The Glass

It was late in the afternoon when I found the small, dirty, and absolutely postage-stamp covered cardboard box waiting for me outside my office door. 

Frankly I was shocked - a parcel delivered right to my office for the first time ever. I checked the dim hallway, but no deliverybeast in sight. When I saw the amount of stamps, my muzzle fell open, but when I saw who it was from I had to sit down in the rickety chair behind my desk. 

“Uncle Shepherd,” the upper left address space on the box declared modestly. I set the parcel down on my coffee ring-stained desk and ran a claw along my incisors. 

“Well scat,” I said as I flumped down.

My maternal uncle Shepherd was a self-styled ‘explorer’ who went missing off the coast of Antarctica a few years back. According to the postage dates that ringed the various stamps, he’d probably sent this shortly before his fateful expedition. 

“No wonder it took so long to finally reach me,” I said, taking a sip from my mug. No alcohol in it that morning, luckily.

I’m getting ahead of myself though it seems: introductions are in order. 

Name’s Snickertooth. Skreet Snickertooth. 

Only a few months ago I was a rat in the homicide division of the NYPD. But now, after some ...policy disagreements,... I’m here on my own, in my own little office. 

I’m a private eye these days. 

My eyes drifted back to the parcel: a raggedy box covered in stamps, notes from various far-flung post offices, and tape. 

“You’re an explorer too, aren’t you?” I asked it, trying to calm my anxiety and skepticism as to its contents.

There had to be a reason he sent this to me. 

Uncle Shepherd was one of the few members of my family I could actually stand. My claw sliced through the packing tape of the parcel and a heavy black object hit my desk, followed by the angel feather lightness of a piece of paper. 

My whiskers twitched as I picked the paper up first. 

Hey, favorite nephew. Sending this to you for safekeeping. I swear it’s not just a joke given your profession. I was sorry to hear you left the force, but sounds like it was for the best. This expedition is... Sorry, I’m not sure what to say. This latest adventure of mine is like nothing else in the history of the world. Is that mysterious enough for you, ha ha? 

I saw that he’d underlined “history”. I made a mental note and moved past it.

I wish I could go into more details, but I fear it might jeopardize some secret government department. I’ve got a funny feeling about this whole trip I’m on, so in the meantime look after this. 

If I don’t make it back, consider this an inheritance.

-Uncle Shepherd. 

I had a funny feeling about that expedition or ‘adventure’ or whateveritwas, too, even back when he’d left and I met him at the docks as he boarded that scientific vessel bound for the Southern reaches. ...But my own snout-poking had gotten me nowhere but redacted files, armed guards, and dead ends. 

Deep in the packaging of paper and cardboard, I found my supposed inheritance. I regarded it, curled my tail around my chair, and chuckled. 

A magnifying glass. 

“Well, guess I’m a real detective now,” I muttered to myself, smirking. 

It was a handsome thing. The handle was well-worn wood, the frame a dark iron, and the lens itself seemed more like a diamond than glass. I tapped the lens gently with a claw, seemed it actually was some sort of stone instead of glass. I couldn’t help myself as I held the lens up to my eye looking at my window, admired the slums of New York, and gently returned it to my desk. 

I moved to grab a glass of an entirely different kind when I paused. The window. There was a gaping, shattered hole in it. 

I looked back to verify my sanity, and there was the whole window: A little dirty perhaps, but no hole - no broken glass. I flattened my ears and thought nothing of it, a trick of the mind, nothing more. 

Days passed and I took a case, a nasty affair involving an ex husband and a campaign to make the former missus look insane. It was during this case I had a sizeable rock thrown through my window.

Impressive arm considering I’m on the third floor.

It wasn’t till after the case ended and I was sweeping up glass that it came to me. 

I’d seen that hole in the window before! 

A sharp sense of observation was, of course, a requirement for someone in my line of work, and I knew I had seen the exact same ragged hole in my window through the glass. I picked it up and looked through it at the window again, wondering if I would see the pane whole again. I caught a slight shimmer like a heat mirage, and then it was as if the window and wall didn’t exist - even the textile factory next door was gone. Instead I was looking at an antique carriage rolling along a cobbled street with a pair of well dressed raccoons within... Just for an instant, before the view collapsed back to reality.

I lowered the glass.

Once again I questioned my sanity - much like my last client had. A second look revealed nothing, just the window as it was. Or was it as it was a few minutes ago, or a few minutes for now? Or the present state?

“Where did you find this thing uncle?” I whispered aloud, turning it over in my pawhands - but uncle Shepherd kept his silence. 

Likely in his watery grave.

I recalled a line that had always stuck with me. 

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

At that moment, that was the best I had to go on: I didn’t even know how to begin to investigate this magnifying glass. After my initial shock, I threw the thing in my desk drawer - gently - and tried to forget what I had seen. Soon afterward, though, I thought it could prove a boon to my work... but the damned thing wouldn’t cooperate. There was seemingly no rhyme or reason as to whether if it would show past or future, or how far back or forward. At times I feared what I might see through it, some things ‘mere mortals’ aren’t meant to know. Every now and then though, it came through for me. 

Most of the time I had to stick to the tried-and-true detective work.   

Whenever I had time, the magnifying glass would be my case. I did some digging into it and the circumstances regarding my uncle’s disappearance. I had to be very careful when letting experts look at it, but eventually it seemed that the iron and handle had been made at some point at the turn of the last century, but other than that, they couldn’t give me anything solid. 

No craftsman’s shop, no signature in the iron or wood. 

The gemologist I took it to was absolutely bewildered. Haddock was a friend - an older possum with a long, grey muzzle. I still remember him, with his pair of magnifying goggles pushed up to his forehead and a puzzled look in his beady eyes. 

“Not glass,” he said. "Not crystal, not quartz, not anything I've got a name for.” He slid it back across the counter without meeting my eyes. “Take it to a church, or a museum, or the bottom of a deep lake. Take it anywhere I'm not."

“What is it?”

“It's old,” Haddock said. “Older than old. And whatever it's made of was never quarried. It was grown.” 

“Grown? It’s awfully perfect to have been grown.” 

“Yes, puzzling, isn’t it?” Haddock replied. 

There was more he wasn’t telling me. I had been in the biz long enough to know that. Maybe he had seen something in the glass too. 

I know there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I've got the inheritance to prove it.