The Dream Factory

The Olde Curiosity Shop

Snap was always the go to man for any Red curios. He had an old run down establishment behind Lockets, the embalmer. In Lockets you could pick up a small stuffed Red for twenty dollars and something more substantial for one hundred plus. People used them as garden sculptures or mounted them either side of their gate posts to impress their neighbours. Big was good, stranger was better, if you had the money. I occasional sold pieces to Locket but preferred Snap as he'd always give me a better price and had the bonus that he allowed me to hang around in his shop to escape the choking dust of the passing storms.

I'd always liked Snap, he'd had the shop as long as I could remember. He had a gentle sense of humour that came with dealing in the bizarre. A deadpan face with quirky uplift in his tone when he made a joke that I always found myself strangely beholden to. I'd sit on the padded leather stool he kept for his high end clientele and we'd talk about the Reds, the weather, what was selling and what wasn't while I drank the weak tea he poured from a cracked china teapot. All the while Heyday would bustle around us with his little duster topped with a plume of coloured tail feathers.

The Red camp ran from the old mining town of Regus all the way down to Fredrick's Drift. The camp occupied the old salt flats, a vast prehistoric lake bed with the mountains on one side and us, in our windblown clapboard houses at Regus on the other. The camp was surrounded by a thirty foot high wall with an electrified fence on the top. Stand close to the wall, not so close that the Loom might take a shot at you from their platforms, and you could hear the Reds inside. The yells and screams and wailing sounded like some hideous painting I'd once see in a magazine. Snap reckoned I was thinking of Hieronymus Bosch. I was thinking of Hell, if that's what Bosch had painted.

'Hi Snap.' I closed the door quickly to stop the drifting sand being blown over the floor.

The little bell above me rang out and Snap looked up expectantly. His bushy eyebrows did a little dance of recognition across his forehead. 'Hi Yip, welcome to my emporium.' Snap had a customer, he gave me a little knowing wink and I dropped my bag in a corner and began browsing out of harm's way.

The shelves in the window were packed with little phials of potions. I'd sell any Red body parts I found on the tip to Snap and he bought ones from Lockets to keep his stock up. He made them into lotions and cures for the locals who figured there was something in Red anatomy that was close to magical. They probably got that bit from Snap himself. They weren't for me; I found it all a bit creepy.

I shuffled around two packed cabinets, picked up an umbrella that appeared to be made of something like bats wings and flapped it open and closed a few times before dropping it back into a stand made of black bones shaped like the branches of the thorn trees I'd seen out in the plains, twisted obscenely inward on each other in an attempt to protect themselves from the searching winds.

In a locked display case the shop's more valuable pieces were displayed. Anything that was personal to a Red attracted more value. A little green stone that changed colour when you held it. I'd sold Snap that. Fin tokens, cloud rings, neck clips, and finger charms all carefully laid out with white paper price tags inlaid with gold ink in Snap's neat gothic handwriting.

Snap's customer looked furtively back at me and passed Snap a dollar bill before stuffing whatever Snap had sold him under his coat he slipped past and out the door leaving the brass bell ringing his exit.

At the sound of the bell Heyday had appeared. He sidestepped me, checked the door was closed before producing a dustpan and brush from his sack and briskly sweeping away the sand.

Heyday had always been there since I'd first visited the shop. Heyday had a nervous energy about him, constantly sculling around the shop until Snap told him to stop and sit down. He was shorter than me, two long spindly arms topped by gloved hands protruding from a worn red velvet waistcoat. He was the only Red I'd met in the flesh. He had no head. Snap told me it had been shot off by a Loom and that's how Snap was allowed to keep him. I don't know how he got around without a head, but he seemed to sense where everything was. He would sweep up, unpack boxes, and dust the stuff Snap had on the shelves. Maybe he could remember where everything was, like blind people do with an internal map in his head. I never saw him break anything.