Masked (2010) (52 page)

He watches her drive off when she has finished with her notes. The police are in Skodas now. They used to be in Rovers, but that was when Rovers were good cars and Skodas were joke cars.
These claims, well, they’re so outlandish I don’t think anyone could really believe them
, Community Officer Delargy had said before closing her electronic notebook. It will be quiet again. He can carry on in his life of everyday unsuperness.

“That was a bit naughty,” Doreen says, entering now that her rightful chair is hers again. A Tesco bag swings from the handles of her walker.

“What?”

“Pulling rank like that.”

“I did remember her. It was real, it happened. And I think at the end she may have remembered me.”

“Chester, it was over thirty years ago.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“A present.”

“For me?”

“Who else would it be for? Not that you deserve it; that was a horrid thing to do, you bad old goat. Here you are anyway.”

In the bag is a brown paper parcel tied with string. The rule with Doreen’s presents has always been no peeping. Chester does not break it now, but it does smells of fabric conditioner, and the package is soft, springy to his touch. He tears open a corner. Crimson and gold spill out.

“I thought I’d thrown this out years ago.”

“You did. I threw it back in. Oh, I know I was so very afraid, every time you went out, and I know that’s why you got rid of it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t. It needed a damn good wash, and I’m afraid some of the stretch has gone. Go on. You have to go. You have to find out.”

Chester Barnes holds the paper parcel in his hands.

“I won’t leave you, Dor. I won’t ever do that.”

He thinks he may have strained something scrambling over the wall. A twinge in the lower back. Stupid stupid stupid, with just a thought he could have been over it, quicker and less conspicuously than climbing up the moss-smooth stone. Chester Barnes pauses, stretches, one side then the other. Even superheroes need to warm up. He’s only a stone’s throw from the main road, the yellow street light glows through the tree branches, and the traffic is a constant rumble, but the Ormeau Park seems far away from the concerns of Haypark Avenue. The night is warm and the flowering shrubs release a tremendous sweetness. Shaking out the muscle cramp, step
ping out boldly along the deserted path, he feels hugely alive. Every breath empowers. Here is a secret heart in the city and tonight he is connected to it as he hasn’t felt in years. With the merest flicker of his powers, he can steer clear of the dog shit as well.

“So, Captain Miracle!” a voice booms from a rhododendron clump. Chester Barnes stops dead. For all his powers, he’s a little shocked.

“You know I can see right into that rhododendron,” he says.

“You know, would you ever, once, let me finish?” says a peevish, cigarette-thick voice from inside the shrubbery. “Just let me say it. So, Captain Miracle! Tonight!”

“Tonight what, old enemy?”

“Tonight. . . we fly!”

Dr. Nightshade, evil genius, Pasha of Crime, Tsar of Wrongdoing, steps from the rhododendron. He wears his purple cape and leotard; the Facility Belt has been let out at the waist and the mask sags over one eye. Chester doesn’t remember him so short.

“So you made it then, Chester.”

“Well, Sean, you made it hard to refuse.”

“Good to see you anyway,” says Dr. Nightshade. He extends a gloved hand. Chester Barnes takes and shakes it warily. “I don’t want to seem an ingrate, but I did kind of make an effort.” He indicates his costume. Chester Barnes steps back. With his two hands he takes his cardigan and tears it open. Golden yellow on scarlet shines forth: a glowing letter M.

“Give me two minutes.” Chester Barnes steps into the bushes. Dr. Nightshade averts his gaze. In less than the advertised time he steps back, a hero in scarlet and gold, creased at knee and elbow, loose across the chest and tight across the belly. Chester tugs at the cape.

“I could never get this bloody thing to sit right.”

“I never bothered,” Dr. Nightshade says. “Pain in the hoop, capes. Shall we, er?” He nods down the empty path. They walk together, hero and villain.

“It feels rather odd,” Chester says, tugging decorously at his crotch. “What if someone sees us?”

“I don’t know, it feels kind of free to me,” says Dr. Nightshade. “A bit mad and wild. And there’s much worse goes on in this park after dark.”

They stroll through the trees to the high point overlooking the football pitches. The grounds are closed up, someone has left a light on in the pavilion. Beyond the dark circle of the Ormeau Park, Belfast shines. Aircraft lights pass overhead.

“There’s no one else understands, you know,” Dr. Nightshade says.

“What about all those alumnus groups, the online forums, Heroes Reunited, all that?”

“Ach, who could be arsed with that? It’s all bloody talk, and a few wankers like to hog the forum. And anyway, it’s our thing, you know? A Belfast thing.”

“No heroes or villains here,” Chester says. “Only politics. I thought you went to Spain after you got out?”

“It was good until everyone started moving there and, well, to be honest, it’s expensive now. The pound’s weak as piss against the euro and I’ll let you into a wee supervillain secret: I was never that well off, thanks to you. Those Criminal Asset Recovery boys; that’s a real superpower. It’s just, well, in the end, you understand more than anyone else.”

Traffic curves along the Ormeau Embankment. The river smells strongly tonight. The night smells merely strong. Chester Barnes looks up to the few stars bold enough to challenge Belfast’s amber airglow.

“Do you ever?” Chester asks. “Have you ever?”

“Oh no. It doesn’t seem right. You?”

“No, never. But tonight. . .”

“Let’s see if we still can. One last time,” says Dr. Nightshade, suddenly fierce and passionate. “Just to show we bloody can!”

“Because we bloody can, yes!” shouts Chester Barnes. “Who’s
like us? Who can do what we can do? They’re all too busy on their iPods to look up when they hear something go over their heads, too bloody busy texting to look up when they see a flash of light up there in the sun. Come on, we’ll not get another chance.” He punches a fist at the stars, then runs after it, down the hill, pell mell, headlong, in golden boots over the dew-wet grass.

“Hey, wait for me, you bastard!” cries Dr. Nightshade and runs after his enemy, the only one who can ever understand him, but Captain Miracle is ahead and drawing away and Dr. Nightshade is panting, heaving, the breath shuddering in his chest. He stops on the center spot of the football pitch, leaning on his thighs, fighting down nausea. Captain Miracle is far ahead, almost at the Ravenhill Road gates. Then he hears a strange cry and a peal of laughter, ringing out over the traffic and looks up to see a streak of gold and crimson arc up into the sky. The curve of light bends back over him, dips with a supersonic roar, then turns and climbs toward the lower stars with a faint, half-heard shout: “Away! Avaunt!”

Bill Willingham
is the multiple award-winning author of the DC Vertigo title
Fables
, itself the recipient of fourteen coveted Eisner Awards to date. His
Jack of Fables
, created with Matthew Sturges (whose work opens this anthology), was chosen by
Time
magazine as number 5 in their Top 10 Graphic Novels of 2007. His first
Fables
prose novel,
Peter and Max
, was released in 2009, the same year that his comic book,
Fables: War and Pieces,
was nominated for the first Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. One of the most popular comics writers of the current time, he delivers a massive novella that forms an entire super-pantheon in and of itself, a brilliant comics continuity out of whole cloth that is the perfect end piece for this anthology.

B
ILL
W
ILLINGHAM

A is for Achilles

Hero of Old

It was bitter cold up in the hills above Lamia, where Major Kyle Stewart and Manolis Siantas had retreated following the operation. They’d been cut off from the other Greek resistance fighters, those fierce and wild andartes, along with their British SOE advisors, and were thus unable to make it to the designated rendezvous point for extraction. The backup plan was for every fighter to fade into the surrounding wilderness on his own or in small groups, which is precisely what the two soldiers, one Greek and one Canadian, had done.

“Did we do it, Major?” Manolis asked. His halting breath puffed staggered semaphores of vapor into the dark November air.

“Splendidly,” Kyle said. He replaced the dying Turkish cigarette in the other man’s mouth and lit the new one for him. One of Manolis’s hands was gone completely, along with most of that arm.
The other hand was too torn up to matter much by comparison. In the retreat he’d caught part of a German 88 shell burst. “Operation
Harling
was an overwhelming success. The Gorgopotamos railway bridge is but a memory, the occupying forces are confounded, and the German supply trains are already backed up twenty or thirty to a side, sitting ducks for the next Allied air strike. The Greek Resistance has well and truly announced its existence to the world. Be proud, my friend.”

“Die proud, you mean.”

“Nonsense. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to get you to a medic, once we’ve rested here for an hour or two.”

“I don’t think so. I appreciate the encouraging lie, but we both know I’ll be crossing the river tonight. Don’t forget to put a coin under my tongue, so I can pay the ferryman. Don’t be stingy, either, trying to get by with one of your joeys. I expect a full quid at least. Maybe I’ll get one of the better seats.”

Manolis died an hour later, and Kyle granted his last request, grinning through his tears at his friend’s superstitions.

Little time had passed after that before Kyle thought he could just make out a ghostly figure standing over Manolis’s body. A trick of the cold, the mist, and my lack of sleep, he thought. Or did I fall to sleep at last and this is a dream?

Then Kyle imagined he could see a semitransparent duplicate of Manolis rise up from his own body and join the first ghostly figure. They walked off together, down the hillside.

Kyle shouldered his weapon and followed.

“Dream or no, I’ll be damned if I’m going to abandon a comrade in the field,” he muttered.

Kyle shadowed the two ghosts for an hour or more, down the rocky defile and then into a deep and twisting dry gorge that eventually opened up onto the expanse of a great river valley. Ink-black waters flowed sluggishly in the river, the opposite shore of which he couldn’t make out in the night’s gloom. He knew the territory well enough to be certain that this wasn’t some uncharted tributary of the strategically vital Sperkheios River, the one they’d fought at
earlier in the day. It couldn’t be. This one was too big and in the wrong place.

Considering the weird circumstances under which he’d arrived, he realized this had to be the River Styx, though his rational mind still resisted the knowledge. Kyle was well versed in his classical mythology.

There was a long wooden rowboat pulled up to the pebbled bank, with a cloaked figure beside it. The two ghosts approached the boat, whereupon the first guide faded. Manolis spit Kyle’s two-quid coin into the ferryman’s hand. He took his place in the boat as the ferryman pulled hard on the oars, sending the craft out onto the silent waters. Kyle followed, walking down to the river’s edge, watching his friend for as long as he could, until they’d rowed out of sight.

In ancient times the hero Achilles had bathed in these waters. His mother was the sea nymph Thetis, lovely beyond description, beloved of both Zeus and Poseidon. But the gods forced her to marry a mortal, as otherwise her son was prophesied to be stronger than the both of them combined. Thetis dipped Achilles into the River Styx as a newborn. Holding her son by one heel when putting him in the water, she made the child’s entire body, except the heel, immortal and invulnerable.

Impossible dream or not, Kyle was never one to pass up a golden opportunity. He wouldn’t make the same mistake Thetis had. He dropped his weapon and stripped. When he was entirely naked, he took a short run and dove into the coal-dark Styx, immersing himself completely. No heel, or any other part of him, remained untouched by the water.