“GOLEMS ARE US. FREE GOLEMS.”
I must have walked past that storefront a hundred times, and steadfastly ignored its peeling signs. I don’t know what compelled me to go in. Golem warehouses were pretty tasteless at the best of times. Ever since the Chinese had discovered you didn’t have to actually hand-transcribe the Ancient Scroll of Lak’ptui and could just bang it through a photocopier, the places had been springing up then closing down again just as quickly, like rug stores only worse because they were trafficking in sentient clay and not inanimate lumps of woven fibre.
This place made those look like the goddamn Ritz. The earthy smell hit me like a ton of bricks as I pushed through the dusty door. There was one light in the entire place, and it wasn’t doing a very good job- most of what I could see was from the sunlight streaming through the glass shopfront. I looked idly around for a counter.
That was odd. No counter.
“Hello?” I called out, “Anyone here?”
There was silence for a moment, and then a clanking from the back of the store.
“Hello?”
The clanking resolved into footsteps, and an animate golem rounded the corner, with a storeman’s apron crudely draped over it for modesty. For reasons no animatologist could figure out, golems refused to animate unless they were anatomically correct. Either that, or it was a conspiriacy thought up by clothing manufacturers looking to cut into a new market.
“Could you tell me where the owner is?”
The golem pulled a tablet from its apron and began to print, cuneiform-style, its answer. Very, very slowly.
Present.
Ah, golems. Sentient, sure, but none too bright.
“Where is the owner?”
Again the slow pressing of the wedgelike stylus. Someone really needs to invent a voice system for these, I thought, or maybe just teach them to type.
Present.
That didn’t make sense.
“Do you understand?”
Faster this time:
Yes.
“So who owns this store?”
Present.
This was getting ridiculous. “Look, is there anyone here I can talk to? About possibly buying a golem? No?”
No.
“Right. Popped out for coffee, I expect. Slackers”. My nerves were just about at their limit.
“So when will they be back?”
No.
Nothing this clay man was saying made any sense. Probably badly baked, or a misprinted scroll. Whatever the reason, I’d had it.
“Right.”
I pushed the door open and stepped out of the stale warehouse. And as I walked down the street, I paused and looked back at the peeling signs on the window.
“GOLEMS ARE US. FREE GOLEMS.”
And it hit me like a bolt of lightning, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach, and I started to run. And from then on, I couldn’t even look at a golem, in a supermarket, or sweeping the streets, or making coffee, without going pale and breaking out in cold sweats. Because that wasn’t a sales pitch.
It was a manifesto.
Fictitious Casual Fridays
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantasy. Show all posts
11.9.11
2.9.11
The Pentagon
September 11, 1941. Midnight.
A titanic crash echoed through the virgin Pennsylvanian forest. Zombie Abraham Lincoln straightened his hat and holstered his revolver with a steely glint in his eye.
“Ooh, boy. She’s angry alright. We’re going to need something a mite bigger this time around.”
He motioned to the man next to him.
“Ronald... bring me Tabitha.”
Ronald Reagan gave a curt nod and sprinted into the darkness. Lincoln stood in the clearing, stock still, and silent. He was good at standing still. It was one of many advantages of being undead. The unholy symbol draped around his neck pulsed with an unearthly light, drawing the creature closer, like bait in a trap. Exactly like bait in a trap, since it was, in fact, the bait in a trap.
Any second now...
The trees in front of him exploded into splinters, and from a hundred feet in the air there was a tremendous roar. Lincoln stood his ground, drawing both this silver revolvers and emptying twelve alchemical iron rounds into the beast’s towering form. The creature roared, less with pain than with annoyance. He placed his hand on the thousand-year-old katana on his back. If Reagan didn’t hurry, he was going to have to get medieval-Japan on its reptillian behind, and that would just ruin his suit.
“Abraham!” came the shout from across the clearing. In the split second it took Lincoln to glance his way, the beast struck, swiping at him with a claw the size of a stagecoach, sending him flying into the air. As he came down, he drew the katana and, performing a perfect backflip, landed on the beast’s scaly head
“NOW, REAGAN!”, he roared, as he brought the blade down ineffectually against the enormous skull. On the ground, Ronald Reagan let out an animal yell, which was only marginally less terrifying than the whine of Tabitha, Lincoln’s vorpal minigun, spinning up to four hundred thousand RPM. In a blaze of eldrich energy, Reagan opened fire.
The effect was almost instantaneous. One of the creature’s seven limbs was liquified to a gooey paste of bone and sinew. With a screech of genuine pain this time, the creature thrashed its thousand ton mass from left to right, leaving Lincoln clinging to the handle of the katana, whose steel blade embedded in the creature’s skull was the only thing preventing him from being thrown to his re-demise. “AGAIN! HAVE AT HER!”, he bellowed.
Reagan’s second burst of sustained fire struck true. Half a million shards of depleted Neptunium bored a perfectly cylindrical hole in the creature’s chest. With a quiet groan, it keeled ponderously over and landed on the ground with a ground-cracking crash. Lincoln stepped calmly off the beast’s head, wiping the viscera from his katana. “That won’t stop it for long. We need the containment field ready, as soon as possible. Get Edison out here on double. Tell him we have her down.”
“No need, Mr. President.”, said a voice from the shadows. Thomas Edison lurched out of the forest and, with a curt nod to Abraham Lincoln, offered one cloth-wrapped mummified hand to Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan. The late Thomas Alva Edison, at your service.” He turned to the shadows again. “Bring out the generators!”
A rustling and squeaking came from the surrounding forest. As the three looked on, thousands of bats, each tied to a tiny harness, dragged out five massive engines, each bolted to a pair of copper coils which, in turn, was atttached to a parabolic dish. The creature on the ground began to stir feebly.
“No time to lose. Everyone out of the pentacle!”. Edison handed Lincoln and Reagan each a pair of goggles, and then pulled down hard on a lever on the side of the closest generator. In unison, five bolts of lightning lanced across the clearing, trapping the waking creature at the centre of a perfect five-pointed star.
“Reagan. The incantations.”, said Edison.
“You have no idea the lengths I went to to get this. I had to rob the library of congress. Me, the President- well, the president one day at any rate-”
“Quiet! Just do it!” Lincoln turned one eye to the horizon. “Dawn is coming.”
Ronald Reagan pulled a surprisingly small but exceptionally old grimoire from inside his trenchcoat. He uttered fourteen guttural syllables, and snapped the book shut as they watched the creature flicker into invisibility.
As the sun rose, the three headed out of the forest. Lincoln turned to the other two. “Right. Our work here is done.” Checking his pocket watch, he turned and nodded gravely at each of the men in turn. “I shall see you at the End of the World.” As Lincoln returned to his grave, Edison to his flying pyramid space zeppelin, and Reagan to his stolen time machine, each one of them saluted the secret service men, who were just beginning to arrive. They were here as part of a far larger plan. A far more difficult, and complex, and dangerous plan. A plan to contain the beast, not just temporarily, but permanently, within a specially constructed pentagonal building, whose shape could channel away and safely earth the arcane energies which surrounded the beast and whose construction would be supervised under the watchful eye of the Department of Supernatural Defense of the United States of America. A building which would come to be known as...
The Pentagon.
A titanic crash echoed through the virgin Pennsylvanian forest. Zombie Abraham Lincoln straightened his hat and holstered his revolver with a steely glint in his eye.
“Ooh, boy. She’s angry alright. We’re going to need something a mite bigger this time around.”
He motioned to the man next to him.
“Ronald... bring me Tabitha.”
Ronald Reagan gave a curt nod and sprinted into the darkness. Lincoln stood in the clearing, stock still, and silent. He was good at standing still. It was one of many advantages of being undead. The unholy symbol draped around his neck pulsed with an unearthly light, drawing the creature closer, like bait in a trap. Exactly like bait in a trap, since it was, in fact, the bait in a trap.
Any second now...
The trees in front of him exploded into splinters, and from a hundred feet in the air there was a tremendous roar. Lincoln stood his ground, drawing both this silver revolvers and emptying twelve alchemical iron rounds into the beast’s towering form. The creature roared, less with pain than with annoyance. He placed his hand on the thousand-year-old katana on his back. If Reagan didn’t hurry, he was going to have to get medieval-Japan on its reptillian behind, and that would just ruin his suit.
“Abraham!” came the shout from across the clearing. In the split second it took Lincoln to glance his way, the beast struck, swiping at him with a claw the size of a stagecoach, sending him flying into the air. As he came down, he drew the katana and, performing a perfect backflip, landed on the beast’s scaly head
“NOW, REAGAN!”, he roared, as he brought the blade down ineffectually against the enormous skull. On the ground, Ronald Reagan let out an animal yell, which was only marginally less terrifying than the whine of Tabitha, Lincoln’s vorpal minigun, spinning up to four hundred thousand RPM. In a blaze of eldrich energy, Reagan opened fire.
The effect was almost instantaneous. One of the creature’s seven limbs was liquified to a gooey paste of bone and sinew. With a screech of genuine pain this time, the creature thrashed its thousand ton mass from left to right, leaving Lincoln clinging to the handle of the katana, whose steel blade embedded in the creature’s skull was the only thing preventing him from being thrown to his re-demise. “AGAIN! HAVE AT HER!”, he bellowed.
Reagan’s second burst of sustained fire struck true. Half a million shards of depleted Neptunium bored a perfectly cylindrical hole in the creature’s chest. With a quiet groan, it keeled ponderously over and landed on the ground with a ground-cracking crash. Lincoln stepped calmly off the beast’s head, wiping the viscera from his katana. “That won’t stop it for long. We need the containment field ready, as soon as possible. Get Edison out here on double. Tell him we have her down.”
“No need, Mr. President.”, said a voice from the shadows. Thomas Edison lurched out of the forest and, with a curt nod to Abraham Lincoln, offered one cloth-wrapped mummified hand to Ronald Reagan. “Mr. Reagan. The late Thomas Alva Edison, at your service.” He turned to the shadows again. “Bring out the generators!”
A rustling and squeaking came from the surrounding forest. As the three looked on, thousands of bats, each tied to a tiny harness, dragged out five massive engines, each bolted to a pair of copper coils which, in turn, was atttached to a parabolic dish. The creature on the ground began to stir feebly.
“No time to lose. Everyone out of the pentacle!”. Edison handed Lincoln and Reagan each a pair of goggles, and then pulled down hard on a lever on the side of the closest generator. In unison, five bolts of lightning lanced across the clearing, trapping the waking creature at the centre of a perfect five-pointed star.
“Reagan. The incantations.”, said Edison.
“You have no idea the lengths I went to to get this. I had to rob the library of congress. Me, the President- well, the president one day at any rate-”
“Quiet! Just do it!” Lincoln turned one eye to the horizon. “Dawn is coming.”
Ronald Reagan pulled a surprisingly small but exceptionally old grimoire from inside his trenchcoat. He uttered fourteen guttural syllables, and snapped the book shut as they watched the creature flicker into invisibility.
As the sun rose, the three headed out of the forest. Lincoln turned to the other two. “Right. Our work here is done.” Checking his pocket watch, he turned and nodded gravely at each of the men in turn. “I shall see you at the End of the World.” As Lincoln returned to his grave, Edison to his flying pyramid space zeppelin, and Reagan to his stolen time machine, each one of them saluted the secret service men, who were just beginning to arrive. They were here as part of a far larger plan. A far more difficult, and complex, and dangerous plan. A plan to contain the beast, not just temporarily, but permanently, within a specially constructed pentagonal building, whose shape could channel away and safely earth the arcane energies which surrounded the beast and whose construction would be supervised under the watchful eye of the Department of Supernatural Defense of the United States of America. A building which would come to be known as...
The Pentagon.
20.8.11
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.”
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.”
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