbur knew this client was likely never going to be quite all right ever again.

  Wednesday, August 11, 2100, Avon, Vermont, NBE

  Kris liked old jazz records. She liked pianos and hi-hat cymbals and saxophones, all things she’d only seen in films, never in person, and she liked to listen to the lot of it on old records, great crates of them found in dusty shops. The technology to run things off plastic discs and streamed from the ether was gone, the power in the agency house all diverted to the time travel mechanisms, but the Victrola replica only needed a few watts of power. With just a near-invisible needle, a few inches of black vinyl engraved with subtle grooves via a technology so old, so lost it might as well have been magic, and Kris was awash in the tenderness of fingers pressing ivory, lips blowing across brass and wood, dead fingers and mouths working instruments that were now long destroyed, burned in battles or buried deep in landfills.

  These dead men—and, dammit, Kris knew most of the instrumentalists were indeed men, but that was apparently something they were good for, coaxing these things into scales and climaxes—inspired nostalgia in her for things she’d never experienced, things she never would, unless she let Ben and Vere slip a bit of microchip into her hand and send her molecules splattering across the centuries.

  No, that wasn’t her. Kris lived for the stories, lived for the flickers of images on a sputtering tablet screen or sepia-toned photographs in a well-read book. She lived for the way the clients recounted their journeys, and she lived for these haunting, tinny sounds from the point of the needle. These men’s names were like mantras to her, these moments alone with the Victrola were her church, her meditation, her everything.

  Dave Brubeck. Miles Davis. George Winston. John Coltrane. Chet Baker. Django Reinhardt.

  But today it was Harry Connick, Jr., though none of his schmaltzy vocals for her. She’d returned all those to the shop with a sigh of disappointment. “No singing,” she’d told the owner. He’d promptly given her vinyl dubs of his earlier work, piano solos or spare arrangements where the New Orleans prodigy accompanied just a bass and drums. This was where Kris’s heart swelled today, lying on the floor of the agency’s front room with her eyes shut, listening to a dead man’s nimble fingers running across the keys of a tune called “I Mean You.” Ben’s cat Bodhi was nestled next to her, and his rumbling purr was like an extra bass line beneath the music. Kris reveled in the song even as a stack of mail sat unopened, even as she knew things were bad and Ben and Eddy were fretting about important, scary matters. Somewhere deep in her soul she felt a pang of knowledge that it was too long since fingers had touched her the way Connick’s caressed the piano keys…

  Somewhere there was a girl with dark, sad eyes, brows shaved back to effect a strange, haunted look, glossy hair in a shaggy blue Mohawk. This girl had hands almost as magical as these musicians’ elegant hands, but their very absence from Kris’s lithe body had gone on longer than their relationship had lasted.

  Maura…

  The track changed, and this one was more strings heavy, the bass line thrumming out the melodic motif of Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock.” Kris preferred the piano to dominate instead and wasn’t a big fan of the tune. She sighed, stretched, and peeled herself from the rug. Bodhi stretched and sauntered off to the kitchen. One of Kris’s feet protested, pins-and-needles numb. She shook it, favored it, half-limping over to the record player.

  “You getting back to work?”

  It was Ben, tired and irritable. Kris took the needle off the record and filled the room with the sound of the fire licking quietly at the inside of the hearth.

  “Just takin’ a break, boss,” she said. “Mail’s in.” She went to her desk and sorted through the stack of letters. “Everything okay?” One pile for Ben, one pile for Vere, one pile for the agency generally—her pile, by default—and one pile of obvious junk—her other pile by default, but that one went easier and mostly wound up as kindling. She took one letter from the pile, hand addressed in calligraphy to Ben. “You might want this one first.”

  Ben opened it. “An invoice,” he read.

  Kris held out her hand. “That gets done with accounts,” she told him. “I do those on Tuesdays.”

  “Not this one.” Ben tucked it away inside his vest pocket.

  “No offense, man, but that’s my job,” Kris said. “Like I said. Tuesdays. If you need it to go out faster, I can do a batch this afternoon instead. It’s gotta go in the ledger.”

  Ben’s shoulders sagged. “Kris, no. Not this one.” He stepped toward her and gave her a gentle pat on the arm. “It’s nothing. Just…I need to do this one.” His eyes got a faraway look in them. “Actually, Eddy does this one, to be precise.” He passed Kris and headed downstairs.

  Invoice. Maybe for the cleanup of Mister Wheaton? Oh, geez. Kris knew it was the contractors she’d never met, the contractors who’d apparently succeeded in doing whatever it is they did that resulted in there being something she wasn’t supposed to see locked up in the cabinet at the top of the stairs leading to the third floor.

  Kris crept to the laboratory door and listened for a moment. They were both down there, Ben and Vere, and the conversation was hushed and calm. How long would they be?

  Screw it. If they find me, I’ll just be honest. But if they don’t find me…

  Kris took a poker from the fireplace before slipping up to the staircase at the center of the building, running up the treads two by two, until she reached the cabinet on the landing before the attic.

  It was polished cherry wood, dark and oil-scented, one of the pieces Ben still had from his family before converting the home into the business. Though Ben locked it once he put the object inside,
he didn’t know the lock wasn’t as secure as it seemed or that Kris had another way in.

  She knelt on the carpet in front of the cabinet, turned her wrists a bit to limber them up, and then wriggled her hands, palms up, between the floor and the cabinet’s bottom panel. With some small effort, Kris was able to push the panel through a thin slot at the unit’s rear just enough until there was a soft “thunk” sound, indicating the panel hit the wall. She slid the fireplace poker into the gap, up inside the front of the cabinet, and jimmied the lock from the inside.

  The door swung open, revealing mostly things that would only be treasures to the Jonson family. Kris had only ever broken into the cabinet in the first place out of boredom, not larceny, and the lack of anything much beyond old travelogues and family photographs kept her disinterested. But she’d seen Vere hand off a package to Ben, who then squirreled it away in here.

  And there it was, no longer in its wrappings but just sitting on a shelf as if it were a curio instead of a weapon.

  It was silver and larger than her palm, with an oblong barrel that started out somewhat bulbous toward the grip and then slimmed as it reached the muzzle. Where there should be a hole for a bullet to eject at the muzzle instead was only more smooth metal, making Kris wonder if this was, indeed, a weapon after all. Just because it resembled a gun didn’t mean that’s what it was. She cradled it in her right hand.

  The grip seemed to shift and undulate beneath her skin, molding itself to the exact size and shape of her palm and fingers. The movement tickled and then stopped once the grip customized itself for her.

  No, this is a gun. What else but a weapon would actually be designed to do that?

  And yet there was no visible trigger, no buttons or latches or levers visible anywhere. She examined the base of the grip, the underside of the barrel…nothing. Kris raised her arm and pretended to aim at the vase on a small table at the end of the hallway. She lined up the slight rise at the end of the barrel with the very center of the vase, squeezed one eye shut to get better aim, and then—

  Dust.

  There was no sound, no explosion, no flying pieces of vase anywhere, but one second there was a smooth white vase with jaunty blue flowers dancing across its surface, and the next second the vase was gone, replaced by a small pyramid of dust just a few inches tall.

  Kris stared at the gun, wanting but afraid to drop it. She placed it back on its shelf in the cabinet and shut it back up.

  Scrambling to the table, she stared, wide-eyed, at the dust. Some was white, some was blue, and it was all the remains of the vase. The valuable, antique vase that survived God-knew-how-many wars and political upheavals and moves from place to place. Kris imagined an older woman with Ben’s features lovingly packing it in newspaper and straw in a cardboard box labeled “VERMONT.” And that same woman, not quite as old, smiling at the vase in a store window. A young man with a paintbrush as thin as horsehair painstakingly adding blue swirls to the vase’s surface before firing.

  How many hands had this porcelain gone through before winding up on this table in this hallway? How many bouquets of flowers had been lovingly displayed in it, only to have the thing be relegated to nothing in the blink of an eye, and at her own hand?

  Kris thought of her record collection, the hands that played her favorite trills and melodies now rotted to bone, shoved into boxes underground all across the world. She’d meditated to those records, dreamed to those records, loved to them. What if they were cruelly ripped from her life? Was this vase a gift from mother to daughter, from daughter to son? Did it celebrate births and weddings and—

  A door shut somewhere far downstairs. Kris wiped at moisture at the corners of her eyes and dashed across the hall to a water closet. She grabbed a towel from the rack and swept the vase’s remains into it, which she then bundled up into a tiny, makeshift bag. She picked up the fireplace poker and raced back to her desk.

  But Ben was already standing there, and his caterpillar brows angled downward to point at his nose. “What were you doing upstairs?” He gestured to the poker. “What’s going on?”

  “I heard a noise,” she managed, breathless. “I, uh, thought somebody was breaking in.”

  “Upstairs?” Ben nodded to the staircase. “How could—”

  “I don’t know,” Kris interrupted. She put the poker back in its stand next to the hearth and hoped he wouldn’t notice the towel still clutched in her left hand. “Crazy shit’s goin’ down lately. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “If something like that happens again, just call for me, okay?”

  “You’re so busy. I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “I worry. It’s what I do,” Ben said. “It’s why I can’t…Nevermind.”

  Something about the way his shoulders sagged pulled at Kris. Ben was never a happy man, but he’d grown more content in his business venture, relishing the stories the clients brought back. “You’ve been nothing but kind to me, you and your family,” Kris said. She opened the towel and held out its contents to him. “I’m sorry. I have to explain something.”

  After Kris related the story of the gun, Ben’s mood changed. “I guess that thing isn’t so secure after all,” he said.

  Kris flinched. “I don’t…that’s not a habit or anything. I guess I wanted to know what it was.”

  “I get that,” Ben said. “Trust me, I get that. Hoo, boy. Okay. If it’s not scaring you too much, you wanna show me what that gun can do?” Ben headed for the stairs.

  “So long as I don’t aim it at any more priceless heirlooms, I guess we’re good,” Kris replied, following him.

  “Nah, I picked that thing up at a garage sale. Fifty cents. And it was fake.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  Ben paused in his ascent to the next story. “Of course not.”

  Thursday, November 8, 1888, London, England

  I can’t do this anymore. I can’t waste my trips on this side project. I have to get to the child.

  And yet here Claudio was, long past midnight, watching a young woman in a pub. He was seated several tables away, barely touching his own drink, but the woman downed ale after ale and sang, loudly and off key, in a thick accent. Irish? Welsh? It was hard to place, but it wasn’t the Cockney lilt of the men vying for her attentions.

  “Aw, c’mon, then, Ginger, let’s give us a go tonight, eh?”

  “No, no, not ’im, Mary. I got a bottle of rum at me house, and the misses is out.”

  “Please, Miss Jeanette. Give us a go.”

  “Gents, I can’t tonight,” the young woman replied, answering to so many different nicknames that Claudio had no idea what her parents called her. “My Joe is comin’ home and there’ll be a row. He’s tossed out our flatmate, and I’ve got to help ’er sort things ’forehand.” She took one last swig from her tankard and scrambled off the top of the table where she’d perched amongst her suitors. “Ta, loves. I’ll be ’round in a few days or so.”

  She wobbled out, her pale bosom heaving with the effort, but it seemed she wasn’t so drunk as she’d let on. Claudio slipped out after her and once in the street, the woman smoothed her strawberry blond hair back into a neat bun. She whistled and strolled toward a row of flats near an alley.

  Claudio balled his hands into fists. This would be the last, he decided. He’d slaughtered several now, and each one made him feel more alive, more powerful, and more real.

  It’s training. Training for wiping out the whole lot of them, the Empiricist scum, the race traitors, the women who wrong me.

  But still he wanted the girl—Virginia—so he could protect her and bring her up to take his place when he died. Virginia was female, and he would raise her as his daughter. So if women were half the problem, how could Claudio curtail his rage so it wouldn’t explode against the baby when he finally got her? Virginia was the most racially pure human on the continent, and yet she would still grow up to be one of those foul women, inferior to men. He would have to learn not to hurt h
er.

  Channel it into the grown women. Channel it, and then make sure to raise Virginia right so she won’t grow up a bitch, so she’ll know her place and treat her men with proper respect.

  This woman, this Mary or Jeanette or Ginger…she was too forward in her sexuality, too brazen and delighted with herself, too full in the corset and too wide-hipped and replete with fertility. It was disgusting, the flagrant way she took up space in the alley. It was disgusting and provocative, and Claudio wanted to possess her, wanted to tear and rend and then look inside to see how everything worked. Maybe then he would understand.

  Virginia. I’m doing this for Virginia so she won’t grow up in a world with people who don’t acknowledge their superiority, people who mix and mingle and think permissive thoughts.

  The woman spun on her heel and turned to face him. Claudio stepped back.

  She grinned. “You was followin’ me, yeah?” She batted her eyelashes at him. “I was goin’ to take the night off, but if you got somethin’ for me, maybe I’d be coaxed to have somethin’ for you.” Her smile widened, and Claudio was shocked to see that her teeth were barely yellow.

  She’s very young. The rest were older, but this one can’t be much out of her teens.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Mary Jane,” she replied. “But if that don’t suit ya, it could be whatever ya want.” She stepped closer and slid a finger along his lapel. “What d’ya fancy I call you, hmm? ’Cause you look like a right devil, you do, all that dark hair and bein’ just a slip of a man—”

  “A slip?” Claudio swatted her hand away.

  Mary Jane pouted, displaying the fullness of her crimson mouth. “I just meant you’re passin’ elegant, sir. You’s the sort what can eat like a horse ’n’ not gain an ounce. I like it. It suits your face.” She examined his face now, growing serious. “Got a haunted look ’bout ya like ya lost a lover.”