by Paul Tobin
There isn’t an awards show I haven’t been asked to host. Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, the Nobel prizes, La Liga soccer championships, and so on and so on.
Ugly as I am, I’m one of the beautiful people, and the citizens of the world want to know about beautiful people, demanding to know about any battles with villains, any demeaning secrets about heroes, mystic rites that supposedly exist to allow them (meaning every housewife, weekend sportsman, trailer-park resident, Wal-Mart employee, roadie, carny, frat boy, sorority girl, news anchor, etc. etc.) to become one of us, to soar through the skies and heave cars aside.
People want to know how many times I’ve been shot (even I don’t know that) and how many times I’ve been dropped from space (twice: fuck you, Stellar) and how many women I’ve slept with (it’s a fair number, and some of the names pop up again in the list of those who have shot me, or dropped me from space) and, of course, people want to know about my punch, and the year of life it smashes aside.
People do not want to know about how I was heaving in something close to fear (it was more like being uncomfortable, but a superhuman size of uncomfortable, a feeling which all regular people need to face, anyway, at times) when I was holding the phone to my cheek, and how my cell phone felt as heavy as the boulder (twice the size of the trailer it had destroyed) that I lifted in order to free Joshua Williams, who had survived an avalanche by the expedient of falling into a hole that had been prepared for installation of a new septic tank.
Adele, on the phone, said, “Hello?”
I said, “Yes,” which was nonsensical.
She said, “Steve?”
I said, “Hello.” I was getting things backward. If Mindworm hadn’t been in his cerebral holding carriage, I would have suspected he was at work.
Adele said, “I was told that you were in town. I’m… I’m… happy. Steve. I’m happy. Where are you?”
“Standing outside the log cabin,” I answered. “In Charles Park.” I don’t know why I lied. I mean, I lied because I was panicked, but I don’t know why I was panicked. It was Adele. On the phone. That’s why I was panicked. I knew that, of course.
“Do you want me to come there?” she asked.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.” She was going to ask why not. I needed to have an answer ready. I was backing away from her house, hunkering down behind a Smart Car that was barely big enough to hide me. I found myself wishing for Tom. He would have kicked me into view. I needed that kick.
“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?” Adele asked. She came to the window, parted the curtain, looking out.
“A fight,” I said.
“A fight?”
“With Eleventh Hour. It… didn’t go well. I’m beat up pretty bad. Don’t think you want to see me like this.”
“Steve,” she said. “I just want to see you.”
She didn’t make it sound tearful, or pleading, or false, the way old lovers will sometimes do. Any one of those might have made it easier.
I didn’t say anything.
She was still standing between the parted curtains, but she’d turned off the lights in the room, probably so she could see outside better.
“Are you hiding behind the Smart Car?” she asked. Damn. Damn it to hell. I stood up.
“There you are,” she said. There was a catch in her voice I would have given anything to understand.
“How’d you know?”
“That’s where I would have hidden. Listen, my downstairs door is locked. I’m going to go unlock it. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
I started walking towards the house.
***
Octagon announced his presence to the world, as everyone knows, when he stormed the Churchill, the secret (well, secret at the time) British nuclear submarine then off the coast of Portugal taking part in an underwater mapping exercise.
Octagon appeared in Captain Wilmer Bosley’s quarters (beaming a live video feed that piggybacked onto television waves worldwide) and boldly strode throughout the craft (which was then nearly six hundred meters below the surface) disabling the crew members with a device that radiated a disrupting charge (attuned to the human brain, rendering all within the field of effect unconscious within seconds) in a circle that could pass through the bulkheads, and was nearly seventy feet in diameter, which is an epic measurement in an underwater craft.
He robbed them.
That’s all Octagon did.
He mugged each and every one of the unconscious crewmembers.
Their wallets. Their rings. Any money they had in their pockets.
A worldwide live broadcast of the oddest mass mugging on record.
He said, “I am Octagon. My eight arms reach everywhere. You have ceased to be safe.”
The rings, and all the personal photos from the crewmember’s wallets, were later found floating inside a hard rubber balloon (with an attached air horn that was sounding in bursts) about the size of a beach ball, floating in the Thames.
The world wanted to know how Octagon had gotten into (and subsequently, off) the Churchill at such a depth. The world was also curious about how Octagon had, for the time he was aboard (two hours, after the crewmen were rendered inert) managed to pilot and maintain the ship’s course completely by himself. The world wanted to know what Octagon’s suit was made of… how he could reach into the black void of his costume and bring out all sorts of devices. The world wanted to know this.
The world wanted to know about Octagon.
So they sent me after him.
***
The first time the American public became aware of Macabre it was because he’d robbed the First United National Bank in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, later claiming he had chosen this site because of their name. First. United. National. F. U. N. Fun.
That’s all it was. It wasn’t about money. He just said it sounded like it would be fun. What did a master of magic need with money? He could conjure himself a castle. Servants. Food. Gems. Everything. It was famously said that the only thing Macabre couldn’t conjure was a sense of morality, and he was the one who coined the phrase.
Seven men and women died during Macabre’s first appearance. Keep in mind they didn’t have to die. Macabre could have done anything he wished. This wasn’t a man who had a gun in his hands and was firing in panic, out of his mind, trying to preserve his own life, caught in a situation that had gotten out of control, or half out of his mind with fear. This was a man with reality in his hand, twisting it at whim, making no effort to preserve anyone’s life, completely out of his mind with arrogance and power.
Greg Lemond: a teller. His body was, during the course of the robbery, turned into coins. It started with pennies dropping from his ears, sliding out from his eyes, heaving out of his choking mouth. Then, quarters and dimes and staters and kruggerands and drachms and rubles, coins from all ages, began flaking away from his entire body like scales, like pieces of his skin, until there was nothing left of him but a memory of a few horrible moments of screaming, and a large pile of assorted coins, many of which were surreptitiously pocketed by onlookers, the police, and a bewildered coroner.
Judith Swan: Another teller. She was four months pregnant. Her fetus burst into flames, burning (according to Macabre himself) at six hundred and sixty-six thousand degrees centigrade for the space of three long seconds. No trace of Ms. Swan was ever recovered, unless you were to count a blackened smear on the nearby walls.
Alfie Breeks: He was there at the bank in order to deposit some winnings from a fine night of poker. He was a small-time crook. Or maybe a medium-time crook. He was devoured by a demon. It came up out of a deposit slip box, or possibly it was a deposit slip box. Witnesses are unclear on this.
Jason Fenel: A customer who was closing his account. Moving to Australia. A new girlfriend had encouraged him to become either a poet, a wilderness adventurer, or a kangaroo farmer. Macabre turned him into a piece of paper and presented him to Judith Swan with a demand for money written on
the surface, and a pair of unblinking, terrified eyes on the back of the sheet.
Nathan Offutt and his girlfriend, Lisbeth Zoni: No matter who fired on Macabre, no matter their vantage point, no matter the timing, no matter if it was a bank guard or the police, every bullet had its path diverted. Redirected to either Nathan or Lisbeth. There were hundreds of shots before people understood what was happening.
Jeremy Bond: A bank guard. Still there. Still frozen into position. Unmovable from the spot. Possibly alive. An office has been built around him so that customers can’t see him, can’t grow uneasy, won’t take their business elsewhere. The employees, of course, have learned to live with his presence. Somewhat.
Macabre left the bank with two hundred thousand dollars in cash. Less than thirty thousand dollars per life. Outside, in the street, he scattered more than a million dollars worth of five-dollar bills. He’d never needed the cash at all.
He just wanted to rob.
He just wanted to kill.
So they sent me after him.
***
Tempest had been known as Anya Neatridge, but nobody calls her by that name anymore. For all intents and purposes she died when she fell (there is a body of evidence suggesting she was pushed) into the waste containment facility at SRD, at a time when I was three buildings over, being systematically injured so that I and a group of interested onlookers could gauge my healing abilities.
Anya had surfaced only once, (at least when she was still Anya) and even then it was just her foot. Her clothing had dissolved instantly within the radioactive brine. Surveillance tapes (there were no surviving witnesses) suggest there was a bubble of light, as if something of brilliant magnitude was brewing below. In the videos, it’s possible to see papers, attached to a clipboard hanging on the wall, begin to ruffle. Soon after, these papers, the clipboard itself, a work safety poster, and a number of safety garments (lead-lined “raincoats,” helmets, goggles, a glove with a built-in Geiger counter, etc.) begin to swirl about the room. The footage itself begins to shudder. The walls are shaking. Ice forms in several places. It begins, against all reason, to hail. Lightning streams down from the ceiling as if it were being spouted by the fire containment system.
Three guards rush in from an adjoining door. Two of them are struck instantly by lightning and they fracture into several charred pieces. The remains of these two men (and the third man, who was, at that point, still alive) are swept up into the winds to be battered against the walls amongst the rest of the debris. The vat begins to buckle. Waste begins to spew outwards. One of the cameras is wrenched from the wall. In the remaining camera’s view, the walls themselves begin to shred. There is a brief moment of the sky and then, according to some people, Tempest herself rises from the vat and into the air. But the form (whatever it is) is just a rush of color, a quick swath of white, and amidst all the other debris it is no more likely to be Tempest herself than a burnt area on a piece of toast is truly Jesus Christ.
The last of the cameras goes out.
Three days later, Tempest, pure white flesh, pure red hair flowing about her naked body, was floating above Osage, Iowa, held in mid-air by a series of strong updrafts of her own making, and which were absolutely under her control. It was her first official appearance. It was Osage’s last.
Tempest’s storm blackened the land. Her rains rose the waters of the normally placid Cedar River over twenty-four feet in a matter of minutes, far enough that many of the town’s buildings and residents were swept away in the flood. The others were soon encased in ice. Buried in snow.
They found Tempest atop the snowdrifts, sprawled naked, laughing to herself. In this case, “they” were two state troopers on snowmobiles they’d had to haul out of summer storage, and four other officers staggering up and onto the giant white drifts. Along with the entire town of Osage, Tempest killed them, too.
And they sent me after her.
***
Adele, when she opened the door, was wearing a red skirt with a white top. The top hadn’t been tucked in properly, and she was pulling on a stocking, revealing a glimpse of upper leg as she hopped across her porch, so that the first thing I did, after not having seen the love of my life (please, tabloids… it was never Siren, or Stellar, or Mistress Mary, or any of the models) is burst out laughing.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said, but in a tone of voice making clear that it was okay that I was laughing at her.
“Why didn’t you get dressed first?” I asked. “I mean, all the way dressed?”
“Didn’t want you to run away before I got to the door. I hear you run fast.”
“I do. Three times normal.”
“What’s that mean?” she asked. She was tucking the white top into her skirt, circling her waist with a practiced swoop. “I’ve heard it said you’re three times faster than normal, but what’s normal? Most normal people are about sixty pounds overweight and can’t run over five miles an hour without breaking into a profuse sweat and costing their insurance company a hundred thousand dollars in hospital bills. So… three times faster than five miles per hour? That’s only fifteen miles per hour. It’s not all that impressive.”
“I thought I would be the one to babble.”
“You too? God. Damn. You want a beer?”
“I want a beer,” I told her.
“You’re still holding your phone,” she told me, beckoning me into the kitchen. “Thanks for not being in costume.”
“I hate being in costume. I’m… sorry for not calling. I mean, you know, the years.” I put away my phone. She pretended she didn’t hear me, which was for the best. Her kitchen was medium-sized, well kept, with an assortment of devices that I wouldn’t have known what to do with. There were machines that chopped and sliced and liquefied. I mostly call out for food. I don’t mind cooking. Or I never used to mind cooking. How long has it been since I cooked? I couldn’t remember. I was suddenly consumed with a desire to cook. I wondered if Adele would think it was strange if I came into her house and started making pancakes, seared trout, linguini with a sauce I used to make with Portobello and morel mushrooms. I hadn’t made it for, what, three years? The last time was for Siren, so, yes… about three years.
Adele grabbed me a beer from a fridge full of vegetables, leafy greens, fruits, yogurts, and an amazing array of other consumables. I sat at a round walnut table with a flower vase that was nearly invisible beneath a crush of gladiolas. There was a map of the world on the wall, with pins stuck in various places. The map, for certain reasons, reminded me of my brother, Tom. There were no pictures of kids that I could see in Adele’s home. Not on the fridge or the walls or on any of the shelves. There was, as far as I could tell, nobody else at home. There was no way to ask without it being obvious, without it sounding like I was attaching too much importance to the question. It really didn’t make all that much difference. It was, at the same time, the most important question I could possibly consider.
“What’s wrong with being in costume?” I asked. Adele sat across from me at the table. She opened her mouth twice to answer, but backed away each time. A cat (white with brown splotches) came into the kitchen, looked at me, didn’t care, left. Adele’s long brown hair was touching her shoulders. Her eyes were as wide as they once were. A couple worry lines spread away from them, but they just made her look human, not really any older. Her lips were still her lips. Her nose still had the upthrust tip. It was like she was still Adele, but of course that was impossible.
“I remember waving to you and Greg and… your brother,” she said. She sipped a little from her beer. She noticed I hadn’t opened mine and she stood and walked to me, opened it, licked away a touch of beer that had gotten onto her index finger, touched me on my shoulder and went and sat back down. She had avoided saying Tom’s name, which I understood. She hadn’t hesitated when she touched me on the shoulder, which isn’t something I’m used to anymore, not these days, and it felt like a damn rainbow. Yeah. Ten minutes into her presence, and I was talki
ng like a poet, again.
“You were going to the quarry,” she said. “On your bikes.” It was something that had happened plenty enough times, but I knew the day she meant.
“That was the last time I saw you,” she said. “At least when you weren’t in a coma.” She started to drink more of her beer. There were a couple of gulps and then she stood, quickly, scowling, and poured the rest down her sink, washing it away with a three-second cascade of water from her faucet.
“Sorry,” she said. “I just… I was an alcoholic for a while, okay? I shouldn’t drink beer this late at night.” The cat came back in, still didn’t see anything it liked, left again. I thought about asking for the cat’s name. They say one way to a woman’s heart is to let her talk about her pets. It seemed an awful time to intrude on any woman’s heart, though. Especially Adele’s. It wouldn’t have been fair. I was pledged to another. I had another date. It was only ten days away, and it was holding a laser pistol in one hand.
Adele said, “I suppose, what I meant about the costume is… you never came back. You had the accident and I sat next to you in the hospital, before, you know, before.” I knew what she meant. When I finally came out of my coma there had been an incident at the hospital. My location was moved. Adele wouldn’t have been able to sit anywhere near me. Not after that.
I said, “So, you needed me to come back. Closure for you? And if I came back in costume I wouldn’t have been Steve Clarke anymore?”
She said, “I needed you to come back.” The cat sauntered into the kitchen, jumped up onto the table and brushed its tail through the flowers. They rustled. The cat looked at me like it expected to be praised for this achievement. I picked it up and sat it on the floor. It walked off. Adele didn’t introduce me to the feline. I wondered if that was a good sign or a bad one.
I heard creaking on the stairway.
Someone was coming down the stairs.
