Fiction: Killing the House

I can't say too much about this unfinished story, only that now, after so much time has elapsed, I have NO idea what it was going to be about.

Killing the House

Before Jack Babel left the world for greener pastures, he lived for many years in a house upon the upper slopes of the Sleeping Giant, in Kauai.

From the outside, the house looked similar to the types of homes that wealthy families build along the sides of mountains and valleys all over the world: two-storied, shingle-roofed, dark-colored, with a patio overlooking some view or another. But the outside was merely a shell for the wonders and terrors that were contained within.

Using knowledge drawn from both mundane and occult sources, Jack invested his home with many properties, chiefest among them the fact that the house was larger inside its walls than outside them.

Though his visitors were infrequent, and never casual, Jack always insisted that he accompany them upon their tours of his house. “To prevent,” he’d explain, “the misfortune of losing yet another guest.”

“Another?” Someone would invariably ask.

“Yes, dreadful shame. The little daughter of a cousin of mine. She had been needing to skip to the loo, my darling. I was in the middle of an important series of conjurings and said that she’d have to wait until I could accompany her. For her safety, you see, but apparently, when you have to go, you have to go.” And here he would grin with obvious glee.

“But what happened?”

And Jack would stop for a moment and let a small frown crease his brow and purse his lips. “She went.”

And while the guests glanced sideways at each other, he’d finish, “She recently asked if I’d seen her, from the back of a milk carton. And when I said no, my milk turned sour.”

The services that Jack provided his guests were too important to allow them to quibble with Jack’s evident disaffected outlook on life, so for the most part, they would remain silent.

But every fifth guest would gossip, and the questions grew. And while Jack secretly enjoyed the aura of mystery this furnished him, he knew all along that a great deal of the enigma belonged to the house.

Sometimes Jack would hear bangings upon the walls and know that it was the sound of frightened Brownies seeking escape. Occasionally dim circles of weak light would flash and disappear along the corridor to the library, and Jack would prepare himself to confront the apparitions of friends long since passed away. Every now and then, Jack would smell the char and parch of burning plastic and be satisfied that his Soul Refinery was operating without a hitch.

For nothing occurred within his home that Jack did not know about, because it all sprang directly from himself. Every alcove issuing forth vapors of oily smoke was his product. Each chamber absorbing the shrieks of rage from lost children was his invention. All rooms encompassing the dances of lust and desire were rendered from blueprints designed by him.

This was the house that Jack built.

And it was this house that I tried to live in, for almost two years.

Of course, I heard the rumors. Started a few of them myself. I think every student of the Lycaeum Indigo is taught at least three of them that the instructors will swear is true. While I was attending, my favorite story was the one about the Jehovah’s Witness and the attack foyer. I guess you can’t believe everything you read, even if it’s on a welcome mat.

I enrolled in the Lycaeum Indigo in the Fall of 1987. Affectionately known by its students as the Blue School, the Lycaeum harbors some of the finest minds on Earth, dedicated to the pursuit of magical knowledge. Its instructors claim that the origins of the college are unimportant; that the Lycaeum has always been here, and always will be. Never remaining in the same space twice, one of the prerequisites to attend is the ability to locate the campus grounds.

Generally, students are accepted on a sponsorship basis; alumni who chance upon a promising candidate will bring the entrant to the Circle of Lords for them to determine, by whatever arcane means at their disposal, whether or not the chosen person is worthy of tutelage.

That’s how I got there. My uncle Trevor had gone there in his youth, and graduated with full honors in the early Summer of 1948. On my nineteenth birthday, he came to my party and had a long talk with my parents, who knew that my grades were slipping, and that I was falling in with the wrong crowd, etc.

Apparently, the aptitude to work with the forces of magic are passed down directly through the male line of our family. My father decided early on not to enroll in the Blue School when he met my mother in high school. But wanting to put an end to my carousing and neglecting my studies, he decided to send me to the family equivalent of military school. He said that it would shape me up, turn me into a responsible individual.

Within a year, the Lycaeum had cast me out.

I had the necessary aptitude, the sponsorship, the power, and even for once the interest to settle down a bit and take it all seriously. But my interest in experimentation was what destroyed my seminal career.

Basically, without going into too much detail, I attempted to call down something that I thought would help me learn at a faster rate. What actually showed up, after destroying my wards and intrinsically altering the deep tissues of my brain, was so potent that it took three instructors half an hour to send the bubbling thing back.

At the inquiry, they decided that while I could not be allowed to stay, no further punishment would be levied. The damage inflicted by the scterith was penalty enough.

I had wanted to increase my capacity to learn, to store and recall information quicker, better. The scterith had done that, but to a degree unexpected: I could instantly recall, with perfect clarity, every event that had ever happened within my sphere of experience. Things that I thought I had forgotten came right back, with such precision and vividness that it felt as though I were reliving them all over again. Every stupid thing I’d ever said, every humiliating moment, every low and petty jealousy that no one will ever admit to, relived again with shocking, violent intimacy.

Punishment enough.

After a few weeks, I had become intolerable; at any moment, I might suddenly begin to moan and shake, recalling some vicious slight or indignity. I’d wail and curse, knocking over the plate of vegetables handed to me across the dinner table. I could no longer bear my friends; even my childhood buddies were suddenly merely the products of all the simple abuses heaped upon each other as kids.

My parents kicked me out of the house and I went running to my uncle Trevor, who was the only person who understood. He fed me and gave me shelter, and let me assist him in his experiments. I was the perfect acolyte: I never forgot the contents of a spell, never mislabeled a philter, never made a mistake with the hexes and plans.

And my uncle taught me everything he knew; even things that I had never wanted to know. Things about clouds, and what they steal. Things about the great trenches in the ocean, and the hidden agendas of insects. I didn’t want to know, but I learned them anyway.

And that’s how I found out about Jack Babel, and his Chinese puzzle of a house.

Very rarely, someone discovers the Lycaeum Indigo by themselves. A human mage of great potential may simply see the college, indistinctly, as though it were a mirage. The Blue School simply doesn’t exist for anyone else. At this point, the latent magician will usually walk right into the main office and begin asking questions.

Jack’s questions were atypical, however, of the bewildered passerby. Instead of asking of the nature of the building, or of his current whereabouts, he demanded to know who had dared to “park this faux Victorian monstrosity” upon the site of his favorite picnic grounds. And looking behind him at the door from which he’d entered, and seeing the shimmering, spidery wards that guarded the entrance, Jack merely shook his head.

“That thing wouldn’t stop the merest cat burglar. Why not use a few heavy-duty deadbolts? I’ve got an uncle in the business would fix you up straight.”

The Lycaeum never looks a gift horse in the mouth. After welcoming Jack to the university, the Dean of Admissions himself saw to it that the new student be enrolled in a full schedule of classes, and explained to Jack the rules of the Blue School. Rules about which doors must remain closed, and which must remain open. Rules about conduct, about status, about hierarchy. Rules, in short, which comprised the basis and foundation of the system upon which the Lycaeum Indigo had always depended. Rules that were etched in stone. Tradition.

But Jack knew that tradition was never a good reason to do anything. Slowly, over five years’ time, he proceeded to show the Lycaeum what the will of a strong individual could accomplish.

After his first year, it was clear that Jack could easily outperform any of his peers, and to some extent, even a few of his professors. The fear that held the mages of the Blue School in check, fear of the unknown and of their own power, never troubled Jack. At an end-of-semester test, Jack created an animated sculpture of the Gaudi cathedral in Spain. Instead of rendering it in stone or wood, as the teacher had specified, however, Jack had used the multicolored forms of local air elementals to be the material for the building. As the spirits came together and locked themselves into the rigid lines of the cathedral, every attending mage either sat in stunned silence or whispered in frank admiration to his companion. The elementals, united in composition, began to copulate in a frenzy of sudden, claustrophobic lust, and the substance of the cathedral seemed to waver and dance.

Jack merely smiled smugly to his audience. “A man is as strong as he will let himself be.” His words were to be engraved upon the plaque affixed above the entrance to the Lycaeum at the time of his leaving, four years later.

Over the second year, such demonstrations were to become common for Jack, who seemed at once to find everything both a challenge, and ridiculously simple. In the middle of his third year, Jack finally announced that he had had enough of the rigid and inflexible teachings of his instructors, and that he would be leaving the Lycaeum at the end of the semester. However, not wishing to lose his talent, the Council stunned the old guard company of professors by offering Jack Babel his own teaching position at the university.

And there you have it. Sorry if you were enjoying that!

Where was I? I forgot the point that I was making
I said if I was smart that I would
Save up for a piece of string
And a rock to wind the string around
-- "We Want a Rock", They Might Be Giants