by DD Barant
“Hello, Agent Valchek,” Sheldon Vincent says. “I’m surprised you’re here. The climax was the big fight at the rocket facility—epilogues are for books, not comics. They’re a more conservative medium when it comes to length.”
“Blame it on my nagging need for closure,” I say. “The fight was impressive, I’ll admit—lots of drama, things blowing up, plenty at stake. Heroism, sacrifice, last-minute saves, and a tragic death for the tormented villain. Bravo.”
“Yes. Six of them, in fact. Can I ask what led you to me?”
“Bizarro—an insane golem who had to do everything backward. Once I understood the reference, I found all sorts of links to the character throughout the case. There’s only one problem: He was created in 1958, while comics here were banned two years earlier. There’s no way he could find his way into a Seinfeld episode—not unless the character was imported from my world, by someone both a member of the Four Color Club and a writer. You never mentioned your stint as staff writer on the Superman TV show in the 1960s.”
“It’s not a time I’m proud of. The technology of the era couldn’t capture the grandeur of the genre.”
“It did a good enough job to make Jerry Seinfeld a lifelong fan. And you even managed to sneak in a tribute to a literary sibling of yours—a very well-known creation of your mother’s.”
He smiles. “Very astute. Yes, my full name is actually Shelley da Vinci. I assume I don’t have to explain the second half.”
“So, the result of a union between Mary Shelley and Leonardo—or at least his genetics. Quite the legacy to live up to—I don’t blame you for changing your name.”
“Legacy? It’s a curse.” He’s not smiling anymore. “My mother was the author of Frankenstein—the very first Industrial myth—and my father was one of the most revered scientific and artistic minds in history. Do you have any idea of the expectations that surrounded me? And I very nearly didn’t exist at all—the Hexagon was always more focused on politicians and warlords than creators. I was an experiment… one many considered a failure.”
“But not John Dark. He was one of your champions, wasn’t he? And when the time came, you returned the favor. You made sure he survived the attack at Mount Saint Helens. You helped him cut a deal.”
“That’s what the Hexagon does. Endless maneuvering, alliances and betrayals and political brokering. Everyone owes us favors—even the Crooked Shadows. We make kings, we make queens.” His voice is bitter.
“That’s not what you wanted to make at all, was it?” I ask. “You wanted to make something else. You wanted to make art.”
“It’s who I am. It’s what I am. And the comic book form is the greatest medium of them all—it’s the only one that combines the visual and the textual, which means it engages both hemispheres of the brain at once. And comic book art is deeply symbolic, not merely representational; it’s a language itself. Alan Moore understands that. Grant Morrison understands that. And they understand that language is the basis of all magic, even though they live in a world where access to mystic forces is limited.”
Okay, I’ve got him geared up for a rant. And why not? He’s holding enough firepower to incinerate me or change me into a frog, and all my allies are in the intensive care ward. Almost all of them, anyway…
“In a way, I have you to thank for all this, Agent Valchek. Or maybe I should refer to you as the Bloodhound? Yes, I know what your co-workers call you. It’s no Sword of Midnight, but it’ll do… and it was your actions, after all, that led to the release of the Ghatanothoa footage on the Web.”
I glare at him. Subliminal imagery of an Elder God spliced into the equivalent of a YouTube clip had gone viral, the resulting effect being mental instability in a certain percentage of exposed thropes and pires. NSA projections put their number at around 120,000 worldwide—not so bad, except that until now the supernatural races had been immune to mental illness and had little experience in dealing with it.
“Yes, I was one of the ones who watched it,” he says. “And I knew I was watching something extraordinary. The government’s pathetic attempts to suppress it—including their claims that viewing it led to madness—only confirmed my suspicions.”
He takes a step downward. I fight the urge to back up. “It’s just like they said. What we call fiction are actually other universes, real places with real people in them. Every writer, every artist, knows that feeling when the images, the words, just flow; when you feel less like a creator and more like a conduit, when something is being expressed through you instead of by you. When that happens, you’ve become a channel for the energy of the multiverse.”
“Yeah? Then there must be some crappy alternate worlds out there, because I’ve read some pretty bad books.”
He laughs, low and deep. “But that’s the key, Bloodhound. Craftsmanship. See, no matter how inspired the writer, he still has control. He can choose, he can change the direction of the plot. It led me to one inescapable conclusion: that a writer—a truly inspired writer—can not only channel true information, but actually affect events. Transform reality. And isn’t that the definition of a god?”
He’s halfway down the staircase now. The heat coming off him is like an open oven. My hands remember what happened less than an hour ago, and pulse in pain.
“So you’re a god,” I say evenly. My brain is feeding me many, many inappropriate responses, some of which are downright hilarious, but now is not the time to make with the funny. “What does a god need with weapons?”
“It was necessary to the plot,” he says, as though that explains everything. “I knew what I had to do when Brother Stone came to me. I’d been thinking about it for a while, studying the rituals that Wertham had done, and I finally figured it out. A spell that would give me the kind of power to change reality here as in the universes of fiction. I just had to reverse everything.”
He steps off the staircase, now only a yard away from me. “The secrets weren’t in Wertham’s rituals, though I learned some valuable things from them—how to induce the transformation of flesh and bone to metal, for instance. No, the true insights were in the comics themselves, encoded there for anyone with the right eyes to see. One of Superman’s most powerful foes is an imp from another dimension, a being who can manipulate reality with a thought; the only way to defeat him is to make him say his own name, backward. Most writers made him a joke, but Moore demonstrated how powerful—how significant—he really was. Morrison wrote a mini-series about a sorceress named Zatanna, who recites all her spells by speaking backward. He knew, too. And now, so do I.”
“But Stone didn’t,” I say. “He wanted you to transport him to another world, but you found out he was human and blackmailed him into helping you steal the Brigade’s weapons. You could locate them because you kept blood samples from each of the Bravos when you created the Brigade comic book—even a small amount of the Quicksilver Kid’s mercury. And you started with the Sword of Midnight, because you knew Brother Stone could get close to her.”
“Yes. They used to be lovers. I found out when I established a psychic link to his mind, so we could communicate without being detected; he simply dug a tunnel from the inside of his mausoleum into the forest when he wanted to come and go without being observed. I used the link to coerce him when he hesitated, and he reacted badly. Too much guilt there already.”
Yeah. I could see the dynamic. A human half crazy with self-recrimination and a thrope half crazy from exposure to an extradimensional presence. Plant both halves in the fertile imaginative territory of comic books, and watch them bloom into a whole psychotic. Their link probably reinforced every irrational thought they had, bouncing obsessions between their minds like a deranged game of Ping-Pong.
“Whatever you were trying to accomplish,” I tell him, “it’s over. Gretchen’s baby survived. Your… spell is incomplete, and Stone’s dead.”
“It doesn’t make any difference. It’s the sequence of events that matter, not the deaths. Those were incidental.”
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I shake my head, but don’t take my eyes off him. “Incidental?”
“Yes. I told you Stone reacted badly.” He stares at me, unblinking, his face lit by the glow of the helmet that surrounds it. “He committed the murders, not me. In my opinion, he was quite mad.”
Even though I know he’s the crazy one, for a second I doubt myself. It’s not his utter assurance that shakes me—I once met a schizophrenic who could explain, in minuscule detail and with complete assurance, how chipmunks ruled the Earth—but the fact that on this world, his explanation almost makes sense. There are alternate realities, there is magic; both are inescapable parts of my life now. The very fact that an essential element of his craziness is a psychic link with a monk made of living stone illustrates the problem nicely: When the world itself is this nuts, even a raving lunatic could be right on the money.
But da Vinci isn’t. Eisfanger didn’t find any traces of spell-weaving at any of the murder sites—that part is all in da Vinci’s mind.
“If Stone was crazy,” I say, “you were the one who pushed him over the edge. He was no killer. He’d been living with his guilt for decades, had found a way to atone for it. See, human beings are used to craziness; we’re all a little bit crazy half the time anyway. But you’re not. You couldn’t handle the sudden instability in your own head—so you pushed it into his.”
Okay, he’s close enough. I hope this works… “I’m going to pull my cell phone out, all right? There’s something on it I want to show you.”
I put my hand in my coat pocket very slowly, keeping eye contact, trying to radiate sincerity and harmlessness. He doesn’t try to stop me, but he probably figures there’s not a lot I can do to him. He may be right.
And then I have my gun out and pointed at his face.
“Don’t even twitch,” I say evenly. “Unlike most of the people in this reality, you know what this is. You know what it can do. It’s loaded with silver-tipped bullets and packs enough of a punch to take your head clean off. I know right now your brain is trying to tell you that ridiculous, clunky-looking thing in her hand couldn’t possibly hurt a god-like being such as yourself. Don’t listen to it.”
Being this near to him is like standing too close to a bonfire. Sweat forms on my forehead and rolls into my eyes. “Listen to me, instead. You’re an intelligent man. You have connections. You know where I’m from, you know what my area of expertise is. You really think Cassius would go to the trouble of bringing me over if I wasn’t damn good at what I do?”
“You’re an expert in the science of criminal profiling, specializing in psychopathic personalities,” he says. “I don’t dispute your credentials, Bloodhound.”
“Good. Then tell me why I’d risk my life with a powerful opponent I know to be insane with a weapon that clearly isn’t a threat?”
I watch him think it through. The reason guns never caught on here is entirely artificial, the result of a spell cast centuries ago. As it was explained to me, the spell has three levels: The first level persuades people that the idea of using explosions to power weaponry shouldn’t be taken seriously, and the second persuades people that the logic of the first should never be examined too closely. The third level is another problem entirely, and one I hope I won’t have to deal with immediately.
Because I’m from another reality, I’m immune to the spell’s effects. And the werewitch that told me how the spell worked also told me it was possible to break it, though she hadn’t explained exactly how. I thought I knew—you could make it collapse under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies, but only under a very particular set of circumstances. Circumstances that I figure I’m stuck right in the middle of.
“You can’t be bluffing,” he says. “There’s no point. Obviously you believe you can hurt me with that thing—”
There’s a very solid-looking door to my right, probably oak. I put a bowling-ball-size hole in it with one quick shot, the sound of the shot startling da Vinci into taking a step backward. I center the barrel back between his eyes. “Still think it’s harmless?” I say.
He frowns. “That isn’t—it doesn’t—”
“It works here just fine. It works here just as well as it does on my world—just as well as they do in the comics.”
His eyes widen. No matter how many bulletproof guys there are flying around in spandex, they always seem to run into crooks with guns. People do get shot—innocent bystanders or hostages, usually, but bullets and their victims are still part of the mythology that’s so important to da Vinci’s worldview. Until now, he’s been able to compartmentalize that part as fiction—but fiction and reality have already collided in his mind, the difference between the possible and the impossible blurring. The artificial barrier imposed by the spell is one of the few things separating them, and I’ve just hit that sucker with a battering ram.
“You must be insane,” he whispers. “That thing is ridiculous. I don’t want to think about this!”
Level two. Gotta keep hammering away. What other comic book characters use guns? “The Lone Ranger used silver bullets, didn’t he? Worked just fine for him.” I don’t even know if the Lone Ranger had his own comic book, but I figure it’s a good possibility. “Or how about Dick Tracy? All cops carry guns where I come from, Shelley.”
A sudden inspiration strikes me. “How about Batman, Shelley? How did he get started? What happened to change the trajectory of his life? What event triggered his transformation from spoiled rich kid to vigilante?”
“His… his parents were killed. By a criminal.” Da Vinci’s voice sounds thick, slurred. His eyes aren’t tracking properly.
“How? How were they killed?”
“They were shot. Shot.” He puts a glowing hand to his head, suddenly unsteady on his feet. “Killed by a thief’s bullet, shot by a robber as he was running away and Spider-Man could have stopped him but didn’t so his Uncle Ben was shot, and you wouldn’t think a single piece of metal so small could change so much, but it does, it does and now the guilty must be punished, but Batman doesn’t use guns, never guns, heroes don’t use them but the Punisher does, lots and lots of guns and bombs and that’s all he does, shoot and shoot and shoot, it’s crazy, it makes no sense, but the Shadow knows, twin forty-fives and the weed of crime bears bitter fruit—”
He staggers backward, his own insanity hurling itself against the reef of the spell, an irresistible force smashing against an immovable object. I should take the opportunity to just shoot him, but I’m not an executioner.
He raises his right hand, the one clenched in a fist, and now I can see something poking out by his thumb—he’s holding on to some kind of elongated crystal, one that does more than just shine with reflected light from the armor; it seems to have its own internal glow, something that shimmers and pulses with different colors before shifting to a steady crimson.
Da Vinci shakes his head once, then fixes me with a look that no longer seems uncertain. “That was impressive,” he says. “You might have been able to shut down my mind completely if not for one thing. I have the Balancer.”
I see now that the crystal he holds is emitting blue light from one end and red from the other. The Balancer gem, the one Stone took from Doctor Transe. Not entirely clear on what it does, but from its name I guess it’s counteracting the chaos I set off in da Vinci’s skull.
“Amazing,” he continues. “I never even suspected the existence of that spell, but now that it’s gone everything seems different.”
“Situation hasn’t changed,” I point out, the Ruger still aimed between his eyes.
“No,” he agrees. “But my priorities have.”
He throws a gauntleted arm in front of his face at the same second the armor bursts into brilliance. I squeeze off three fast shots as my vision flares into white pain, and hear three distinct ricochets off metal. The Ruger would punch through any ordinary kind of armor, but whatever the Centurion suit is made of isn’t ordinary.
I throw myself to the side and snap o
ff two more shots, but it doesn’t sound like I hit anything but the wall. Then my wrist goes numb and I hear a heavy thump on the floor next to me.
I can’t feel my hand. Why can’t I feel my hand?
My vision clears slowly. Da Vinci is standing over me, the Midnight Sword pointed at my heart. I try to aim my gun at him, but I don’t have it anymore.
Or my right hand.
My arm just ends. There’s no pain, no blood. I bring it closer, trying to blink away the spots in my vision, and see what looks like a perfect transparent cutaway at the stump. I can see blood vessels, muscles, an artery—but I’m not bleeding.
“Get on your feet,” Da Vinci says. “Or I’ll send your head where your hand went.”
I glance down. The Ruger’s lying on the floor, but my hand’s nowhere to be seen.
I’d applaud, if I could.
He takes me to the basement. Access is through a hidden door in the study, but at least we don’t have to slide down Batpoles. I’d have a hard time doing that one-handed.
I’m feeling kind of shocky, which is to say light-headed, flushed, and short of breath. My heart’s pounding like I just ran a marathon. “What happened to my hand?” I say, trying to make it sound like a demand rather than a plea.
He motions me into the stairwell with the sword. “I sent it through time. It still exists—in fact, it’s still connected to you—but nerve impulses are more complicated than blood flow, so you can’t feel it. It’ll return in around an hour.”
Great. My hand is off having adventures while I’m the prisoner of Dr. Frankenshine. I wonder where the hell Eisfanger is—and then I get my answer.
He’s lying sprawled and unconscious in the middle of the large room at the base of the stairs. I know he’s unconscious and not dead because he’s still in were form. Half a dozen red-feathered darts jut from his back like an abortive attempt to sprout wings. His aluminum case is open, though—maybe he managed to accomplish something before he was brought down.
“I see you didn’t come alone after all,” da Vinci says. “Unfortunately for your partner, I have an excellent security system. He’s lucky he isn’t a pire; options for dealing with them are considerably more lethal.”
