Zillo the Incompetent by A J Cole (no david read aloud .TXT) 📕

Many years ago, a scroll was found in the ruins of a stone tower. The fact that this scroll somehow survived what appeared to be millennia should have been enough to give the explorer who discovered it pause. Instead, he tossed it in among the other artifacts he’d found there, which, unlike the scroll, were in a condition one would expect for the age they appeared to be.

Several years after the explorer passed away, his son found the scroll while going through an old trunk in the attic. Upon unrolling it, he found it to be not one sheet, but several, covered with what he assumed was some kind of ancient script he didn’t understand.

Upon showing it to a professor of ancient languages at the local university, the young man was told it was a list of items that according to its title had been enchanted by someone named Zillo the Incompetent. Uninterested, he gifted the scroll to the professor.

This professor eventually completed the translation and began to study the list, but became more and more baffled. He wondered about Zillo, the purported creator of the items. Obsessed with learning more, the professor undertook the task of learning who this wizard had been.

The Catalogue is the result of his studies, and begins with the story of Zillo as penned by the professor, a man with an odd sense of humor and bizarre writing style. When the story concludes, there follows the list of what the professor (who insisted on anonymity as a condition of having this published in its entirety) calls “disturbing” magical items. No doubt the reader will agree.

It should be noted that (according to the professor’s research) Zillo had a son who was not at all magical, but his grandson was. The great-grandson was not, while the great-great grandson was, meaning this inborn magical ability continually skipped a generation. The last descendant of Zillo the Incompetent was, the professor learned, a man by the name of Brody Zillman, who was born during the “Baby Boomer” era, and who was killed in a laboratory explosion when he was only thirty-five. Brody contributed several items of his own to the list, as he had been the last to inherit the “magic gene,” as it were.

WARNING: None of these items was ever found, but should one of the readers of this Catalogue ever locate one or more of them, that person would be wise to leave the thing(s) untouched and get as far away from it/them as possible.

A J Cole

A Convoluted History

As Told By An Anonymous Scroll-Translating Professor of Ancient Languages

(Followed by a list of Disturbing Magical Items Crafted by Zillo)

Like the rest of the population, regardless of origin, race, species, or creed, wizards can always find among their number that single exception: the one who should never have existed. Yet find him they did, and his name was Zillo.

From the beginning, Zillo exhibited disturbing behaviors. Nothing he did during his early life was evil or warped, nor was it good or praiseworthy. It was…disturbing. According to various records and diaries, that word would surface anywhere from ten to twenty times a day throughout his lifetime, even if Zillo wasn’t present. Even if he was locked up in his room. Even if he was on the other side of the continent. Disturbing.

The family physician was the first to use that term, and he did so mere seconds after Zillo’s birth. At first, the baby’s mother thought the physician was referring to her, and berated him for the insult, but then noticed the physician was staring at what was squirming in the midwife’s arms as the woman tried to clean it off.

A boy. They’d had a boy. How wonderful that would have been for Zillo’s father, Millo, but that was not to be. The physician, whose name was Crankle, and whose name shall be used from here on (because constantly calling him “the physician” is annoying), was checking the infant’s ears as his assistant cut the umbilical chord. A second later, he backed up to the other side of the room, his face drained of color, and for the second time, muttered, “Disturbing.”

No one knew what happened – Crankle didn’t talk about it, in fact refused to talk about it, and gave no details in his medical log, yet neither Crankle’s assistant, Zillo’s mother, or the curious next door neighbor who had snuck in (she admitted this later) had seen anything out of the ordinary. But Zillo’s parents soon began to suspect what may have occurred, being treated to daily doses of the special weirdness associated with their son, beginning two days after his birth.

When Crela (Zillo’s mother) had recovered enough from childbirth to change her baby’s diaper for the first time, she’d found ten small frogs growing out of the tips of her fingers. And yes, she had considered it disturbing. To her great relief, however, the little amphibians had disappeared before she could get suicidal, probably because Zillo was too young for the magic to be permanent.

Millo, too, experienced the inexplicable, mere hours later that same day when he went to give little Zillo his first bottle (Crela had flat-out refused to breast-feed him). As he was holding his son and gazing down at the tiny, red, wrinkled face, Millo had noticed what looked like some kind of large snout hovering inches from the child’s tummy. Startled, he’d rushed to the looking glass over the chest of drawers, and found that his head, a head he had grown fond of over the years, was now that of a horse. He’d cried out in horror, but it sounded like a whinny, so he had dumped his son back in the cradle and dashed out of the room before his wife could come in to see what a horse was doing in the nursery. He had zoomed off into what one would call an outhouse – probably because it was an outhouse. Not his favorite place, but there was little likelihood Crela would go in there looking for him.

For what seemed like hours, he had made soft horse-in-distress noises, but at some point noticed they were sounding more and more like human whimpers. As had his wife’s frog fingers (which of course he new nothing about…yet), the horse head finally disappeared, fading into whatever vortex horse heads came from.

Free of the equestrian horror at last, Millo had emerged from said outhouse muttering, “Disturbing…”

As little Zillo grew up, all kinds of bizarre occurrences characterized his life. When learning to eat with utensils, for instance, the crude wooden objects would sometimes jump out of his chubby fingers and slither off the table, only to burrow under a nearby floorboard. His attempts at writing often ended with the quill flying out the nearest window, while the ink would start spouting out of the inkwell like a black fountain, the parchment rolling itself up while making snickering noises. Zillo’s education was thus a slow, agonizing process.

When he was nine, a wizard came to the cottage, took one look at the physics-defying chaos in which the boy and his parents were living, and declared Zillo to be a rare individual, one with abilities that only occurred every thousand years or so: a natural wizard from birth. All true wizards are born with a certain predilection for magic, but none with the quantities that could do so much damage during childhood. To the intense relief of Millo and Crela, the wizard insisted that Zillo come away with him to be properly trained.

Later, when Zillo was much older, he would look back on that day and realize that his parents’ tears had not been those of sorrow at his departure, but of sheer relief that he was leaving. It bothered him a bit, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that with him gone, they never again had to worry about the cottage skipping off in the middle of the night (which it had begun to do once, but Millo had thought to knock his son out with a brick, after which the building had stopped misbehaving), or the cat catching fire (giving new meaning to the phrase, “put the cat out”), or any of the other worrying things that Zillo had unwittingly caused to happen.

Life at the Wizard Guild, once Zillo was installed, became a nightmare. Still, the members felt they had an obligation to every other living being to help this anomalous young man control his gift. For a while, it worked. In fact, by the time he was in his twenties, Zillo appeared to have lost some of his, er, talents, and was eventually known by the less-than-flattering appellation, Zillo the Incompetent.

For years he struggled under the burden of his reputation, and by the time he reached his thirtieth year, was convinced that he would be doing everyone a great favor if he took a long, vertical walk off the top of the Wizard Guild tower. While contemplating this, Zillo made a discovery, one that would change life – his and everyone else’s – forever. Not necessarily for the best, either, except once in a while.

By this time, Zillo was well versed in the ways of magic. He had learned how to imbue items with it, how to cast spells, how to dispel magical effects, things like that. But for some reason, his teachers had never encouraged him to enchant anything even though they’d shown him how, telling him that he still needed to work out several kinks in his natural ability.1

The only reason for this, he conceded, was that he was, in reality, incompetent. Who needed a wizard who couldn’t control the simplest spell, but could somehow do idiotic things like making all the rats in the Tower turn into gigantic spiders when all he was trying to do was make the rodents disappear? He thus concluded that the world would be a better and safer place without him.

On the day he was going to take his “walk,” he decided to fortify himself first with a stiff drink. Sitting at his cluttered desk in his room in the basement of the Guild tower, Zillo admitted he was dreading the long walk up the spiral staircase to the roof more than the quick descent he was planning

“I need alcohol,” he said aloud. Reaching into the pouch on his belt, he dug around for coins. The tavern was a block away – he’d grab a snootful of the strongest ale they had, and then back to the tower he’d go, ready to face his self-imposed destiny. Trouble was, his groping fingers found only a tooth (he had no idea who’s), some grainy stuff that might have once been a cookie, a few small stones, and a dead spider. No coins.

He got up, disgusted, and began pacing. “Great. My final act as a wizard will be me screaming like a little girl as I plunge…wait a moment! Aha!” He grabbed a goblet from one of the dusty shelves – Zillo was at least like other wizards with regard