Curioddity Read Online Free Page B

beloved wife. The only thing Barry Morgan now cherished—his only connection to Melinda—was his son, Wil. And it would be a cold day in a hot place before he ever lost his boy to the same fate that had claimed his wife.
    Over time, Dad’s constant needling about the perils of possessing an imagination and believing in things wore on his son. Harsh reality seemed to triumph more frequently over flights of fancy. Dad was never so proud nor relieved as the day Wil chose calculus over art in high school. He helped Wil choose a proper accounting college and set him up with a bankable IRA, which could only be cashed in without penalty once Wil reached the oh-so-safe age of fifty-five without being atomized in a terrible accident. To this day, Barry Morgan had absolutely no idea that his son had chosen a relatively perilous career in insurance fraud detection over a more sensible path through the safe and steady world of chartered accounting.
    *   *   *
    W IL TOOK the old English penny from his pocket and spun it on the table. As it wandered across the desk, he found himself staring at the blinking red light of his outdated answering machine. He’d promised himself on many occasions that he’d buy a service provided by the telephone company that took messages at a remote location and kept them for him to retrieve from the system whenever he chose. Alas, he could not afford such a luxury, and so his primitive system was his only option. On the rare occasions the telephone actually rang, Wil half-expected the 1980s to be on the other end of the line, asking for their old answering machine back. His machine was rotten, quirky, and quite possibly possessed by demons. It seemed to delight in switching on and off at the most inopportune times. It recorded messages either at a whisper or trapped beneath hideous feedback that sounded like something out of the early Apollo missions. Worst of all, it worked perfectly only when the message being left belonged to a debt collector, auto-dialer, telemarketer, or recorded message from a local politician trying to spread dirt about his or her political opponent.
    The penny clattered to a stop on the desk. Wil stared at it in silence. As if in response, the penny moved, almost imperceptibly. Over at his window, Wil noticed that one of his photo frames was getting ready to take a walk across the painted surface of the sill. The sound of an enormous cog clicking into place rattled the walls. This could only mean one thing: his personal soundtrack was about to go off, minus the trudging.
    KLONNG!
    Wil caught the photo frame just as it fell from the windowsill. If such an inanimate object could have attempted suicide by tossing itself off a ledge, Wil would not have blamed it one bit. His own daydreams had tended toward the homicidal—or, he supposed, “clockicidal”—every Monday morning for years. Wil knew with absolute certainty that he would gladly have accepted a sentence of thirty to life just for one morning of respite from the thing that tormented him the most.
    Directly across from Wil’s office stood a massive clock tower that the city forefathers had once received as a gift from the government of Switzerland to commemorate something nobody could remember. Wil hated this monstrosity more than he had ever hated anything in the known universe, not to mention a substantial portion of the undiscovered bit. It was a thoughtless, pointless, artless container of decibels that counted away the hours of his life one painfully annoying quarter hour at a time.
    KLONNG!
    As part of his morning ritual, Wil liked to stand at his window and shake his fist at the clock until it stopped going “klonng.” He would utter increasingly profane oaths in its direction and silently wish it would sprout large robotic legs and go away. In fact, Wil had once opened his window to challenge the awful beast to a fight to the death, to which it had simply