Guarded Keepsakes, Page 3

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  “Ninety-grand was a steal,” Gus whistled as Jay stepped into the Turner home. “You'll get five times your money out of this place. I know you're not gonna mind if I take a few of these pieces home.”

  Jay refrained from answering and directed his attention to the items crowding the home's foyer. Tin, wind-up rockets and motorcycles piled along the walls. Dusty boxes of old games rested on a game table, an unfolded, board displaying a contest neither Jay nor Gus recognized. Red-coated toy soldiers and chess pieces gathered in formations within a display case in a corner. Marbles of coral greens, aqua-blues and fire oranges filled several glass jars. Boy scout magazines and books with spaceman covers lay upon the floor. The Turner home stood in the ruin of its age, and all the dust blanketing the toys in the greeting foyer accentuated the decay.

  “Those splotches look fresh,” Gus bent over a secretary hutch, its desk open to reveal a spiral notebook. Aged fountain pens surrounded the paper, and black ink from an overturned bottle spilled across the desk and stained one of the notebook's corners.

  Jay extended a finger into the glistening ink and pulled back a darkened digit. “The ink's still fresh.”

  “Maybe the attorney was noting something,” Gus offered. “See if the notebook tells us anything.”

  Jay scanned the open page. The black scrawl was written tightly. Strange letters and runes Jay failed to decipher looped and slanted into one another. Thinking such strange writing perhaps the marks left behind by a hand scribbling to find a consistent flow of ink through an old, unfamiliar pen, Jay turned through the pages. The strange script filled the entire notebook. Jay saw there had been a long, concentrated effort to so fill the notebook, an effort, he could not avoid thinking, wasted with such incomprehensible markings.

  “Maybe you can make it out,” Jay held the script up to Gus's good, green eye.

  Gus grunted. “I'll do no better than you, and I didn't come out here to read.”

  “Just doesn't make much sense.”

  Gus shrugged. “A kid probably left that notebook behind sneaking around this place.”

  Gus's curiosity drifted away from notebooks filled with undecipherable scrawl towards the antiques waiting deeper within the home. Jay tossed the notebook back upon the secretary desk and followed Gus through an archway into an adjoining parlor. Thick curtains hung above the windows and set the chamber into shadow. A draft whispered through yet unvisited halls, and the wide, crystal chandelier suspended from the tall ceiling chimed. A player's piano stood against the far wall, with canisters placed atop the keyboard that Jay suspected were filled with paper rolls of old melodies. The horns of several gramophones arched towards a crimson, Victorian feinting couch. Records were strewn about the floor's thick carpet and surrounded the room's couch. Jay followed Gus towards a gramophone, careful not to step upon any of the sheets of music and song books that littered the floor.

  “These records might be worth something. This is the first I've seen these up close” Gus gathered a short stack of disks from the floor. “These are glass records, Jay. Glass was what the first records were made of. Might be worth a treasure depending on what we find on them.”

  “Try to play one. You know how to set one of those gramophones up?”

  “Sure.” Gus winked. “An old gramophone like one of these was my first sound system.”

  “I didn't think you were that old, Gus.”

  “My family couldn't afford to buy anything else.”

  Jay nodded. “I think I understand your passion for all these antiques a little better now. Must feel nice to see the outcast and the old gain value through time.”

  Gus's good, green eye swiveled upon Jay while the glass orb set in his right socket didn't move, creating that peering, appraising look that still unsettled Jay. Gus grunted after a moment and began winding a gramophone. Several turns later, with the gramophone's hidden, inner gears making no noise of disrepair, Gus placed a glass record onto the player. With a flip of a mechanism, the record began to spin, and Gus swiveled the arm over a groove and lowered the needle without a scratch.

  Snaps and cracks floated out of the gramophone's horn.

  “I wouldn't expect anything but low fidelity,” Gus chuckled. “That needle looked awful dull and old.”

  Notes slowly fell from the horn, weaving together in a melancholy melody that sounded too heavy to float about the chamber, music that instead rolled across the floor like heavy, gray smoke.

  “Sounds like a funeral march.” Jay spoke.

  Gus nodded. “Not any I recognize.”

  Simply listening to the music exhausted Jay. He shook his head to chase away a drowsiness that pulled at his eyelids. He moved towards the gramophone to stop the song when a discordant shrill shrieked from the horn, sending Jay into shivers, turning the fine hairs of his forearms into quills. Mad, savage instruments of percussion and string roared from the horn. The rhythm of the march vanished into a swirling scrum of discord and sound, growing louder the longer the record spun.

  Suddenly, a chorus of angry voices shouted from the spinning glass.

  “Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”

  Jay's heart quickened. He strained to recognize the words screamed by those voices, but he could recognize nothing in the garble, could understand no meaning in the recording of tongues that roared such mumbles through the spiraling groove carved into glass.

  “Un'ghhe' imnehst Arat'khen eenour Khuns Lleung Omthe!”

  The needle scraped to the end of the record, and silence returned to the parlor.

  “I don't think a dull needle has much to do with that awful noise.” Gus shook his head. “I don't think that record's going to be worth much.”

  “Those words don't sound like any language I've ever heard,” Jay responded. “Let's just move on and leave the others on the floor.”

  “We're not going to have time to organize anything on our first day,” Gus spoke. “We've only seen the first two rooms. We still have a lot of house, and we'll be lucky to peek in half of the buildings waiting outside. We'd cover more ground if we separated.”

  Jay hesitated, unsure how far he could trust Gus. Would Gus keep any pearls and jewels he might discover in the secrets of his pockets, or would the one-eyed companion disclose whatever valuables he found in old sock drawers? Knowing he lacked the leverage needed to argue with Gus, Jay sighed. He needed Gus's help. He needed Gus's trailer. He needed his friend's expertise and eye.

  “Alright,” Jay responded. “You take the house and I'll get to the outbuildings. Just remember where you find things for now.”

  Gus's good, green eye squinted at Jay. “Oh, I won't move anything without you, partner,” Gus's lip twitched. “Just don't get lost in all the junk in the backyard. My hearing's not much better than my vision, so don't take it for granted that I'd hear you shouting for help should you get lost.”