when the wizard calls

An undercurrent of urgency propels your steps along the brightly lit downtown intersection at which you find yourself. The dark shops blur in your periphery, wispy and stalling. You're moving fast, but your going feels slow.

A long bus with an accordion middle sings by, orange and creamy light glowing from its condensate-fogged windows. You pick up the pace and round the corner in a rush, stopping sharply when you spot the bus already coasting up the hill.

You can't wait for the next one; you could climb the hill in half the time. Your boss, Dr. Jacolvainth, is paying you a bonus for the inconvenience of checking on his house so late at night, and he implored you to make haste in arriving. So you aren't wearing the best shoes for climbing hills, but you proceed nonetheless.

Dr. Jacolvainth's call was a bit of a blur; the connection choppy and his concerns garbled over the line. It's probably just a window letting in the rain, or that the mailman forgot to close the gate.

Your steps stick strangely, catching on thick sap, spread across the sidewalk and glowing in the moonlight. A shadow creature rustles, stuck in the sap not far from you, straining slower than it'll take to escape the trap it's in.

The lights flicker, and you notice the crooked lamp-pole, knotted with coiling roots, supporting a tree with its trunk split open at the bottom. With the weather lately, it's no surprise the carnivorous maples are active this late in the season.

You take a hopping step, and in two more you reach out, scooping up the shadow creature under its belly to pull it from the sap. As you leap clear, your shoe comes off, and you land barefoot as the panicked creature darts away, leaving streaks of shadow in its wake.

The lights flicker, and the tree grunts, and hundreds of little, glowing eyes peer back at you from beyond the light.

You amble onward up the hill, careful where you step, wondering if you might retrieve your shoe when you're done and could make your way back home.

At the top of the hill is another intersection, red lights glowing four ways, with nary a wisp of traffic. The breeze shakes the trees standing taller than the large houses they line, the family type, witnesses to time.

A slight tingling finds your cheeks, like static electricity or a fizzy drink, both in the air and the fog pouring in. You press the pedestrian button, and the stoplights remain red, so you tap it again as you realize the fog is actually a long, stretching procession.

The light blinks white and off you dart, making half before the ghostly procession completely swallows up the street, leaving you stumbling onto the sidewalk, teeth chattering with an ice-bath heebie-jeebies chill.

The iron gate is open at Dr. Jacolvainth's house, creaking and rattling in the wind. Your first idea was right after all; now you can check the house quickly and make it out before the last bus of the night.

You shut the gate and latch it, and make your way up the chilly stone front steps. The keys glimmer in the moonlight, gold and silver, tagged and hanging jumbled on a metal ring large enough to be a bangle.

The large wood door swings open, eager to receive you, and you stumble into the dark vestibule, hands groping for the light switch as the door shuts so quickly you could believe it was in a rush too.

The light switch clicks with a firm-fingered press, and the warm lights come on to light the way just as a pair of slippers hits you in the back. You kick off your remaining shoe and don the slippers, stepping into the main hall where the flickering lights become visible on the left.

The furniture is floating!

You reach the doorway and peer up at chairs, sofas and side tables bobbing in the air with their lamps. Several sets of glowing eyes peer down at you from various pieces of furniture. The nearest, a white featherduster of a specimen, who might be still alive via magical intervention, meows in query, and the others chirp and whine in agreement.

"You guys alright?" you ask, glancing around. "Jacolvainth sent me to check on the house. Anything I should know?"

They meow and chitter amongst themselves. You are being discussed, you can tell, and then argued over too. Another cat gets up with a grumpy huff; the chocolate cookie calico named Duchess you liked jumps from the loveseat to a low-hanging footrest, and finally the floor, nattering away like someone's grandma as she turns tail out of sight.

You follow her lead to the stout, arched doorway that leads to the back hall where the alcove opens right into the basement stairwell. Neon green spills from the kitchen, making your clothes and nails glow, except for the arm that remains matte, flat, and dull. The cat stretches up on her hind legs and paws the light switch on her own, making your arm disappear entirely in the light.

You thank her. She seems disinterested as she turns back to the den.

The basement could fit a pool, but instead it hosts a maze of shelves. They're allowed to rearrange themselves so long as Dr. Jacolvainth can get to his office without dilly-dally. They didn't need to extend the same courtesy to you, though, so while they're too shy to move while you're around, the path they make means weaving through shelves as short as your knees and taller than you can reach.

"Dr. Jacolvainth sent me," you say to the room, stepping over an opening between shelves and up several steps where the wooden bookcases diverge into different platforms.

"I need to get to the office." You cover your eyes. "I won't look if that helps!"

For seconds it's quiet, and all you hear is your breath, and then the shelves in front of you begin to shift. Creaking grunts and cracking thumps settle after a moment, and when you uncover your eyes, there's only one more turn to make.

"Thank you!"

The office is walled with stone, cool and quiet and underground. The wooden tables plum with leather journals, typewriters, and vials of enchanted inks bonded to certain pens.

The wall ripples from the far left of the room, where hangs a subtly glowing, sheer curtain against the stone. A gust of misplaced wind knocks sheaves of paper to the floor, directly into the light of a warm lamp. Your hand disappears when you bend to retrieve it, making you switch to your unstained hand.

The room whines and buzzes, colours warping as you approach the curtain. A stuttering whoosh has you staggering into the brightly moonlit upstairs office.

The wind rattles the window and lets it smack, and you quickly reset the latch and look back at the rippling curtain against this upstairs wall: much the same.

The solution to this problem is downstairs.

The second floor hallway is deep and narrow, leading to the guest suite at the back of the house. You feel for the latch of the half-hidden door to get to the stairs that exit opposite the kitchen.

You step into the dark as you reach for the light, but before you can reach it, you plummet down a steep slide, some glowing tube carrying you through a void that spits you out in the basement library again.

The shelves shudder as you land in a heap on the couch, muttering apologies as you jump up and rush to the nearest opening among the books.

"I need to get to the stairs!"

You climb over shelves of ridiculous heights, winding corners, and think to cover your eyes.

"Please! I'm sorry I scared you!"

The shelves move further away, out of sight.

You round the next corner and see your way out, but this path the shelves made puts you flush with the office. That strange stuttering whoosh from before reaches your ears, and in the blink of an eye you're being tossed onto a table in the upstairs office all over again.

"I need to get to the utility room!" You exclaim. "Show me which way to go!"

Something pale and fluttering appears by the door, and when you step back into the second-floor hall, you find pearlescent, glowing moths guiding you along.

Their wings stutter against Dr. Jacolvainth's bedroom door, and your keys jingle eagerly from the ring on your belt.

The bed in the corner is only twin size to leave room for copious shelves and books of all kinds. Above the dresser, crystal balls are mounted, all keepsakes of the cats he's kept. Their spirits dance around the room as you forge ahead, following the moths to the closet to your right, where a garment bag hangs from the darkness beyond.

You grab the garment bag with both hands and are propelled into a dark tunnel, suspended on an overhead monorail conveyor. Akin to holding a plank, you can barely count your breath, let alone the passage of time, and you stumble off jelly-legged like that whole thing was a ski lift, hands held out in front of you while you're temporarily blind in the dark.

The wardrobe doors open with a clunk to the boxy guest suite, and the tall, cylindrical shelf holding discs of all sorts. A moth settles on one disc in particular, shining warmer than the rest, that your shadow-stained hand passes right through, forcing you to switch hands again.

With a clang, the shelves start to twist and expand. A gate takes shape and the keys at your hip jingle until you find the one the lock wants.

It's like climbing a ladder more than climbing the stairs, but you're certainly climbing up and up until all the room that's left is crawl space looking like the inside of a lampshade. At the end, where it's brightest, you're crawling one-handed.

Moths dance backlit against the canvas, leading you to a gap where you can wriggle through. A humming woosh makes your teeth rattle in your head as you emerge among stacks of books, into Dr. Jalcovainth's attic solarium library. You're pretty sure the books have rearranged themselves since last week. At least the moths still guide the way, while auroras are on full display above precarious piles of newspapers and magicscientific journals.

You're led to the atrium, balancing on the railings and peering down to the second and first floors among a canopy of leaves and growing plants that you brush as you pass.

"I don't know why I couldn't come this way before," you say to the house as you descend the narrow stairs. Two steps further and the stairs fall right out from under you.

This time you slide through an invisible tube, moving through each room so fast that it feels slow, like a little hamster running through its enrichment tunnels, even sliding you outside where some sprites are partying in the garden, playing games with the gnomes and some of the kittens. You drop lower and plunge somewhere below the house, a deep cave full of bats and lava and so many glittering crystals it looks like a starscape.

You shoot through a velvet veil, and with an inelegant WOOMPH you're tossed into a hamper full of Dr. Jacolvainth's cloaks, who have no problem at all helping you out.

The tall window is as tall as a tree; the sprite's party lights blink from behind a layer of leaves, casting a green overlay all over the room.

You go to the closet where the breaker box is, and find it a pitch-dark, matte, dull void instead. You reach in with your shadow-stained arm, and lest the void be something you can fall into again, you steady your other hand against the doorframe. In search of the panel door, you grope along the wall until your fingers find a seam and you slip them beneath it.

There! You clutch the switch and pull it down.

Reality goes blank, silent and still.

You throw the switch up with a ThWACK and watch reality be redefined.

The kitchen glows neon green when you step into the back hall and sit on the bench to catch your breath.

Disgruntled meows precede the same Duchess from earlier as she appears from up ahead. You follow her lead back to the front hall where you're happy to find the furniture back on the ground.

A hollow thump and bump sound from above, and a pair of shoes drops from the rickety dumbwaiter half hidden by the stairs.

"I see how it is," you say, and pick up the shoes, taking them into the vestibule to sit down and lace them up right.

You turn off the light, and bid the front door goodbye, who shuts politely behind you as you step into the night.

A taxi waits on the road outside the gate, sing glowing softly, waiting to take you home.

Thank you for reading; your comments, shares, and tips keep this writer going!

Rooney