Right away, Alma was disappointed. Horribly, terribly, gut-wrenchingly disappointed.
All those times she’d thought about the Fifth Point—so mysterious with its four doorways, shrouded from prying eyes by the thickly besmudged windows—all those times, she had always imagined that there would have to be something truly wonderful inside. A library of shining-spine books. A nursery of exotic plants. An apothecary with jars and vials and vats filled with unheard-of contents.
“But you’re just junk,” Alma said to the dust-blanketed heaps lit by the faint blue light of the shop. “Just a bunch of junk.”
Piles and piles of dingy, moldering, thrift-store-rejected rubbish.
The disappointment, added to the many disappointments of the past three months, was so immense and so overwhelming that Alma felt tears in her eyes as she spun around to leave.
But then she paused.
On the shelf in front of her, blurred by her tears, something had caught the light.
Something was shining.
Alma moved aside a cracked lawn gnome. She moved aside a blob of melted wax that was once a candle, and a handleless teal pitcher. Behind them, there was a box.
It was a wooden case, covered in scuffs and scratches. The case had a copper latch—the shining thing—that was half-covered in a green patina.
“What are you, I wonder?” Alma asked, wiping her eyes with her jacket sleeve.
She knelt down and pulled out the case. Rusted wind chimes slid off, tinkling a minor-key tune.
The box was about two feet long and a foot wide, the size of a trumpet case. Alma opened the lid.
It wasn’t a trumpet.
The object in the box was split into three tapered cylindrical pieces, large, medium, and small. The cylinders were wooden, as scuffed and scratched as the box they came in, with copper casings. They lay on a bed of red velvet.
“A telescope,” Alma said.
At least, she thought it was.
She picked up the smallest cone. It had a glass lens on one end, and she peered into it, although she knew it wouldn’t work without the other pieces.
But it did. Through the eyepiece, the entire shop seemed to shine with a golden light, and inside of Alma, that feeling of brightness grew too.
She sat there on the floor, peering through the telescope lens at the chipped blue of a doll’s eye and the corroded black of an iron step, and she thought that this couldn’t be a coincidence. How could it be a coincidence that she would find a flyer for an Astronomy Club and a telescope on the same day?
And this shop was obviously abandoned. No one had been here in a long, long time.
The telescope, like the flyer, felt like it was here for her.
“I’m going to take you with me,” Alma said to the eyepiece as she placed it gently back in the case. “I’m going to take you home.”
Alma closed the case and latched it shut.
And then a flash of blue light filled the shop.
And upstairs, the ceiling creaked, as if someone were walking above her.
The shop was not abandoned after all.
Alma leaped to her feet, leaving the case on the ground. She whirled toward the doorway, ready to flee, when a voice from overhead rang out, high-pitched and urgent, like the solitary chime of a clock at one:
“Wait!”