The Curious Case of the Cursed Spectacles Read online

  "Well that stinks," I said. "I managed to lose our only lead, and the only team member who knows anything at all about the ethereal side of things is absent due to injuries."

  "I'll admit that Edgar did have some sense of the spooky bits," Clarence agreed. "And the way he gets in and out of cars is classy. Maybe he'll be back after he has a rest."

  I dusted off my clothes, getting shed of some twigs and grass. "I hope that's all it is. Since we don't know what happened..."

  "Right. In the meantime, I think the only thing we can do is keep searching for clues."

  Clarence nodded at the house. I looked and saw the back door standing open. "Since we've been invited in, we might as well go check out Timothy's house and see what we can find."

  "Sometimes, Clarence, you say the perfect thing. Even if he knew we were coming, we came earlier than he expected. I can just smell clues lurking about."

  Chapter Eleven

  There was nothing special about the house and, I was beginning to suspect, nothing special about Timothy Welker either. "Your average guy, struggling to get by, finds an object and can't deal with the powers it unleashes."

  "The premise for a horror movie?" Clarence asked.

  "The story of Timothy Welker's life from what I see." We'd come into the kitchen, which seemed as good a place to start looking as any. There was a table that seemed to serve for eating and as a makeshift office as well, from the stacks of papers. "It looks like he's lived here alone for some time."

  Clarence scowled. "What makes you say that with just a glance?"

  "The place has a musty smell that takes a while to cultivate and I doubt a wife or girlfriend would put up with it."

  Clarence sniffed. "That's pretty sexist."

  "True. So I'll amend it to it being a smell that a wife, girlfriend or boyfriend wouldn't put up with."

  "Better."

  "And... there's only one coffee cup by the coffee pot, a single plate on the table..."

  "My, my, aren't you the regular Agatha Marple?"

  I started to correct him. It irritated me hearing him jumbling up the names of the author and detective that way, but his smile told me he was teasing, either trying to cheer me up or annoy me. Either way, I'd missed my chance to sneer as he'd already turned his attention to rooting around in the messy pile of papers and mail stacked on the kitchen table. He'd taken a seat and was sorting through it, bringing up memories of my old job. Suddenly that job, the city, my apartment seemed more like a movie I'd seen than my own life.

  I felt a shudder run through me. Was I losing myself?

  "Aha," he said, holding two papers up.

  "And what have you found, Nero Fox?"

  I saw him flinch. Bingo. I'd managed to score.

  "It seems that until recently, as in just before the robbery at Mason's, our suspect worked for a financial planning firm. But two weeks ago he was fired for some unspecified cause. That meant he didn't get any severance pay. That had to be tough on him, stressful. Being let go abruptly is a jolt and not having a financial cushion, which it appears he didn't, makes it worse." He showed me a pay stub and a pink slip. "He was moping over these, it seems. I can't say that I blame him."

  "That's a good find," I had to admit. "It's hard to know how that relates to him finding the object, but we know a lot more about Timothy Welker than we did. It's likely he was unstable when he found the object."

  "Let's keep looking. I bet we can learn a lot more."

  "I've finished with these, so I'll take the living room," Clarence said, so I headed into the bedroom. Every person was different, and we didn't know this man, but I could hope that even if he wasn't the type to keep a journal or diary, the shock of some new power coming into his life might start him making notes. If that happened to me I'd probably have them beside my bed.

  I walked into the small bedroom. It was cluttered and chaotic and I resigned myself to a long search. Sitting on the unmade bed to take an overview, my gaze landed on a book sitting on the nightstand. It was conveniently labeled: "Tim's journal."

  Opening it made me cringe. I felt like I was invading his privacy even more than I had by going into his home. The house held his possessions. If I was lucky, the book held his thoughts and observations. I started reading.

  The first half was filled with ordinary notes and comments about work, some woman he was seeing, and about therapy sessions. Apparently, his life was rather stressful, or at least it was stressing him out. It was all somewhat interesting, but I got impatient and flipped to the most recent entries. If things had been tough to deal with, they had gotten worse in a hurry.

  It all started when he found a pair of glasses on a bench. He thought they looked old fashioned, reminding him of the ones his grandfather had worn. His own glasses were lightweight, sharp looking, and rather boring. The urge to find out what life looked like through those lenses, someone else's perspective of the world became overwhelming. After a time, and feeling foolish he took his glasses off and put these on. And the strange things started.

  He was dizzy for a moment, then realized that these glasses were the right prescription for him. He could see perfectly. In fact, he could see much better, more clearly with these on, than wearing his own.

  That was why, with a certain amount of guilt for not trying to find the owner of the found glasses weighing down his excitement, he took them home. He wore them home. He could see so well, so effortlessly, that he didn't want to take them off. He was afraid of not seeing the world clearly any more. The intensity of that feeling upset him, but he couldn't fight it.

  That night he settled in his favorite chair to watch television. As he watched suddenly he had an actual, live vision of his floor flooding. He saw himself rushing into the kitchen. Under the sink, the pipe that brought the cold water into the kitchen was leaking at a joint. He grabbed a pipe wrench and tried to tighten it, to get it to stop. The pressure was too strong and he couldn't stop it and then the pipe broke. Fortunately, he didn't have carpeting, because the water went everywhere.

  And then the vision passed. Shocked by the vividness of the vision, he got himself out of his chair, went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet under the sink and looked at the pipe. It looked fine. He could see the joint that had leaked. The vision had been so real and he wondered how you knew if a joint was good or bad. Obviously, the vision was trying to warn him that the joint was loose, so he got out his pipe wrench, which was the one in the vision, and tightened the joint. It made sense... if he tightened the joint before it started leaking, he might avert the disaster.

  Unfortunately, the plumbing was old and the joint was already snug. When he turned the wrench on the pipe it broke. Water flooded the house as he stood helplessly in the kitchen, calling a plumber to come and shut off the flow of water and repair the damage.

  It had been an expense he couldn't afford at all, and worse, it was only the first of a number of frequent incidents, times when he could see the future. Wearing the spectacles he'd see something bad happen. If he did nothing, it would play out exactly as he saw it. Ironically, if he tried to intervened and tried to change an outcome—a car accident, a broken window, and finally even a house fire—whatever he did only seemed to make the bad thing happen. And as it had with the broken pipe, nothing changed. The event was inevitable, no matter how he altered what happened leading up to it.

  As he wrote these latter entries, as he grew to understand that his gift of seeing the future was more of a curse, his handwriting grew increasingly erratic. He began questioning the existence, the very idea of free will, wondering whether the future is written for everyone already. His thoughts on the matter weren't based on study, but on his experience and his penmanship became as uncertain as his thinking.

  "Read this," I said, taking the journal into the living room where Clarence was looking through the man's mail. He sat down. "The important stuff is the last few pages," I told him.

  I watched him skim the pages, then turned my attention to looki
ng out the front window at the way the weeds were taking over the lawn.

  "I wonder if the glasses only show bad things, or if that's something to do with his own mindset?" Clarence said. Obviously, as I had, he'd concluded that those glasses were our target—the first of the cursed objects to reappear.

  "I don't know. I've been more focused on how we get them back."

  Clarence sighed. "I think we need to give Enid a call. Maybe we can get her to tell us a little more about some of the things that she's avoided mentioning."

  It surprised me that Clarence had evaluated Enid the same way I had. "It's worth a try." I hoped someone, sooner rather than later, would decide to let us know what was going on. But it didn't seem likely. "I don't think we'll find much more useful here. Let's drive to her house. I think better face to face."

  Chapter Twelve

  Enid seemed to find our story of the hunt for the spectacles amusing, except for the near death moments. On the positive side, we managed to trigger her memory a bit. "Oh, yes, of course. You are looking for Cassandra's spectacles."

  "You remember them?" I asked.

  "Yes. We managed to find those in, oh... about 1982. They are rather nasty little goggles, you know. And they are possessed with or by, whichever is correct, a terrible curse."

  I sat in her living room, in her overstuffed chair, smelling lilac and wondering how she could stand the place being so stuffy. Me, I was inclined to open a window and let the fresh air in. "Just how bad is it? The curse, I mean."

  "When a person is wearing those glasses they start to mess up a person's mind. First thing is that they show the wearer a really bad possible future."

  That gave me some hope. "Not a certainty, just a possible?"

  Enid was brought up by the question. "Well, as far as I know. Whether or not what they see is inevitable gets rather unclear, especially to the cursed person. You see, they are shown this dark future and, quite naturally a decent human being wants to try and prevent it. But part of the curse is that the glasses can affect their judgment, their perception of events. This means that they make mistakes that make a future possibility into a likely reality."

  "Timothy said if he does nothing they happen anyway."

  "Which could be the glasses showing him things that will happen and he can interfere with, so that when it wants him to act, he thinks it isn't his actions that produced that tragedy, just that he failed to prevent it. They trick the wearer into doing whatever is necessary to make that bad outcome happen just as advertised."

  "And it doesn't matter who wears them?"

  "Not at all. And the person has trouble believing any of it is a lie because wearing them they think they are seeing so incredibly clearly for the first time."

  "How did you find them?"

  "Your uncle got them from a repairman on the Ocean Ranger."

  "What's that?"

  "It was a huge, semi-submersible offshore drilling unit, nearly 400-foot long. It provided a complete drilling facility and living quarters for the crew. It was reported to be the world's largest semi-submersible oil rig and was rated for working as deep as 1,500 feet below the surface of the ocean."

  "It sounds formidable. I take it that something bad happened to it?"

  "Oh yes. It was scheduled to operate on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. While he was preparing it to go on its mission, Michael Lindeman foresaw it sinking. He told his family, later, that he actually experienced the horror of the deaths of the 84 people on board it. In his vision, he saw a rogue wave from an Atlantic hurricane smash through a portlight in the ballast control room. When it failed, that led to a chain of events that saw the vessel sink. The entire crew was lost."

  "So he replaced it?" I guessed.

  She nodded. "He did."

  "But it failed anyway?"

  "It failed precisely because he replaced it. After the fact, it turned out that the one he put in was part of a defective batch. It couldn't withstand the pressure of the wave. They tested the one he took out and it proved to be fine. There was no question that if he'd done nothing, the vessel would not have been lost. Naturally, when we found Michael, he was a wreck—wracked with grief and guilt."

  "So he was glad to give up the glasses?"

  "I wish that had been the case. Unfortunately, he'd also foreseen us arriving and trying to get the glasses from him. Somehow his curse made that seem horrific to him—although we never learned what danger he saw from us getting them. The glasses seemed to show him whatever it had to, to ensure he kept them."

  "That's exactly our problem with Timothy," I said. "Whatever he fears, he thinks it's worth killing us to keep us from getting them."

  "So how did you get them from Michael?" Clarence asked, ever the practical one.

  "We didn't actually. He died. He killed himself and we found his body. Historically, everyone who wears the glasses winds up dead or crazy. Or, more specifically the lenses—they've found life in a variety of frames over the time."

  "They've been around for a time then?" I asked.

  She giggled. "Long enough that Nostradamus wore them in his spectacles. Silly bugger. The story goes that he predicted his own death as one of his final predictions, and did everything he could to avoid it; in the end, he died from a bad case of dropsy that was exacerbated by the things he'd done to avoid his demise."

  I let that sink in. "It probably isn't reasonable to just wait for Timothy to die so that we can scoop up his glasses?"

  "Not really all that ethical either," Clarence said. "I have another issue I need help with," I told her. She looked at me expectantly. "Edgar's vanished."

  She cocked her head. “I was going to ask about his absence. How did you lose the little bugger?"

  I told her what had happened, about him saving me and she listened thoughtfully.

  "Well, I suspect you might be on your own for a while then. When a spirit has to work too hard out of their own space and time, it weakens them."

  "What is his space and time?" I asked.

  Enid smiled and ignored the question. "I'm sure he'll return when he's recovered. He just overdid, is all. I'm quite sure."

  "We need his help," Clarence said. "We don't have a lot of time, and from what you say, Timothy might have even less. Even if he's okay, we need to stop Timothy from trying to save the world."

  "We don't want to be responsible for another Ocean Ranger," I added.

  "Well that's your job, isn't it?" Enid said cheerfully. "It gives you something useful to do while Edgar gets himself back together."

  As we left Enid's house and got in the car, Clarence picked up Timothy's journal. It was the only thing we'd brought from his house. As he flipped through it, reading here and there, a piece of paper fell out onto his lap. "Hullo," he said. "What have we here?"

  "Reading Sherlock Holmes again are we?"

  He read it and sighed, then handed it to me. "He recorded some more visions here," he said. "Two of them. He must've had them when he was away from home and wrote them down so he could put them in the journal later."

  I pulled the car to the side of the road and took the paper. The handwriting was even worse than in his last journal entries and I had to work to decipher them. The first was about two people coming for Timothy—a man and a woman. In it, they take him away and one of them shoots Timothy. "Now we know why he ran from us," I said.

  "But he shot at us."

  "Obviously that's the curse at work, making him do whatever it takes to make the vision come true."

  "How?"

  "Maybe the curse thingie thought we'd be foolish to go after him without a gun and we'd shoot back, killing him?" Clarence just stared. "Well, I'm guessing, of course."

  "Curse thingie?" he said disdainfully.

  The other vision was more dramatic. "He saw a gas explosion in Koin?" I gasped.

  "Did you read the note?"

  I hadn't. In the margin, he'd scrawled: "Must shut off the gas at the source."

  "We need to get back there
," I said.

  "To Timothy's house? He's long gone."

  "We need to get to the gas company's distribution station."

  "Right," Clarence agreed as I put the car in gear and we retraced our steps.

  Chapter Thirteen

  As we drove, Clarence gave me information that was more relevant than I could've hoped for. "All the small towns around here, like Koin and Destiny's Point, get their natural gas through a major pipeline that comes from the city. Each town has a distribution station where they tap into the main pipeline and channel the gas into the town through several pipes," Clarence said.

  I gave him a look. "You know this how?"

  "My uncle worked for the gas company for thirty years. When I was a kid he'd take me along on his inspection tours. The one for Koin is, fortunately, on this side of town. Just before we hit the town limits you'll see an access road that goes off the to the right. It will just say 'gas company access road' or something equally informative but lacking in imagination."

  As I drove, making a hash of the speed limit, I put part of my mind on trying to summon Edgar up. "We could use your help here, Edgar," I said.

  Clarence looked inside the car around. "Are you getting an answer?" I shook my head. "So no dice. Our spook is still AWOL?"

  I nodded. "I'm afraid so. We are on our own, I guess."

  As we approached the town limits we spotted the road. I turned down the road toward the gas distribution station. As we neared the chain link fence that surrounded it, topped by a formidable sign saying 'danger, natural gas," we saw people running toward us.

  "This doesn't look promising," Clarence said.

  It didn't. The people seemed to be residents as well as uniformed gas company workers. I thought of stopping and asking someone what was going on, but they didn't appear to be in the mood to talk—everyone was panicky. And then we heard a gunshot.

  "There's our Timothy. The whacko has started shooting off his gun in a natural gas facility," Clarence moaned.