THE HORROR OF SUPERVILLAINY
Book Seven of The Supervillainy Saga
By C. T. Phipps
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2021
Copyright © 2021 C. T. Phipps
Cover art © 2021 Raffaele Marinetti
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
C. T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.
Bibliography
Novels
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Kingdom of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #5)
The Future of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #6)
The Horror of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #6)
I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)
A Nightmare on Elk Street (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 3)
Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)
Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)
100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)
Predestiny (Predestiny, Vol. 1)
Brightblade (The Morgan Detective Agency, Book 1)
Psycho Killers in Love
Anthologies (as editor)
Blackest Knights
Blackest Spells
Tales of the Al-Azif
Tales of Yog-Sothoth
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Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Foreword
Hey folks,
I’m pleased to introduce you to the seventh of Gary Karkofsky’s amazing adventures with The Horror of Supervillainy! This is going to be my homage to things like Vertigo, Ghost Rider, Blade, and other horror comics that have sort of fallen off the radar in mainstream comics. It’s been a long time since Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing introduced characters like John Constantine or the original Giant-Sized Man-Thing was in print.
*Snicker*
Yes, that was a real comic. Also, yes, I’m twelve years old. At heart, at least. Horror and comics have always had a relationship and it used to be one of the pillars of the medium. Tales from the Crypt got its start as one of the long-running horror comics and there used to be an enormous number of spooky horror stories to be found in their pages.
While growing up, I used to go down to the comic bookstore and regularly bought old issues of the Seventies’ Tomb of Dracula. I’d been brought into the medium by the short-lived “Midnight Sons” storyline of the early Nineties. It was Marvel comics attempt to do something akin to Vertigo before crashing and burning due to a variety of factors.
Gary Karkofsky, aka Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM, has always had an element of horror to his story. The Nightwalker was created as a combination of Doctor Strange and Batman with Falconcrest City envisioned as a kind of Lovecraftian Gotham City. It has all the problems of the Joker and Penguin but also Great Cthulhu.
Poor Gary’s second book dealt with him having to stop a zombie apocalypse, a sinister cult, and a Great Beast all in one. It also cost him the life of his beloved wife, Mandy, who has been a continuing presence in his life ever since despite the fact she’s lost her soul. That is a wound that never heals even though Gary has tried everything up to and including trying to move on to do so. This is going to be something Gary is finally going to confront, for good or bad, and I think longtime fans will enjoy it.
Another element is the fact that Gary has finally made his transition from antivillain to antihero. At least that’s what he’s trying to do. Becoming a superhero is something he wants to do for his kids because they change your life. He also wants to do it for Gabrielle in hopes of making right what he did wrong before.
Unfortunately, changing your entire nature is harder than it sounds. Gary has always fought for what he thought was right. Coloring in the lines and being a lawful hero is going to be a lot harder than it sounds. He’s gone from Chaotic Neutral to Chaotic Good but could he ever be Lawful Good? Yeah, right.
This will be an important book in the transition of Gary’s life. He’s gone from being a guy in his late twenties trying to figure out his life to being a guy in his late thirties now dealing with the consequences of his decisions. Gary, unlike Peter Parker, has the option of aging into his responsibilities.
/> For better or worse.
Chapter One
Knocking on My Chamber Door
“I’m sorry but are you Gary Karkofsky, the Superhero without Mercy?” an obnoxious Italian by way of Jersey sounding voice asked.
I was sitting back in the offices of MERCILESS: CA$H FOR $UPERHEROI$M, #MercilessForMoney. It was a large empty building in the middle of downtown Falconcrest City with a big neon sign across the front of the place. The metropolis voted “Worst City in America” fifty years running had suffered a zombie apocalypse, a fascist takeover by my alternate universe doppelganger, and a severe economic recession. That, thankfully, made real estate dirt cheap and allowed me to buy the entire city block for what I presumed would be a regular series of knock-down, drag out brawls with the city’s supervillain elite. That hadn’t happened.
Instead, I had my feet propped up on my desk for my second straight month of absolutely nothing to do. The large gray walled central chamber had the desk, a secondary desk for Cindy (who didn’t show up for work), a firepole leading up to the second floor, a jukebox that played nothing but Eighties’ punk albums, and a spiraling staircase. After the first month of nothing to do, I’d started bringing an e-reader to catch up on my reading as well as a bottle of Merciless brand alcohol. I was starting to debate leaving the e-reader behind.
“It’s Merciless: The Superhero without MercyTM,” I corrected the voice, not looking up from my e-reader. “Hush now, I’m trying to see what happens to Dumbledore.”
“You never finished that series?” the voice asked, sounding surprisingly close. As if standing on my desk.
“I wiped my memory of it so I could experience the joy of it for the second time,” I said, pausing. “Or maybe third since I don’t remember how many times, I’ve read it. I can’t wait to watch this new Game of Thrones show and see how awesome it’s ending is going to be.”
Mind you, I was reading the Harry Potter from Earth-B where the author wasn’t transphobic and the Game of Thrones that was nine seasons long and had an awesome ending. One of the benefits of living in a multiverse where you could travel with magic was the fact that you didn’t have to look far to see better versions of your favorite shows.
“Put down the tablet, Gary,” the voice said.
I did so and blinked. “You’re a bird.”
“No, shit,” the raven on my desk said. He was wearing a tiny fedora and had a striped tie around his neck. “What gave it away?”
“Say nevermore,” I said.
“No,” the raven said. “Also, that joke’s been done to death.”
“Who the hell are you?” I asked. “Also, why are you in my office?”
“To hire you, numbnuts,” the bird said. “What the hell do you think I’m here for?”
“I don’t work for chickenfeed,” I said, adopting my best Humphrey Bogart. “Buzz off, birdbrain.”
I really shouldn’t have been turning down a paying job, but Falconcrest City had been eerily quiet for the past couple of years. It wasn’t that it wasn’t lacking opportunities to fight crime, we still had supervillains, it’s just that the second Nightwalker (Amanda Douglas) took care of most of them alongside her husband, Mr. Inventor. Whenever I showed up to a crime scene, the criminals also turned themselves over to the police. Which, you know, is what they were supposed to do but that didn’t give me any opportunities for epic fights. I’d made my business in hopes of some beautiful femme fatale walking in with a case I could investigate. As such, I wasn’t interested in what a bird was bringing to the table.
“Are we going to make this conversation nothing but racial slurs, monkey boy?” the bird asked. “Because I can exchange barbs with shaved apes like you all days. Chimps like you don’t frighten me. Also, I’m not offering you chickenfeed. I’m here to hire you with cold hard cash. Solid gold bricks. Two million. Untraceable. Not bananas.”
I crossed my arms and leaned forward. “Alright, you had my curiosity but now you have my attention. Where did you get that kind of shiny, swallow?”
“Not by swallowing like your girlfriend, Cindy,” the bird said.
I grabbed him with one hand and he immediately choked up. “Don’t call my girlfriend a whore.”
“Because she gave that up?” the bird asked.
I paused. “Yes? Don’t insult any of my family. I’m fine with you running me down but don’t insult the ones I love. I get real personable about that.”
I was a married man with one girlfriend, two kids, a twin sister, a niece, and a mother I barely talked to since she wanted me to do the talk show circuit with her. Compared to the majority of superheroes, who were suspiciously mostly made of orphans and swinging singles, I was what approached a family man. If you were upset about the fact I was married and had a girlfriend, don’t worry, they were the ones who came up with the idea. My wife, Ultragoddess, spent most of her time in space and had a alien prince husband on another planet. My girlfriend, Cindy, aka Little Red Riding Hood, was also someone with an open and expansive view of sexuality. Yes, she’d been a prostitute at one point but that was in her past. She didn’t need to charge for it anymore. As for my kids? Well, no one made fun of them and lived. They were still rebuilding Twitter after someone looking like me nuked their servers. It seemed someone created a thread about how boneable my daughters would be when they reached adulthood. They were five and six now, by the way. Well, when they weren’t time travelling. God, being a superhero was weird.
“Okay, okay,” the bird said. “The chick and chicklets are off limits, Donkey Kong.”
I let go of the raven. “So, what’s your name or should I just call you Poe?”
“You already did the reference there,” the bird said. “I am the Nightflier, animal sidekick to the Nightwalker! I also go by David Niall Wilson. It’s the pen name I write under when I do horror novels.”
The Nightwalker was my mentor, idol, and predecessor as a superhero. Lancel Warren, aka Cloak, had been a billionaire’s police detective brother who had studied magic and gone on to become the most powerful wizard in the world. He’d worn the Reaper’s Cloak and protected Falconcrest City for a century before dying of old age. I’d inherited the Reaper’s Cloak, by accident, and spent my formative years being educated by his ghost. Cloak had sacrificed himself to rebuild a dead world and I’d been left without his influence. If the Nightflier was his friend, then I was willing to hear him out. It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
I blinked. “Animal sidekick?”
David sighed. “It was a thing in the Sixties to Eighties. Every major superhero had an intelligent super-pet. Ultragod had Ultradog, the Nightwalker had me, Guinevere had her kangaroo Punchy, and later, Gabrielle had Ultrahorse.”
“You could talk but you were pets,” I asked, making sure I was hearing that correctly.
“It was not a terribly enlightened time,” David said. “Let’s be honest, it’s still not a great time to be me in America. I’m black.”
I opened my desk drawer, removed the suspiciously Jack Daniels-shaped bottle of Merciless brand alcohol, and poured us both a glass. “Here, you need this more than I do.”
“You realize this stuff is like the lowest grade cheapest imitation whiskey there is, right?” David asked, showing surprising knowledge of spirits for a raven. “I mean, this isn’t even Tennessee whiskey. It’s South Michigan whiskey, made in Satan’s Hollow by redneck moonshiners.”
“I know,” I said. “I produce it. You pay like a hundred dollars a bottle and put it on your shelf to know that you contributed to my taking over the world.”
“I thought you were a superhero now,” David said.
“That’s the least fraudulent thing about it,” I said, pulling out a sucker from the drawer and putting it in my mouth. It was laced with pot, Red Dust, and magic. Cindy made them as the only cooking she did. They were only for dying patients, chronic pain sufferers, and rich addicts. Oh, and her boyfriend. “So, what’s the gig?”
“Why are you ta
lking like a noir private detective?” David asked. “Not even a real one but a parody of one you’d see in comedy skits.”
“I’m trying to get into the mood,” I said, conjuring a fedora on my head with my magic.
David shook his little bird head. “Only birds, Indiana Jones, and guys with problems with women wear fedoras today, friend.”
I shrugged and removed the fedora, putting it on my desk. “Why don’t you share the job then? My fee is five hundred bucks a day plus expenses.”
I didn’t need the money. As a supervillain, I’d won and lost fortunes. But due to Cindy being slightly smarter with money than myself, I’d invested in various properties at her behest. So, I had Super Pizza, Merciless brand whiskey, and a variety of other sources of revenue. Not to mention I’d given my sister the world’s largest evil megacorp that she was busy dismantling the evil part of. No, I charged what I did to keep people with stupid problems from showing up. I didn’t exactly want to spend all my time getting cats out of trees, especially when I was a dog man. Given I’d received absolutely zero work from the public, most of my neighbors moving away, I suspected I should just put out a FIRST SUPERHERO CASE FREE sign instead.
“Deal,” David said. “The president’s daughter has been kidnapped by an evil cult.”
I blinked. “Well, I can see why you would come to me. Is it the Ultralogists? Tom Cruise always had the makings of a supervillain in my view.”
“Funny,” David said. “But can you take this seriously?”
“I am pathologically incapable of taking anything seriously,” I said, fully committed to the truth of my statement.
David shrugged his wings. “Anyway, Dracula has taken Leslie Trust hostage in his castle around Slaughterhouse Swamp.”
Karl Trust was the president of the United States after the fall of President Charles Omega after he was revealed to be a time-traveling Nazi. An American actor and businessman from New Angeles, Karl was a compromise candidate between the two major parties implicated in letting a lunatic take over the country. I wasn’t a big fan of Karl since he’d sent troops to try and kidnap my children while his Chief of Staff turned out to be a PHANTOM operative. Leslie Trust was the youngest of his equally unpleasant family, She looked like an Olsen Twin and ran a fashion network across the globe.
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