The Wizard Catcher

I espied it at the precise moment she showed me the rooftop garden. A wizard-catcher, maroon and glittering with intentions atop its faux-stone pedestal. “I see you catch wizards,” remarked yours truly. “Indeed.” There followed a pause. “What are you talking about?” I concealed my embarrassment concerning the preceding reference to mystical capturing devices. “It is the thing there which is maroon and glittering with intentions atop its faux-stone pedestal,” I explained, “Which is used for catching wizards in the manner that a bug-light catches bugs.” “I can see that,” she convivially replied. We happened to become distracted by a mosslike carpet swooning over a chimneytop. “What is that doing there?” “I have no idea.” It may have thought the same of us, having acquired sentience via a complex mouldering process.

Two days later, an urgent message arrived in the Inbox of my cellular phone. “It really is a wizard catcher.” This news gave me a frisson of foreboding. Was it possible that I had somehow activated it by recognizing its purpose? Had it somehow lain dormant until its dark powers were spoken of? Or was it merely the weather, suddenly bright and terribly warm, that had coincided with an influx of touristic wizards; driven them to her rooftop, bony fingers outstretched and crackling with electric tension, keen gazes fixed upon that siren globe?

“How many did you capture?” “Only one or two…” “A worthy haul,” went the ensuing flurry of phone-based missives. My nervousness did naught but increase. Two wizards in a single night is a very unusual occurrence, since the initial wizard’s corpse typically alerts subsequent wizards to the fact that touching a wizard-catcher will zap them tremendously dead.

A whisper of doubt passed through my mind at this point, as I contemplated a heap of frizzled wizards building beside the summer plants; the somber, mossy chimney-rug. For what were these ageless menfolk being harvested? Were these magic-wielders truly such a threat or nuisance as to be weeded out like insects by the wizard-catcher? Why were there no such warlock-catchers? Wherefore are the witch-catchers (although, one must consent, this group has probably suffered enough over the years, and seems to have relegated itself to the stuff of silly shops shilling tarot cards and “healing crystals”) Unless— …unless these groups themselves were orchestrating the entirety of the wizard-catcher phenomenon. Of course! What else could possibly account for the accumulation of these unappealing devices on the lawns of otherwise normal citizens; for this mistaken belief in their aesthetic quality?

Clearly, then, these objects are something to be wary of indeed. As I gather evidence to support my theory, which could absolutely create an enormous war between magical and non-magical beings whose uneasy truce has held for eons, I am all too aware of the building threat I am likely under. I hear every nighttime shadow and start when lamplights flicker off as I pass beneath them. Each cat who stares too long, each pitchfork or broom resting innocently in its place, each and every abstruse chalk marking which could be said to evoke ancient symbolics; these things make my breaths seem shorter and more finite.

Even writing this now, dear reader, I fear there is coolness around me where others feel heat. As crickets go silent in patches drawing ever closer to my cozy blogging-chair, the small hairs on the back of my neck go rigid. Is it the coolness of dusk, my fears of reprisal, or an electric hum rising softly just past the windowsill?