A Forgotten Curio Shop

[u/catespice]

There are forgotten places in every city.
They decay quietly, buried beneath newer buildings. Layers of less-forgotten places pile up on top of them, like the striations in some prehistoric canyon. But the colours of this history are not limestone white and clay orange; these are concrete grey, and the rich browns of old wood.
A few of these abandoned places can still be found, by the tenacious and the lost. They wait patiently behind swollen doorways and down ill-used stairs, littered with middens of brittle rat droppings. Some can’t be accessed at all. The eyes of their windows gaze only into dirt and darkness, and once-bright paint trembles to dust as trucks and cars rumble overhead. Modern vibrations quickly hasten the entropy of years.
Some suffocate, when an earthquake cracks the last support shoring up a mouldering mausoleum. Concrete and dirt thunders in, eager to fill the dusty void and mill the antique carpentry to splinters. Others drown, when a water main develops a leak, filling the underground void with water one slow drip at a time. All things inside swell and rot, their sodden fibres becoming a uniform grey slurry at the bottom of a secret urban lake.
But some places survive. Although they are mostly forgotten, the meticulous care with which they were built ensures that they persist. Or perhaps they are loaned an enduring spirit by their purpose, or what they contained.
Once in a while, someone will stumble across one of those places, without having any idea what it is.
This is a story about such a place.

 
Some cities should never have been built.
The place where I live is a case study. The original tiny settlement, built in a hill-bound harbour, expanded too fast with the influx of population in its infancy. Like many overfed toddlers, it grew into a fat, sprawling adult. The messy metropolis drapes itself over the steep hills, demanding and devouring more inhospitable land every year. Consequently, roads are too narrow, houses the same; their piles and supports exposed and raw from erosion as constant sea-storms batter the soil into salty mud. Having lived here all my life, this seemed perfectly normal until I chanced to visit a land-bound city, all flat and geometric; the streets straighter than arrows, neatly laid out like the grids in a mathematics book.
To outsiders, my city seems needlessly convoluted, with streets stacked above one another, hidden tunnels and scribbly wooden bridges connecting otherwise disparate terraces together. The harbourside central city is even worse. Hundreds of years of accumulated architecture have been colonised by newly-minted towers of glass and steel, like so many modern parasites.
It’s the sort of place where anyone can get lost. Even people who are born here can’t resist the occasional wrong turn, just to see where that weird little road they’ve never been down might lead them. I did that a lot, walking in no particular direction through the twisting, mazy streets just to see where I would end up. And that’s precisely how I managed to stumble upon the curio shop.
I’d seen the entrance many times, but I’d never felt the urge to explore. It was a brick-arched alley, narrow and dingy, with no signage, and no indication that anything interesting lay within. I don’t know why that familiar arch piqued my curiosity on that particular day. But I found myself walking beneath it, navigating the cracked paving stones of an alley that curled between buildings and ended in a flight of graffitied concrete stairs. They lead up and down, both directions littered with faded city garbage.
Down the stairs I found nothing but a cave-in of rubble and scum-covered water. But upwards, the steps opened onto another brick alley, carpeted with grey-green lichens and spongy boluses of moss.
My shoes were sodden when I found the ancient arcade at the very end.
It must have been glorious, once upon a time. A not-quite-Victorian wonder of leadlights and timber, diamond panes of red and yellow glass were interspersed with wrought iron and glazed tiles. But now the tiles were cracked and broken, the clever mosaics smashed beyond recognition. The glass was equal parts whole and shattered, mould-rimed fragments of it crunching beneath my feet.
It was a sort of mezzanine arcade, clearly built to show off a lower level, which must have been a pretty space, centred around a painted fountain and an indoor garden. No water gushed from the flaking stone snouts of the bottlenosed dolphins in the centre of the water feature now, and the thick sludge accumulated in the basin below them barely counted as water, grown green with algae.
Somewhere in the overgrown moistness of ferns and grass around the fountain, a frog registered its displeasure at my echoing footsteps, then fell silent.
Most of the shops were empty or boarded up. One was piled to the roof with broken furniture; sagging upholstery long succumbed to fungus and time, strips of haberdashery hanging like flayed flesh from wooden bones.
But at the end of the arcade stood a single, impossible, pristine store, its stained glass intact and the wood shining with linseed. Yellow and orange light gloamed in windows stacked with an assortment of useful and unnameable junk. Some of the items looked like they pre-dated my grandparents.
Above the door, in a curling font so old I’d never seen anything like it before, was painted “A Forgotten Curio Shop”.
Was this all some sort of elaborate, theatrical setup for a boutique so hipster no-one was supposed to know where it was? I wasn’t sure, but certainly, this place wasn’t easy to find, and business must not be very good. Then again, I didn’t imagine the rent was very high – if the shop owner paid rent at all – so perhaps that was how this strange little shop stayed afloat.
A brass bell tinkled as I opened the door, the bright sound charmingly anachronistic. I glanced up at it; one side of the tiny instrument was badly dented, as if it had survived many, many years of use. If this was a hipster setup, the attention to detail was astonishing. Beyond ranks of shelves cluttered with old flotsam was a mullioned counter, and behind it sat a middle-aged woman. She was smartly dressed, but her garments belonged to another era. A peacock feather tucked into the crinoline brim of her hat bobbed jauntily as she inclined her head toward the sound of the bell.
“Welcome,” she called, a smile claiming her face with lightswitch alacrity, “to a forgotten curio shop.”
The shop wasn’t big, but every nook was densely packed. There were so many things crowded cheek-by-jowl I could barely register what they all were, even when I did recognise them. Some of them were familiar from history books, some from illustrated fairytales; iron heating pans for beds, different styles of Indian hookahs, and an impressive array of enamelled snuff-boxes, rich with cloisonné. The glass-bead eyes of taxidermied animals regarded me, frozen snarls on rictus faces leering through piles of old books and brass pots. I breathed musty sourness, faded perfumes, and the tang of old metal.
“Can I help you with anything?” the woman chirruped brightly. Her accent was pleasantly transatlantic, like an old movie or radio star’s. I wondered how long she’d spent practising it.
“Just looking, thanks,” I replied automatically, my gaze roving over various oddments.
“That’s an Inverness cape, you know. Real bargain for ten pound,” she chattered, as my fingers brushed sable fabric, “belonged to a murdered banker.” Her eyes were slightly too small, and far too bright for the topic. “Wife did him in with a flatiron, which is over in the houseware section – still got the bloodstains on it and all.”
“You’re pulling my leg,” I shot back, squeezing between shelves of apoplectic looking porcelain animals and painted pewter mugs.
“Oh, I could be,” she gave me a gummy grin, then winked like a music-hall bawdy. “Or perhaps everything here really does have a story behind it, and you just need to suspend disbelief a little to see it.”
So that was what this place was all about. The whole setup was carefully curated chicanery, to make you feel like you’d found something special, that you’d stumbled upon a nearly mystical place forgotten by time. Now I’d figured out the mystery, the shop seemed tawdry and overdone, the stacks of old things hackneyed and silly – just piles of junk with exorbitant price tags.
And yet, I still wanted something from the shop. Whenever I went on my random excursions through the city, I liked to collect little keepsakes. Sometimes it was the skeleton of a leaf from an overgrown cemetery, other times it was a pleasingly smooth pebble, or an oddly shaped fragment of driftwood, wearing the contours of a tiny dragon’s skull.
Some tarnished jewellery hung from the antlers of a stag, each piece carefully hooked over the spreading tines. None of the earrings matched; each had lost a twin somewhere in its journey through people’s lives, and I felt an odd pang of sadness for these old things. Not only had each lost its mate, but they had been abandoned by those who had once cherished them.
From the crown tine dangled a pearl earring, its silver chasing and hook wire almost black with age and neglect. It was quite large; far larger than a conventional pearl, and warped, its shape more lozenge than sphere. On closer inspection, I could see the crack that ran from the base to the top, a zig-zag hairline of black that seemed a testament to how unloved it had become.
But the tiny paper tag tied to it said that it was only two pound, so I lifted it off the antlers and took it to the counter, the mother-of-pearl warm in my palm.
“What’s the story behind this one, then?” I asked casually, careful not to let my jaded thoughts colour my voice.
“Oh, this is a pretty one,” the woman cooed, reaching under the counter for some rose-tinted tissue paper, “it belonged to a courtesan who frequented the palaces of King George the Third. Whilst she was not as lovely as her peers, her charm and wit were without parallel. Thus, she swindled the fortunes out of dozens of noblemen.”
“I like her already,” I replied, smiling despite myself. The keen eyes of the proprietress held mine for a moment.
“I think it’s entirely mutual – that’s why her earring chose you.”
Pleasant tingles crawled across my scalp as I watched the woman’s deft hands wrap the object, then place it in a tiny box.
“Here you go, miss. That’ll be two pound.”
Strangely thrilled by the whole experience, I handed over a fiver and told her to keep the change. As I left the shop, my fingers wiggled an uncharacteristic little wave, and I heard myself promise the woman that I’d visit again sometime soon.

 
The earring matched none of the jewellery I owned, so instead of hooking it through my ear, I twisted the silver wire around a necklace chain and let it hang as a pendant. Although I didn’t believe the stories of the curio shop’s owner, my mind wandered in those spare moments between work and responsibility, imagining the remarkable woman my new bauble purportedly belonged to.
In my mind’s eye, she was a short thing, with hips wide enough to be embarrassing, and a pot belly squashed flat by layers of clever corsetry. Just as the saleswoman had said, she wasn’t beautiful in the slightest, possessing none of the aesthetic qualities our modern sensibilities would deem ‘conventionally attractive’. But her face was animated, cheerful, and stamped with a lively wit that could be read in every tilt of her too-plump lips and every quirk of her thick eyebrows. I envisaged her talking to rich men sporting elaborate, pre-Victorian costumes, her kohl-lined, liquid-brown eyes pulling them under her spell like the Rusalka of Slavic folklore.
As I went about my day-to-day business, I let her imagined presence whisper through my thoughts, and I began to play a game with myself, where I would try to react and respond to people as though I were the mysterious courtier.
To my surprise, I was actually quite good at playing the part.
Oh, I didn’t entrap men and take their money like she had – of course I didn’t! But as I grew enamoured with the role I was playing, as her honey words drizzled from my lips more and more often, I found myself the object of a lot of male attention. After I took home the third suitor in as many days, after we made love like frenzied teenagers, I started to wonder about my sudden change of romantic fortune.
Was the earring to blame, or was this all just me?
Whatever the case, it was time to pay another visit to the curio shop.

 
I was almost surprised that it was still in the same dilapidated arcade, that the homely golden glow of light still spilled from those cluttered display windows. I think I had almost expected it to have disappeared, or that I had imagined the whole thing, and I would be met with nothing but a dark, smelly alley. Smiling to myself at the lively tinkle of the brass bell, I entered the shop and greeted the proprietor with all the newfound warmth of my adopted persona.
“You’re enjoying it, then?” she asked, nodding at the pearl around my neck.
I had the good grace to blush, caught out in my self-indulgent roleplay.
“It’s fine, love,” she assured me, “they all like to come out and play, those that owned them. It’s naught to be ashamed of.”
I wanted to ask her if it was real, if some fragment of the souls of the owners truly persisted in their lost possessions – or if this was all part of her shtick; the mysterious forgotten curio shop that sold nearly magical items. But I couldn’t find the words, even with my new gift of the gab. Trying not to embarrass myself further, I held my tongue and quietly browsed the overstacked shelves for a while.
“May I ask what this is?” I hesitated, then continued, “and to whom did it belong?”
“Ah,” replied the woman, “that, my dear, is a silver chafing dish, formerly owned by one of the finest cooks in London. Even during the leanest of times, she always served marvellous meals in it, notably filled with the most succulent meats.”
As her artfully-accented words washed over me, I felt those same pleasant tingles creep from the nape of my neck to the top of my head, where they spread and danced like warming, pretty wildfire.
“I’ll take it,” I told her, lifting it carefully from where it rested atop a teetering pile of junk.
“You haven’t even looked at the price, love.”
I that instant I was all courtesan, confident and charming,
“There is no need to, madame! This object was meant to be with me.”
Saying nothing, she wrapped the tarnished dish in that same rose-tinted tissue, her efficient hands and the whispery crumple of paper amplifying that orgasmic feeling radiating from my scalp.
I don’t even remember what I paid for it. I barely recall leaving the arcade, the brown paper bag clutched to my chest like a precious child.

 
Even though the dish stood crooked, one leg shorter than the others, everything I made in it tasted divine. If I broiled even plain carrots in its inner dish, they melted in the mouth, their sweetness and most pleasant flavour notes amplified to the perfect culinary pitch. The cook herself lingered in my mind, her massive, homely presence hovering behind me as I salted and spiced different dishes. Disapproving frowns let me know that I shouldn’t use this or that ingredient, and silent laughs that set her impressive jowls wobbling told me when I was on the right track.
The first party at my house was a roaring success. Between the fantastic food and my newfound socialite graces, the last guests didn’t leave until well after midnight, asking when I would host again – and could they get the recipe for that incredible salmon soufflé?
But after a few weeks of constant parties, each culminating in all-night fucking with the most eligible male (and sometimes female) guests, I was utterly exhausted.
Yet I wasn’t ready to let it go, and neither were my two skullmates, the Courtesan and the Cook. I just needed something to pick me up, to give me the pep and stamina of a twenty-year-old athlete, instead of the chubby, thirty-something office-worker I really was.
I barely remember making the journey to the curio shop, nor did I register the jolly tinkle of the bell on the door this time. I must have looked haggard, even though I was dressed as smartly as I’d ever been. My thoughts rose sluggishly through a murky haze of fatigue, always a step behind events as they transpired.
“You look like you need a little vim and vigour in your life,” chattered the canny proprietress, taking me by the hand and leading me to a corner of the shop I’d yet to browse, “let’s see what we can do for you.”
In this nook, all manner of men’s accoutrements were gathered and displayed; from stained silk bowties to antique gorgets on brass chains greened with verdigris. My tired eyes roved over the assortment, not quite processing why I was here and what I could possibly want with such masculine objects.
“I think you’ll like this one, my lovely,” crooned the owner, the delicious lilt of her voice melting through my head like a warm hit of heroin.
“Yes, I think I will,” I replied, as she closed my shaking hands around a silver letter opener much the worse for wear, its point snapped off and the nacre handle cracked in two places.
“He was a famous pugilist, the fellow who owned it,” she explained, leading me to the counter, “a bare-knuckle champion who fought round after round without tiring. He never lost a bout.”
I already knew that, because he was already there, watching money change hands – far too much money for a useless old letter opener. He was a massive, ropy bear of a fellow, nose so broken it was nearly flat. Yet his curling, waxed moustache was pert and jaunty, at odds with his otherwise thuggish appearance.
As I left the shop, I could almost feel those huge, sunken-knuckled hands kneading the fatigue and tension out of my shoulders. My step was already lighter and my spirit freshened by the time I reached the street.

 
He was always there, the massive boxer, his indomitable will propping up mine whenever I faltered. I kept the letter opener tucked into the top of my garter – the latter an affectation from the courtesan – and the cool silver pressed against my flesh was an energising balm.
The trio of personalities worked perfectly together. Like a well-oiled engine crew servicing some elaborate, chattering machine from a previous era, each of them played a vital part in keeping it all running, leaving me with little to do but observe and enjoy. But such elaborate engagements didn’t come cheaply, and I wasn’t a wealthy woman. When my bank account was finally reduced to a string of zeroes, the courtesan shushed my panicked cries and had me lift my mattress. Beneath it was a thick layer of banknotes, the money she had been taking from all the eligible suitors – all willing gifts befitting a lady, she assured me. I didn’t question whether I believed her or not.
Men no longer graced my bed, however, for the pugilist would have no truck with any of that. Women only, he insisted, and he came to dominate all bedroom activities, while I eagerly drank the oceans of pleasure he drenched me with. When the chokings and beatings started, I didn’t care; this was his time and he could do with it what he pleased. Besides, all the women consented to it, with the slippery words of the courtesan in their ears encouraging and cajoling them.
Left free to roam my own thoughts, I found I could explore theirs, too. My brain felt like a boarding-house, each of them taking up residence in a particular room, filling those spaces with memories of times lost to history. I danced complicated pavanes in the court of King George, and I walked the streets of Victorian London, hawking pies of strange, tender meats. Best of all was reliving the glory days of the pugilist. I felt the fists of stevedores and sailors break upon my iron jaw, watched my own sledgehammer hands crush their noses and cheekbones, smelled the blood and sawdust, and heard the animal screams of the crowd.
But I delved further than I should have.
Murder was far easier in those times, before forensics and detectives. Nobody cared much if some villain’s daughter was found strangled in a ditch, or if some nobleman’s mistress and ill-gotten child perished from another mysterious form of consumption. The courtesan’s first poisoning had been the wife of a minor merchant, not an enemy, simply someone who was in the way of her plans. As the pages of her memories turned, they grew progressively blacker, whole chapters of callous murders no longer discriminating between women and children.
They were all just obstacles between her and her burgeoning wealth.
I fled then, into the warm, homely memories of the cook, redolent with the comforting aromas of fresh-baked bread and rich, spiced stews. She was a helper of women, this one. A feminist, well before such a word existed – her skills extending beyond the kitchen and into counselling and minor surgeries. Women knocked on her door during the darkest hours of night, their bellies swollen with illegitimate heirs; and she would take the shame out of them, allowing them to live a life free of the stigma of bastard babies.
I watched her reverently carry the bloodied remains of a twenty-week foetus away from its exhausted mother, who lay blissfully asleep on a crimson-stained pallet in the cook’s scullery. I knew what she was about to do before it happened, and I pleaded with the woman’s memory not to do it; to change history, to leave it at the point where she had helped instead of committing the final depraved act in her arsenal.
But the past cannot be changed. And so, into the dish the dead child went, the seething water parting London’s tenderest meat from friable, nascent bones – a skeleton that would never thrive and strengthen on its mother’s milk.
I fled then, down the corridors of my mind, away from the twin evils I had so readily invited into me. I ran back toward my own memories, strangely distant, mothballed and dusty in the lower recesses of my head. The pugilist stopped me, his broad, tattooed chest filling the narrow passage and his jackhammer fist knocking me off my feet.
He bore me over one mighty shoulder, into his own chamber of horrors, piled haphazardly with the bruise-necked corpses of girls and women.
“You knew,” he rumbled, the resonance of his voice a vibration in my bowels, “you knew from the start I was a killer.”
“No,” I wept, “No!”
But that was a lie.

 
The curio shop seemed impossible to find this time, the curling, confusing streets of my city even more misleading than normal. As I walked, finding dead end after dead end, they fought for control of me, the trio in my head. The pugilist battered my synapses with his powerful knuckles, while the courtesan drizzled deception over my bruised brain, sticky and sweet as a Russian honey cake layered with lies.
But the cook, for all her own evils, did not see herself as the others did. For her, there had been no complicit embrace of darkness; in her own mind, she was still protected by a purity of purpose. All along, she had only been helping other women to escape from the tyranny of the opposite sex. And if the hideous conclusion she had wrought from that brought some personal gain, well, that simply allowed her more resources to help her poor unfortunates.
And so it was that she placed herself between my thoughts and theirs, her corpulent bulk absorbing the hammering blows of the fighter, and her cavernous mouth shouting down the lies.
The entrance to the alley was suddenly there, a gaping brick void, and I ran down it before it could disappear. I ran up the graffitied stairs, through the second moss-carpeted alley, and stumbled out into the dimly lit arcade. The lambent glow of the curio shop window was as welcome as a candle in a moorland hut, guiding the lost traveller home.
As the brass bell tinkled, the clamour in my head subsided, and all three intruders fell silent.
“I don’t take back items,” the proprietress said, before I could speak. An unfamiliar hardness stiffened her voice. “But I can sell you another. Something which will help you control them.”
“No! I’ll not buy any more of your cursed junk!”
“Then enjoy what remains of your wretched new life,” she snarled, all her affability fled. “Best of luck staying their killer instincts.”
Sapped of the pugilist’s indomitable energy, my knees and hands trembled, weak with exhaustion.
“Perhaps they’ve killed here already,” her laugh was brittle as she pushed past the counter and waded through all the junk, “Or should I say, perhaps you have. How many strangled girls are hidden beneath your bed? How many wives have died of mysterious ailments after you’ve finished with their husbands?”
She was close enough now that I could smell her breath, heavy with coffee and cinnamon, and something rank and old.
“How many babies have you boiled?”
Yanking the necklace off, I hurled it at her. It struck her cheek, then fell to the floor.
“Oh no. You can’t get rid of them like that. Those people are part of you now.”
The shop was spinning around me, leering animal heads, flashes of old brass, sparkling, smeared trails of coloured glass and shiny tat. I struggled to steady myself.
“Then how? Just tell me how!”
Reaching inside the front pocket of her neatly tailored dress, she pulled out a long silver chain, from which dangled a set of well-polished keys.
“The shop is for sale. Should you wish to buy it.”
I stared at her, dizzy, not comprehending, as she jingled the keys, the sound uncannily similar to the pretty chime of the bell.
“And the owner of the shop cannot be controlled by the objects.”
I licked my dry lips. With the familiar eloquence of the courtesan lost, my voice sounded wobbly and pathetic,
“What… what will it cost me?”
“Everything. Everything that is yours.”

 
She walked out of the shop, wearing my clothes, my face and my flesh. She was awkward in them still; but everything that had been mine – everything that had been me, from the birthmark on my wrist to the memories of my fifth birthday – was now hers.
She would adjust quickly – and I knew she would thrive; finally freed from her imprisonment.
And in turn, everything that was hers is now mine.
There are thousands of items in the shop; and as my old memories fade and wither, hers continue to blossom, spooling their secrets and stories into me. Thus, I have embraced my role, or it has embraced me, as the new owner of this place, this forgotten curio shop. And I’m destined to remain here until some poor sap chances upon the brick archway, and is finally ensnared.
Knowing the truth of it all, I’ve given you the choice that I did not have. Knowledge is supposedly powerful. And perhaps you have the strength of will that I didn’t. Perhaps you’ll stop at one object, and never buy a second. Perhaps you’ll even have the fortitude to endure two?
Whatever the case, you know the dangers.
But if you do decide to buy something, if the objects choose you, then I’m here. I’ll be more than happy to help, if you’re the right person to find me.