by Paul Jenkins
At the end of one section, a small alley led into a circular cul de sac. Wil was startled to see that the alley was lit by old-style gaslights, and he had to stop for a moment and rub his eyes to see if the illusion might go away. Surely not, he thought to himself. Surely, the basic fundamentals of marketing dictated that one should attract customers by use of fancy neon signs and special offers advertised on the Internet. This particular shop seemed to say, “If you have the nerve to come down this alley and browse our storefront, you probably qualify as the type of customer we need.”
Intrigued, Wil made his way toward what appeared to be a dilapidated knickknack and trinket shop. A small, rusted sign above the window had once upon a time been emblazoned with the words LUCY’S MAGIC LOCKER. Nowadays, the worn letters looked as if they had reached retirement age and would have been better off emblazoning a shuffleboard court somewhere in Florida.
Wil chuckled to himself as he scanned the detritus that had collected over the years inside the shop window. He’d once read about a very large section of the Pacific Ocean that was, essentially, a floating pile of junk that had been trapped over the decades by various subaquatic currents. As Wil recalled, this junkyard of the sea was destined to simply grow and grow until it eventually reached land simply by the volume of its surface area. If he wasn’t mistaken, someone must have discovered this floating pile of crud and deposited an arbitrary section of it inside the window of Lucy’s Magic Locker. No doubt, Mr. Dinsdale would be delighted to learn that his Curioddity Museum was infinitely less dreadful than this place, although Wil suspected the old man would probably have an interest in turning it into some kind of exhibit overflow.
It would have been generous to describe the items on sale as “used,” and perhaps a little more accurate to describe them as “abused.” An old stuffed teddy bear looked as though it may once have entertained one of the crowned princes of Europe, assuming teddy bears had been invented at any point in the third century. Next to this, a stained black teakettle with a hole in it was propped against a single roller skate from the third Ming dynasty. Wil grimaced a little, imagining the roller skate’s lost twin floating on a cardboard box somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. There was nothing for him in Lucy’s Magic Locker save for a collection of rusted items and a possible respiratory infection. But just as his eyes began to move in the direction of the market street, and the rest of his Tuesday, he caught sight of something amazing, something completely unexpected: a particular item that he would never have imagined he’d see again in a million years. It was an old box with faded two-color graphics—an item he hadn’t laid eyes on since he was a little boy—and it was the encapsulation of all that he had ever been, and all the things he had ever lost.
For there—hidden underneath an old newspaper and partly covered by some old socks—was the most exciting object in the history of all existence: a Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit!
* * *
WIL PAUSED for a moment, trying to understand his emotions. He felt big tears welling up in his eyes, and a lump in his throat that wanted to bring up a cry of joy. Was this really the very toy he’d always wished his father had kept instead of throwing it into the garbage along with all of the other bittersweet memories? Unable to take his eyes off the Tesla Kit—hoping beyond hope that no one would enter the store and purchase it in the few seconds he’d take to make it inside—Wil moved toward the slightly dodgy-looking door of Lucy’s Magic Locker. He rather hoped Lucy would be a kindly old lady with a penchant for making people’s dreams come true, though he was willing to admit to himself that he would pay for the Tesla Kit no matter the price.
Inside the store, a little bell tinkled like glass as Wil entered. It barely seemed like the kind of bell one might use to alert oneself to the presence of customers, and better suited to sending a person to sleep. The inside of Lucy’s Magic Locker was—in terms of pure, unadulterated trash—a gold mine, a veritable cornucopia of stuff that nobody wanted. Bookshelves full of old, dusty tomes crowded into what might be mistaken for aisles. Next to the far-too-old sales counter was a damaged workbench covered in a thick layer of dust, which really didn’t surprise Wil one bit since everything in the store seemed to be broken. But apart from the various layers of discarded junk, there was no sign of Lucy.
“Hello?” called Wil, nervously. “Is anybody there? Hello?” No answer. He wondered for a moment if he might not find the skeletal remains of poor old Lucy hidden under a pile of shoes at the far end of the store. “Hello!” he called again, this time more forcefully. No doubt the poor old dear’s hearing device was of the same pedigree and epoch as the other contents of her store. Wil waited for someone to emerge from the back of the store, probably with a large funnel held to her ear. But no such luck: the only thing he could hear was the dripping of a tap in a sink somewhere.
For a brief moment, Wil considered leaving. Perhaps the store owner had gone next door to borrow a cup of sugar. Maybe she was taking a very early afternoon nap. But he quickly dismissed these notions of leaving in such cowardly fashion; perhaps someone was at the back of the store piling books. If so, he thought, they would probably do better to restack the ones up front and create a clear pathway though the aisles. Wil moved cautiously toward the back of the store, which carried the unmistakable musty smell of old, unread books and mouse droppings. This wasn’t the sort of place you frequented to stock up on your antiques, thought Wil; it was more like the kind of place you nervously entered as a kid in order to retrieve your lost Frisbee.
At the back of the store was a mishmash of clutter that seemed to possess a kind of New Age theme, Wil thought, assuming that age had begun in, oh, say, the 1950s. The floor plan had clearly not been thought out very carefully since anyone with half an ounce of common sense would have brought all the bookshelves back here and put them against the back wall. While there was not a shelf in sight, Wil did find a strange collection of smooth, round rocks and a cracked crystal that had dropped a few shards along the way. A partially inflated beach ball waited forlornly at the base of a pile of old sporting equipment that would not have been out of place at the 1900 Paris Olympics. And just underneath an old persimmon golf club sat a battered wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl that could have passed for the one Mr. Dinsdale had commissioned him to find. Not a bad candidate, thought Wil, as he picked the box up to examine it. Of course, it was blindingly unremarkable, which only added to its possible authenticity. Wil turned the box upside down, where the unmistakable legend MA#E IN #####N was revealed in faded capital letters. Wil chuckled to himself. Made in Taiwan, indeed. His search was narrowing by the minute.
As Wil flipped the box this way and that, wondering if he possessed the courage to try and pass it off as Mr. Dinsdale’s coveted box of Levity, he felt the strange sensation of movement around him. Looking up, he could see nothing out of the ordinary, really. But he got the distinct impression that someone had just walked by. He waited a few moments for something to happen—something that must explain the strange sensation. He imagined what it must be like to close one’s eyes and then stand in a room full of a hundred silent people; this is exactly how he felt, he determined. He looked back down at the wooden box, only for the sensation to occur again. This time he was not mistaken: someone had definitely moved by, and he had the strangest feeling he’d looked across to the back wall of the store and seen an open room, which had suddenly disappeared and been replaced by the wall just as he was looking up at it.
Another movement … this time in Wil’s peripheral vision: Wil tried to think back about just how many of these strange incidents he’d encountered in the last day or so. Where had he felt this way before? He counted roughly four or five peripheral intruders over that time span, including the strange crates inside the Curioddity Museum and the apparition of the girl inside the featureless room. And because this kind of thing was now less unsettling and becoming slightly the norm, it took Wil just slightly longer than it might have otherwise ta
ken to react.
As Wil looked up, he was astonished to see an attractive young woman with brown, curly hair moving rapidly toward him with her arms raised high above her shoulders.
He was equally astonished when she smashed him over the head with an oversized copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, though he was forced to concede as he fell to the ground, stunned, that this was a novel approach.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FIRST thing that struck Wil—or the second thing that struck him (since the first was, technically, a large book)—was that the ceilings of Lucy’s Magic Locker were painted a very dark shade of green: Oxford green, he speculated, or perhaps something a little more synthetic, like army green. No matter the exact hue, he felt a special kinship with this color—and this ceiling in particular—since to concentrate on anything else at this moment in time would be to invite a state of unconsciousness. To Wil, the ceiling was the color of Heaven, and he would have smiled a satisfied smile and drifted off to sleep if the thought of waking up didn’t make his head hurt so.
Instead, he frowned. An annoying blob of something kept getting between him and his view of the nice, comfortable ceiling. The blob was babbling at him in a language he didn’t understand. Trying to ignore the thing by smiling at it only seemed to make it angry. For a blob, it possessed quite a healthy head of brown, curly hair. As Wil’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, the searing pain, and the contrast of the ceiling (hunter green, definitely hunter green), he could see that the blob was morphing into an attractive-yet-dangerous young woman who brandished a copy of War and Peace as if it were an offensive weapon. Wil found himself wishing the girl had spent a little time reading the “peace” section of the book.
“Who are you?” asked the young woman/blob. “What are you doing back here?”
“I’m looking at your ceiling,” replied Wil. “It’s green.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“And hitting someone over the head with a book does?”
“That depends. Why is your head all covered with blood?” The girl brandished the book a little more dangerously, just in case it was not yet clear she meant business.
“I think because you just hit me with that book,” replied Wil.
“Okay, sure … but I only did half of it. You already had blood on your head when you came in.”
“That’s no reason to hit me over the head. Is that Oxford or army?” Wil looked around him: the inlaid wooden box he’d been examining had gone clattering across the floor and was now wedged under an old baseball bat. There was evidence of neither angels nor ambulance workers, which Wil took to be a positive sign. He began to giggle, uncontrollably. Post-concussion syndrome didn’t seem so bad after all.
“Hey, cut it out,” remonstrated the young woman.
“You know, I just realized something,” Wil offered as he tried to lift his head. “I took the middle path, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m upside down.” He felt he should make a token effort to sit up and see if he was in a snowdrift but the idea of it was too much to bear. If he was going to meet his end at the hand of an admittedly attractive dingbat, she was going to have to finish the job without any protest on his part.
The young woman eyed him with a confused look. Perhaps, Wil thought, as she lowered the book from its attack position, realization was beginning to dawn on her. This was the kind of awkward silence people observe when one of them is considering damages, lawsuits, and possible ways out of both.
“I came in to ask you about the Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit you have in the window,” Wil volunteered, hoping this might break the tension. His head literally felt like it was splitting in two as he made an effort to recover by propping himself up on one elbow. “Aren’t you supposed to ask customers if they need help finding anything before you bash them over the head with a heavy object?”
“You were skulking around the back of my store—”
“I was browsing!”
“Okay, you were browsing. But how do I know you’re not a crazy person?”
“Hey, I’m not the one hitting people over the head with a book. I take it you must be Lucy?” Wil proffered his hand, partly in hopes that the young woman would deem this a harmless introduction but mostly because he hoped she might help him to his feet.
The girl narrowed her eyes. “How do you know my name?” she questioned. “Did someone send you here?”
“It says Lucy’s Magic Locker on the sign out front.”
“Oh. Right.”
* * *
IT FELT to Wil as though a few more seconds of awkward silence would be fitting, just so the girl might fully comprehend the consequences of her actions. He had, after all, been assailed during the simple execution of his quite innocuous purchasing activities. Apologies were no doubt in order and—if this was to be turned to his advantage—perhaps a generous offer on her part to provide him with a free gift (such as the Nikola Tesla Junior Genius Mega-Volt Test Kit) in return for his cooperation. She was a pretty girl, to be sure, but that in no way disqualified her from her duties as a responsible store owner. And being a responsible store owner meant that she was obliged to offer him fair service, reasonable pricing, and zero whacks over the head with anything written by Tolstoy. Wil waited for an apology but was to be quickly disappointed. Lucy widened her eyes a little—apparently impressed by her own bravery and the copious amounts of blood this had withdrawn from Wil’s head—and then she began to snigger.
“Wow, I really got you good, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Look, I don’t expect that to be a source of pride—”
“I mean you never know, do you?” she continued, disregarding the possible extent of the damage she’d just caused. “Like, if you went to war, or something, you never know if you’d run away or stand your ground.” The girl was beginning to warm to her subject, and Wil felt it was neither his place nor inclination to stand in the way of her shining moment, not while half of his life support dripped down the side of his head. “I mean, one minute you’re minding your own business piling some books and the next you’re, like, Enter the Dragon … hy-ahh!”
The girl’s sudden enthusiastic demonstration of martial arts bravado was startling, considering the circumstances. “Yes,” Wil agreed as he pushed himself up from the floor, sat up, and shook his head, dazed, “I’d imagine you’ll be up for a medal or something. Do they give out awards for attacking defenseless customers when they’re not looking?”
“Oh, God, I’m really sorry.” The girl seemed to immediately soften. She stuck out her hand and smiled the sweetest of smiles. “Lucy Price. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Wil. Morgan. Wil Morgan,” Wil responded as he tried to remember both his manners and his name. It wasn’t so much the pain scrambling his neurons, or the fact that he was sitting on a pile of old magazines—it was the girl’s sudden and immediate transformation from maniacal to charming. He felt as though he’d just ridden a dragster from two hundred miles per hour to zero after a computer malfunction in the dashboard had accidentally deployed his parachute.
For the strangest reason, Wil felt as though he had met Lucy before. But he also felt that bringing this up under such bizarre circumstances would be a little forward of him. He’d never been much good at talking to pretty girls, and when in their company, he constantly fretted that anything he said might be misconstrued as a pickup line. Whatever the case, he felt ridiculous sitting on the floor and bleeding profusely. And so he propped himself up a bit and allowed Lucy to help him to his feet. The ground wobbled.
As they shook hands, Lucy seemed ever so slightly distracted. She gripped Wil’s hand just a little longer than might seem appropriate, and narrowed her eyes. Wil had seen this look before, most often on television during daytime soap operas. He never understood those either.
“Where do I know you from, Wil?” asked Lucy. “You look familiar.”
“I wish I knew,” replied Wil, suddenly feeling self-conscious. “I�
��ve had a weird couple of days, and I’ve been seeing a lot of movement in my peripheral vision. Have you been stalking me or am I just a target of opportunity?”
“I didn’t hear you come in. This is the first time I’ve ever attacked a customer, I promise.”
“Lucky me.”
“We need to get some of that blood off so we can see your handsome face,” she said. “Come on.”
With that unexpected comment Lucy pulled a very dazed and confused Wil Morgan to his feet and pointed him toward a little kitchen at the back of the store, which could be seen poking through an open door. As he allowed himself to be led away, Wil found himself ever so slightly charmed by the girl’s light step and the way her bright-orange gypsy-style dress flowed around her curvaceous figure. She moved lightly across the floor, leading him past the maze of discarded old books and centuries-old metal junk. Was it his imagination or had this pretty girl just flirted with him?
* * *
AT THE kitchen sink, Lucy dutifully mopped the side of Wil’s bloody head with an old sponge that Wil suspected doubled as a botulism farm. The pain was beginning to recede, and in its place a kind of dull ache was emerging. But Wil didn’t mind; this girl seemed relatable—if not actually remorseful—and he conceded it might be difficult to blame her fully since half the damage to his head had been done by a street sign the day before. Wil winced as the sponge smeared blood across his cheek, and cold water dripped down the back of his neck.
“You know this might have been a less painful introduction if your doorbell was actually loud enough to do its job,” he said, indignantly. “Usually, doorbells don’t sound like someone trying to keep a secret.”
Lucy’s eyes widened, and she chuckled. “Yeah, but it wouldn’t have been so memorable.”
