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Under the earth they bartered in soul, never in doubt about the wizard house. Never in doubt about the wizard house.
Radiant holes lined my mind on Sunday, I awoke with a start and pulled my clothes from the dryer. My whole life was a fearful lie, but the brutal work ahead saw me shivering in the threshold.
(Shy nights,
open nights,
dreams to find,
quiet life)
A six-pointed star, a five-pointed star, a four-pointed star, a three-pointed star, a two-pointed star, a one-pointed star, a no-pointed star stood in the heavens lighting million miles of nebulous ether - rocks and trees, and trees and rocks. I pulled on my clothes, cleaned my teeth and ears and nose and went about my day's business cutting gems into non-euclidean faceted stones. It's a troubling gig, and I sometimes have a dream where I'm chased by an angle of masonry and it opens impossibly wide to trap me deep within. I'm tired when I wake and tired again when I sleep... I have another dream where I enter a car and the stranger, by way of being in my mind, can intercept all that I think... it's just as disconcerting as knowing just what is not reality.
I don't have secrets - not now, not really. I speak too much, and what dreams may haunt the wizard house roll free through cracks in my old face... where lands their fancy in colored rains, confusion's feigned and draws forth more. It was for many years that they sat stagnating, and many years more that I lived in equilibrium. There is no cause left for either. Look out that window, here to my right, to the garden. There is the iris, blossomed in full, white flesh of its flower raised to the sun... and beside it are ferns, grass, clover, dandelions, a rose, thistle, wild strawberries, creeper, ivy, and a crumbling wall of brick. If you squint, you can barely see the iris at all... but it's there, somewhere, sometime, and do you feel any lesser if today it has vanished from the garden altogether?
Look further, beyond the empty, crowded soil. There is someone hammering up the hill. There are several men hammering something. There are many men hammering something, now its skeleton takes shape, and standing before it they wipe the sweat from their brow as it is made flesh. There it is at last -
the Iris!
Atop a colossal green stem, a great delicate flower of immaculate palour pricks the blue heavens. It is such a triumph of architecture, that standing there high its creators leave it to speak for itself... and so as I speak here to you, I recall that the Iris stood outside my window for many years with great renown being heaped upon it by five or six people until eventually the sustained weight of their enthusiasm took its toll and the great flower began to collapse in on itself. Its weakened stem snapped sharply in two places, fallen as three great green beams, while the fibers which connected the petals of the flower began to loosen at their base and pull apart, widening the flower at its neck into a sort of cone. Dismal, the remains of the flower lay there in the gray, dark days of the fall among leaflitter and pinestraw, being unsuccessfully bid upon by beetles, fungus, bacteria, and doddering flies until finally the ever-ready builder ants came upon it and sought to salvage the immense thing.
The ants cut through the insides of the fallen, cracked stem-beams, making from these many much smaller beams. Here, a second crew of ants came carrying stones, as the first crew assembled the many beams into an immense frame - a great, wide structure with high ceilings and about three floors. At the center was a vast ampitheatre, and around this on all floors were the outlines of many rooms and halls of various size.
The second crew of ants quickly lay the stones like bricks all around the structure, closing it off to the elements. At the top sat the flower of the Iris, now so separated at its base that its top had fused from the pressure of its petals falling inward.
(Shy nights,
open nights,
dreams to find,
quiet life)
The resulting sharp white cone looked not unlike a roof.
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... and so the structure sat there for years, gradually settling in the soil, its colors changing under the sun and wind and rain until its outward appearance began to resemble other structures. The ants themselves, obsessed with legality and rigid hierarchy, long abandoned the building over a managerial dispute. Without their careful hands, it ceased to look like the kind of house which ants would maintain. Only a stray few would even, after years had passed, admit their involvement in building it.
Casual speculation took place among other animals, and briefly a procession of mushrooms considered claiming it... though they later backed out. No one ever figured out why. People in the neighborhood sometimes guessed that the house had been a school or a church - and a great boiler room had congealed at the center of the basement, upon whose presence they claimed to base their theories. Their guesses were of no consequence to the things which crawled.
When time came one dreadful Sunday that The Wizard House, as it had come to be called, would, after several more years untouched, be entered by a small troupe of curious rhabscallions, most of the neighborhood's minds had long since ceased inquiring. The dispute over The Wizard House and its creation could not have been further from the public consciousness as the youths slipped into its darkness through an unlocked side door.
As with its exterior, in the absence of its insect groundskeepers, the interior of the building had decayed to a state in which it began to resemble something of human creation. It was sparsely furnished - in the middle of a wide hall, a fallen piece of flower stem had come to resemble an old couch, pristine on one side and badly torn on the other. The teeth of a piano lay strewn by a doorway, and in the adjoining room the floor was decorated with the splintered pieces of the ebony case. Against the wall, fibres scraped from within the plant by the ants had come to resemble the strings pulled from within the instrument, propped harplike upright. In this room a mattress had grown out of the floor, stained in places and strewn with an equally stained woolen blanket. The youths were enthralled by the strange natural wonders of The Wizard House, made from an Iris, and continued through its halls, passageways, and corridors. They circled twice the outer ring of rooms on the first floor before they found their way to the central ampitheater. Here they were wowed by rows and rows of many kinds of chairs in the encircling theater - folding chairs of various age, material, and size. Benches, ottomans, stray stools, and a few armchairs... all stretched off as far as the eye could see in the dark from the central circle. There were only a few built-in seats - it seems the ants had little use for these... but by incident all the ants had abandoned had degraded towards human utility.
The flesh of the plant on the floor resembled peeling carpet, and what lay beneath was hard, cold stone. The party of foolish youths now circled upwards playfully through the rows of the audience, exiting the ampitheater finally in three separate groups through three separate doors on the third floor. It was while passing through its halls among the strange debris of quasi-human origin that the group's troubles began. In short, they were beset upon BY GHOULS!!!
While they moved through these strange third-floor rooms in darkness, more and more the passageways began to moan and writhe. The corrupted floor slowly came to grow naturalistic protrusions which reached, hungering, for the legs of the baffled trespassers. One by one, all the years of spiritual corrosion drew from the structure furious natural specters of human-like form, and one-by-one the youths were hunted and taken by the horrible dark shapes of the wakened ghouls whose thirst for death had up until then been cannibalistic.
Screaming out to eachother, to anyone, in ever-dwindling number the trespassers were grabbed, hit, pulled into blackness from a last thrall of absolute terror until none were left. The ants had never consecrated the ground.
Beyond this, however, I know of no other terrible incidents. Some time later, true to its name, the house became occupied by a true wizard. He, and a host of ghouls (editor's note: actually, these were ghosts, not ghouls. Carlton misspoke. No slander intended.) and magicians in his employ, took to studying, lofting, and entertaining in the place, where they used the dark ampitheater to perform numberous shows of fantastic magick and spectacle.
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