Who Is Percy Maelock?
Before we go into all the lies surrounding Percy Maelock, we should first and foremost go over the things we know to be true.
Percival Nemo Maelock (yes, that’s his actual name) was born on February 29th, which is a ridiculously inconsistent date for an equally ridiculous man. His father, Dr. Julius Maelock, was the chief anesthesiologist at St. Hildegard County Hospital. His mother, Penelope Dalton, was once one of the most published photojournalists in the world before comfortably settling into a teaching position so that she could enjoy more time at home with her growing family. Both Julius and Penelope had a deep love for classic literature, which is why they decided to name their firstborn after both the legendary Knight of the Round Table fabled to have found the Holy Grail and Jules Verne’s iconic character who famously journeyed through the impossible. Despite this grandeur and his own undeniable compulsions toward the theatrical, the sound of hearing his own full name has always been akin to nails being scraped across a chalkboard for Percy.
Once upon a time, he was quite surprisingly normal. He had, as one might expect, a fairly ordinary childhood. Or as ordinary a childhood as someone can have when still a toddler. He crawled. He walked. He learned his colors. It was a much simpler time, back when the most peculiar thing about him was the name of the town his family called home – Wit’s End.
Wit’s End was a small community (mostly farmers and teachers and well-off retirees) nestled in the middle of nowhere. They had a school with a historically talented football team, a hospital with more funding than it would realistically ever need, a post office manned by a very sweet old man whom local legend claimed to be well over two-hundred years old, and a bountiful farmer’s market every Saturday that was the crown jewel the whole county looked forward to attending.
Yes, all things considered, Percy Maelock grew up in simplistic, rural bliss. And then he turned four. That’s when the stories started.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the year Percy started telling stories was the same year that his sister was born. Both of his younger sisters – Eddie and Annie – most certainly find more delight than anyone else in calling out Percy for the liar he is, even if it does no good at all. Of the many stories that they like to leverage against their brother, his original lie is undoubtably their favorite. I have to imagine it was quite adorable when little Percy came trudging back inside after a full day of playing in the woods and told his parents all about his very first adventure. The way he told it, and then annoyingly continued to insist upon for several decades afterwards, was that he had stumbled into a hole hidden between the roots of a great tree. Only, this wasn’t an ordinary hole of worms and rabbits and dirt. No, this hole was an ancient doorway into an unseen world of monsters and magic and imaginary friends. Little four-year-old Percy called this realm of fairytales the Dreaming Space.
Down and down and down he tumbled until he landed firmly in the pale heart of the Dreaming Space, far from any help whether it be imaginary or real. He was trapped in a fluctuating landscape from which all the imagination in the universe originated. It might have been only minutes to us, but Percy claims to have been stuck wandering those ever-changing paths and battling monsters for seven years until he was finally saved by a wizard named Albion.
The part about the wizard is the bit his sisters enjoy teasing Percy about the most, and I can’t say that I blame them one bit. The first time I heard the story about his fall into the Dreaming Space was while we were out celebrating my twenty-first birthday. Even after all those years, he still talked about it as though it was a truly harrowing experience that really happened and defined who he’d one day become. Hearing about it was my fault, really. We’d had a few drinks and I stupidly asked the overtly critical question: “What made you this way?”
He was more than happy to tell me the story of how he had plunged headfirst into the heart of imagination and made it back to tell the tale. He told me how Albion was a wizard that lived in a haunted house and tended a garden where infinite possibilities flowered; he told me how being a wizard meant Albion could easily step between the real and the imaginary; and he told me how, after rescuing him from the pale heart, the wizard sent him on an adventure to climb his way back up into our world.
“Anyone can get lost in imagination,” Percy said to me. “It happens to the best of us. But the very heart of imagination. The Divine Spark. No mortal was ever meant to walk its changing roadways. Now, wizards can walk amongst all realties as they please as easily as stepping through a door. But for people like you and me, it’s infinitely harder to climb your way back up to reality. So, the wizard gave me three choices on how I could get back home.”
The first choice, as Percy explained it, was for him to befriend a passing daydream and bargain for a ride to reality. The challenge with this option, as Percy explained it, was that daydreams are wildly unpredictable. They may say they’re going one place, but they’ll zigzag and switch directions thirty-one different times along the way before likely never even making it to where they’d originally intended to go.
The second choice was to tame a rampant nightmare and ride it all the way back home. This too, according to Percy, came with its considerable number of risks. All nightmares, no matter how tame they may appear, are inherently monstrous and cannot be trusted. For a four-year-old boy to try and take one on in the waking world is difficult enough. Had Percy tried to hunt one in the Dreaming Space, where it would still be finding its shape and be at its most powerful, would have practically been a death sentence.
This left Percy with only the third and final choice. Naturally, this meant embarking on a grand adventure.
“You’d think it could have been as simple as the wizard just taking me all the way home, but no,” Percy elaborated, a little drunk by this point in his story. “As annoying as it might be, wizards don’t operate that way. They’re all about helping others help themselves. So, after Albion lifted me up from the heart of imagination, he told me exactly where I needed to go and what I needed to do.”
The adventure Percy claims to have undertaken would have made for a lovely children’s book, filled with monsters and daring escapes and no less than three instances where he crossed blades with pirates. The wizard sent him on a quest to find a compass. Only it wasn’t an ordinary compass. No, this compass had been made a very long time ago by a mythological inventor and it was designed to guide its owner towards many, many different things. Towards fantastical, wonderful things. Instead of pointing north, it navigates its holder to a still point between where they want to go and where they need to be. If Percy were to find it, it could help him discover the right path between realities and back home.
Off into the great wide unknown Percy went, armed with nothing but his childish wits and a wizard’s encouraging words. He traversed great mountains made of diamond and silver, braved twisted forests of poisonous thorns and giant spiders, explored haunted castles plagued by monsters and carnivorous marauders, sailed upon the rushing tides of consciousness, and even had time to share a cup of tea with a nomad who could command the very air around him. But it was not until he had the fabled compass in his hands, which he won fair and square from a pirate captain after besting him at an intense game of hide and seek, that the real adventure supposedly began.
The compass guided him to a labyrinth of immense sprawling corridors that could interconnect all places, realities, and times if you knew how to walk it. The labyrinth had been designed by the very same man who created the compass, and he realized through betrayal and hardship that something that could allow someone to be in all places and all times was perhaps the most dangerous thing to exist throughout all of imagination. And so, the inventor placed a terrible monster within the labyrinth to watch over the infinite paths. It was the very same monster that began to hunt Percy the very moment he stepped foot within the maze.
It took some trial and error, as well as a fair share of cleverness to continuously outmaneuver the beast clawing at his heels, but Percy was finally able to find his way home. Up he climbed from the very same hole he had fallen into, covered in all kinds of dirt and muck and who knows what else. Can you imagine a four-year-old walking out of the woods looking like that and then justifying it to his parents with such an imaginative story? It would be every bit as adorable as it was impressive. But then imagine telling that same story years later with the same amount of conviction to your friend on their twenty-first birthday? Do you see how quickly adorability would step aside so that annoyance could take the stage?
