Interlude: Behind the Curtain
“I am great,” he whispered, immediately shaking his head. “No, no, that’s not right. I am the great…. The great… what was it again?”
He sat back down on his cushioned stool, wincing as it creaked beneath him. “I need to get that fixed.” He made a mental note of it. Nobody would be able to come here, he reminded himself; he would need to drag the damn thing down to one of the maintenance guilds and get them to repair it, somehow without them realizing where it came from. He didn’t really like going down there anyway, though, so he’d probably just ask someone else to do it for him.
The professor paused a moment to consider just how long it had been since he’d left his room. Granted, it was an awfully large room, and had basically everything a person might need, short of the legendary need for human interaction. And even what little of that he got was through his projected self. It had been years since he’d felt the touch of another person. Even now, the tactile memories of those random points of contact were growing too distant to be readily recounted. What had it even felt like?
His eyes rested upon the fabric of the curtain that concealed the little antechamber in which he spent most of his waking hours. How long had it been since he felt the crushing weight of claustrophobia? Was that even a thing? A smile flirted at the corners of his mouth, and he lifted one hand to gently stroke his moustache. It was a challenge to think of the amount of time he spent here – on the one hand, the intermittent barrage of “help me do this” and “how do I fix that?” kept him from the more existential quandaries of trying to ascertain just how a retired carnival barker ended up advising an entire impossible world. In those terrible moments of abject silence, the voices from the abyss all knew his name, knew his fears, knew his absolute certainty that he had never truly retired but was still trying to sell a hapless and uninformed mob on the presence of bearded ladies and conjoined twins. Or the mermaid, the world’s tallest man, the strongest woman, the chess-playing chicken, and on and on. It was all illusion. Misdirection. Sleight of hand. It was all bullshit, and he was full of it. It was just…
Footsteps in the outer hall. They were coming, he realized, even before glancing over at one of the many screens that showed him the interior of the great towering chambers of his castle within the kingdom. A pair of guards escorted the small group who had wreaked such havoc in so short a time. Their misadventures had placed the balance all their lives required in an impressive quantity of danger. Lives lost, fear deployed, the threat of a terrible war breathing down all their necks. And so many thousands of souls looking to him for a solution? No, he corrected himself. They didn’t look to him. They looked to his frightening façade. They knelt and trembled before that glorious lightshow, the Smoke and Mirrors that kept them all in line. They looked through fear-tinged lenses for all their answers, and he was no more brave or wise than any of them. He was simply the only one who knew the truth.
The grand doors opened in, and the eclectic band of four were escorted in and effectively abandoned to his care. The guards no doubt cowered in place for several minutes after closing the doors behind them; he didn’t need to view their cameras to see it for himself.
He let them stand and speak for a few moments, using the time to see what he could discern just by looking at them more closely. A girl and her dog, a scarecrow, a tin woodsman, and a lion. Not so much to look at, but together their collective good fortune had been enough to murder the witch of the east, enrage her sister and upset everyone else in between. No, they had to go, and they had to go now.
He flipped the main lever on his control panel, bringing the lightshow blazing to life.
“I am the great…” he spoke into the microphone, pausing as the great disembodied head echoed his words to the cowering foursome. “…and terrible Oz!” They were frightened and shook with the potency of his declaration, but, as all the times before, he took no joy in their reactions. He knew what he was: a humbug and a charlatan. He decided that the best course of action was to send them on an impossible quest, lest they think too much about the impossibility of it all. Worst case, they perish in the attempt. Best case, they deprive him of a worthy opponent who’d caused him no end of grief. “Destroy the witch of the west, and bring me her magical broomstick!” he ordered them. They resisted, but he flipped more switches, filling the audience chamber with smoke and flashing lights. They accepted their charge and left, concerned but resolved. The doors slammed shut once more, leaving the professor alone with his unending inner voices to draw him back to the edge of his darkness.
His secret would live another day.
He reached up to smooth one of the folds in the green and shimmering cloth which helped maintain his Great Lie. To no one in particular, he whispered: “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”