BY DR. AGONSON
The old wizard lumbered around the counter, beckoning me with a wave of his hand as he passed.
“Come on,” he croaked.
I watched him slowly move among the isles of his strange, eclectic wares, hobbling as he wandered toward the back of the store.
“Come on,” he said again.
I followed him through a dark door. Cold, concrete steps led down into an unlit basement. In the shadows, I could hear the creaking of his knees and the labored panting of his breath. We came to level ground, and I stared. The darkened room was alive with dim, blue stars, glimmering in ordered ranks. The faint luminescence was like something from a faery tale. I heard a click, followed by a vibrating hum; above, the filaments buzzed with a few preliminary flickers of light and then suddenly came alive with their pale glow.
It was a sort of well ordered laboratory, a strange contrast to the varied accumulation of knickknacks decorating the upper room. Here, there were shelves neatly lined with rows and rows of test tubes, their soft glimmer the source of the blue stars I had seen.
“You’re right,” he told me. “Or, I should say, on the right track. I’ve been preparing, as you can see.” He gestured toward his lab.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“Humph,” he snickered. “I suppose, you might say it’s an armory.” I raised an eyebrow. “There’s an invasion coming,” he explained. “You were right. You sense something, stirrings, a buildup, little hints of what’s about to happen.”
“I’m not the only one,” I say.
“I’m not surprised,” he adds. “The warnings have been almost deafening, but you lot can’t discern between a madman and a prophet. No,” he drew out the syllable, “though it’s grown hard even for me to tell.”
I let the comment pass. “What are these for?” I asked, reaching up to touch one of the vials. It was like ice, and I pulled my hand away.
“Careful,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Depends on whom you ask. Your occultist friends would call it a potion, your scientists a phosphorescent mixture of unknown compounds. That wacko who drove you here might have some weird classification for it he saw on some odd reddit post, or he might just call it extraterrestrial ooze. They would all be right on the phenomenological sense that they are calling it what they see it to be. The real question, which you asked earlier, regards its purpose. There’s an invasion coming.”
“You said that,” I said, “and it makes sense, but which invasion? My friend in the van won’t shut up about the aliens, and Lucy keeps raving about her dreams and the rising of strange monsters from out of the sea. Larry’s all on about migrations and the periodic emergence of some as of yet unknown species. It’s like everyone’s saying the same thing but different.”
“True. Do you want to hear another spin on the same thing? It’s personally one of my favorites of your explanations because it is older than the others, longer lasting than the novelties of your friends.”
I nod.
“Good,” he said. “There are many versions of this one, but it usually goes something like this: There was a war, often between heaven and hell, or sometimes light and darkness, good and evil. If I were telling it, I would say . . . well, let’s stick to the story. A war, between the gods, between angels, among the heroes of old, whatever you want to call them. The good guys win, and they lock up the bad guys in some sort of prison.”
“Okay.”
“The prisoners are about to break out.” He stares at me, squinting through his bushy eyebrows, a half smile playing on his face. “Just one more story, I suppose,” he finally says. “Just a variation on the same theme. There’s about to be war, a real war which will make your wars look like petty squabbles. A war that’s always raging is about to kick it into high gear.”
“And I suppose you’re one of these gods,” I smirk. “An angel sent down to battle the demons?”
He cackles, waddling deeper into his laboratory. “Hardly. You’ve never seen an angel,” he coughs, “or you wouldn’t joke like that. Sonny, I’m one of the prisoners.”
“A devil?” I ask, going along with him.
“Not so high, not so low. I was a sort of Sweden in the war. If it was a battle between light and darkness, I was grey.”
“And for that they imprisoned you?”
“For that? For being grey? Not exactly. It’s hard to explain. Reality you see . . . well . . . there’s something . . . I suppose it’s . . . ” he fumbled as he searched for the words. “My crime, you might say, was a crime of passion, or not passion. Ugh,” he sighed. “It’s so hard to explain. There is one light, and we’re supposed to love it. Some end up hating it. I didn’t do either, I didn’t do anything.” After a moment’s reflection, he added, “The punishment fits the crime. I stayed out of it, I didn’t love what I ought to have loved, and now,” he reached out his hand as if grasping the air, “I am separated from love.”
He pulled down a vial. “This is my blood,” he explained. “Passionless. Liquefied apathy. I am given this penance, to bleed myself of my sin. Your Larry is expecting some sort of insect swarm, and this will be to him a potent insecticide. Lucy might see it as charm or ward. The wacko in the van will imagine it to be some sort of biological weapon. They’re all right.” Grabbing a cardboard box off of the counter, he shoved it towards me. It was like ice in my hands. “Things are moving quickly, now. You’ll soon find use for these.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “What do you mean?”
“How can I trust you,” I said, “how can I trust anything you’re saying, if I don’t know your name?”
“A name?” he laughed. “You’ll trust me,” he said, “when you need to, and you’ll know who I am when you trust me, because that is who I am, the Trusty of this little prison.”
Tale Told 