#40 1000-Word

TITLE: The Opposite of Magic
GENRE: Contemporary fantasy

Emily stared at the gargoyle, mystified and just a bit amused. She'd never seen one indoors before. At the bottom of a stairwell, no less. Eyes bulging, mouth gaping, hands rending its face, the statue looked not only horrible but also reproachful, as if it knew she felt sorry for herself and its definition of misfortune did not match up with hers. It crouched next to the arched door into the basement, above which--she now noticed--was taped a message straight from Dante's Inferno: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Good God, nobody was going to visit her during office hours. Shaking her head, she opened the door, anticipating cardboard cutouts of tortured sinners.

Instead, an empty passageway made entirely of stone stretched ahead, deeply shadowed. Bare-bulb fixtures clung to the ceiling, casting small islands of light. Torch brackets--empty ones--dotted the walls. Even for a Gothic Revival building, it was over the top.

"This isn't a basement," she said, appalled. "It's a dungeon."

"Hello?" a male voice called out, startling her so badly she nearly dropped her bag. "Aha!" the man added, coming out of the first corridor on the left and stopping under a light. "Bernie Ballantine, medieval lit. You must be the history department castoff."

"Afraid so," she said, heartbeat stuttering back to normal. "Emily Daggett." With sympathy she added: "Are you an English department castoff?"

He laughed. "I insisted they put me down here. It’s the perfect place for my gargoyle."

He looked like a man with an odd sense of humor. He wore a neon-yellow fedora over salt-and-pepper hair that touched his shoulders. His beard was an aggressive growth. His mouth, what she could see of it, twitched mischievously. As further proof of oddness, he didn't turn condescending when she admitted her specialty.

"Lots of myth and magic in my field, too," he said. "Well," he added, with an expansive gesture, "don't let me stand between you and your office."

It wasn't precisely an office in the sense that an umbrella wasn't precisely a hat. A desk, telephone and computer sat just inside one of the corridors running off the central spine. Emily, walking around a bit, found her corridor led only to other corridors. No rooms. No other occupants besides Bernie Ballantine in the corridor next to hers. Nothing else, in fact, but several large piles of boxes. She couldn't fathom why Ashburn College built a basement that looked like this one did, but its current use was clearly storing unwanted things.

"Do these corridors go anywhere?" she asked as she circled back.

"Nope," her co-worker said from his office. "Nowhere at all."

A metaphor if ever there was. She slumped into her chair, which wobbled, wheels intended for carpet. This office was the craziest she'd ever seen, and as a graduate assistant she'd once worked in a converted supply closet. She'd really thought she could go nowhere from there but up. Apparently no one was lower than the educational equivalent of a temp at the least-regarded college in the state.

She glared at her surroundings. But the glare turned by degrees into a grim smile and finally gave way to stifled laughter. Despite her wounded pride, she could see the humor in life supplying something that looked like the setting for a rip-roaring adventure of the sort she'd wanted as a kid, but instead would be used for grading papers and checking email.

When she actually tried to check her email, however, she discovered that lighting was not the least functional part of Bernie Ballantine's Inferno. The PC worked well enough while she typed in syllabus information for her five courses, but the screen flickered when she opened the mail program. It came back to life with jumbled-up pixels. Emily, who avoided computers whenever possible because of time-wasting stunts like this, called Ashburn's automated tech-help line with a mental roll of the eyes and settled in to read The Necromancers: Forbidden Arts of the Middle Ages.

Ten minutes later, tech support strode in. An angular specimen of perhaps thirty, he had a shaved head and a monochromatic idea of fashion: black boots, black jeans and a black holster with cell phone, personal digital assistant and not one but two pagers--all black. (The shirt, for variety's sake, was gray.) Something in his rounded shoulders gave the impression of an oyster clamped shut, rather than a too-tall man apologetic about his height.

He was standing under a light fixture, so she could see the mild irritation on his face. Then he blinked, and his expression changed lightning-quick to disgust.

Emily diagnosed it as "how do people get paid to sit around reading such nonsense"--she'd seen that look before--and moved her book out of view. "Hi," she said. "I'm--"

"What have you done?" the man interrupted, sharp words faintly accented.

She had plenty of experience with disguised rudeness. Undisguised rudeness was much less common in the Midwest, and all she could manage in response was an "um …"

"This is a brand-new computer," he said angrily. "I set it up myself last week. Nothing was wrong with it then, so: What have you done?"

"How could you possibly know it's my fault before you've even looked at the thing?"

"I'm an excellent judge of character. Get out of my way, will you?"

Witty comebacks failing her, she scrambled off the chair.

"Keep going," he said.

Seething, she took several steps backward as he hunched over the monitor.

"I tried control-alt-delete, but it wouldn't respond," she said.

The man shot her a look over his shoulder and went back to what he'd been doing--nothing, besides bracing himself on the hardware and (she assumed) testing whether his icy stare of death worked on inanimate objects. A minute passed. Then he tapped three keys and the reboot window popped up. With an exaggerated flourish, he clicked "restart."

"Lovely to meet you," he said, conveying the opposite meaning, and swept out.