When I climbed into bed, Janet stirred. She mumbled a greeting while I kissed her nape. I settled in and spooned her. She fell asleep again immediately. I was exhausted, too, but I couldn’t get the stranger out of my head. It was several hours before I finally succumbed to a sleep haunted by nightmares — the stranger and me running, wounded, hunted by giant monsters from Jake Kurtz’s comics.
“Soon,” she said, “they will come. Their technology allows them to locate my point of entry, but, unlike Hunter, they have no scanner to find me once they arrive.”
Hunter. I managed to suppress my reaction. A mixture of fear, shock, and excitement. Kurtz’s final episode of “The Preservers” had ended with the unfulfilled promise: “Next! The Hunter Strikes!”
“Hunter will detect their arrival. That’s when I’ll need you most. You must distract them. All of them. So I can . . .” Her voice trailed off. She looked into my eyes, as if to see how much she could trust me. It was cold that night, but it was also beautiful. Not a cloud in the dark sky, and the stars sharp, bright points. There was no wind, and I almost convinced myself that the ocean smelled like it used to when I was a teenager and we could swim in it.
For five days now, I’d been dividing my time between fixing up the house with Janet, renewing my bonds with the Singleton community, and keeping the stranger company on the beach.
At my every visit the stranger repeated her story, adding a detail or two with each retelling. “Hunter wants to kill me, regardless of the consequences. He enjoys my suffering. He’ll take his time, he’ll torture me — he always does. But they . . . they want to capture me. They’re convinced I’m dangerous. They also believe I’m more of a threat dead than alive. They want to get to me before Hunter finds me. But I can’t trust them; they’ve betrayed me before.”
“Why don’t you leave here, then? Flee to somewhere none of these people can find you?”
She didn’t answer. Her attention turned inward, as if she’d forgotten I was there.
I waited a few minutes, my mind buzzing with questions about this bizarre and possibly insane woman, and then I asked her another question, almost certain she wouldn’t answer that one either. “You keep saying ‘they’ — who are you talking about?”
“A family of adventurers. The Kings.”
I suddenly felt very dizzy. “The Preservers?”
The stranger rose and bared her teeth. “You know them!” She struck me on the side of the head, and it sent me sprawling on the sand.
“No, I don’t!” Her fists were clenched, and her eyes spat her anger at me. What insanity had I let myself fall into? I spoke quickly, hoping to quell her fury. “They’re not real! They’re characters in comic books. A man called Jake Kurtz invented them.”
She sat again, partially mollified but suspicion still clouding her eyes.
I asked her, “Who are you?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” She frowned. “After . . . afterward, once I get what I need from them, once I can escape from all this . . . I’ll tell you everything. If you still want to know.” She was almost crying. “For now, I’m betting this life that they’ll get here before Hunter returns.”
The stranger was silent for a long time, her face flickering between sadness and fury. Then she asked me about Jake Kurtz and his connection to the Kings, so I told her about my obsession with comics, and with his work in particular. I stopped paying attention to her as I got excited describing Kurtz’s early monster comics, and the Preservers, and Destroyer of Worlds. I never got to speak to anyone about this stuff, not even Janet, who only silently tolerated my comics habit.
The stranger’s fingers grasped my arm in a tight vise as I detailed Shiva’s devious schemes in Destroyer of Worlds. For the first time since I’d launched into my speech, I took a good look at her. She was pale, shivering, frightened.
Part of me was more convinced than ever that she was simply a crazy woman who imagined herself in the middle of some superhero story she’d once read. But that theory couldn’t explain the man — Hunter, if that really was his name — with the pinging device.
Before I could say anything more, she said, “Leave me alone. Go back to your life.”
I returned to the beach two mornings later, with fresh bread, scrambled eggs in a plastic container, and two thermoses, one filled with orange juice, the other with coffee. Noisily, to make sure the stranger knew I was there, I set myself up among the rocks where I’d first seen her walk into the water.
I drank coffee, hoping she was still here. Wishing she’d come out and talk to me. I was worried about her, and I wanted to know why she’d grown so scared the other night.
Within fifteen minutes, she joined me, emerging from the small woods. The dress she wore — a frilly, knee-length blue thing with a revealing, low-cut neckline — I remembered when Janet bought it, fifteen, maybe sixteen years ago. We’d taken a day off in the middle of summer and gone shopping at the new mall that had opened a couple of towns over. I’d picked that dress for her from a sale rack, and she loved it. Janet had grown a bit too plump for it eventually, and, besides, it had a few holes and tears now. Janet would never wear anything in such a state, even though she knew I found scruffy clothes sexy.
The stranger accepted breakfast wordlessly. When the eggs, bread, coffee, and juice were all gone, she said, “Thank you for coming back. And for befriending me. I’ve not had a friend in a long time.”
I nodded mutely, not trusting myself to have the right words. I feared igniting her volatile temper again.
We sat together in silence, getting used to each other’s presence.
After a while I recounted that dream in which the two of us were hunted by Jake Kurtz’s absurd monsters.
The dream made her laugh. A new sound; a deep, unself-conscious, guffawing laughter. For the first time, I relaxed around her.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said.
I spent the whole day listening to her stories of wondrous worlds — alternate realities where every fancy could be true. Where history had taken other paths. Where monsters roamed. Where the continents had formed in different configurations. Where alien species walked the Earth. Where gods and animals and humans crossbred into exotic new permutations. Where superbeings flew through the skies.
Worlds, she told me, that she had visited.
Janet played with her food and avoided my eyes. She was preparing to tell me something difficult. I knew it was best to let her get to it at her own pace.
I finished my lasagna, cleared my plate, and came back to sit next to her.
She put her fork down and said, “I’ve noticed food disappearing. Recent leftovers that neither of us ate. A whole unopened box of crackers. A bag of raisins. Other stuff, too. And you’ve gone through my clothes. One of my old dresses is missing.”
She paused and looked at my face.
Tension knotted my back. I didn’t know what to tell her, or even if she wanted me to respond.
“You sneak away for hours at a time. You get up in the middle of the night and don’t come back until dawn. You think I don’t notice, but I do.”
All I had to do was tell her about the stranger. Janet wasn’t paranoid or jealous. If I told her the truth — that I’d been helping a woman stranded by the storm — she’d believe me. But that wasn’t the whole truth. Janet would want to help, too, and I couldn’t face such an intrusion into the insular world of the beach. I didn’t know how to explain myself without sounding crazy, or without exposing something that felt too private to share — even with Janet.
I didn’t say anything.
Later that day, while Janet was running some errands, I packed my camping gear. I left a note, apologizing for not being able to share with her what was going on with me. Apologizing for suddenly taking off. I didn’t tell her where I was going. I didn’t tell her why. The note said: I hope you’ll still be able to welcome me when I return. I wrote that I loved her, and I meant it, even as I was probably destroying wh
atever affection she still felt for me.
I wouldn’t have been able to leave if Janet had been there to talk me out of it. And I didn’t want her to. I didn’t.
I joined the stranger on the beach.
Together we waited for “them.” For the Preservers.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Janet, but otherwise I enjoyed being a beach bum. No-one ever came here, so Janet wouldn’t find me. If she even bothered to try after what I did to her. Occasionally, I’d go into town and buy some food. Word had gotten around about how I’d abandoned my wife, and people were ruder to me than ever. The Johnsons barely tolerated my presence in their grocery store.
When all this was over, when the woman was safe — or at least when I’d done what I could to help her, or whatever it was I was doing — I’d go back to Janet. If she’d still have me.
Or maybe I’d become a lonely old grouch. Or I’d finally leave this dump of a town.
Most of my time on the beach was spent alone, while the stranger hid. I crooned old sailing songs to the seagulls.
The same thought kept nagging at me, no matter how hard I tried to let go of it: how unbelievably stupid it was to leave Janet just as the fun and the passion were finally coming back into our relationship. Or was all that just a temporary byproduct of the storm? Maybe it had been best not to hope it would last. Eventually, life would have returned to banal, numbing normality.
I spoke to the stranger about my life, about what she called “this world.” She described more of the myriad worlds that she claimed to have visited. But she was tight-lipped about her personal details. And no matter how I prodded and asked, she wouldn’t say how she had travelled to these countless alternate realities. “After,” she kept reminding me, “I’ll tell you everything.”
I didn’t know if I really believed the stranger. I both did and didn’t, somewhat apprehensive of either possibility. I wanted to believe that the universe was as fantastic as her stories made it out to be.
But it was all so crazy. And yet . . . how had she spent an entire day under the water? And what about that man she called Hunter, with his Jake Kurtz technology?
Maybe she hadn’t really spent that much time in the water . . . maybe she had surfaced somewhere and then swum back . . . and that man could be from a secret high-tech government agency or something.
She could be a crazy woman who needed help. Maybe I was projecting too much of my own imagination into all this. Was I really helping her by encouraging her delusions?
I was skipping rocks on the water when a violent burst of hot wind knocked me down. I looked up. They had arrived. A woman in skin-tight dark leather, her scalp shaved to stubble and her face covered with tattoos and piercings. Large, feathery wings sprouted from her back. Sandy King was no longer a teenager, but a woman of . . . sixty? Sixty-five?
Another woman in a similar leather outfit: her trim body gave the illusion of youth, but her weathered face revealed her age. In the comics, no-one ages, but Suzanne King must have been at least eighty.
Cliff King’s age was harder to tell. Ten feet tall, his entire body covered in blue scales, he looked only remotely human.
Stanley King, holding a metal pad that could have been designed by Jake Kurtz, looked twenty-five. But he could mold his features into any shape.
Behind them, a gaping portal into the unknown, a gateway to the fantastic world they had come from, still leaked a prodigious amount of heat.
I hadn’t really believed her until this moment. Now I had no choice but to believe. I wept, partially from the blast of burning heat but also from joy that the universe truly was as wondrous as I’d dreamed as a boy.
The Human Angel. Spectral. The Brute. Professor Unknown. “The Preservers!”
Professor Unknown spoke. “You know who we are?”
I had to pretend to know less than I did. For her. But there was still so much I didn’t know.
“The Preservers are my favourite comics characters. Is this a movie set or something? What kind of special effect is that thing . . . that hole behind you?”
“Comics? In this universe, we’re characters in comic books? Interesting.”
“Stanley,” said Spectral. “There’s no time for all that.”
“You’re right, Suzanne. Sir, I wish we had time to explain, but we really are the Preservers.” As if to highlight the Professor’s claims, the Human Angel spread her wings and flew up into the dawn sky.
I gasped in awe. Could I really deceive these people? I wiped my eyes dry. Already the heat from the portal was receding.
Stanley King addressed me again. “We’re looking for someone. A woman.”
Before I could respond, the Human Angel landed back among her family. She looked at me. “I saw a tent over there.” She nodded toward it. “Do you live on this beach?”
I said that I did.
Professor Unknown asked me, “Has anything peculiar happened here recently?”
“You mean more peculiar than superpowered comics characters coming to life?” That came out more facetious than I’d intended.
Suzanne interrupted. “Sir, I’m afraid this is rather urgent. Your world is in danger. As are countless others, unless we capture this woman. So, if you don’t know anything, we’ll be on our way.”
“No, wait. I think I know who you mean. But, if you ask me, she seems to be the one in trouble, not the world.”
Professor Unknown said, “Please continue.”
“Well, about a month ago, a young woman I’d never seen before walked into the ocean. No-one ever swims or anything here. The water’s too contaminated. Anyone going into that water has only one thing in mind, and that’s killing themselves. And then, that very day, there was a monstrous storm, the worst I’ve seen in my whole life. Tore the town apart.”
I hesitated. Could I betray her to these heroes? She was in my care — whoever, whatever she was. There was a fragile loneliness that hid behind all that pent-up fury of hers, and that moved me. Impulsively, not fully in control of the fact that I was doing so, I made up a story, borrowing details from a chapter of Kurtz’s Destroyer of Worlds.
“The next day, she walked out of the ocean, dressed in a silver metal bodysuit overlaid with the same kind of circuitry design as that pad you’re holding — ”
Interrupting me, Spectral murmured to herself, “How did she get a hold of that kind of technology?” She looked worried, but mostly impatient. “What happened next?”
“And at that moment a big guy ran out from that path over there and started shooting at her, firing a strange-looking gun, again with those circuitry markings. What is that stuff? I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.”
“Please, it’s important that we know where these people went,” Professor Unknown replied, ignoring my question.
“I think you’re going to have to tell me what this is all about before I say anything more. The girl was scared. That maniac was hunting her.”
Sandy barked, “Listen, you filthy bum, there’s no time for that. Tell us what you know.”
The Brute gently put a hand on her shoulder, while Professor Unknown harrumphed.
Stanley said, “I apologize for that, sir; we’ve all been under tremendous stress.” He cleared his throat again. “You were right, when you first saw that woman, she was in all likelihood committing suicide. And she succeeded. She died. Then the second time you saw her, someone else — something else — was inhabiting her body. What you saw emerge from the ocean was a reanimated corpse taken over by a destructive entity that lays waste to universes as she travels from timeline to timeline. We want to capture her and hold her until we can figure out how to neutralize her threat.”
“If she’s so dangerous, why not simply kill her?”
“Because her death is what triggers the travel between dimensions, and she can’t leave a timeline without automatically destroying it. The entity’s new avatar is always a freshly dead woman.”
“And that maniac?”
“But . . . doesn’t he die when the worlds get destroyed?”
“No. He automatically jumps to the avatar’s next destination world, though not necessarily near her point of arrival. Sometimes it takes him months to track her down, sometimes hours. On many worlds, there’s a network, a secret society devoted to his master, that awaits his arrival and helps him. He’s only an agent of her true enemy, a much more powerful entity.”
“Do these . . . entities . . . have names?”
“She is Kali, and her enemy is her husband, Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. It’s all a game to them.”
I gulped. Kali? The stranger was a Hindu goddess? The same Kali that Jake Kurtz had written about in Destroyer of Worlds? Could I trust her? Should I? These people — the Preservers — were heroes. They saved worlds. They didn’t destroy them. At least, that’s what the comic books said.
I continued lying to my heroes. “Then they both flew away. Like superheroes. Or like gods, I guess. And I never saw them again. I guess this ‘Hunter’ hasn’t caught up to her, because the world’s still here.”
The Brute suddenly moved more quickly than could be expected of a creature of his size and girth. He knocked all of us to the ground, shielding us from a ray beam striking from the sky. He grunted in pain but appeared otherwise unhurt.
Sandy King snarled, “Hunter.”
Our attacker flew with the aid of another Kurtz-like machine, a one-man platform with curved handle controls. Another beam shot from one of the handles.
The Human Angel flew straight at Hunter, evading his ray beams. The powerful Brute valiantly shrugged off direct hits from Hunter’s weapon as if they were insect bites. Spectral became nearly invisible and rose into the air toward their foe. Professor Unknown shouted instructions at his family, coordinating their efforts.
While the Preservers and Hunter fought, I crawled into the woods. To relative safety.
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