“Hello Russell,” the woman said; she didn’t shake his hand, Russell noted. “I’m Agent Dwyers, CIA. Do you remember me? We spoke yesterday. And this person next to me is Agent Kurt Byrne.” Both sat down in front of him on the black chairs in the small padded room of the psychiatric ward.

“I have a memory of your visit, yes,” Russell said. “That’s two of us with a delusion. Him I don’t remember seeing, are you sure he’s real?”

“What do you mean delusion? How can this guy be of any use, Dana? He’s a nutcase like everyone else in here. Let me slap him around and we’ll see if I’m real enough.”

“Relax Agent Byrne,” Dwyers replied, “Russell is not just just any nutcase, he’s a very special nutcase. Aren’t you, Russell?”

Russell remained silent and stared at the man, who stared back at him, clearly irked. “Well,” he finally said, “Maybe he’s real. Maybe he was here even yesterday, and we just didn’t notice him. Or maybe you and I are not real, and he’s here alone, imagining us.”

Agent Byrne threw his hands in the air and glared at his colleague, expectantly.

“Could be, could be,” Dwyers said, ignoring him, “Do you remember our conversation too?”

A nurse walked into the room with a tray and sat down next to Russell, who spontaneously offered his arm.

“So you remember that part as well. Yes, it was a nice conversation. It had some verbs in it, a lot of nouns albeit not many adjectives, except towards the end. Oh, and some parts were rather – intriguing.” He ignored the needle in his arm. Sometimes not seeing was the best way to avoid pain. Other times it made things worse.

“The intriguing parts, yes, ” Agent Dwyers insisted while Agent Byrne shook his head. “Do you remember what they were about?”

“Oh, you mean you don’t remember that part? Did I imagine them?” The nurse wiped his arm with some cotton imbued with alcohol, Russell let the vapours run up his sinuses.

“Oh, no, no, I just wanted to make sure you remembered correctly.”

“I see,” he rubbed his arm and let his gaze follow the cart as the nurse left the room. “Excuse me, did you just see this happen?”

“See what?” Dana Dwyers asked, she seemed determined not to lose her patience as she had the day before. The one named Kurt stood up and walked to the small barred window, growling his train of curses.

“Oh, nothing, nothing. Yes, the bit about that criminal you are hunting for was very interesting. How can he cause hallucinations in people without resorting to drugs, you asked. Could it be hypnosis, you asked.”

“Yes,” she waved for her colleague to sit back down again. It was a complex gesture, indicating both superiority in command and a vague threat of punishment to come, in case of insubordination. There was something else, too.

“Yes,” Russell repeated and smiled.

“Yes, and…?”

“And then a giant cockroach crossed the room, do you remember that too?”

“No… no, Russell, I think you made that bit up,” Dana sighed.

“Pity, that part, too, was quite interesting.”

“Cockroaches!” Kurt snorted as he sat down heavily, “How can this clown help us with our case? Half of what he sees ain’t real and the other half he can’t say straight.”

Russell brighened up at this definition of his condition. “You know? I think you’ve pretty much squared me out, Kurt. The problem is, well, the third half.”

“What would that be?” said Kurt.

“The half I don’t see. You two are lovers, aren’t you?”

The two agents stared back, dumbfounded.

“She’s your boss, and keeps the dominant role in the bedroom as well. You play rough and tough because you know it turns her on. Your colleagues never discovered anything of this except for the usual rumors which go around the building and which you, Dana, occasionally fanned to distract people from the truth. In a certain sense that is not too far removed from the hallucinations which have haunted me since I was born. Rumors in my brain which distract me from reality, whichever that may be. But my mind is broken, and I can sometimes see through the hallucinations, or see other people’s ones, or even not see them, but I know they’re there. I let them go freely, in and out of my breached conscience, and they have stopped bothering me long ago.”

“Ah… yes,” Dana took a deep breath, she was trying hard to maintain her cool. “You have done it again… I knew I shouldn’t have brought you, Kur… Agent Byrne, but you had to see what Russell is capable of.”

“Well, he’s good at guessing people out, I’ll admit to that,” Kurt said. His mask had dropped but he still was holding onto his dignity. “But still a patient in a mental hospital. How can he-”

“He has a natural gift for deduction and is an expert on hallucinations. So, Russell, you’ve had your fun… again. Could you please answer my questions now?” There, she was on the edge of losing her cool. It was not a good idea to let this happen with her boyfriend at her heel. Russell smirked. The woman knew exactly what she was doing when she brought her violent half along with her.

“The answer to both your questions is no. You can’t cause hallucinations in other people without drugs, not even with hypnosis.”

Agent Dwyers hung her head in defeat. Next to her, Agent Byrne straightened up a bit. Things were bound to change a little, in their crazy little relationship, Russell thought.

Both agents stood up at the same time and, without another word, left the room. A pity they didn’t wait long enough to let him find the words to complete his answer. You can’t cause hallucinations, he was going to say, but you can feed and encourage the ones people already have, make them see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear. Sometimes it worked, others it didn’t. The nurse, for example, that one didn’t work.

Where was he now? He looked around; his surroundings didn’t look like a padded room anymore, Dana had expected to find a madman in a psychiatric ward and that’s where he’d let himself be found. Brilliant woman; pity for her delusions on her dead lover. Russell touched his pockets and found a fat wad of bills. Of course it was the result of his most recent robbery but he was amazed nonetheless by the fact that for some reason it hadn’t disappeared. No need for action tonight, it seemed.

He stood up and the black tin can he’d been sitting on toppled over and rolled next to the other two. He wasn’t sure this abandoned warehouse was real, but the door appeared open to him, and he walked outside.

*******

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Refusing to pay attention to his complaining joints he calmly unrolled a red and brown woolen mat, as ancient as him and,  looking at the setting sun far off into the distance, sat down and lit his pipe. 

“You’ve come a long way to die old one.”- the voice sounded like boulders crumbling. Grey Deer took a long puff from his pipe before slowly turning round to face a very stern looking buzzard.

“You have no sense of tact, do you Mosau’u?”

The Death Spirit ruffled his feathers. “I thought I’d dress up for the occasion.” The voice seemed to come from an underground cave beneath the great bird.

Grey deer held the creature’s gaze. “But first, I have a request.”

“I know what you want Masichuvio and the answer is no. Little Tiponi’s time is due. I shall visit her after you.”

“You call me by my Hopi name, you listen to me!” The old man raised his voice slightly. “…or I will refuse to die.”

“That is unacceptable, the other gods will never allow it!” the underground boulders churned.

“Chrome poisoning is not natural, you must tell them her time isn’t due!”

“Only a warrior who completes an impossible task can postpone someone’s death and that’s final.” The spirit of death punctuated with a loud sqwawk.

Grey Deer stood up with surprising agility and faced Mosau’u, nose to beak. “Then give me a task now.”

The buzzard leapt back with a flap of wings. “Now?” Mosau’u looked around at the bare sandy top of the rocky pinnacle. He slowly turned his beak back to the old warrior with a new gleam in his eye.

“Very well, Masichuvio. Walk off this peak without falling. If you succeed, little Tiponi lives, if you fail…well you know what happens next.” The buzzard’s talons scraped the soil in anticipation.

“Walk off this?” the old man said, carefully making his way to the edge of the drop.

“Yes,” the rumble managed to sound gleeful.

“All right…” Grey Deer took a few steps out and turned around, suspended in mid-air, grinning.

“NO! That is impossible! Only spirits can-“

“Look behind you Mosau’u,” the old man said. The buzzard spun around and there, on the ancient mat, John Grey Deer’s body was still sitting and peacefully smiling at the horizon, a thin twirl of smoke could be seen, coming from the pipe resting in his lifeless hand.

“I think you should be the one to tell the other gods,” said Grey Deer’s spirit, “I’ll make an appearance at Tiponi’s house tonight. Enjoy your meal “

With a victorious warrior’s whoop, the old man disappeared, leaving the buzzard alone. Mosau’u stood gazing balefully at the dead man, all hunger gone. “Ahul and the others will be furious at this news,” the death spirit groaned and flew away, leaving the old smiling man’s body intact.

***

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She totally loathed Hungarian.

“It’s just a few sentences,” her boss, whom she also despised,  had said. “You can learn them in one afternoon, and we can impress our clients when they arrive tomorrow.”

It was now three hours to tomorrow, and the afternoon hadn’t brought anything but regret.

For instance, Tessa deeply regretted the one adjective she’d added in her resumè: ‘quick-learning’, a year earlier, and which had led her to be hired by Assist Insurance Inc. and promptly set to work. Officially as secretary, and unofficially as the company’s multi-tool. If anything new turned up, all her boss had to do was deploy the quick learner, she’d get things done. So now the new thing was a hefty contract with a Hungarian bridge construction company whose name alone would make your gums bleed, and which, for some reason, had decided to send a few members of its board all the way to Chicago, for a tour of Assist Insurance headquarters, which was stupid, Tessa thought, since there were no plans to build a bridge inside the building.

‘Now repeat!”

The sentence looked like what a cat would write on a keyboard, if it were tied up and slammed repeatedly over the keys. Tessa clicked the “listen again” button to hear the expert Hungarian speaker say the sentence again. It sounded like what the cat would say.

Tessa tried to repeat the ugly sounds. ‘Wrong!’ the screen flashed back at her, but still in cheerful colors.

She repeated the sentence again in a slightly louder tone. It was supposed to mean “Welcome to Chicago, We hope you had a pleasant flight from Hungary.” Not even ‘Hungary’ sounded like ‘Hungary’ in Hungarian, it was ‘Magyarországra’. 

‘Wrong!’

She listened to the sample again, it didn’t even sound like something a human mouth could pronounce. She did her best to replicate it, in an even louder voice.

‘Wrong!’

Furious, she grabbed the laptop screen by the sides, drew it close to her face and screamed the sentence once more, then grabbed the power chord and yanked it from the wall socket. 

It ripped, there was a bright electric arc and all the room went dark. There was a sharp smell. Ozone, she thought, although she had imagined it to smell differently. This was more of a rotten egg smell.

‘Wrong!’ said the screen of the laptop with battery-powered smugness.

Tessa felt her way to the socket. She pulled out what was left of the plug from the wall, to make sure there was no short-circuit.

Then, begrudgingly assisted by the light coming from the screen, she made it to the the electrical cabinet down the corridor near the entrance to her apartment. She flipped the circuit breaker back up and saw the light return to her living room.

Another thing she saw, as soon as she had taken a few steps, was the large, steaming, horned creature on her sofa.

“You know, I heard you the first time, no need to shout like that,” it said.

Tessa was so surprised she simply forgot to scream. Her legs went from under her and she found herself sitting on the floor.

“Now, don’t act so shocked,” it said as it rose from its seat, “you summoned me by my name. What were you expecting?” The creature’s horns were an inch away from scratching her ceiling.

“Wha… how… name?” Tessa stuttered.

“Jaar-Athoth, Fifth level demon. What is wrong with you? Did the summon backfire and send your brains off somewhere?”

“Su-summon?” Tessa realized she was hyperventilating and held  her breath for a few seconds. The monster stared at her quizzically with its black eyes and red irises. It looked down, as if to inspect her carpet.

Tessa exhaled slowly and took another, slower breath. “Summon?” she repeated, “I most certainly did not summon you. A Demon?”

Jaar-Athoth raised a clawed finger, which then turned downwards as he pointed to the floor.

“Excuse me,” he complained, “where is my pentacle?”

Tessa blinked her eyes at the sudden change of tone. “Pentacle?”
“Yes! Pentacle! Would you stop repeating what I say and start providing some answers? Because I’m beginning to question our current arrangement.”

Tessa did not like that sort of treatment, not from her boss, not from Hungarian clients, and most certainly not from a seven-foot tall, red-skinned horned beast.

“What?” she said, “What? You show up all of a sudden, whatever you are, steam up my living room, not to mention the rotten eggs, scare me half to death and you have demands?”

“Demands?” the demon thundered, “I have existential doubts! For example how did you manage to get me across without a pentacle of protection?”

“Well listen here!” Tessa shouted back, “I’m wondering too what sort of beast you are, if you need to be protected!”

Jaar-Athoth blinked at her in disbelief. “The pentacle should be there to protect your world, to enclose the portal so your reality doesn’t pour down into hell like hot cheese and especially to protect you from me, you nitwit!” His voice had become hoarse with all the shouting.

“Well I didn’t summon you, so no pentacle. Ha!”

The demon plopped back down on the sofa, which almost folded onto itself under his weight. “You have no idea of what’s going on…” he muttered, “…no pentacle…I don’t know how you pulled that trick.” 

He looked back at her, as if he was considering grounding her with no TV. “I could devour your soul, and then consume your body, you know that?”

That was hardly the type of conversation one was expected to have around a coffee table. 

“Oh?” Tessa said. The idea of her sharing the same room with a red-skinned beast from hell, now that she’d gotten over the initial surprise and anger,  was starting to gnaw at her. She began to feel the urge to escape.

“…but I won’t,” said Jaar-Athoth.

“Oh! Oh well, thanks…”

“At least not yet. I’m free, you see, unconstrained. And I suppose quite famous back where I’m from. Nobody’s had a summoning in, oh, at least three thousand years. You can imagine how bored we all were when, all of a sudden, I hear my name being called,” Jaar-Athoth grinned with the memory and Tessa could see the gleam of his white fangs. “You should have heard the cheers, and also the insults!”

“Jealous?” Tessa said.

“Livid green jealous. Hah!” The demon slapped his knee and stood up. “Well, off I go. I might be back, or not. Don’t know.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Outside. No pentacle remember? I am free to wreak havoc and bring hell back on earth. Oh the songs they’ll sing in my name down below. All off tune, of course.” He unfurled a pair of ridiculously small wings. “Mind if I use your window?”

“Ah, no problem…do you really have to do all those things?” Tessa said, but he had already leapt outside.

The room felt strangely empty now, but that’s how rooms probably feel after a horned giant moved out. Tessa had a strange feeling at the back of her head, something about unleashing a demon from hell, which may or may not be all her fault. She shrugged it off. There were more pressing matters at hand. She grabbed her laptop and shut off the stupid language learning program. It had turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. A quick search pointed her in the right direction. She grabbed her phone, navigated the app store to the correct download, paid the $4.99 and a few seconds later a new icon had appeared on her phone. ‘GlobalVoice’ it said. She tapped it, and a menu appeared. She selected input and output languages. Now the screen showed a microphone symbol. 

“Welcome to Chicago, We hope you had a pleasant flight from Hungary,” she said.

“Üdvözöljük Chicagóban, reméljük, kellemes járatot kapott Magyarországról“ the phone spoke back. 

“Nifty!” Tessa said, and went to sleep.

Twelve stories below, an increasingly bewildered Jaar-Athoth squealed as a high-speed car grazed him, the horn blaring haughtily. Fumes from the exhaust gases choked him, neon lights from the many street signs hurt his eyes. The demonic creature stood, wondering which other demon had preceded him, and had successfully turned earth into a living hell. 

***

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Matt Murphy is a private eye. When Matt investigates, cases get solved. Or shit gets real ugly. On good days he manages both.

Today he’s just got himself locked in a room by someone who shut the door behind him while he was exploring.  It’s a panic room so no windows… and the door is bullet proof.

Yep. The shitty part is moving along just fine.

The room’s not his, nor is the house around it. It’s his client’s. Miss Candy Kleinhart’s.

Miss Kleinhart came to him the evening before. “They want to kill me,” she said. Her pleading eyes did the rest.

That and five hundred a day plus expenses. Miss Kleinhart has the money. And the looks.

And now she’s safe and sound in a motel, and they don’t have her.

They have Matt Murphy, and Matt Murphy has a gun.

He knows what they’re thinking, he knows they wanna ask him where the hell he put the sexy bimbo, so he makes them feel confident. He lies down on a small sofa and waits. After a while a key softly jingles before unlocking the door.
There’s a creaky floorboard right in front of the sofa and when it creaks he springs up, grabs an arm and down the body comes under him. Pinned by his butt and his caliber nine. Both deadly weapons.

“Hell!” he says, “What are you doing here?”

It’s the sexy bimbo.

Miss Kleinhart says, “I got a call on my mobile. Thought you were in trouble.”

“We are now, they’re already in the house, or around it.” he looks at the open door.  Nobody there. Yet.

“What’s that hiss?” says Miss Kleinhart.

He looks up and sees the white smoke pouring out of the air vent. “Shit!” He pushes her out of the room and bounces backwards on the couch.
A split second later he emerges from the room trailing sweet smelling wisps.

“Did you breathe it?” she asks.

“A whiff. Run!”

They rush to the front door. Closed.

“Keys?” he says.

“They were in the door.”

“Gone now.” he says. His vision is blurring.

Multicolored flashlights outside. “They’re coming!” she shouts.

Matt fumbles for her hand. “Lead! Hide us!”. He has trouble thinking now, and he’s hallucinating.

A small herd of orange buffaloes gallop by his side. He hears a jingling noise with every step. The buffaloes start humming “jingle bells” to it.

Miss Kleinhart turns sharply right and they’re in a dark room. She closes the door and crouches behind him. “Can you shoot?”

“Think so,” he replies, “quarter past eleven,” he adds, the polite llama in a business suit thanks him and disappears.

Something in the back of his head nags at him.

“Footsteps!” she says. “Kill him!”

He lifts his shooter and points at the door, still the nagging feeling.

Miss Kleinhart screams as the door is flung open.

Matt Murphy drops his gun and holds his open hands high against the bright light.

“What!…  Why?” She shrieks.

“I don’t kill cops.”

A police officer is standing in the doorway. “An anonymous letter in my car windshield said a murder was being committed here.”

“Nearly so,” Matt replies.  He stands up, still woozy. “do you know this woman?”

“Yes. I’m investigating Candy Kleinhart’s business for fraud.”

“So you organized this so I could eliminate him and stop the investigation, right?” Matt says, but Miss Kleinhart remains silent until she’s handcuffed and ready to get into the police car, then she looks at him.

“How did you find out?”

“A lot of small things, but especially this:” he takes her by the shoulders and gives a good shake. The house keys concealed in her bra dance with the rest of its contents.

“Jingle Bells.” he says.

***

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The basic thing about Harry Potter’s world is that it’s nice, imaginative, colorful, and ends about three feet around the corner at the end of Diagon Alley. You just get that perception that it’s a painted façade, and that if Harry makes one wrong turn, he’ll find himself floating in an empty void while J.K.Rowling frantically dreams up a new setting for the scene.

By contrast, anything happening anywhere in Middle Earth looks like it’s not the first time that sort of thing happens there, it probably won’t be the last, and, to put it quite simply, wherever there is, it doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about what is happening, because it’s been around long enough to have an opinion. Reading about the setting feels, in other words, like a real, living world, and the events which come together to form the Lord of The Rings trilogy are just the last chapter of a beautifully complex interaction of history, society and even geology.

In other words, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a troll inexplicably shows up inside Hogwarts. How did it get loose? There is some half-assed explanation about the bad guy trying to do random Bad Guy acts, but basically it’s because J.K.Rowling thought it would be a good moment for a troll to appear, more specifically to appear in the girls’ bathroom. Why? I DON’T KNOW WHY!

In The Fellowship of the Ring, the company encounters a Balrog. Why? Because they’re in Moria, underground, and Balrogs are underground. How did it get loose? The dwarves dug too deep. Where are the dwarves? KILLED BY THE FREAKING BALROG, NOW RUN! It just all fits together better.

But the true magic is even deeper, in the synapses and veins of the narration itself. It’s in the names of things and places which, I’m sure you noticed the first time you read LOTR, come very close to discouraging you from reading such a complicated text. But you read on, and as you read, you start to realize that the strange names are not just patched up word games like, say, “diagon alley” and “hogsmeade”. You have Ered Luin, and then Ered Mithrin, and realize that ered means “mountains”, and mithrin means “grey”. And then you remember that one of Gandalf’s nicknames is Mithrandir, which means ‘Grey Wanderer’ and you go ‘oooooooh!’

You never go ‘oooooh!’ in Harry potter, but there is, admittedly, more booger humor.

The secret to this incredible realism of Tolkien’s world is in his special linguistic alchemy: he started from the languages and built the elves around them. Then his elves had some serious argument over some drag costume jewelry or something like that, and they split up into two groups. So the languages divided into Quenya and Sindarin (and other dialects too, but you don’t hear elves use them unless they’re swearing). Then came the other races, including men. For men, specifically the horseriding Rohirrim, Tolkien played the ace up his linguistic sleeve: Anglo-Saxon (or Old English). Eoh is Old English for ‘horse’ which became Roh in Sindarin, and although “Rohan” is a Sindarin name, you may have noticed that many of the actual names of the horse-people in Rohan begins with “Eo”, such as Eomer, and Eowyn. Eowyn herself speaks Rohirric when at the end of “The King of the Golden Hall” she says “Westu, Theoden hal,” which is 100% Old English for “bless you Theoden”. It is possible to etymologically trace many Anglo-Saxon words to their modern form.

But the J to the double R T. didn’t stop there, because he wanted his other languages to sound realistic as well, and so he made sure they too could boast some of that cool etymology, only the other way around. For example he reverse engineered ancient Quenya so our modern languages appear to contain words which originate from it. I shall leave you with a few examples:

• Direct connection: the word I cited above, ered, comes from ancient Quenya oron, which means mountain. So does Greek oros.
• Association: the ancient Quenya word for ‘strong’ is taura. Taurus means ‘bull’ in Latin.
• The Geology: ok, follow me here, the verb root for ‘to fall’ in Quenya is tal_. For example: taltuva, ‘he fell’, and atal_, ‘has fallen’. The fabled island of Nùmenor, the peoples of which Aragorn is himself a descendant, is said to have been punished by the gods after its inhabitants rebelled against them. The punishment? It was made to sink down into the sea at the end of the Second Age. After the cataclysm, the sunken island was known as ‘The Downfallen’. In Quenya: Atalantë 

oooooooh!

Ian Lahey writes fantasy and sci-fi. He really doesn’t want to be funny, he just fails at being serious. You can read more of Ian’s failures below, and even find links to his books.

Thanks to Marc Zender for correcting a linguistic blunder I’d made, which compromised my otherwise very serious article.

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This short fantasy story is for those who love classic dragon battles and just a touch of humor.

Reader warning for the presence of sensual and violent content.

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