by Rhys Thomas
“Quick,” she said. He could see the crescent moon reflected in the lenses of her glasses as she beamed at him. “Make a wish.”
* * *
On the drive home the car fell into an insulated silence. Moonlight on the fields, over the low hedgerows, made the world feel uncanny, altered. Sarah had fallen asleep, her face turned away from him, thin neck exposed. Blotchy and Tango were both snoring.
Sometimes Sam considered the various levels of thought in the human mind. First there is the simple pursuit of food and shelter; the base, outer layer into which everything else feeds. The second layer is where you live most of your life: working, thinking about work, your plans for the evening, choosing your dinner—the everyday functions. Further in is where thought gets a little deeper and you consider things such as your own personal future, what you hope for on a superficial level: a nice car, house, holidays, pensions, savings. The fourth layer formulates moral codes: what you believe to be right and wrong in the world, how you think a society should operate; at what point personal responsibility should kick in for a person’s actions. Then there are two more levels: a dense outer layer around a core. In the fifth you might consider your place in the universe as you stand drunkenly under winter stars just before Christmas, or maybe wonder if magic still exists, or aliens, or secret government organizations. It is a whimsical level of belief, something separate from the true belief that resides in the core of your being, in the sixth layer of thought, right in the center of the brain onion where everything you are becomes distilled and you must decide where you stand on the meaning of life.
He dropped Tango and Blotchy off first, bringing the car quietly into the sleeping housing estates where their parents lived, estates built within the last two decades, redbrick houses decorated with small features—yellow quoins, little porticos over the front doors, or the occasional white wood finial—and neat gardens, narrow roads with fresh tarmac that didn’t bump the car. There was a neat sheen to the little estates where in the summer grew daisies and manufactured hedgerows, and each garden was well kept by people who were proud of their small patch of the planet they’d worked so hard for. Blotchy mumbled something under his breath as he collected his bag and telescope from the boot. But when they reached Tango’s house, his friend nodded across to the sleeping Sarah and raised his eyebrows.
Tango smiled to Sam. “Great stuff,” he whispered, and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.
It made Sam feel foolish, but he also appreciated it.
That central core, the sixth layer of thought, usually stirs on nights when sleep is far off but you’re lying in bed anyway, worrying about work the next day, how many hours of sleep you can get, deep thoughts crawling out of dark caves. We are all animals and alone, the universe is infinite, there is no such thing as a future because everything will crumble to dust in the end. Or so it went for Sam, who stayed well clear of the sixth layer as often as he could, listening to the radio before sleeping, always planning evenings well in advance so that boredom couldn’t creep in; he didn’t want his mind wandering down pathways he’d rather avoid, didn’t want to face the existential crisis in the middle of him.
Sarah’s place was in a not so great part of town, her flat above a boarded-up shop. The little sash windows looked dark and depressing. He woke her up and offered to see her to the door.
“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she said. A red imprint of the seat belt was on her cheek. “Too much talking.” She rubbed her eyes with the crook of her wrist, pushing her glasses up her forehead.
“Did you have a nice time?”
She nodded. “I really did.”
A fluttering in his chest again.
It was freezing, frost crystallizing on the pavement, the air sharp as needles.
“Thanks again,” she said. The lights had come on in the car from when she’d opened the door. “Seriously, I’ve had a really, really nice time.”
In his mind the shooting star flashed and he wondered if he should try to kiss her.
“Me too,” he said.
She closed the car door behind her and he watched her let herself into her flat before taking a deep breath.
* * *
At home the house was cold. He changed into his pajamas, pulled the duvet over him and checked Facebook on his tablet. He was so tired, but he lay in bed, in the dark, scrolling down the ever so bright screen. Most of his friends were people he had gone to school or university with, though he no longer had real-world contact with any of them.
Facebook late at night put in him a catastrophic form of loneliness, staring at the lives being lived out there, those dutifully filed online for people like Sam to marvel over—days out with babies in country parks, the selection of wedding venues, ice cream sundaes in nice-looking restaurants, arm in arm with a lover before the Eiffel Tower. His friends lambasted social media, citing invasion of privacy, tax evasion, the addicting properties of the internet, the unmitigated disaster of the echo chamber, but they all used it. Sam knew it wasn’t good, that something deeply sinister and depressing was at play beneath the pixels, but its pull was enormously strong, way too strong for him to resist.
It had been so long since he’d taken a genuine interest in a girl, he found it hard to know how he felt. The happiness he’d felt on the mountain was already beginning to warp as all the memories of his life came pouring back in. The bubble in which he’d spent the evening had burst, so he scrolled and scrolled and tried to fight off the darkness. Why couldn’t he just be normal?
At last he sensed he could fall asleep, so he quickly listened to his voice mails before setting the sleep timer alarm on his radio, listening to a debate on the coming apocalypse when antibiotics will no longer work, hearing how people will die from a common infection, how governments are burying their head in the sand and we’re all doomed. But it was okay because even listening to this was better than facing the total horror of his sixth layer of thought.
6
A real-life superhero came to the aid of over a hundred vulnerable people on Thursday night, community workers report.
The incident took place late on Duke Street, where volunteers run a soup kitchen and food bank for the city’s homeless. Nicholas Bush, 47, one of the volunteers, said, “It was just a normal night when all of a sudden we saw this dark figure running toward us, dressed in fancy dress. We all thought it was a drunk guy on a stag party until he threw a big bag of sandwiches and pasties at us.”
The sandwiches are thought to have originated from popular baking chain Greggs, who were unavailable for comment.
Sharon Claymore, 54, another volunteer, commended the masked vigilante. “In all my years I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t know about the costume, but the sandwiches were much needed and appreciated.”
This is not the first time people have taken to the streets of Britain dressed as masked crusaders...
He skipped this part.
A police spokesperson said, “No law has been broken, no crime committed, so if somebody wants to help people, even dressed as a superhero, it’s up to them, though we wouldn’t recommend it. Vigilantism itself is a crime and so if this man has any notions of crime fighting we suggest he leaves it to the experts. The law remains the law.”
Sitting at his breakfast table the next morning with a warm croissant and cup of coffee, Sam scrolled through the Google results. The story was posted on his local paper’s website under the headline Superhero Loose on City Streets, and the story had been syndicated on a few other sites, as well as being shared on Facebook and Twitter, where it had gained the hashtag #RealLifeSuperHero.
Stunned, Sam reached for his breakfast marmalade and spread it on the croissant. He didn’t know what he expected, hadn’t even considered the possibility of his alter ego being reported in the press. That others might be interested in his dressing up was, in retrospect, completely obvious now. He took a bite of
his croissant.
He needed to be more careful, lurk in the shadows, cut the number of days he patrolled. What would Sarah think of all this? Oh. That thought didn’t feel nice. Yesterday, being the Phantasm was one thing. Suddenly, it was another.
“You’re a sensitive boy,” his mother had once told him, and she was right. He sensed the feelings of others keenly and frequently put himself second if it meant making somebody else feel good. His friends labeled this a weakness (and sometimes pious)—and maybe it was—but Sam couldn’t help himself. He took pleasure in seeing others happy—that was what made him happy—but being in a new relationship (not that he assumed a relationship was a foregone conclusion, but it was surely a possibility) meant losing out on the safe and comfortable life he had built around himself, over which he exercised so much control. He took another bite of his croissant.
All the odd routines, like the way he took time to appreciate the lovely carpet in the boot of his car, would be gone, or at least diminished, because showing Sarah how he liked to stare into the boot for minutes at a time, at the clean, empty space, might distance himself from her. He liked his routines, they brought him tremendous calm. To lose them would be to lose a large part of who he was, and erode the dam built between him and the raging chaos that swirled at the edges of his mind.
But if he was so scared and worried at the prospect of his life changing, why did he get butterflies whenever he remembered Sarah’s face in the moonlight? And as each successive memory arrived, he sensed the distant collapse of rocks somewhere in the kingdom.
* * *
Sometimes Sam would just gravitate to the place where he grew up. He sat in his parked car opposite his parents’ old house and felt the enveloping warmth of being here. He knew this street so well, had cycled up and down it so many times he knew every crack on the pavement, every lip of every curb. It still felt like home. He looked at the house, at the bedroom windows behind which they’d all slept, the front door he’d posed before on his first day of school, for a photograph.
Pushing the car door open, the cold air hitting his face, Sam walked down the street. It was so quiet, just as it had always been. Put up in the ’70s—pebble-dashed walls, stone cladding beneath the ground-floor windows—it now housed mostly retirees who had never moved. Memories hatched in that quick way where they merge to form a feeling, an essence of his life then, how it had been.
When he reached the end of the street, he turned left into the alleyway, which led to a small gravel track near the river, a little path between two tall fences, away from the estate and onto the horse paddocks and then across the river bridge to the woods. Halfway along the steel bridge Sam stopped to watch the water move beneath him.
The Phantasm had to endure. He would just be more careful. He’d pulled on the mask to help people, and even if only by a tiny amount, he knew he had made the world a better place with some of the things he’d done.
He crossed the river and came to the woods, turning left, heading north, wintry branches hanging still in the dead air, the sky pearlescent beyond. The air was still and so cold it carried sound easily—the caw of crows, the rush of the river. Tree roots snaked from the hard ground, fallen autumn leaves drifted against ridges of jutting rock. He’d been here hundreds of times as a kid, but it never lost its magic.
He checked his phone, but nothing from Sarah. There was a text from Tango, though. What are you doing tomorrow night? Sam ignored it. He thought of Sarah. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
Shafts of sunlight gave the water of a tributary stream a strange white translucence, a fairy-tale effect, and then he came to a ridge and continued over it into a small valley where he had once spent a dark winter night reading comic books by torchlight. Up the far slope a tricky clamber away stood the old tree with its overhanging roots, the cleft in the rock where the tree had split the cave open.
He didn’t think he would ever come back again, but here he was, scrambling up the slope, her face repeating in his mind, making him feel in turns alive and afraid, the thump of his heart at once pleasant and unpleasant. After all those years, through everything, he was back at the one place he used to come to feel safe.
Hand over fist he clambered toward the tree, breathless, leaves and rocks sliding out from under him. It was harder than he remembered, and his ribs ached, but at last he got a hold of the cliff face and sidled along under the tree roots to the cave, his Batcave, the place of ultimate safety. He thought it might open him up, give him a kind of perspective, tell him what to do, but it did none of these things. Whatever spiritual link had existed between him and this place was absent now. He looked down into the small leaf-strewn basin, at the tree trunks growing at strange angles, the black remains of a bonfire, a gray squirrel scuttling along a branch. Suddenly, he felt like crying. Turning into the cave, he found the hidden alcove at the back and reached inside, hoping to find something he’d missed last time he was here—a magnifying glass, a pencil, a comic, some message from the past—but there was nothing there save dusty rock.
* * *
It was such a familiar voice, yet so long since he’d heard it.
“Sam?”
“Oh,” he said.
The woman in the doorway of the house, not his parents’ but the one next door, looked so much older now. Her face had thinned and crumpled, she was ever so slightly hunched, her hair less full. But there she was. Guilt, built over time, welled up inside him. Seeing her now, he realized the scale of his betrayal.
“God, look at you.”
When he was growing up, Sam would go to Moira’s house to play with the dog and eat biscuits before his parents got home from work. Being part of the old gentry, she would take him for day trips to local farms, hidden pockets of the country you wouldn’t even know existed, or the country houses of huge manors on the brink of bankruptcy as the old ways died. He’d go and watch detective dramas on her huge television; would, on occasion, be taken to the cinema to watch a film she wanted to see (widowed and childless, with her family miles away, she wanted a companion and Sam was fine with that—he liked her). Moira had been a huge part of his childhood, and he hadn’t seen her in years.
“What are you doing here?”
“I was just passing, thought I’d come see the old place.”
“I hope you were going to knock my door.”
“I was in a bit of a rush,” he blurted.
“You should come and see me, dear.”
She was a thin woman, but tall; even with the hunch she looked down on him as he went to the edge of her garden.
“I know. I’m just, you know, so busy.”
“Don’t give me that.”
Her brazen manner was only a shell for her kindness. Sam tapped the end of his key with his little finger.
“I’m sorry. It’s just...”
“I know. Come in, the kettle’s on.”
He wanted to go in. More than anything he wanted to go in. She’d have the log fire burning in there, that special kind of heat. He could listen to her stories about her nieces and nephews—and, possibly, their kids now—what meals she had planned for the week ahead, her TV schedule. He wondered if the portrait of her old racehorse, Thunder, was still on the wall, the holiday knickknacks still cramming every inch of every shelf.
“I really do have to go,” he said.
She stood with one hand on her front door, using it as a support, and there was the sudden sense of the crushing effects of time.
“I’ll come back, I promise, but I have to go. I have to...go.”
She stared at him. Her eyes bored a hole through his skin, loosing so many memories, and in that moment he could tell she could see past his clothes and skin and organs, past even the years he’d put between the Event and now, right into the black scribble of his heart.
THE PHANTASM #005
Man’s Best Friend
It’s Malcolm. He’s sure it’s Malcolm. He checks his Phantfone and, using his 4G, finds the news article. Malcolm has been missing for five months and the campaign to find him had become so widespread it had been picked up in the news. After she lost her husband, Malcolm was all Josephine Grabham had left. But Malcolm could not get over the grief of losing Private Andrew Grabham of the British Army and, when he went missing, the story touched the nation. It had spread like wildfire across all social media, there were coordinated teams out looking for him on weekends. The Phantasm looks at the photograph of Malcolm, his sad adolescent face, and compares it to the one looking at him from between the bins in the deserted lane. Whenever Private Grabham returned from a tour of the Middle East, Malcolm was the first to greet him, running across the tarmac of the barracks and jumping up at him, welcoming him home, licking his face wildly. Malcolm is a dog.
A lovely border collie with one green eye and one blue eye and a distinctive black-and-white pelt.
When the dark hero calls his name, the dog’s head tilts inquisitively to one side. It’s him. Slowly, the Phantasm moves in. He reaches out his arms and pictures the joyous face of Josephine when he returns her lost love. But it’s not going to be so simple. Malcolm bolts. He dashes past the masked champion of the night, who lunges but misses, and off he sprints up the lane. Immediately the Phantasm is after him.
But boy is he fast. He wishes he’d brought his bike, because Malcolm is getting away. Out into the main street the dog is up ahead, dodging traffic, and the hero’s heart leaps into his mouth. Between the headlights of the cars the dog is making a beeline right up the center of the road. There is no choice. Into the traffic he goes, following the animal. Horns blare, people wind down their windows, then wind them right back up again when they see the masked specter hurtling toward them.