THE NOSE AND HIS PERFUME

Chapter One

This chapter is dedicated to @CaitlinOHanlan for introducing me to wattpad.

Chapter One: Spark’s and Campbell’s Emporium of Interesting Goods

The old department store seemed to groan, like a grumpy old man, as the twins made their way through its gloomy underbelly. The basement was cold and smelled like wet clay. Bunny shivered, and as she shifted her grip on the enormous box of tinsel she was carrying, accidentally knocked the box against the wall of the hallway, brushing a few chunks of crumbling plaster loose. The store hadn’t always been so dingy. According to her brother, Beau, who was becoming something of an expert on Spark’s and Campbell’s history, the basement had once been used for more than just storage. Now half of its many rooms were cluttered with junk, while the other half were empty and forgotten. The twins had found the box of vintage tinsel they were sent for buried under a dusty heap of previous generations’ odd, holiday-themed inventions, like the little clockwork cupids that shot rolled-up coupons.

The twins were twelve and allowed to roam the rest of the store on their own, but they weren’t allowed in its half-abandoned basement without permission. So whenever the opportunity arose, they would always volunteer to get things from storage. No one else liked going down to the creepy basement anyway, but the twins didn’t mind. In addition to the old department store, Bunny and Beau Spark were heir to the great legacy it was built on. They were the great, great grandchildren of Thelonius Spark. The Thelonius Spark, of the famous exploring and inventing duo, Thelonius Spark and Magnus Campbell, who founded Spark’s and Campbell’s Emporium of Interesting Goods one hundred and fifty years ago. Someday Bunny hoped to become like Thelonius and Magnus, or any of the other famous adventurers and inventors that had been in their family, but she knew there was little chance of this. She was an ordinary girl stuck in a run-down place, where it seemed like everything interesting that would ever happen had happened before she was born.

The twins were too young when their parents died to remember them, but they had heard plenty of stories about their many great inventions. No one ever talked about what happened to them. The twins’ parents had died under mysterious circumstances—no discernible cause of death had ever been found. By all accounts, they had simply dropped dead. The twins knew this, not because anybody ever told them, but because Beau had been researching them.

“Whatever invention they were working on when they died, it was something big,” Beau said, updating Bunny on the latest bit of information he had found. “They died before it was finished.”

“What was it?”

Beau shrugged. “No one knows. It was a secret.”

A subway passed by the store underground, rattling the glass, antique light fixtures on the wall and vibrating the floor. Even though she couldn’t really see over the top of the giant box of tinsel she was carrying, Bunny was leading the way. The further away from the elevators and storage rooms the twins got, the more lights were burned out or flickering. It wasn’t just in the basement that things didn’t work. There was a spot on the third floor of the store, where, if the music was turned on, the lights went out.

According to everyone who worked there, the store would go out of business soon. The Varshavskys and Basil tried to dispel the twins’ worries, but they were getting too old to believe that everything was going to be fine. All they had to do was look around to see that this wasn’t the case. Who knew how many more opportunities they would get to explore the basement, where there was rumored to be secret passages and tunnels to other places. Though no one seemed to know any longer where these secret passages were, the one rumor that was consistent was that there had once been a secret passage that led from the store to their parents’ laboratory. Bunny wanted to find it.