Curioddity
Page 31
“Again, wonderful,” agreed Wil. “But I tend to think one of the parties isn’t really going to be very accommodating right now.” He gently shoved Cousin Engelbert through the near-darkness toward the perpetual motion exhibition room.
“Ah! I think I’m beginning to understand!” called Dinsdale as he and Mary now hustled in the direction Wil wanted everyone to go. “The perpetual motion machines … of course!”
“Oh yeah?” Wil was beginning to pick up a head of steam—partly fueled by his general sense of agitation but mostly fueled by a sense of self-preservation. “Would you mind explaining to the rest of us, Mr. Dinsdale?”
“The perpetual exhibits don’t need electricity!” cried the old man. “They work just fine by themselves!”
“Doing what?”
“It doesn’t matter! I’m sure you’ll think of something!” And having satisfied his cryptic urges, Mr. Dinsdale forged toward the perpetual exhibition room just as the far end of the hallway caved in and a very testy blue monstrosity came through it, yelling profanities.
Not to lose the momentum he had so recently gained, Barry Morgan found Wil in the hallway as the group clattered toward the room with hollow-point bullets whizzing above their heads. “As it turns out, Wil, there was a clerical error!” he yelled above the noise of bullets clattering into the walls.
“What?”
“A clerical error! The old electricity bill was paid in full a century ago! Plus the thirteen-cent late fee!”
“That’s nice, Dad! Can we please take this up later?”
“What?”
The conversation was getting out of hand in more ways than one. “I’d like to focus on survival, if you don’t mind, Dad!” yelled Wil above the whine of Marcus James’s laser weapons. “It’s just that I’ve met a very nice girl who I think could be the one and I’d like to be around to find out if our second official date is as interesting as the first one!”
“Oh!”
Nearby, Lucy was enjoying herself thoroughly. “Is this still our first date?” she asked, impishly, as a nearby shelf carrying combine harvester parts from ancient Sumeria clattered to the floor by her feet. “Only I’m beginning to have second thoughts!”
* * *
WIL AND his group managed to round a corner into the perpetual exhibition room just as a final spattering of bullets went across the wall next to them. At the far end of the hall, the guns fell silent, and only an ominous blue glow now remained, which grew in intensity as the exoskeleton approached. Marcus was considering his options, which seemed limited to shooting hollow-point bullets or blasting people with his lasers.
A quick glance about the room revealed a disturbing scarcity of additional exits. But Wil already knew that escape was not an option—he was going to follow the random set of instructions about to be given to him by his future dad. Mary Gold glided her way to the back of the exhibits and stood next to a shelf, while Dinsdale and Engelbert chose the relative safety of a perpetual motion machine that looked like an egg and had supposedly been a gift to Sir Winston Churchill from a race of aliens from Sixty-one Cygni. Wil and Lucy set up shop across the room behind a device that looked like a pinball machine, which—upon further inspection—turned out to be a pinball machine.
“Now what?” asked Lucy, who in Wil’s opinion was acting a little too wide-eyed and enthusiastic, considering the probabilities facing her.
“I don’t know—wait!” Suddenly remembering the museum’s logic, Wil fished the Lemon phone from his pocket.
“Greetings, Wil Morgan,” said SARA cautiously. “Would you like the latest stock market projections for Marcus James Industries, Incorporated?”
“Not right now, SARA, but thank you anyway. I’m sure that’ll be fun later. For the moment, please dial the Museum of Curioddity’s main number.”
“Dialing…”
SARA’s rudimentary cell phone function—almost an afterthought to the Lemon phone’s designers, it seemed—now sent out its request into the ether. Down the hallway in Mr. Dinsdale’s office, a phone began to ring.
“What are you doing?” hissed Lucy, who was finally beginning to get a more accurate sense of her predicament as the bluish glow of Marcus’s exoskeleton closed in on the entrance to her hiding spot.
“I’m not doing anything,” whispered Wil through gritted teeth. “I think it’s doing it all by itself. Whatever ‘it’ is! Dad! Here!”
Wil tossed the Lemon phone to his father across the room. Barry picked it up and listened as, presumably, Mr. Dinsdale’s odd little message repeated itself once more.
“There’s no one answering!” wailed Barry.
“Dad, that’s not important right now! What’s important is that you do exactly as I say, okay?”
“Okay!”
“And don’t hang up!”
* * *
WIL PONDERED for a moment, for a moment was all he was going to get. Outside the room, the blue glow was increasing in intensity: this suggested not only that Marcus James was getting closer, but also that he was not going to be arriving in a very good mood at all.
Next to Wil, Lucy breathed heavily with anticipation. She either had a death wish, or a delusional belief that she and the group were going to come out of this unscathed, no matter the certainty that they were all going to die at the hands of an angry maniac.
The Sequitur beeped inside his pocket. Without his trusty Air-Max 4000, Wil wasn’t sure he’d be able to concentrate on relaxing properly. He had a terrible feeling the strange device was about as useful to him right now as a screen door on a submarine.
All in all, things were not looking entirely positive. And yet despite all of this, Wil felt a sort of exhilaration, as if he were transported in time and headed down a snow-covered hill on the back of a tea tray. Across the room, his father seemed genuinely excited to be involved in something life threatening. Today was the first time Wil had seen his dad enthusiastic since he was seven years old and had accurately recited his nine-times table in front of some relatives at Thanksgiving.
If there was going to be a way out of this, Wil reasoned, it was going to require quite a stretch of the imagination. And if he wasn’t going to trust his imagination after the week he’d experienced, exactly when would be the right time?
Wil steeled himself. For the first time in years, he felt completely in control of his destiny, simply by giving up any semblance of control and trusting to random chance. He rolled his English penny over and over in his pocket.
“Mom,” Wil whispered quietly in the general direction of the ceiling, “I hope to God you know what you’re doing.”
Lucy leaned in and kissed his cheek. “That was from her,” she said.
Comforted by this notion, Wil let go of the English penny and pulled out the lightning catcher, which he had been carrying in his other pocket. Quite a miniature storm had been building inside the green bottle since the last time he’d looked inside. And it was at this exact moment—as Wil stared into the heart of the storm—that the random connectivity of chance, imagination, and sheer, blind luck collided in his cerebral cortex, and he knew exactly what he was going to do.
* * *
DAD!” WIL cried from across the room, “I need you to leave a message for me! Don’t ask questions because it’s not going to make any sense! Just tell me to leave some of that blue clay I was carrying on the counter at the front desk! And Mr. Dinsdale, I need you to go and stand in the middle of the aisle, in plain sight! When I give the word, duck!”
“Righty ho! I remember your Dad leaving that message on the answering machine!” called Dinsdale, cheerfully, as he emerged from his hiding place and moved into the center of the room.
Wil grasped the lightning catcher firmly in his hand and positioned it like a grenade. The bottle trembled slightly. He crouched down below the level of the pinball table and positioned himself so that Mr. Dinsdale was not standing directly in the line of the doorway. Outside, the ominous blue glow was getting closer.
Outside, Marcus James had hastened his stomping and was making a beeline for the entrance to the perpetual exhibit, sensing his opponents had given the game away. “Dinsdale!” cried the maddened pitchman. “There’s nowhere to hide, you old coot! Give me back my property!”
“Attaboy, Dad!” hissed Wil. “Now tell me to open one of the crates! And remind Mr. Dinsdale that when Marcus comes in he needs to duck!”
“Oh, and maybe loosen one of the gates?” called Barry into the Lemon phone.
“Not gates!” cried Lucy, exasperated. “Crates!”
“Oh, right. Crates! Also, tell Mr. Dinsdale to duck—”
* * *
WITH A crackle of electrical discharge, a blue glow skirted the corner of the door and became a rather angry individual with overly white teeth, dressed in an exoskeleton. Upon seeing Dinsdale standing before him, Marcus quickly leveled his hand cannon.
Wil tossed the lightning catcher directly at Dinsdale’s head. “Duck!” he yelled as loudly as he could. Quickly, the little curator bent at the waist so that he could watch the proceedings from a very different angle, and the green bottle sailed over his head.
From Marcus James’s perspective, Dinsdale suddenly disappeared from view, to be replaced by a rapidly approaching green glass bottle, which promptly smashed into the exoskeleton’s chest plate and proceeded to do something most unusual. From within the bottle, a huge bolt of lightning shot out in all directions, fritzing half of the perpetual motion machines nearby, and most of Marcus James’s onboard systems. With a shriek of pain, the overzealous pitchman staggered forward, clutching at his various armored body parts. He began to rapidly shed his protective headgear and gloves, while a very localized tempest raged all around him.
“He’s short-circuiting!” Lucy yelled to Wil above the noise of the storm. “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know!” cried Wil. “I didn’t get this far along in the planning phase!”
Another massive bolt of lightning suddenly shot out of the localized thunderstorm, causing Wil to dive for cover as it struck the pinball machine next to him. Lucy let out a small yelp of fear, and quickly backed away. Just as suddenly as it had arrived, the little storm folded in upon itself, leaving a man with slightly smoking hair in its wake, and a blue exoskeleton desperately trying to reboot its operating systems.
There was silence for a moment. A familiar metallic voice now made its presence known. “Greetings, Wil Morgan,” said SARA from the Lemon phone that Barry Morgan was still holding. “Kindly turn your attention to the far end of the perpetual motion section of the museum.”
Marcus moaned slightly, like a golfer who’d just used his Air-Max 4000 to hit a hole in one only to realize there were no immediate witnesses. Wil turned his attention to the far end of the room, where Leonardo da Vinci’s malfunctioning Perpetual Emotion machine purred happily along, throwing out a few sparks with which to entice its next victim. Before Wil could even fathom how events had handily unfolded in his favor—and before Marcus could recover and bring his vicious machinery back online—Wil suddenly grabbed the pitchman and shoved him roughly in the direction of the Perpetual Emotion machine. Marcus wobbled slightly, and with the weight of his exoskeleton’s immobile legs rendering control virtually impossible, he clattered a few feet and toppled toward Leonardo’s sparking monstrosity. With a yelp, Marcus raised his hand to prevent himself from falling into the machine’s open orifice. But it was too late: his raised arm went all the way in to the shoulder, sending a huge shower of sparks across the immediate vicinity.
Wil, Lucy, and the others shielded their eyes as a mass of sparks flooded out of the diabolical machine, giving Marcus the appearance of a steel rod that had just been kissed by a welding torch. He immediately began to weep giant tears that came from the bottom of his cold, black heart—dredging up emotions he hadn’t felt, presumably, since his first year of being the most unpleasant kid in the class at elementary school.
“It’s not fair!” sobbed Marcus. “I don’t know where it all went wrong!” Sparks were now playing across the remains of his defunct exoskeleton, which clearly knew when it was beaten and had mercifully switched itself off rather than endure an existential crisis of its own. “Why don’t we ever know where we’re going?” continued Marcus. “And what do we even find when we get there? It’s all so pointless!”
* * *
WIL AND Mr. Dinsdale approached the machine cautiously as Barry and Engelbert gathered up fallen papers. Over at the pinball machine, Lucy and Mary had found each other intact and were trying to work out what to do next.
Barry seemed to realize that SARA was still in his possession, and still connected to a few hours ago. He stood up abruptly to close the connection. Before him, little shards of shattered green glass were spread across the room. “Oh, and make sure you bring the lightning catcher,” said Barry into the receiver before closing the connection for good.
“Now what do we do?” said Wil as he and the curator watched Marcus James’s existential overload with something akin to mild indifference. “Do we let him out?”
“Eventually, I’m sure,” replied Dinsdale. “But let’s have him stew in there for a while. He did try to fill us full of hollow-points, after all.”
By now, Marcus had merely fallen into quiet sobs, accompanied by the occasional rhetorical question about the pointlessness of existence and the futility of trying to make anything of it. The sparks around him had dissipated somewhat but no one in their right mind was going to go anywhere near Leonardo’s infernal Perpetual Emotion machine—not in a month of Sundays and for all the tea in China.
Lucy moved to Wil and put his arm around her waist. “We can’t just leave him there. Eventually, we’re going to have to call the police, aren’t we?”
* * *
MR. DINSDALE allowed himself a smile. “Perhaps not,” he said as his smile morphed from mirthful to a delicious, unrepentant wickedness in the blinking of an eye. “I think I might have a better idea.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE ONE thing Wil Morgan had concluded from his recent exploits was that a brand-new lease on life comes with substantially lower payments.
It was the end of a remarkable week, and the beginning of a new era. Though he hadn’t slept all night, Wil Morgan was content to stand at the end of Upside-Down Street with one eye covered and watch the early-afternoon cars flying past on the city’s one-way system. From this angle—bent at the waist as he was—the vehicles appeared to be zipping along on a gravity-defying monorail—much more satisfying, he thought, than simply looking at things the way he had always been taught.
Next to him, Lucy also stood bent at the waist and looked at the world with one eye closed and her mind and heart fully open. Together, they counted the red cars passing by.
“Fifty-four!” said Lucy. She had been concentrating on this task for the past ten minutes, and Wil was beginning to think the blood was rushing to her head.
“No, that’s fifty-three,” he countered.
“Nope. Fifty-four. You forgot that London bus full of circus clowns.”
“Oh. Right.” This way up, the world was far more interesting but it tended to induce headaches. Wil stood up straight and looked around him. “Do you really think this is it?” he asked.
“Sure it is,” said Lucy as she also straightened and move in close to Wil. “Only better.”
Despite the lack of sleep, Wil’s unthinkable Thursday had given way to a fan
tastic Friday. All in all, things were looking up. Mr. Dinsdale had (quite rightly) hit upon a most unique solution to the bulk of the difficulties facing the museum.
With Marcus James trapped and sobbing inside the Perpetual Emotion machine—and therefore about as captive and willing an audience as has ever succumbed to blackmail of the highest order—Cousin Engelbert had hastily drawn up an agreement between the Curioddity Museum and Marcus James Enterprises, Incorporated. This agreement outlined Marcus James’s obligations in a most delightful and satisfying manner in exchange for the dropping of all charges (and Marcus’s release from his existential nightmare, natch). The pitchman would provide full reimbursement of all costs associated with the attack on the museum, and full ownership of his army of lawyers, without which he would be utterly powerless. Marcus also agreed to move his banking institutions to the far end of the city and also to return all of Mr. Dinsdale’s original patents. But this was not to be the end of his extremely unsatisfying week.
As it turned out, there had indeed been a clerical error involving the old electricity bill, which had indeed been paid in full, as had the original thirteen-cent late fee and its two-cent surcharge. However, further research had uncovered a nominal discrepancy in the Edison Electric Company’s calculation of the original bill: a two-cent overcharge that had never been refunded. Barry and Engelbert had calculated and recalculated, using standard addition of compound interest and market standards of late fees, even-later fees, and the dreaded so-late-it’s-not-even-funny fees. By their calculation, Marcus James Enterprises, Incorporated—the lien holder for the original bill and therefore the debtor for the current, updated one—owed Mr. Dinsdale in excess of $133,386,703.12. All of which was due by late Saturday afternoon, failing which a surcharge of a further three cents would be tacked on. Cousin Engelbert had dutifully—enthusiastically, even—written a brand-new bill using his best quill and ink, which he had walked over to the bank next door and hand delivered to a very confused bank teller.