by Seth Jacob
“I promise,” I said, and I was overcome with pity that almost made me apologize for threatening his comics.
“I was hired by Mistress Gorgon to steal the box of your father’s stuff…but it wasn’t for her. I have a rule about clients, I need to know about the product that I’m securing, for my protection. So I asked her about this box of garbage you had in your apartment, and she didn’t know anything about the stuff in it. All she would say is that she was doing this as a favor for someone else, she was like a middleman for, I don’t know, someone who didn’t want to expose themselves to crimefighting dicks like you. Someone who was smart enough to not leave a trail. And I couldn’t help myself, I’m a collector…so I took one of your father’s stupid slingshot things, okay? That’s it. That’s everything. Now can you help me down from this roof?”
I did help him down from that roof, and paid for a cab to send the guy back to his store, his elderly mother, his corpulent cat Cornelius, and his precious, pristinely preserved comic book collection. The Specialist was pretty embarrassed as I carried him on my shoulder and down to the street, and I was processing what he had just told me the whole time that I sent him on his way. Mistress Gorgon was a high level supervillain. She was not the sort of D-list criminal that I usually handled. She was an old school ultra-outlaw who had been fighting the Superb 6 since before I was born. She was exactly the type of superhuman that I would have avoided because of my one simple rule, my personal policy of never fighting villains that are more powerful than me.
I walked home instead of leaping from rooftop to rooftop so that I could think about this. I was oblivious to the people on the street gawking at me in my superhero costume, I was lost in a whirlwind of doubts and anxieties and confusion, and I was afraid. I was afraid of confronting a villain on the scale of Mistress Gorgon, I was afraid of whoever she was representing, I was afraid that I would give in to the powerful urge to just give up this stupid and increasingly dangerous search for my father’s legacy, and those were just the fears that I was aware of at the time. There were also things nagging at my subconscious that I didn’t realize until much later, like the fear that on some level, I was as immature as the Specialist, that I was so disgusted by him because I saw myself when I looked at that stunted man-child, that maybe my own obsession with regaining the physical remnants of my father’s superhero career was the same thing as the Specialist’s obsessive preservation of aging comics, that maybe I was falling apart while I tried to preserve the past.
Chapter 9: Lady of the Past, Lady of the Future
The Z-Ray Lounge is the kind of establishment where you can throw away your money on lap dances from superhuman ladies, you can drown yourself in booze and sex and soup if you know the right people, and I was more than a little embarrassed to be there. I’d asked around about Mistress Gorgon, and I’d learned that she had gone legit and bought this “super-gentleman’s club.” I had been to the Z-Ray Lounge when I was younger and stupider, and on the night that I went there again for answers from Mistress Gorgon, I wasn’t exactly as happy to be there as I was when I was nineteen and flush with cash to stuff into utility belts.
I paid the cover to get into the Z-Ray Lounge, and as I walked into the place, memories of being there in a drunken stupor bubbled up in my mind. I remembered the smells of bad perfume and cigarettes and sweat. I remembered the way that it was decorated like someone tried to imitate the look of a superhero team headquarters that they had seen on Hyper-Cribs, but it came across as a gaudy neon parody of a crimefighter’s lair. I remembered the beautiful women peeling off capes and gloves and cowls and practically painted on spandex costumes on stages around the club, I remembered the leering men sitting on red felt chairs, and maybe most of all, I remembered the strange mixture of shame and excitement that accompanied being in that place.
I walked past one of the stages where a young stripper dressed as Queen Quantum was doing something that Queen Quantum would never do, and I sat down at the bar. The bartender was a young attractive lady dressed in a much skimpier version of Doc Hyper’s costume, and she was whizzing around behind the bar like a hummingbird. She was mixing drinks, taking orders, masterfully flirting and feigning interest in men she clearly had no interest in, delivering drinks, and cashing out tabs, all at impressive super speeds that she could have used to be a crimefighter instead of tend bar in a place like this. I caught her eye, she darted up to me in a blur, and a few napkins blew up into the air in her wake. She snatched the napkins and put them back into their stacks on the bar before they could even start to fall back down.
“What can I get you, sweetie?”
“I want to talk to the owner,” I said, and I was all business despite the considerable charm of her smile and beautiful green eyes. She looked familiar to me for some reason, but I just assumed it was my imagination.
“Oh, I’m sorry baby…is there something wrong? I can help you with any problems you’ve had here…”
“No, everything’s fine. I have something to discuss with the owner, that’s all. Can you get her?
“Well handsome, I can’t just get the owner. She’s a busy woman. Actually, she’s not even here right now.” She sped away from me and took another order at the other end of the bar, then she was back in front of me and pouring a beer before I had time to exhale.
“Then call her. Tell her The Spectacle wants to have a word with her.”
“Oh, The Spectacle? I’ve heard of you,” she chimed, and then she delivered the beer to the other end of the bar so fast that I couldn’t even see it happen. One second she was standing in front of me with the beer, I blinked, and then the beer was gone and the guy at the other end of the bar was drinking it. I’m pretty sure she didn’t spill a drop, either.
“Yeah, you’re in that super-group The Millennials, right? You guys are cool, I’ve watched a bunch of your videos online.”
“Listen, I appreciate it, but get Mistress Gorgon on the phone. Tell her to get down here—”
“Baby, I can call, but I can’t promise that she’ll show…she’s a busy woman, you know?”
“…she’ll show. Tell her The Spectacle is waiting.”
“Okay, can I get you anything while you wait?”
“I’ll have a beer,” I said only because you can’t just not order a drink in a place like that. It took a lot of willpower to not touch that beer in the Z-Ray Lounge, especially when it would have helped calm the storm in my stomach. I was extremely nervous about confronting Mistress Gorgon, but I wanted to have my wits about me, or as much as I could have my wits about me when gorgeous women were taking off their clothes all around me.
I sat there at that bar, on that bar stool designed to look like a chair at a superhero headquarters round table, and I waited for hours while loud music blared all around me. For a long time, I kept my head buried in my phone. I tried to focus on reading e-mails and checking various social media stuff while my beer sat there sweating. I exuded an aura of seriousness that was very out of place in the Z-Ray Lounge, I turned down several ladies who came up to me and asked if I wanted a lap dance, I imagined my conversation with Mistress Gorgon and I wrote out clever dialogue in my head…but after a while, my attention drifted and I swiveled in my chair to watch the dancers on the main stage. What can I say? I may be superhuman, but I’m still human.
The music, the gyrating naked women, the colorful flashing lights, it all had the effect of zoning me out. The super speed bartender dressed as Doc Hyper assured me that Mistress Gorgon was on her way, but I had my doubts after waiting for so long, and I drank the beer that had gone completely warm. I was about to order another beer from the bartender, and I still couldn’t shake the strange feeling that I knew her from somewhere, when a soft hand graced my shoulder. I turned around expecting another lap dance request, but instead I saw Mistress Gorgon, and despite all that time preparing what I would say to her and how I would say it, I was speechless.
I had seen pictures and videos of Mistress Gorgon befo
re, but there was clearly something about her that was hard to capture on film. She was both shockingly beautiful and terrifying. She had tan, flawless skin. She was tall and curvaceous in her tight cut red dress. She had a perfectly formed face with high cheekbones and full, pouting lips that curled at the corners like she knew exactly how easy handling me was going to be for her. I knew from her lengthy and storied career spanning from the 60’s to modern day that she must have been pushing 60, but she looked 29 at most.
But her incredible beauty was mixed with superhuman features that were very unsettling. Her hair was a tangle of writhing black snakes, each of which had glowing red eyes like bloody rubies. The spaghetti-thin serpents squirmed around on the top of her head, and it was almost impossible to not stare at the shiny black mass of wriggling snakes. Her piercing, white eyes looked like they were carved marble orbs. I don’t mean that she had white eyes. I mean that they literally looked like they were made out of rock. Her stony eyes connected with mine, and it almost looked like her irises and pupils were carved onto them with a chisel.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Spectacle,” Mistress Gorgon said in a smokey voice that sent chills through my spine and raised the hair on my neck.
“It’s…alright?” I sputtered, and all of the brilliant opening lines that I put together at that bar suddenly disappeared from my brain.
“Let’s go get a seat, and chat for a bit,” Mistress Gorgon took my hand and led me over to a corner of the Z-Ray Lounge without waiting for me to answer. I followed as she held my gloved hand in hers, and tried to not look at the nest of slithering snakes that was her hair. She slinked into one of the tacky armchairs plastered in cheap upholstery, crossed her legs, and gestured for me to sit down in front of her. I sat down and tried to pull myself together as her marble eyes bored into mine.
“Can I get you something before we get started? On the house, of course. A drink? A lap dance? Or maybe some soup, I know your father had a taste for the soup—”
“No,” I said, and her barbed comment about my father cleared my head in a way that was probably the opposite of what she had intended.
“Well, you’re a formal sort of boy, aren’t you? Let’s get right down to it then,” Mistress Gorgon hadn’t broken eye contact with me yet, and the snakes on her head started hissing and flicking their forked pink tongues at me.
“I don’t have any problem with you, Mistress Gorgon. I don’t want to disrupt your business here—”
“I’m sure you don’t. My ladies tell me you’ve been enjoying the sights here for quite some time,” Mistress Gorgon smiled.
“I was just…waiting for you to show. I don’t have any beef with you, Mistress Gorgon, I just want to know why you contracted the Specialist to steal my father’s things. I want to know who you were arranging the buy for. I want to know who has the box that basically contains Jack Titan’s soul,” I said in my best attempt at a commanding tone, and as I’m writing this, I can’t believe that I actually said that soul line out loud.
“Jack Titan’s soul, huh? I don’t know about that, but it was quite the collection. Honey, just calm down, take a deep breath. We can be reasonable adults about this, right?” Mistress Gorgon laid one of her small, perfectly tanned hands on my knee as she said this. I brushed it off.
“I don’t want to play games, Mistress Gorgon. Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll leave.”
Mistress Gorgon blinked and finally broke her marble glare. She took a cigarette out of her pocket book and put it between her lips. One of the snakes on her head slid down her forehead and towards the cigarette. It opened up its mouth wide as if it was going to swallow the cigarette like a mouse dinner, and a blue flame spurted out of its gaping maw and lit the cigarette. She took a long drag on the cigarette, and then she let the smoke flow out of her nose while she looked at me as if she was considering turning that blue flame on me next.
“Relax,” she said, and she leaned over to the table between us and tapped her cigarette in the ashtray. She was exposing a lot of her cleavage to me, and the teasing look in her rock eyes made it clear that it was intentional. “What do you want, Spectacle? You want to know about your daddy? Because I could tell you quite a bit about him. Probably more than you want to know, actually.”
“I know that you had a relationship with him, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh, did you? Did you know that he was still with your mommy when we had our ‘relationship’?”
“…no, I guess I didn’t.”
“Well, he was. You don’t really know that much about your daddy, do you? Is that what this little hunt for that box of trinkets is about?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It is, isn’t it? Let me tell you something. Your father was a deeply fucked up individual. He was with me when your mom was pregnant with you. He was with me when I was at the height of my supervillain career, when I was regularly fighting that sell out Beyond Man and those egomaniacs in the Superb 6. Your father didn’t care about saving people, he wasn’t this comic book superhero that you’ve got in your head. He just wanted to get stoned on SUHP and get laid, and he was a superhero just for the crazy rush it gave him. And you know something?”
She took a final drag on her cigarette, and blew a cloud of smoke in front of her. A couple of the snakes on her head poked their heads into the smoke and breathed deeply.
“I think that you’re just like him.”
I was at a loss. She waved to the bartender, and she zipped over to us in her Doc Hyper costume.
“Two whiskeys on the rocks. I think Mr. Spectacle here needs something for his head,” she said, and I wanted to refuse the drink, but I just couldn’t. The bartender looked at me in an oddly concerned way before she blurred to the bar and back with the drinks. She handed the glass to me, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew her, and then she ran off again at super speed.
“Let me tell you how it is,” Mistress Gorgon stated in a matter of fact way, and she took a sip from her glass of top notch whiskey.
“I’m not going to tell you who contacted me about stealing your daddy’s box of junk. That’s just not going to happen. Here’s what is going to happen. I’m going to treat you to the best night of your life. All the drinks are on the house. Have as many lap dances as you want, no charge. You see any of these ladies that you like a little more than the others? She goes home with you tonight. Maybe I’ll join her if you play your cards right. Forget about your dad. He’s gone, you’re not. Live in the moment, Spectacle. Have some fun.”
I drank the whiskey, and it was very good. I looked around the Z-Ray Lounge at the lithe, nubile ladies in colorful spandex that clung to their bodies. I drank from the glass again, and I looked at Mistress Gorgon who had a seductive smile on her face that was growing with every moment that I thought about her offer. I went into that situation with my best poker face, and she looked right through it. I knew that she was right about me.
My entire superhero career had been about crimefighting for the sake of the thrill and the money, not for “truth and justice”. It had been about getting fucked up with my teammates in the Millenials as much as possible, and being with beautiful superhuman women. I was the same as my father, and her offer was like the pinnacle of everything that I had ever wanted out of being a superhero…but I just had to see for myself what was in that box. I had to read what my father wrote about his decades of superheroism in those dozens of spiral notebooks. I just had to know, or I’d never be able to live with myself.
“Sorry, Mistress Gorgon. No deal.”
“Well, that’s a shame, Spectacle.” Mistress Gorgon put out her cigarette in the ashtray, and she averted her stony gaze.
“You really do remind me of your father…now you’re turning me down, just like he left me in the 90’s for your hag of a mother.”
A vicious glint surfaced in those marble eyes of hers. She popped up and out of her chair, she snapped her fingers, and three strippers rushed over t
o her and surrounded me. The snakes on Mistress Gorgon’s head started twisting and hissing, their ruby eyes glowed intensely like a little halo of red suns, the strippers in revealing versions of various Superb 6 member’s costumes closed in around me, and a few bouncers cleared all of the clientele out of the club. I downed my entire glass of whiskey in one quick motion, and I wished that I had taken her up on her offer of unlimited decadence and debauchery. The shiny black serpents on Mistress Gorgon’s head flared towards me and each of their mouths lit up with blue flames.
“Get down!” I heard someone shout. Someone shoved me, and I fell over the chair I had been sitting on and onto the filthy purple carpet. When I looked up, I saw the bartender in the Doc Hyper costume standing in front of me and engulfed in the blazing blue fire shooting from the unhinged jaws of those snakes like projectile vomit. The inferno bent around her instead of burning her to a crisp, and her apparently invulnerable body saved me from being swallowed up by the blue fire.
“The fuck?” I said in complete shock, and then the bartender’s blond wig and mask burned up and revealed her flowing brown hair. It was Ultra Lady, the new member of the Superb 6 and friend of my father who came to visit me all those months ago.
“Get my back,” Ultra Lady said as she shielded me from the blue flaming death surging out of the snakes on Mistress Gorgon’s head, and she didn’t have to tell me twice. I sprung to my feet, and the three strippers launched at me like sexy superpowered assassins. I flipped backwards and away from them and landed on the mainstage.
I saw Ultra Lady unleash a red burst of heat vision at Mistress Gorgon’s face, and the snake haired temptress screeched in pain. Her head whipped back and that blue flame spurted all over the place and lit the ceiling on fire. One of the strippers dressed as Queen Quantum flew at me, and the blue flame started spreading on the ceiling and dripping onto chairs and tables. Stripper Queen Quantum tried to punch me, I ducked out of the way and her fist struck the stripper pole and bent it like a paper clip, and now a lot of the club was being consumed by an unnaturally blue bonfire. Then the other two strippers joined Queen Quantum on the mainstage, the sprinkler system turned on, and it started pouring on us as I danced around the three superhuman strippers hovering around me and trying to kill me. I never thought I’d be dodging soaking wet, beautiful women like my life depended on it.