The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  “Special, how?” Joy asked, while pulling her notebook out of her purse. “Actually, is it okay if I pick your brain for a bit, Professor Gelfland?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Well, I’d say he’s special because he’s the first mythic hero of Kallistrate.”

  “Hmm?” That sounded odd to Joy. “How would he be the first? Dodonus or Jul Varva have been around for hundreds of years, at least, and—”

  “Ah, but those are heroes of the Kallis Coast,” he said. “They don’t mean anything to a Strata farmer or a Goriack highlander. But the Red Specter is a hero of Kallistrate, the entire country.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean now,” said Joy. Kallistrate was a new country, cobbled together from a patchwork of historically independent city-states, squabbling feudal lords, and barbarian tribes from the north. And the Kallis cities were even more diverse, populated by all sorts of ethnic groups whose cultural roots went elsewhere, to Xia or Axum or Zipang or Kosstan or someplace even more remote. Interesting.

  “It’s because he’s associated with the war, isn’t it?” Joy said. “The one major event that everyone in Kallistrate went through.”

  “That’s it exactly,” said Professor Gelfland. “His costume is a gas mask and the trench-coat of a Kallistrate infantryman. Without the war, neither of those things exist. And answer me this—what ethnic group does the Red Specter represent?”

  “Well, that’s—” Joy had been about to say that he must be a Kallisian, the light-haired, pale-skinned peoples who’d founded the Kallis cities and settled all of Strata, but no sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she realized the problem with it. “We don’t know. We never see his face—well, I didn’t in any of the strips I read. Is that true for all of them?”

  “Yes, that’s consistent throughout the series,” he said. “You never see his face. So, not only does he represent the whole country, he could literally be anyone. There’s no one in Kallistrate who couldn't see themselves as the Red Specter.”

  “You mean, there’s no man in Kallistrate who couldn’t see themselves as the Specter,” corrected Joy. “We women are stuck with Lilla Lenko.”

  “Ah… yes, you’ve got a point there,” he said. “Uh, you don’t like Lilla?”

  “She’s nice enough, but she never actually does anything. She just stands around watching the guys, just killing time until she gets held hostage and has to be rescued. Who’d wanna be her?”

  “Oh,” said the Professor. “Well, Shiori is a powerful character, and—”

  “Yes—and she’s naked and evil,” Joy retorted. “Those are my choices?”

  “That is true,” said Professor Gelfland. “Well, do you like any of the characters? It’s going to be hard to write a Red Specter story if you don’t. Which is your favorite?”

  Her favorite? Joy hadn’t even thought about that. She ran through the cast list and found each of them falling short. Lilla was a wuss, Kolton was a milquetoast, Baz too stoic, Dr. Zhang too old. The Red Specter had his moments, but he was so absent from from his own series that he was barely a character. Really, if she had to think of a fun character, one who stole every scene they were in, it’d have to be…

  “Ugh. Shiori Rosewing would have to be my favorite, if I have to pick,” she said. “Because she’s the best character. Not because I’d ever want to be her,” she added, in response to her professor’s raised eyebrow.

  “Well, you’re not alone. Shiori is really popular, for various reasons,” said Professor Gelfland. “It’s a big part of what I’m looking forward to in the Magic Lantern show. They’re saying that the actress who plays her is a blast; just tears the roof of the place.”

  “Well, yippee,” said Joy, though that actually did sound like fun. She kinda wanted to hear what that OH HO HO laugh sounded like. But Joy found the whole turn of this conversation disquieting, like they were doing something wrong. It took her just a second to realize what it was.

  “Isn’t that a problem, though? That there’s this character called Shiori Rosewing who’s this fun sexy villainess who everybody likes?” Joy said. “Shiori Rosewing is a real person. A mass murderer and a war criminal.”

  “Well, I can see that,” he said. “But that’s what we have historians and reporters for—to give future generations the ability to separate myths from reality.”

  Which was the opposite of what she was about to do. Joy felt her spirits sinking, but Professor Gelfland didn’t seem to notice.

  “And when Shiori Rosewing first appeared in the comic, she was very different from the character you see now. She was vicious and humorless and not nearly so sexy. All those attributes developed over time as she became more popular. I can actually show you.”

  Professor Gelfland opened his rucksack and pulled out three books, slim at their spines, but the covers were broad and tall—tabloid-sized. A familiar gas-masked figured gazed up at her, beneath the title: Adventures of the Red Specter. Joy flipped it open to find row after row of the newspaper strip, conveniently laid out, with no need to keep flipping through page after page of unrelated news stories. And what was more, every single strip had been colorized, not just the Sunday ones. And even aside from the color, the art looked much better here, crisp and clean—the result of using higher quality paper, as opposed to cheap newsprint. This would’ve come in handy earlier.

  Joy flipped through the pages until she found Shiori’s first appearance, though Joy didn’t recognize her at first—her face was pale, not red, and she was wearing a fantastical suit of armor. She and the Red Specter were fighting a duel high in the Cloudkills, on a plateau surrounded by a sea of pink gas flowing down towards unsuspecting Brentonsville. The Specter won the duel, impaling Shiori through the gut. Mortally wounded, she fell off the plateau to disappear into the gas, cursing the Red Specter as she did.

  The Specter flew off to warn the city, but Shiori wasn’t done. A vision of a Sidhe witch appeared before her. She said her name was Morrigan, and she could grant Shiori new life and new power to continue to fight in service of the Emperor—but at the cost of her immortal soul. Shiori agreed, on condition that she be allowed to wreak vengeance upon the Red Specter, and the deal was struck. The witch cast her spell, the vaporous Hemlock Gas flowed in through the cracks of Shiori’s armor, dissolving her old body and leaving an empty suit of plate armor behind like a discarded shell. The gas coalesced into the familiar red-skinned figure, with her slinky black evening dress, only most of it was still there.

  “Wow, they didn’t shy away from Brentonsville at all with that origin,” said Joy.

  “Well it makes sense,” said the Professor. “That was where the largest number of Red Specter sightings happened, and that’s where his legend really took off. There are even a few photos.”

  “Photos? Really?” Joy hadn’t heard that. “Have you actually seen—”

  “Front of the book,” he said. “In the Introduction.”

  Joy found what he was talking about. She frowned. “These are awfully blurry,” she said. She supposed that if you squinted, you could make out a figure with a trench-coat, and a shadow that resembled the Red Specter’s forked pole-arm. But this was hardly conclusive evidence.

  “I’ve heard that they’ve invented cameras that can take decent pictures on just a second’s worth of exposure now,” said Professor Gelfland. “But even without that, there were quite a few eyewitnesses who claimed that the Red Specter visited them and warned them to evacuate the town—high profile civic leaders, too—the mayor, the chief of the town guard, major religious leaders. Most of them recanted later, but not all.”

  “Do you think they really saw what they claim?” said Joy. “I remember how the Great Phantasmo warned us about how people’s perceptions can be fooled. Could it have been mass hysteria?”

  “That’s definitely possible. The biggest counterargument to that is that someone had to have ran through the city warning them of the oncoming gas cloud. That part has been confirmed. My theory is that it was act
ually a group of people that did it, likely a Jagdkommando or other special forces unit.”

  “I guess that’s plausible,” said Joy. “Is there a Jagdkommando unit that paints their gas masks red?”

  “Not that I know of, but you know how much the Hardwicke administration loves secrecy,” he said. “So, there could be one, but it also means my theory is going to remain speculation for now.”

  “Ah, too bad,” said Joy. She went to hand the book back to him, but he offered to let her borrow them, as research for her story. She liked that idea, but the books were too big to fit in her purse, so she got his address to pick them up later. “Any other juicy Red Specter rumors I should know about?”

  “Well, I don’t know if this helps your story, but there’s one conspiracy theory about the Red Specter that I actually find plausible: that the Red Specter comic is actually government propaganda.”

  Joy snorted at that. “Propaganda? Really, Professor?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “It doesn’t read like propaganda at all,” said Joy. “It’s not… real propaganda is easy to spot. It’s super on-the-nose. Sure, there were a bunch of pro-Kallistrate themes in the stories I read, but nothing outside of normal patriotism.”

  “Yes, it’s subtle,” said the Professor. “And maybe it doesn’t meet the formal definition for propaganda. I just can’t think of another term to describe it. But it is consistent with how Hardwicke thinks. Most tyrants revel in crude bluster and overblown self-aggrandizement. They have to, in order to whip up the mob. But Hardwicke knows how to work within the system—and he doesn’t need to bluster. He demonstrated his strength by defeating the greatest empire in the history of the world. And one of his greatest strengths is his ability to get the best work out of talented people—even people who would normally be against him. I think Mr. Avakian might be a prime example of that.”

  “Okay,” said Joy. “But I’m hearing a ton of speculation here and no evidence.”

  “I was getting to that,” said the Professor. “You know how popular the comics section of the newspapers has gotten. There are even some people who buy the papers primarily for the comics and barely glance at the actual news.”

  “What?” Joy said. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Not flattering to our profession, but I assure you, it’s true,” he said. “So it makes sense for each paper to try to cultivate their own, exclusive comic strips to draw in readers. But there’s one strip that runs in every major paper, and most smaller ones—tabloids, magazines, even some specialist and hobbyist rags. Guess which one it is.”

  “The Red Specter?” Joy said. “Are you saying these papers are all being pressured to run the Specter comic by the government?”

  “Oh, no—nothing like that. No coercion is needed. Because any periodical publication that’s been in operation for at least six months can obtain the rights to publish the Red Specter for free.”

  “What, really?” Joy said. “You’ve confirmed that, Professor?”

  “Of course,” he said, “It’s no secret either. Check this out.”

  He handed her one of the compilation volumes and asked her to note the price, printed on the back cover.

  “Five dollars!” she said. “For a hardback with color printing? That’s insane.”

  “Only if you care about making money,” said the Professor. “If your goal is to distribute your message as far as possible, it makes perfect sense.”

  “But that’s a huge expense,” Joy tried to mentally calculate all the money lost on an operation like this. “Well, I guess it could be a government agency secretly bankrolling it, but it could also be some eccentric industrialist as well. Wouldn’t that make more sense? I think Hardwicke’s got more important things to worry about than comics.”

  “You could be right, but this actually does fit in with some of Hardwicke’s obsessions about forging a unified national Kallistrate identity. Case in point: Liberation day coming up tomorrow—a brand-new holiday, associated with the war, that applies to everyone, not just specific ethnic groups, like the Kallisian Jolner festival or the Xia Lunar New Year.”

  Joy was about to argue that both those festivals seemed perfectly unifying to her. She’d grown up with Jolner presents around the tree every winter solstice, and everybody turned out for the lion dance parades at the Lunar New Year, with tons of blonde Kallisian and dark-skinned Axumite kids running around with red envelopes of lucky money. But then she remembered her trip up to Knittlefeld. Yeah, she couldn’t picture any lion dances up there.

  Liberation Day would encompass the entire country. Joy paused to take in all the holiday decorations covering the theater district, the banners and flags in red and gold. Who was paying for all this? Joy wondered if Knittlefeld and other towns out in the Strata countryside had perhaps received a shipment of similar decorations, with patriotic posters of Kallistrate’s war heroes. Including one of the Red Specter and his crew, just like the one she’d seen before?

  This whole business was making her head spin, and more importantly, she didn’t see how any of it was going to help her fake an interview. “Ugh, so that’s the secret of the Specter’s popularity, then? Just cheap, widespread war propaganda?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” said Professor Gelfland. “If that was all there was, I sure wouldn’t be spending my Sunday waiting in line for tickets to see a show about him. It’s a great story with a great character.”

  “Great character?” Joy found that description odd. “Well, the stories are fun in a pulpy kind of way, but in the stuff I read he was barely a character at all. He just shows up at the end as a deus ex machina, saves the day, says a bunch of cryptic, spooky lines, wraps it up with his catchphrase about nothing escaping the Red Specter’s wrath, and runs off. Is there more to him in the earlier stories?”

  “Hmm… well, not really—in the sense that the formula you’ve described doesn’t vary much throughout the series,” he said. “With this type of pulp, what makes it good isn’t the same as a literary novel—it’s the way it can tap right into the heart of the hopes and dreams of an entire culture. And I think the Red Specter succeeds there, to a phenomenal degree.”

  “You mean with the supernatural-slash-ghost thing?” Joy asked. “Like, I guess that’s in tune with the aetherology craze that’s been going on lately. Is that it?”

  “Well, that’s related, but I’m speaking to the underlying cause of both these things.”

  “The war,” said Joy, and as soon as she said the words she realized how obvious it was. “A lot of good people were lost, a lot more were injured or permanently maimed, and even more families and loved ones were left behind with their grief. So you’re saying that reading Red Specter comics is a way to help people deal with that?”

  “That’s part of it, but there’s still more,” said the Professor. “Tell me, from the parts that you’ve read, can you tell if the Red Specter character is actually a ghost? Is he alive or dead?”

  “Umm…” Joy played all the details of her morning reading binge back through her mind. “I’m not sure. He kept spouting a lot of nonsense about how he’s both and neither. Didn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Oh, but it does make sense. In fact, that’s the point,” he said. “Because it’s not just grief that people are dealing with—it’s uncertainty. Because in addition to all the soldiers listed as killed, a huge number of them were declared MIA, and have stayed that way for years. Remember when I said that it could be anyone behind that mask?”

  “Oh—I see,” she said, as everything fell into place. “And that anyone includes those who are alive, dead, or missing. Caught between life and death and all that. But he’s not suffering… well, maybe he is… but he’s continuing on as a hero, not as something pathetic or malevolent, like most ghosts. And if you’re one of those people who’s lost someone, just the concept of a lost spirit who fights for justice, that could be a comfort—just the idea that it’s possible.”

  “That’s
it,” said Professor Gelfland. “You always caught on quick.”

  Joy thanked him, but her old teacher seemed lost in thought, and a weighty silence descended over their conversation.

  “Your family didn’t lose anyone, did they?” he asked. “I think I remember you mentioned that once.”

  “Yes, we were lucky,” she said. “I knew some people who died, back from my high school. It was sad, of course, but they weren’t close friends. How about you?”

  “My family is small, and most of us were either too old to fight, like me, or too young, like Hugo,” he said. “I just had a lot of talented students who never came back. I’m glad you weren’t one of them.”

  “They put me safely behind a desk doing translation,” said Joy. “No dangerous secret agent business for me.” For some reason, that sentence came out sounding much more bitter than she’d intended.

  “Secret Agent Joy?” Professor Gelfland was grinning now. “Don’t they have a height requirement?”

  She knew he was just teasing, but something about that rankled her. “Hey, don’t laugh,” she said. “In a different lifetime, I could’ve become a Caliburn Knight.”

  She saw his eyebrows raise incredulously, and kept going. “I’m serious. We had a quite a few summer trips to visit my mom’s family in Suiren, and there wasn’t anybody who could touch me on the Caliburn courses,” she said, referring to the extensive obstacle courses, erected in every city of Albion by the Empire, where aspiring young knights could hone the skills that would allow them to pass the real trials held every year in Cistonia Stadium. “I could blast through them, backwards and forwards, faster than anyone.”

  “Really,” said Professor Gelfland. “Now, that’s something I never knew about you. I hadn’t realized you were such an athlete. And I—oh, wait…”

  He paused, looking back towards the ticket line. “Hugo’s waving. He looks annoyed—and he’s right; we’ve been leaving him out. You should let me introduce you and we can continue the conversation with him.”

  “That sounds nice, but actually, I should get going while it’s light,” she said. “You can introduce me some other time, maybe when I come over to borrow your Red Specter books. And thanks for that insight into his character. It’s going to be really helpful for my story.”