The Dark Satirical Magistrates Office, Chapter One: The Imaginarium Library
It was a dreary night as I lay in my bed, the rain pelted the rooftop and battered the side of the house. A cool breeze blew up the stairs to my bedroom and I shuttered. I rose from the warmth of my covers and placed my feet on the cool wooden floorboards. I walked toward the stairs as I wondered where my brother was. His vacancy in the room created an ominous flow that led me down to the kitchen.
Wind channeled through the front door and the kitchen, permeating through all the little cracks and crevices of my once warm home. I found the source of the gust coming from the open front door where a vicious storm held my home in the clutches of its wrath. I hurried and closed the door with much effort and then stood there wondering where everyone was.
I proceeded down the hallway towards my parents bedroom at the end of the hall. It seemed farther away than it normally was as I counted the steps it took to get to their bedroom door. I counted four as I passed my sisters room, then eight as I passed the bathroom, finally stopping at sixteen. It would normally only take twelve steps to reach their bedroom door. It was cracked open slightly and I noticed a faint glow from within. I shoved the heavy oak door to the master bedroom ajar and I entered. The chest at the end of their bed was open and a bright light shined from it. There was no one in the room and the wind blew in the window as the curtains danced a wicked ballet.
Like a moth to a flame I approached the chest and as I did I heard a mysterious song. The light that shined from the chest turned crimson and the song grew louder as I leaned into it, letting the light and sound enter my senses. My hair was flowing in the wind and a force from the chest pulled me into its jaws like a hungry beast.
I fell into a vortex like that of a spiraling galaxy forcing me into its epicenter. Spinning and soaring as I witnessed passing images only in books and dreams. I saw deep sea beasts devouring prey. I saw dinosaurs hunting one another. Knights in clad silver and gold armor battling to the death. Samurai fighting their friends for the sake of honoring their clans in Feudal Japan. I witnessed mobs torching huts while hunting evil witches that crawled out of the darkness in search of innocent children. A young Perseus rode into Medusa’s lair on the back of a griffin. Dragons bearing eggs in the cosmos of space because they are no longer a part of our world. Visions of great emperors and kings rising to the height of their power only to be consumed by it. Forests of multicolored trees and plants with elves and dwarves dancing. As the visions faded away I found myself floating down into a dark place. A place where it was hard to hear or see anything and everything grew cold. It was like a funnel taking me down to hell. Only this wasn’t hell, there were no flames or screams or demons. It was an abyss of virtual nothingness. The sensations were of other creatures and worlds and dimensions that we don’t understand.
Eventually my vision started to perceive things again and I floated down the top of a structure quite similar to the Sistine Chapel. Only it was dark and dismal and the chandeliers were lit with purple and blue flames. The walls and ceilings were painted with depictions of men fighting off god knows what sort of creatures. There was a black ship battling a hurricane on a sea of blood. There were gods, demons, vampires, werewolves, and other were-creatures. There were giant insects, aliens, fish the size of boats, and crustaceans that walked upright like people. The structure was larger than anything I’d seen in the human world. It was then that I noticed that it was a library and my feet touched the spiraling floor. THE FLOOR!
The floor was like a galaxy under a sheet of glass. It was moving and spiraling and the stars were swirling like when you mix a glass of chocolate milk. The smells were other worldly. A library usually smells like books or dust. But this one smelled like red velvet cake and frosting, or perhaps like elderberry wine. It smelled like candy canes and freshly shaken tapestries. A faint mixture of teas and incense. In fact there were more smells than my nose could register.
I began to wander as one does in a library. And although the light was an unusual array of blue and purple, it was as if your eyes could see multiple layers of the physical. One was a layer of what is, with textures and all the visual aspects of the natural way that matter is perceived. But the second layer was kind of metaphysical, almost like a night vision or a black light. It came in handy when I picked up a book off of the shelf and opened it. A foreign language that I never saw before projected off of the page like a hologram. Next to it was an English translation that I was able to understand. The passage read:
And from the skulls of Megaloceros Giganteus mutant fauns were born, with the scales of fish and the tails of rhinoceros. Their eyes were Nifrillicssus stone from the scar of a mountain on the Planet Gornefricus. They were given fairy wings by a passing throng of fairy children and sent to fly throughout the realm of the Gornef’s for all the ages. They have the ability to blink themselves into a nether realm and out again as a form of time travel and teleportation. Silly little creatures, they tend not to make it to adulthood sometimes because they blink themselves into dangerous and precarious situations. Thus, the Faunvificus are nearly extinct.
I looked up with my newly found vision to see a creature approaching me. He was an odd sort of wolf man. He had the head of a wolf and walked upright. He wore a long tie dye robe that was azure blue, burgundy, and royal purple, which reminded me of the painting, Starry Night. His hands were that of an octopus and he had a pointy arrow tail that wagged behind him as he walked. And aha! His tail was wrapped around a bottle of elderberry wine which he swigged on every minute or so. He stared at me with trepidation as he squinted through his sterling silver monocle.
“No time to quibble young lad, what is your name?” he asked hastily.
“My name is Connor!” I spewed forth out of surprise for his manners.
“Well Connor,” he said my name with initial disdain. “Welcome to the Imaginarium Library. Located on the eight thousand five hundred and twenty seventh floor of the Dark Satirical Magistrates Office.”
“The what?” I asked confused. He looked at me with pain in his heart.
“Ugh, please don’t make me repeat myself. I said, welcome to the Imaginarium Library, located on the eight thousand five hundred and twenty seventh floor of the Dark Satirical Magistrates Office,” he recited it quickly the second time around. I dropped the book I was holding clumsily.
He picked it up and returned it to the shelf in annoyance. “Connor, please don’t damage or misplace any of the items on the shelves, they are quite literally the strings of imagination that hold our fragile little worlds together. And if misfiled or damaged then poof! No more Saint Nicholas, no more Peter Cottontail, and no more precious Tooth Fairy.”
“I’m sorry, umm…”
“The name is Velaticus my dear boy, and here is your quill. Oh right you don’t know what the quill is for. Here we don’t have library cards, because there is no time in the Imaginarium Library, and you could quite literally read everything here without aging a second. However, for Times sake, we have to obey his ascendency and place you somewhere on the timeline of non-fictional reality. So, we use a concoction of venoms from various poisonous critters to write our names in the back of the books you choose to read.”
“What about my family, what happened to them? I remember there was a storm, and my parents and my brother and sister were gone. And then I fell into the chest.”
“Oh, don’t be daft my dear boy, we just swapped timelines when you fell asleep. We abducted you in a hyper-bubble when you drifted off into LaLa Land. Your parents and siblings are still asleep in their beds only in a different timeline. How do you think kids get those phantasmagorical, pandemonius, superlatively intrinsic and euphoric imaginations that they so insist on neglecting? By the way, you don’t ever want to go to the real LaLa Land, a bunch of cutthroat vixens and pixies out to get your tail,” Velaticus hugged his tail and took a swig of elderberry wine as he stared off into space. His lip twitched a little revealing his fangs underneath then he snapped back to reality.
I pushed him for more information, “So when you say timelines, you mean more than one?” as an avid science fiction comic book reader I had to know.
“Yeah yeah, there’s a lot of ‘em. Not all of them are what you might think. In fact, in some of them you can’t think…now that I think about it, I should’ve paid more attention in Timeline History Class. They tend to throw little nuggets of information that are actually useful in real life when you’re not looking in school, you know? I wish I had less squid teachers and more Einstein’s. Weird guy Einstein. There’s too many of him floating around where he ought not to be. Well, I digress, you may take this quill and I will be on my way. If you need me just wave the quill in a V shape in the air and I shall appear. Don’t worry everything is going to be just fine, au revoir Connor!”
With a hasty retreat Velaticus popped into thin air like a soap bubble and left me to peruse the Mythical Creatures of Far-Off Planets Section of the Imaginarium Library.
