Gravity Bend

Book One: The Tourist Trap

I

June 24, 2012

A few days before school got out, Max and Lyra's parents told them, "Kids, you need some fresh air for the summer. And you wanted to see somewhere other than Ontario. We were thinking of sending you down to British Columbia."

"B.C.!" Max shouted. His mind was racing with thoughts of surfing, all-year skiing, and Vancouver shopping. He paused for a moment. "But why B.C.?"

"Because Grandpa Shermy's brother lives in, what do they call it, the Kootenay."

"The Interior?" Max cried, Whistler-based daydreams evaporating. He'd never heard anyone say anything much about the B.C. Interior, but the little he had heard was mostly harsh jokes.

"East of the Interior," her mother corrected, "Some smaller town. It'd be good for the both of you to do some travelling alone. Anyways, with Shermy passed away last year, your great-uncle... Oh, I can never remember his name... Might like to see some family."

Neither Max nor Lyra had ever even known that Grandpa Shermy – who they'd seen little of when he was alive – had had a brother. The twins went together to their father and asked.

"My uncle Stanford," he confirmed, "Dad never talked much about him. Or really about growing up at all. I only met Stan once or twice. He was older than dad and moved out when dad was still pretty young. I do remember hearing that he graduated from physics in university. God knows what for, since I've heard he runs some sort of tacky museum now."

Hefty bags were packed, and at the ebb of June, the twins boarded a long-haul Greyhound. They read, and watched the spring woods out the window, most of the way to the Manitoba border, then fell asleep fitfully on each others' shoulders.  They woke heading for Saskatchewan, sandwiched between the endless neon yellow of canola fields and a flat blue sky.

Then, on the last day, past where Alberta rolled up in aspen-patched foothills,  they plunged into the imposing wall of the front ranges and were among bristling evergreens. The forest piled up to great rock ridges that burst from the earth. An endless city of battlemented castles on an inhuman scale.

Disembarking many, many hours later in a little town called Gravity Bend, they followed their directions from the bus stop to a parking lot off the highway among mossy old-growth forest. In the clearing just beyond stood a peculiar house – a two-story wooden A-frame, paint peeling, listing dangerously. From this basic form, Great-Uncle Stanford had added two shed-roofed expansions on the front and side, one the museum of strange and shoddy artifacts, the other the gift shop where one could and would be coerced into buying expensive and even shoddier replicas of the same. The highest roof was adorned with a giant sign reading MYSTERY SHACK, and a smaller one modifying this with WORLD FAMOUS! This was a stretch to say the least.

There was no front door to knock on. The gift shop had been built in front of where it should have been. There was, however, a tour group filtering into the museum. The twins shared a glance, and wordlessly decided to join the line.

Inside the dusty half-lit gallery, the twins had to be careful not to knock their bags into the tightly packed glass cases of jackalopes and spooky masks. Great-Uncle Stan – it must have been him – stood in a tweed suit and fez.  He wore an eyepatch under a pair of spectacles and leaned on an 8-ball-topped cane. He was describing a Sasquatch on a podium to a distracted audience. To Lyra's eye the Sasquatch looked like a store mannequin taxidermized over with rabbit fur.

At the end of the tour, Lyra and Max followed Stan as he herded the group towards the gift shop. They broke away just long enough for Max to run up and introduce the two of them.