Welcome to a Nightmare

Chapter 22: In the Dark

The two race down the empty streets of the marginalized town, trying not to be seen by this alleged chauffeur that might be following Henry around. They knew that their time was extremely limited because school started in 30 minutes or less. They pass places they knew and loved but were now closed; like a dress shop and the Storybrooke garage. They run past the clock tower, which is now frozen at 8:21, the windows of the library are covered with newspaper, and there's a chain wrapped around the handles of the entrance. It was still a depressing sight to see, even after everything that both Crystal and Henry had seen.

They reach Rumpelstiltskin's shop and only stop briefly to catch their breaths. They look up at the busted-up sign, which reads something different than from before the curse:

Gold & Son Pawnbrokers & Antiquities

The name stung just a little for Crystal; if anything it should have been Gold and Family Pawnbrokers & Antiquities, but then she remembered in this curse, her father would not remember her. For a second, the thought that since this curse created a timeline where she seemingly never existed... could that mean that she was never born? Would she cease to exist just like Back to the Future? She hastily looks at her hands for a moment, but they weren't disappearing, and she was feeling fine. Besides, neither of them went into the past and messed something up anyways, they were in the present, which means she had to exist.

The shop was boarded up like every other building in this disintegrating Storybrooke and was vandalized with spray paint, obviously by someone who hated Gold or ran afoul of his pawnshop business. There were phrases like Fool's Gold, Watch Your Investments Die, Death to the Monster, and Gold is the Devil, smeared across the windows. At some point, Crystal would have delighted in seeing her father's place defaced like this, as well as many other citizens of Storybrooke because technically nothing in the shop belonged to her father, but rather the souls who had been swept up in Regina's curse. Even Hook's hand was in there somewhere, as well as Geppetto's deceased parents in the form of marionettes.

But they weren't after artifacts like that, they wanted spellbooks.

Crystal uses her magic to break the lock and allow both of them to slip inside. The place is filled with dust and it smells awful, like mildew and the faint smell of furniture polish. This was a scent Henry knew well when he'd been his grandfather's "apprentice" while trying to learn more about the Author. Henry tries the lights, but all the bulbs seem to be burnt out. Crystal uses her magic to conjure up a couple of purple orbs of light. The problem is, they are not as bright as they could be. Rumple's daughter snaps her fingers a couple of times, trying to get the spheres to glow more intensely, but they still have a shadowy and darker tint to their surfaces.

"Split up," Crystal mutters and the two go to opposite ends of the shop, going through the shelves in search of spellbooks.

They ignore the dust and cobwebs that have appeared with the curse, meant to signal the lack of use, they sort through everything that they can for something helpful.

The problem is, there are no enchanted artifacts. Crystal had the unusual ability to detect magical potential in various objects merely by touching them and this power first manifested in the very same shop in which they were standing in. She could see visions of how this object came to be in her father's possession and sometimes could even hear voices that accompanied them. However, as she searched through a bunch of old stuffed animals on one of the shelves, she couldn't hear or see anything. These were just regular objects, no enchantment on them at all. She scans through a spyglass, ducks under a bicycle hanging from the roof, an old metal box, a tea set with rabbits on them, a weird looking dagger, copper eyeglasses, a porcelain seashell, an old oil lamp and many other things, but there was no magical potential at all. Even Killian's hand and Geppetto's puppet parents weren't there. When she did get to a shelf of books, none of them were about spells, merely an atlas and a few volumes of a famous author.