My Landlord Is A Wizard

I think my landlord might be a wizard.

I’m actually serious. Not, like, a magician. An actual, honest-to-god wizard.

At first I thought he was just weird. He’d show up for rent inspections wearing a purple dressing gown and apparently without any visible form of transport. Animals were allowed, as long as they were cats, and as long as he could interview them first. He told we could leave the books in the library, or box them and store them in the attic, but either way we weren’t to open them.

But the rent was cheap and the house was clean. Who cares if the guy’s a little weird.

Then we found the hat.

We were taking him up on his suggestion, moving the books to the attic, when Steve found it under some boxes. Steve’s my roommate, or he would be if he was ever home. But hey, he helps pay the rent.

“Hey, look at this,” Steve said.

“It’s a hat.”

“Yeah... but not just any hat. Check it out.” He flapped it through the air like an overenthusiastic bullfighter. It was the dustiest sombrero I’d ever seen.

“Here,” he said, “You take one too.” He tossed me something which looked like it had come straight out of The Three Musketeers: It was wide and floppy and had a massive moth-eaten feather in it. I chucked it aside.

“Can we concentrate on shifting these books already?”

“Aw, why so serious?” he said in his best Jack Nicholson voice, and jammed the hat over my head, flipping the sombrero on at the same time.

“Very funny,” I said as I wrestled the hat off from over my eyes. Steve was standing next to me, slack-jawed and staring into the distance. I waved a hand in front of him, keeping my oversized feather out of my eyes with the other. “Steve? Oi, earth to Steve...”

I turned around and the staring made a bit more sense. The attic had changed, quite significantly. A few modest piles of junk had been replaced with an infinite plane of the stuff. I blinked a few times.

“Um.”

Steve just made a strangled-sounding noise.

I pulled off the hat. The regular attic snapped back into place instantly. I put it back on; and the surreal landscape of junk reappeared. It was the hats for sure then. Interesting.

Steve was starting to drool on the floor, so I tugged the sombrero off his head. That seemed to snap him out of it a bit.

“Far out.”

He went straight for the stairs.

“Where are you going?”, I asked.

“Well, don’t you want to see what the rest of the house looks like with this thing on?” He paused for a second. “Also, I’d quite like to be sick.”

--

The rest of the house also expanded, or at least changed, under the influence of the hats, though not always in the way you’d expect. The bathroom, for example - once Steve had finished throwing up - turned into a lagoon full of cascading waterfalls and tropical birds. We spent a whole hour wandering around the master bedroom, which (as near as I can tell) became an exact replica of the palace at Versailles. The weirdest by far, though, was the library. Hatland’s (Steve’s idea.) library was exactly the same as the ordinary one, but with one addition: in the centre of the room, there was a seven-foot-high obsidian archway.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think we should touch this one.”

“Yeah.”

We went and had lunch instead. At the food court, since the Hatland kitchen was apparently a cross between a biomedical lab and a medieval torture chamber and neither of us really felt like eating out of it any more.

“Sho what do we doo?” said Steve through a mouthful of cheap curry.

“Well,” I pondered, “I reckon we’ve got two choices. Either we admit that we’ve probably gone crazy and turn ourselves over to the asylum, or we call up the landlord and ask exactly what’s going on.”

Steve swallowed. “I like the second one more.”

“Me too. Thing is, he never left a number, just a postal address to forward his mail to. I guess we could send him a postcard.”

“Oh yeah, that’d look good. ‘Dear Mr. Landlord, We found your bonkers hats in your crazy house, please tell us what the hell is going on, much love, Your Devoted Tenants.’”

I shrugged. “Eh. It’s all we’ve got.”

We spent the next week or so testing the boundaries of Hatland. The attic seemed to be the only infinite one (If you went far enough in one direction and then took off the hat you’d end up in someone else’s attic, which was awkward). The rest were just very large. On the downside, our food budget was way up (seriously, the Hatkitchen was freaky), but on the upside, our water bill was way down, since both of us preferred the tropical waterfalls to the grimy old bathroom. I was coming out of there one evening trying to pick the leaves from my hair when Steve came up to me. He looked even more screwed up than when we’d first found the hats.

“Are you alright?”

He shook his head. “I was in the library... and I tripped and touched that archway... and now it’s sort of glowing and... and whispering. And when I took my hat off, it didn’t... It didn’t stop.”

This could definitely not be good.

We stood at the door to the library. The arch was indeed glowing. Purple- but not regular purple. Black-light purple. And pulsing slightly. And yes, whispering. I took a few steps towards it. Steve grabbed my arm.

“I really don’t think you should.”

“I just want to have a bit of a closer look.”

And I took another step.

The archway didn’t like that at all. It crackled. Tiny strings of lightning arced across it and the hairs on my arm started to stand on end. I stepped back. It didn’t stop. Something which looked like a crack was forming in the air down the middle of the arch.

“Steve.”

“Yeah?”

“I think we should go.”

“Yeah.”

We turned and ran, slamming the door behind us just as something black and formless started to force its way through the widening crack. We sprinted down the vaulted marble corridor which was the Hat-house’s version of a hallway. The real hallway is shorter, I realised, and pulled the hat off my head. The end of the hall sprung forwards as the marble columns shimmered out of existence.

“Steve! Take the hat off!”

Steve appeared beside me.

“That saved a lot of time. Do you think-” he paused- “-whatever that was, can get us without the hats on?”

“I don’t freaking know! I just want to get as far away as possible.”

We turned and grabbed the front doorknob at the same time, only to have it yanked away from us. On the doorstep stood the landlord, complete with purple bathrobe, nightcap and bunny slippers.

“Uh. Hi. You got our postcard?” Steve started.

I pushed Steve out the door in front of me. “Sorry, urgent, um, appointment. We have to-”

The landlord looked quizzically at us. “Postcard? What the hell are you on about? I’m here for the rent inspection.”

“Yeah, like I said, there’s a thing we have to do-”

The landlord grabbed the hats from each of our hands and put them on our heads. Several things happened at once.

Firstly, it got a lot darker. It had gone from a reasonably sunny day to the blackest storm I‘ve ever seen, and apparently centered over the house. Three guesses as to what might be causing that.

Secondly, the landlord. His sleepwear had flipped itself somehow into a billowing violet cloak, pointed boots, and a big ol‘ stereotypical wizard hat which added a good foot and a half to his height.

Steve and I just stared.

“I said, I’m here to rebind the ancient seals,” said the landlord.

“No you didn’t. You said rent inspection.”

The landlord looked at me like I was stupid. Then, wordlessly, he pointed at the hats.

Then he kicked the door down.

Or at least he tried to, if at least a hundred massive tentacles hadn’t got there first from the other side. The three of us were thrown bodily into the street as every opening in the house erupted with waving appendages, some tentacles, some eye-stalks, some things which I couldn’t describe even if I wanted to. The landlord drew himself to his feet, eyes literally blazing with light, and started booming words in an ancient tongue which burned my ears when he spoke. A gust of wind caught the hats-

The landlord stood in the middle of the sunny street, eyes faintly glazed over, wearing bunny slippers and reciting softly to himself, “Eggs, milk, tuna- no wait, I got tuna yesterday- Bread, sausages-”

I put the hat back on.

We were standing in the middle of what looked like a rapidly forming active volcano. Glowing cracks criss-crossed the street, and the ground shook with every word the landlord spoke. The thing- whatever it was- was too tall to see the top of now, growing upwards like a tree and branching outwards to cover the entire sky. Oh god, I can’t take it-

A single cloud drifted lazily across the sky. A pair of birds twittered to each other in the trees. The man down the street started his lawnmower, and started filling the air with the intertwined scents of fresh-mown grass, two-stroke engine fuel and impending hay fever-

The landlord was throwing bolts of lightning like a discus-thrower, one end impaling the tentacle-tower and the other slamming into the ground. With each one, he pulled the writhing mass closer to the earth, forcing it, inch by inch, back through the gap it had forced its way through. After what seemed like hours of bellowing and tossing of lightning, something seemed to give, and the- thing - collapsed under apparently the sheer weight of lightning bolts pulling it to the ground. The landlord lazily flicked his wrist, and with a sound like a massive vacuum cleaner, every trace of the creature was slurped back to where it came from, leaving just the wreckage of the Hat-house, looking as if it had been peeled like a banana. The landlord turned to both of us, rolling his eyes.

Steve cleared his throat.

“I don’t suppose we’ll be getting our bond back then.”

---

What I was aiming for, stylistically and content-ually, was some kind of cross between Lovecraft and Pratchett, though to be honest I'm not totally sure it succeeded in terms of style- there's a bit too much hope (ie, they live) for Lovecraft, and not nearly enough satire for Pratchett. Still.

It also occurs to me that this is actually the first time I've ever written proper fantasy. Like, ever. Literally. Every other thing I've ever written has either been sci-fi or moderny stuff.

I kinda like it. I might even do more.