Dr. Morbid's Castle of Blood (Masks)

by Hayden Thorne

  “I really hope Trini and Dario aren’t going to be messed up by the memory zapper thingie,” I said. “And what would happen if their memories turned out to be repressed, not erased, and they start remembering things down the line? What then?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it. The Sentries know what they’re doing. You’ve seen them fix everything before, right? Like, turn those human arachnids back or the toddlers—and both of us! And we’re all safe and healthy.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I can’t help but feel bad, anyway. They got dragged into the whole mess because of me.”

  Peter suddenly stopped just shy of the door. He leaned close and whispered, “If I get all frisky with you after this, will you promise not to get all guilt-trippy over something you shouldn’t even sweat over?”

  “I’m easily bought,” I said, snapping to attention. “I totally come cheap.”

  Peter led me out into the main customer area, where everyone was killing time waiting for the pizza delivery guy to show up. “Atta boy. I knew you were special.”

  * * * *

  Ridley made good his promise to me, which pretty much solidified his status as my newest and greatest BFF. He ordered four pizzas, not two, and we all barreled back into my “classroom” with the loot, Wade and Althea bringing up the rear with the bottles of soda and paper cups (recyclable, by the way).

  The next hour was nothing but a disgusting scene of teenage gluttony, with the girls on par with the boys in levels of greed. Dr. Dibbs took his share, and so did Brenda, who had to eat hers in her back room because her shop was still open, while Dr. Dibbs also set up camp with her there, so he could hammer away at his laptop and not be bothered by thick, intimidating clouds of adolescence. Not sure if he was going to find anything on O’Keefe, but it also wouldn’t be a surprise if he was as bored as everyone else because of the current lull in crime, and he was surfing the ‘net. Hopefully not looking for porn because I really, really didn’t need a mental picture of Dr. Dibbs and naked action stuck in my head. After the trauma of having to see corpses, skeletons, and zombies up close, I didn’t need another one of those.

  “Hey, to Ridley and Eric!” Wade cried, raising a cup of soda up for a toast. She sat on the floor, her back against the wall, and her lap cradling a paper plate that looked like it was about to dissolve under all that grease from the tower of pizza slices she’d hoarded. “They’re the real heroes of this adventure!”

  “Yo, Ridley! Eric!” Freddie chimed in, raising his cup. “You guys rocked, man! By the way, Eric, thanks for wearing me. I thought I was going to be carried by someone, considering, you know, how cheesy my new form was. I could’ve been happy waiting around as a unicorn or a dwarf. Whatever works well in a fairy tale, anyway.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “That’d have to be your gayest moment yet, dude. And that’s as far as you’ll ever get with me.”

  “Oh, come on, you looked great in armor!”

  “Nice try, perv. You were damned heavy.”

  “If it’s any comfort, Eric, Freddie could’ve turned into a full suit of armor, which includes a codpiece,” Wade piped up. When I stared at her, she added, “You’re welcome.” That girl had no shame, I swear.

  Ridley grinned, shrugged, and turned beet-red. I think he stayed beet-red the whole time we ate, which made me wonder at one point if we should call an ambulance because that color looked unhealthy. But that was Ridley for you. I hoped he enjoyed the attention because he sure deserved it.

  We cleaned up and helped dispose of the boxes and paper cups and plates. Leftover slices of pizza were stuffed in large food storage bags—though as to why Brenda kept, like, a gazillion boxes of those in her back room was a mystery—and then distributed among everyone. Brenda and Dr. Dibbs refused, so we all went our separate ways, each a plastic storage bag filled with leftover pizza slices richer.

  Oh, and Peter made good his promise. See, there was a reason why I fell in love with him.

  “You know, I started off hating all this peace and quiet around here, but now I’m kind of glad that we got this quick breather from crime-fighting,” I said, grinning up at him and blinking away the haze.

  As always, we were both cramped in the back seat of his little sports car. Not like we had much choice, really, with our families home and so on. And thank heavens for quiet country roads with tons of trees and helpful super big rocks outside Vintage. Okay, make that boulders that worked well as shields.

  He hovered above me, looking as glassy-eyed as I was. “Huh?”

  “I enjoyed our time together. I mean, not just you and me, but with the others, you know? It’s—it’s kind of weird, but nice.”

  Peter laughed quietly. Man, he was hot when laughed quietly. Especially when he was still a bit flushed from the first round. “Weird but nice?” Oh, and halfway incoherent, too. He made speech issues totally hot.

  “It feels like being in a regular social group, which I guess we are, but I know I’m the only guy in Vintage City who’s best buddies with superheroes.” I somehow managed to free up my numbed arm and reach up to touch his cheek. “I like seeing you guys behaving like regular kids. It was crazy fun—okay, dangerous with that video game bit, but crazy fun. Hopefully you’ll get more chances like this.”

  “Mmm—I have a feeling that it might be another while before we get that chance.”

  “In that case, I guess I might as well take full advantage of this as much as I can.” I pulled him down for another round because, you know, the recovery time for a sixteen-year-old boy was just mind-boggling.

  Chapter 13

  Sure enough, the next day, a couple of incidents (unrelated, apparently) involving bored housewives stuffing their massive purses with unpaid merchandise and then getting busted became Vintage City’s Breaking News of the Day. I guess that’d be one step up from scraping the bottom of the barrel, but at least criminals—or criminal wannabes—were finally crawling out of the woodwork.

  Of course, there was also that chance those shoplifting housewives were so bored with Vintage being eerily crime-free for a while that they decided to shake things up a bit. Just like those missing persons—looked like there were a couple more since I was last told about them—they probably ran away from Vintage City to escape their mind-numbing boredom. The only person who got something good out of this was Bambi Bailey, though it was clear that she was struggling hard to keep herself from yawning so much in front of the camera.

  At any rate, I’d gotten so used to this break from mayhem that I went back to hitting my head against my bedroom wall over Peter’s birthday gift. Eventually I decided to stop giving myself an ulcer over it. I’d earned some money, anyway. I could always take him out and let him decide what he wanted to do—beyond playing my favorite game of Sweaty, Sticky Human Pretzel ™ in the back seat of his car.

  In the meantime, life droned on in the Plath household, the upside being Mom’s defenses finally crumbling where Grimm was concerned.

  “Your father uses Grimm for post-work therapy from 5:30 to 6:30 on the weekdays,” she said over breakfast on Monday. “I’m taking the 7:30 to 8:30 time slot, and when I say that’s sacred, I mean it.”

  “Gotcha, Mom,” Liz said, blinking, before turning to look at me from across the table and silently mouthing, “WTF?”

  I shrugged and ate my breakfast, occasionally turning around to check up on my cat and see if he needed more food. Grimm seemed busy in the corner of the kitchen, scarfing up his canned food. Then a thought hit me, and I frowned.

  “Hey, wait a second,” I muttered, turning to stare at my eggs as I mulled things over. “Grimm’s technically my cat, and people are hogging him for therapy.”

  “Eric, you’re not charging us fees to use your cat for blood pressure relief,” Mom said, her voice cutting straight through the thick soup of ideas that swirled in my brain. When I looked at her, shocked, she added, “I can see that devious little mind of yours at work, mister. You don’t even need to say anything.” She to
ok a sip of her coffee.

  “What the—how would you know what I’m thinking?” I asked, all outraged. Kind of, anyway. I mean, she was right, but I still thought to look as appalled as I possibly could.

  “I’m your mother, and you inherited your grandfather’s penchant for deviance. He wasn’t kicked out of school for nothing, you know. Now finish your breakfast and hustle on down to school. Grimm will be fine looking after the house for us.”

  Well, so much for earning some extra money for college. I would’ve said that, but with Mom getting caffeinated, it was best to let things slide. For now, that is. I wasn’t done yet with the free therapy that my cat was being forced to give. It’d be like having Grimm work in some seedy sweatshop and threatened with deportation if he didn’t do his job.

  When I got to “school,” Brenda met me with cookies, tea, and some news. “So it looks like O’Keefe wasn’t O’Keefe, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise, and his trail’s grown cold, though for good reason.”

  “I expected that,” I said, munching thoughtfully. “But shouldn’t the Sentries be interviewing Arachnaman for more information?”

  “They did, yeah. Yesterday, in fact, thanks to that handy-dandy truth serum we injected him with. That ‘accidental’ mind-reading power the kid claimed to have? That wasn’t someone in the genetics lab doing something under the table. It was Arachnaman himself, experimenting on a random kid he met before his attacks on Vintage. He doesn’t have a brother.”

  I stared at her. “What the what?”

  “The kid was a runaway. He was homeless.” Brenda paused to refill her teacup. “Arachnaman found him somewhere, lured him with drugs, and injected O’Keefe with what he called ‘brain probes’ that lay dormant till the moment Arachnaman activated them himself.”

  That sounded like what the Devil’s Trill did to me once upon a time. I shook my head. “It’s pretty hard wrapping my head around that. Then again, considering everything that’s happened since the heroes and villains came into their powers, I really shouldn’t be questioning anything. I mean, this sounds kinda Star Trek-y, know what I mean?”

  “I know. But with these supervillains, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash. They’re all brilliant in their own ways. I mean, think about the Debutantes—I’m sure their Über Metamorphier shocked the hell out of you, right?” Brenda grinned when she saw the look on my face.

  “I had to pinch myself when I saw that contraption. I’ve always thought they were just a couple of dumb, high maintenance bullies, but their recent attack on Vintage City was brilliant work. It definitely required way more brain cells than I thought they have.”

  At this moment Dr. Dibbs poked his head out from the corner of the hallway that led to the shop’s back rooms, and he waved and then disappeared. That was sort of like my warning bell in school. The second warning would be Dr. Dibbs hollering for me to get my ass in the “classroom” before he filled out a detention slip. So I stuffed my face with another cookie, chewed it up at the speed of light, and then swallowed, ignoring the look of morbid fascination on Brenda’s face as she watched me.

  “Yeah, anyway,” she said, taking a sip of her tea, “you shouldn’t underestimate these guys. Arachnaman, I think, would be the smartest and most creative of the bunch, and maybe it’s his bigotry that feeds his genius in some perverse way. But he’s the most dangerous of the group. And as for O’Keefe, he’s gone, probably ran off to another city, and according to his so-called mentor, he wouldn’t remember a damned thing about what happened here.”

  “The brain probes had an expiration date?”

  She shrugged. “It looks like it. They were only needed to hunt down the heroes and make them play into a trap that O’Keefe put together under Arachnaman’s directions via that temporary mental link they both had. Once the trap was delivered to the heroes, O’Keefe’s time as Arachnaman’s stooge was done, and he was free to go wherever he wanted to.”

  I finished my tea and hopped off my chair. “I’ll bet you, though, if Arachnaman himself was the one who set up that trap from scratch, it would’ve been way harder to crack it.”

  “I wouldn’t bet against that. Now go on and shock the world with your schoolboy skills.” That was a nice send-off, I suppose, though to this day, I still can’t figure out if Brenda was being sarcastic or not.

  * * * *

  Peter picked me up after “school.” It was technically a shocker, but at that point, living in Vintage City had gone far in its daily “Why Life Here Shouldn’t Shock You” lessons, so I was more like pleasantly surprised to find him waiting for me in the customer area.

  “We’re meeting Trini and Dario at Dog-in-a-Bun in about twenty minutes,” he said after the usual meet-and-greet (read: virginal hug and peck on the mouth because Brenda was making faces at us from the safety of her counter). “The GSA scheme’s coming along. We got the backing of the student body president, at least, and we’re trying to schmooze with Mrs. Klein about being a faculty moderator.”

  We strolled down the main avenue toward our default hot dog place. Here and there, we’d stop to window shop or to point something out in the landscape of Vintage City that made us laugh. I told Peter about adopting Grimm, and he ordered me to let him play with the cat whenever he visited.

  “You’ll have to put your name down on a schedule,” I said. “If you want to use my cat for free therapy, you’ll have to get in line. Grimm’s schedule’s pretty much filled up after office hours and after dinner.” I paused, frowning, when another thought hit me. “By the way, I hope this doesn’t mean that I’ll be competing with my own pet for your attention.”

  Peter laughed and nudged me with his elbow, his hidden superpower almost sending me flying against a store’s brick wall. Then he laughed again for forgetting his own strength and almost crushing my brains. I glared at him. Seriously, this whole unemployed superheroes thing was getting borderline creepy. I wondered how the others coped with all those hours of not seeing justice done. I wouldn’t be surprised if they tore their homes apart, the same way dogs destroyed things when you don’t take them out for daily walks or something.

  Trini and Dario were already there when Peter and I arrived, and it was nice seeing Trini again. I couldn’t help but think about the game and how she and her brother kicked major ass, helping me and Ridley whack our way to the castle, so we wouldn’t lose any time. Dario was his sister’s opposite in personality, though they were almost identical in physical characteristics save for their height. While Dario was clean-cut and almost pixie-ish with his short hair and big eyes, he was tall, while Trini was Wade-sized. He was also soft-spoken and easily embarrassed, almost nervous, judging from the way his eyes seemed to move constantly as though he were watching everyone around him. He also had a habit of slouching in his chair, like he wanted to shrink and disappear.

  I figured it was because of his coming-out experience and how he likely felt uncomfortable being Dario and not a girl. I didn’t know anything about transgender people because I never knew any till that moment, so I was at a loss as to how I could make Dario’s experience a little easier. I figured I was probably better off not making a big deal out of it and just treating him no differently from everyone else.

  I was also on full alert mode when we talked, looking out for signs of Trini or Dario’s memory of the game. But nothing came out, even if it was just a slip of a tongue or a sudden weird look on their faces like when a moment of déjà vu or something happened. On one hand, I was relieved to know that my friends’ superhero identities remained safe, but on the other, I still felt kind of bad that Trini and Dario were used like that, even though it was for a good purpose.

  “You know, prom season’s coming up,” Trini said after a lull in the conversation. “If we don’t have a GSA up and running by then, do you think it’s possible for us to put together a GSA-type prom?”

  Peter and I looked at each other. “I don’t know, honestly,” Peter said with a shrug. “I have a feeling that it’ll end up bein
g a private prom that’s not sanctioned by the school.”

  “Well, do you think that people will give you a lot of grief if you two show up as prom dates?” Trini asked, nodding at us both, while Dario thoughtfully scraped excess chili off his hot dog.

  “Good point, but wouldn’t it be worth shaking things up by letting people know that gay kids go to the same school as them?” I answered. That was a brave thing to say, seeing as how I’d never done anything that overt since I came out. “I guess it’ll boil down to what kind of support you guys get in the end. I don’t know. Just wait and see?”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to deal with one thing at a time first. This is turning out to be bigger than I first expected, but we gotta start somewhere, right?” Trini grinned, blushing.

  “And someone’s gotta do it,” Dario said, sinking in his seat another inch.

  In a couple of minutes, we were all talking about stuff other than the GSA, but I couldn’t help but look at Peter every once in a while and feel all proud of him for working with Trini on this. In fact, I was so proud that when he drove me home, I brought him upstairs and let him play with Grimm for as long as he wanted, while I put together some snacks downstairs.

  Come to think of it, I was so damned proud that we ended up playing with the cat till my parents came home, and not once did I take advantage of our private time for five rounds of non-deflowering gay teen love sports. By the time Peter left, Grimm was so exhausted that he slept through his scheduled time with Dad and then Mom.

  “What on earth did you kids do to this poor animal?” Dad asked, frowning at a limp and out cold Grimm, who lay draped in a boneless mass on his lap.

  Mom didn’t have much luck waking him, either. “Whatever organic herbs you give this cat, I want some of them,” she said as she stared in amazement at the snoring mass of fur that wouldn’t respond to her attention.

  “It’s called exercise, Mom,” I said, beaming proudly like a real parent at the wreck of a cat she was trying hard to bond with. “I read online that good pet owners should spend as much time as they can playing with their dogs or cats.”