Chapter One: Wants & Getz

Martin Hollys looked at the sign above the door and then looked at the card in his hand. He did this several times. The address was correct. But the sign above the door promised only an accountant's office. The card read:


WANTS & GETZ
Mementos and Aquisitions
Couriers services provided
27 Mercury Ave.


The card was dingy, off-white. The lettering was the color of fool's gold. Martin Hollys flipped the card over and reread the message written on the back. That made him bring his free hand up to his fresh black eye and swollen lip. After that, his hand seemed to search out the paperback book sized package that he had found with the note. It was in his coat pocket and it was plain, he didn't need to look at it again. He let his fingers tap-tap-tap the side of the package. Just brown paper, it could have been a bomb. Or a box of candy. With a final look up and down the street, he opened the door and went inside.

There was a twinkle of bells and then the smell of old books and muffled sound of music. It wasn't an accountant's office. The space looked like some weird nexus point between the gingerbread house, the bookstore from The Neverending Story, Buffalo Bill's dungeon from Silence Of The Lambs, and a UPS Store. Shelves lined the walls, covered with various paraphernalia and detritus. Martin followed the music.

Sock monkeys slumped next to Matchbox cars. A hug pickle jar filled with a mummified snake held down the pages of an old Sear and Roebuck catalogue. Martin picked up a plastic encased Amazing Fantasy #15, staring at Spider-man on its cover, then he put it back where he found it, next to a huge grimoire that could have easily been The Necronomicon.

And there were more mysterious things, tiny wooden boxes stamped with various words or symbols or combinations of letters and numbers. Plastic bags with the spidery Sharpie marker scrawls. FANCY. MOUNTAINTOP. OTWT#3. QUELL. FV5E. Ankhs, elements of the periodic table, binary code, gibberish.
Martin made his way to the center of all the shelves and boxes and leaning towers and found a counter where a record played a scratchy song in a foreign language. German? Russian? Some eastern Europrean country that no longer existed? There were also several of the dingy business cards, various sticky notes, and a random Tarot card. Five Of Swords.

"May I help you?"

Martin turned around stared at the source of the voice as scratchy as the record. A tiny woman with gray dreadlocks and brown skin looked down at him. She was standing on a ladder, putting more of the strange boxes on an upper shelf. She held one in her hand. HRTS DSR #7. She was wearing some sort of military jacket. Gray as her dreadlocks. To Martin, it looked almost like a Nazi uniform. An SS officer.

"I'm Lola Getz. This is my place."

She was beautiful, Martin decided. In a rawboned, masculine way. Like a black, dreadlocked David Bowie. When she climbed down from the ladder she was slightly taller than Martin, which was off putting. Her eyes were gray and fey. The whites of her eyes were yellowed.

"That's a helluva shiner."

There was an accent. Something about the way the words tumbled out of her mouth, reminded Martin of a Cuban guy he use to play chess with. Anytime Martin made a tricky move or feint, the old Cuban would mutter, 'clever guy clever guy clever guy' to himself. But the pattern of it always sounded to Martin like there was a world of meaning hidden in each syllable.

Martin took the plain package out of his coat pocket. He started to speak but she cut him off.

"Where did you get that?"

Her scratchy foreign voice held a teaspoon of panic in it, like a drop of poison in a cold glass of water. Again, Martin started to speak but she raised a hand and silenced him. She cocked her head to the side, listening. Martin thought about how when most people cocked their heads to the side they look like birds. Lola Getz didn't. She looked like a praying mantis.

"Wait. Not here. Follow me."

She turned on her heels and vanished into one of the rows of shelves. Martin hesitated, looked down at the package, then followed. The row she chose seemed more deranged than the others he passed through. It was like a ticker tape parade and a ransom note had an unwanted child and that child was raised by a mathematician who enjoyed chaos theory and quantum mechanics. If there was a system, it was beyond Martin to tell what it was.

Dreamcatchers, windchimes, and fierce looking kites hung from the ceiling, forcing him to slump forward. He passed shelves full of ivory tusks, Hummel figures, and packs of chewing gum. An Atari 2600 sat next to a shrunken head. Samurai swords, golf clubs, and tiki torches were bound together with bungee cord. Stone idols, false teeth, Rubix Cubes, monkey paws. It all blurred into a colorful nothing. Left, right, right, left. Martin wondered how big the building was.

And then just as suddenly as he thought it, he made one more right and ended up in a sort of break room. There was a fridge and a table and three chairs. Everything was purple velvet and green formica, lit by a naked lightbulb. It was bright and odd. The place looked like a grandmother's house had exploded. Everything looked moldering and Victorian and frilly. Lola Getz leaned against the table watching Martin as he emerged. The tablecloth was all flowers and hearts and jumping ponies. Another woman sat in one of the strange plush chairs.

She was tiny and young and had dark hair. She was coloring with crayons and even though she seemed young she seemed too old for that. She hummed to herself and busied herself with coloring. The table was covered with her drawings. She didn't look up. Martin had a feeling that many a scary cut scene in a video game could play out in this break room. Lola Getz cleared her throat.

"This is my...partner...Lola Wants. Now tell me where you found that package."