BY DR. AGONSON
The dead are coming now. I cannot stop them. Save the world, if you can, but know that, in the end, death is what matters. Run all you like, one day, you will be running with them, trying to get out that gate, longing to breathe just once more, to see, to touch—anything, even something bad. No one sleeps peacefully down here, and all the nightmares of the living world are welcome comforts to the forgotten shades under the earth. We will all be forgotten and nameless one day too.
Run! They’re coming. Close the gate; save the world.
* * *
She sniffed the air and sneered.
“You smell like Hell,” she said.
I spun the chair around and faced her across her desk.
“I’ve been through it. Many times. Thinking of buying a condo down there for the snowball season.”
“Before I have you executed,” she said, “I’d just like to know how, by the Light of Heaven, did you get in here.” Her eyes blazed like lightning as she tried to force my tongue to answer.
“Tut-tut-tut,” I smiled. “You’ve used that trick before. I’ve learned some new ones since then.”
“I let you live,” she said, coldly.
“Ha!”
“I let you all live. I now believe that was a mistake.” She turned back toward the door. “Guards!” she shouted.
They didn’t come.
“Perhaps they’re asleep?” I suggested.
She stomped back toward the doors and threw them open only to find me and her office facing her on the other side.
“Maybe they’re taking a deuce?” the reflection of me beyond her called. She looked from one to the other of me, stomped, and slammed the doors.
“You asked me a question once, long ago; nearly broke my mind in two trying to find the answers I didn’t know.”
She was ignoring me now. Stomping toward the mirror she kept on her wall, she began an incantation.
“Claupin-haupeux-maulix…” she began. As she sung the final syllable, the mirror flashed, and she stepped through it back into her office.
“You know you’re dragging this out way longer than either of us want. I just came from the other place, and seeing you makes me want to go back again.”
“Then go to Hell,” she snapped.
“Tut-tut-tut. Language. Have morals simply fallen off the edge since you toppled the thirteenth pillar? I suspect this whole place is a little unbalanced, now.”
“What do you want?” she demanded, folding her arms like a scolding mother.
“Finally! You’ve hit the question on the head. I was trying to tell you. The damage is done. A thousand years of torture and inquisition, and when we couldn’t answer, you demolished our whole house and toppled the pillar it stood on.”
“I had no choice,” she spat.
I rolled my eyes.
“I can’t change the past, dear, but I can give you an answer now. I had to go much further down than Hell to find his wizard’s soul. It’s still writhing, all of them together.”
She turned away at those words, remembering, no doubt, those awful last moments when we damned my master’s body and soul, while all his screaming faces begged us for mercy. For a moment I remembered, too, what she was before—and what I was—what we both were—when we were children.
“Tears?” I asked. “Come now, madam president. Don’t give me the satisfaction.” I licked my lips and laughed.
“What do you want?”
I kicked my feet happily against the floor.
“It’s too good, really. I’m almost glad it turned out this way. I asked him who they were.”
“They?” she asked, a hint of interest coming over her face.
“Oh yes. I suppose, well, we aren’t exactly exchanging Christmas cards anymore. I’ve been trying to find the answer for some years. I found where he did it. There were thirteen. He seeded his own house, too.”
“Why?”
“I think you’ll guess. So, do you want to know number one or number thirteen, first?”
“By God, Horatio! if you know who’s still in my house—”
“Alexa de Trollis,” I said.
“Yes?”
“No,” I smiled. “Alexa de Trollis.”
Her face grew a leprous white.
“No,” she said.
“But yes. You were number one. Sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier. I didn’t know. None of us did. None of your constituents did, either.” I got up from her chair. She wandered to it like a wraith, her eyes gazing sightlessly. “Sit down,” I said, “before you fall over.”
“You’re lying,” she whispered, her voice choking back tears.
“Only when it suits me, but you’ll be able to test the truth of what I say. You know that, so you know I’m not lying.”
“Why?” she gasped.
“Power. That’s the only thing we seek when love’s gone, and love is gone.”
“Thirteen…” she whispered, quietly. “Please, who’s—”
“Me,” I interjected. “It was me the whole time. You and me. Why else do you think we were the only ones who could get in? Don’t you think it was convenient that you could sneak out of your dorm that night? Heck, he encouraged me to ask you out that first night. We were his puppets.”
“He’s dead.”
“I seem to remember making that argument, but I think someone said, ‘We must purge his influence. This can never happen again.’ Well, you purged me just fine. There’s just one more to go.”
* * *
Outside the presidential palace, the birds began to fall. Her wonderful doves which were forever circling the skies rained down upon the silent denizens who knew enough of magic and augury to guess at the tragedy. The City of Heavenly Light would no longer know the piebald shadows of her omnipresent spies passing overhead. Who would guard them from their neighbors’ secret agendas now, or stop them from plotting their own plots? Mournful faces masked furtive thoughts as each slavish heart was impregnated by this fowl rain with dreams of liberation, advancement, and excess.
The gates had been thrown open.
Tale Told 