Masked

by Lou Anders

  They found Hugh and sat with him. After a moment of awkwardness, offset by the sheer theatricality of how he played that awkwardness, he let them. “So,” he said, “Chris. How was last night?”

  “The Guardian,” Jim found himself suddenly saying, “never said he was gay. He looks like he is, with all the rainbow flag stuff, but he never said it. Isn’t it enough that he protects our lot?” He raised his voice, so that everyone looking could hear. “What, were any of you lot hoping to shag him?”

  He would have gone on. But Chris put his hand on his and stopped him with a look.

  He might have said something else anyway…

  But from outside there came the sound of magic power crackling through the air.

  Chris looked like he might make an effort and stay put.

  But Jim gave him a shove. Go on.

  Chris didn’t bother trying to be stealthy this time. He just got up, without a look at anyone else in the bar, and headed out the door.

  Jim could feel people leaning over, craning to look out the door, hoping to see the change.

  “Don’t wait up for him, like,” someone said.

  Jim closed his eyes and felt pride rather than pain. He was making a sacrifice. And he absolutely knew that Chris was too.

  Chris walked out to the water’s edge, aware of everyone on Canal Street looking at him. Waiting to see if he was going to change. And probably then shag a woman immediately.

  He looked up in the air, and there he was. Jumping Jack. He was stepping from sparkling magic disc to sparkling magic disc, throwing lightning randomly down into the streets, calling the Guardian out.

  Not the murderous sort, this one. The fun kind of magic villain that the people of Manchester most enjoyed. His lightning just gave you a bit of a jolt.

  Lives were not at stake. Not this time.

  He didn’t have to change if he didn’t want to.

  But where would he draw the line? He’d vowed to meet every threat to this little community, vowed to stop every single affront, nasty or sporting equally, as the Guardian.

  The Guardian would do his absolute best to not be seduced. He’d probably succeed, now he’d realized his true nature and wasn’t being taken by surprise by a secret shame. That innocence of his was shored up now, prepared.

  But that meant that his other half shouldn’t be his whole self. That he should deny an aspect of what he was. And wasn’t that what he was all about defending?

  Chris kept watching Jumping Jack as his silhouette sailed past the moon.

  And then an intense expression came over his face.

  And he started to run in the direction of the house he shared with Jim.

  That night, all of Canal Street looked up from their pints to hear a very solid impact of magic villain with water, and a subsequent yelling as magic lightning shorted out in contact with said water. And lots of huffing and puffing as said magic villain was dragged up onto the side of the canal and sent packing.

  And then there was a long wait after the battle was obviously over, and Jim Ashton felt everyone looking at him, with pity and contempt.

  Across the city, a pair of handcuffs closed onto the wrists of a surprised White Candle, who’d been only just about to leave through her own bedroom window. “I can get out of these in seconds,” she said, “unless you don’t want me to.”

  “I don’t want you to,” said the Guardian, gently landing her on the pavement in front of a waiting van from the Manchester Constabulary’s Magic Division, “and so you’ll find, those being solid silver, that you can’t.”

  “That was almost a joke. That’s unlike you.”

  “Well, making jokes is one of the things I’m looking forward to doing a little more.”

  She tutted at him as she stepped into the van, like she was stepping into a limo. “And I thought we’d shared something important!”

  “We did,” he said. “Which gave me intimate knowledge of you. Enough to follow your perfume home.” He took her aside from the police officer in the back of the van for a moment. “Once you’ve served your time, hey, I’d really like to take you out to dinner.”

  She looked boggled at him.

  He gave her a wink and hopped out of the van.

  He watched it drive away with slight regret in his new heart.

  Late that night, Chris Rackham showed up at the door of that bar down the street that had Tall Ben standing there judging people.

  “Astonishingly brave of you to even try,” he said. “But no. Of course not. We all know about your alter ego.”

  Jim arrived and joined him. They stood there, holding hands. Together.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ben. “What matters is what you’re really like, Chris. When you’re not lying to us.”

  The Guardian landed beside them.

  Tall Ben looked between them. “Oh very clever,” he said. “Magic trick, is it?”

  “It’s the truth,” said Chris. “And we’re going to go in now.” And he led Jim into the bar.

  Tall Ben considered for a moment and then didn’t stop them. “Well then,” he said to the Guardian. “Do you want in and all?”

  “No,” said the magic hero. “I came to let you know you can still call on me for help. I’m straight. But I’m still the protector of this area, and everyone in it.”

  Ben sized him up for a moment, and then nodded. “I s’pose it’ll have to do.”

  The Guardian raised an eyebrow at him. And flew off into the night.

  “What’s the Guardian going to do all day?” said Jim, when they got home.

  “Explore space, he says.” Chris took the top hat from the kitchen table, where he’d left it after using it the other night, and hid it in the bottom of the wardrobe. “And get a girlfriend, I should think. He’s all excited. He says it’s like being alive for the first time. He says he always wanted not to change back, but thought it’d be oppressing me to even ask.”

  “Won’t the Top Hat be able to reverse the spell, if he ever gets back from the moon?”

  “I s’pose that’ll be summat else for him and the Guardian to fight about. And if he puts us back together, I’ll just beat him again and use the hat to split us apart again.”

  Jim brushed his teeth and got into bed, and relaxed, properly relaxed, for the first time in ages, as Chris lay against him. “And you aren’t going to resent me for this?” he said. “Long-term, I mean. Not being able to fly anymore and that?”

  “It was always like a dream,” said Chris, pulling him into an embrace. “And we all get to fly in our dreams. This way I get to be myself, all the time.”

  And from outside they heard the sound of magic explosions.

  And they smiled.

  Mike Carey’s considerable talents have been on display in such comic titles as DC Vertigo’s Lucifer : Hellblazer, The Sandman Presents, and The Unwritten, and Marvel’s X-Men: Legacy, Ultimate X-Men, and Secret Invasion, and many, many more. He is also the author of the five Felix Castor novels: The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots, Thicker Than Water, and The Naming of the Beasts. A power writing about powers, Carey gives us a tale that is anything but what its title implies.

  The Non-Event

  MIKE CAREY

  Ptah! Pfff! Kah!

  Nice to have that gag out of my mouth. Got anything to take the taste away? Water, you say? Well, if it’s all you’ve got, I’ll take it. But it’s your choice: I’ll sing a lot louder and clearer if you give me whiskey.

  So you want me to talk about Gallo. Sure you do. And you want to hear about how he came to be lying there, with no head on his shoulders, and if I feel any remorse about killing him.

  Well, you know, I don’t feel much about it one way or the other. The man was an idiot, and worse than that, an idiot who spat when he talked. A pornography addict who liked to talk about his hobby; a man who fell for pyramid selling schemes and wanted all his acquaintances to join the club; a serial drinker of cheap supermarket beer that made him so f
latulent birds fell out of the sky wherever he walked.

  But nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Gallo died classy. I’ll give him that. That’s why I agreed to come here. I’m making this statement. I’m cooperating with your dumbfuck investigation, even though I know the conviction is a lead-pipe certainty whether I talk or not.

  I’ll tell you the whole story about Gallo’s death. I just feel like somebody should. The rest—the confession and everything—yeah, you can have that too. Take it and choke on it, you fuckers.

  So to start with, it was Pete’s idea. Pete Vessell, this is, aka Hyperlink. Not Pete Haig, who is Vessell’s brother-in-law. Haig’s deal is converting base metal into live frogs, which as you’d imagine is not a power that’s in great demand anywhere sane people gather. Vessell has teleportation powers, and even though they’re not as good as the teleportation powers Mass Transit has, say, or even those of Doctor Phase or Little Johnny Blink, they still raise some interesting and suggestive possibilities.

  Let me spell it out. Vessell’s deal is that he can instantaneously appear anywhere his name is written down. I know, I know, it’s like a bad joke. You blink out of reality and reappear inside a fucking mailbox, right? Great party trick. And then you stay there for a good half hour, because that’s how long it takes Vessell to recharge. Before he came up with that Hyperlink name, I suggested Return to Sender and Eponymous Boy. He didn’t laugh.

  Anyway, Vessell brought me in, because I do the whole talking-to-locks thing. I suggested Naseem Hadid, who goes by Perspective, and George Gruber, the Tin of Rin Tin Skin. Then Naseem brought in Cindy Fellows, aka Guesswork, who I think was her girlfriend at the time. It was a good balance of powers, all things considered. But everything depends on the context, of course. Everything depends on the actual job.

  The job in this case was a bank vault: DeJong’s, on Aldwych. It’s technically Dutch soil, by means of some obscure legal switcheroo, so the filthy rich use it as a left-luggage locker for all the stuff they don’t want to pay UK tax on: their Krugerrands and their diamond necklaces, their Fabergé eggs and their bearer bonds. There’s a nice concentration of obscene and highly portable wealth, and Vessell—who used to be a banker himself before the endoclasm—had scoped it out pretty well.

  We met up in his basement—which he’s done up okay, but which still smells of sour milk no matter how many potpourris he puts down there—to go over the logistics and sniff each other’s dog tags. The basement was a necessary part of the equation because it’s lined with lead, which means nobody is going to be reading your lips from five miles off using their X-ray vision. Lead is a nostrum that seems to work against a whole range of superpowers, for reasons nobody has ever been able to explain; but Vessell is friends with Timeslide and Granite Phantom, too, so he’d managed to get the room time-proofed and phase-sealed. Or at least he said he had. You never know how much is bullshit with him.

  He’d made an effort, I’ll say that for him. There was wine and beer, and a party plate from Marks and Sparks with little sausage rolls and vol-au-vents on it: everything except massage chairs. Vessell seemed to want to make the planning of the robbery a festive occasion, whereas mostly they tend to be fairly task-centered affairs.

  So there was a good atmosphere, as far as that went. But when we ran through the plan, it was obvious it still had a serious flaw. Probably more than one, if the truth be told, but certainly one that kind of jumped up, grabbed you by the collar, and screamed “serious fucking flaw!”

  We could get into the building at night when it was empty. We could break the vault and get our hands on a good proportion of what was in it. With Naseem on board, we could even stow the goods where they couldn’t be found until the heat died down and it was safe to sell them on.

  But we didn’t have a strong guy. None of us, not even George, had the serious offensive capability that would allow us to walk away after the job through the shitstorm of superpowered cops who would come down on us out of a clear sky, bringing to bear such a ridiculous variety of powers that our feet would not touch the fucking ground. We needed at the very least the Rainbow Bandit or Ultravox, and preferably one or more of the four Apocalypse Boys. Otherwise there was no way we were getting out of that vault in units of more than one molecule across.

  I should say here that this stuff hurts me. It hurts me in my heart. I was a career criminal back in the old days, before all this bullshit, when all you needed was a crowbar and a hopeful disposition. These days, you can’t even knock over a post office without Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, and the marching band of the radioactive zombie death-ray commandos on your team. And even then, it’s ten to one that one of the really big hitters like Saint Seraph or the Epitome will amble along and you’ll go to the wall anyway.

  It’s not the endoclasm that’s the problem, you know? It’s human nature. The endoclasm gave about one in ten people superhuman powers, but most people are scared shitless when microwaves shoot out of their arses or their chins sprout adamantium bristles or they wake up one morning lying upside down on the ceiling. They fall apart quickly, burn out in some really nasty superpowered suicide, or else repress their abilities so deeply they effectively depower themselves: psychic castration, the experts call it. Two kinds of personality ride the crisis out okay: the deeply criminal and the deeply moral, or, as you might say, the walking ids and the walking superegos. And those law-and-order bastards seem to outnumber us enhanced villains by about a hundred to one.

  I don’t mean supervillains, you understand: I mean good, old-fashioned burglars, bank robbers, and stick-up merchants who just happen to have picked up powers during the endoclasm. We’re not interested in ruling the world, or destroying it, or having a big, pointless punch-up with a bunch of twats in tights. We just ply our trade, when we’re allowed to, do the job, and then clock off.

  So yeah, anyway, we’re contemplating the ruin of Vessell’s plan, and we’re thinking too bad, because it’s a nice bank vault full of all kinds of good stuff, and it would be a pleasant thing indeed to get in there and have a rummage around. Then Vessell said, “In case you’re wondering about the getaway, I’m thinking we’ll use Gallo.”

  There was a blank silence. It was just amazement at first, but then I went right on through to being angry. Seems I was wrong about why Vessell had brought me in: it wasn’t because I’m Lockjaw, it was just because I used to be friends with Gallo.

  “Gallo?” Gruber echoed. He’s not good with civilian names.

  “He means the Non-Event,” Naseem said. “And he’s out of his bloody mind.”

  “I agree,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for the vol-au-vents, Vessell, but fuck you very much for the rest of it. I’m not galloping into town with Rizzo Gallo on the next horse, that’s for friggin’ sure. Good luck with that.”

  Vessell jumped up hastily, making calming downward movements with his hands so he looked like a chicken that was having trouble taking off. “No, listen, Davey,” he said. “I’m serious. I’ve thought it through and it’s going to be fine. Really. Just hear me out. If you don’t think it will work, then you can walk.”

  “I can walk now,” I pointed out, demonstrating.

  “But what do you lose by staying one more minute?” Vessell insisted, stepping into my way. He was sounding kind of whiny now, and I started to remember all over again some of the reasons I didn’t like him. “You listen, you make up your mind, if it doesn’t work for you, you’re gone. Come on, you owe me that much.”

  I didn’t owe him a thing, if the truth be told, and we both knew it. He’s brought me in on a job or two, sure, and I’ve always carried my weight. But that’s the sort of fruitless argument where once you get into it you can end up ripping out each other’s teeth with pliers. I prefer to keep the moral high ground if I can help it. I shrugged, remained on my feet, but stopped heading for the door. Folding my arms, I adopted a “so convince me” stance.

  And he did. He convinced me. As he explained his plan, by some
fluke or intuition he met all my objections in the order they came to me. By the time he was done, I was thinking—very much to my surprise—that this thing might actually have a chance of working.

  “Well, I’ll talk to Gallo,” I said, grudgingly. “No harm in that, anyway.”

  Sure. No harm at all. God likes a good laugh now and again, doesn’t he? That’s what irony is for.

  Gallo was living all on his own in a rat’s-ass workman’s cottage just outside Luton—the only inhabited building on a condemned row that was short but not sweet. I mean, someone would have had to drop serious money on the place to bring it up to the point where you could describe it as a slum. Right then it was just four walls and—intermittently—a roof.

  Gallo didn’t mind much. His needs were modest, and he enjoyed his own company. More to the point, he was scared shitless of anybody else’s. The ExtraNormal Affairs people were talking back in the day about giving him a pension to stay away from major population centers, but then the Tories got in again and the mood swung. They left Gallo to starve on his own time.

  And that gave me my in, as it were. I pointed out to him that this job would set him up for the rest of his life. He could buy a place in the country, a thousand miles from anywhere. Buy a tent and live on top of a mountain in Tibet, or out in the Kalahari, I don’t know. Anywhere except the ragged edge of fucking Luton: even a dog deserves better than that.

  Gallo shook his head slowly, clearly not liking the idea. “I don’t know, Davey,” he mumbled in that singsong way of his. “I mean I really don’t know. I’m doing all right here.”

  I looked around his living room, staring in turn at the two cracked teacups, the sway-backed Formica table, the ancient portable TV zebra-striped on top with cigarette burns. I didn’t need to say anything: Gallo knew what I was thinking.

  “But it’s all right for me,” he said, throwing out his arms in what was either a shrug or a plea. “I don’t miss anything very much. And at least—out here—I can’t hurt anyone. That’s the most important thing. There’s nothing much to upset me, but if I do get upset, then nobody gets hurt.” Both times he said the word hurt he lingered on it, almost making it into two syllables. I knew where he was coming from, and I even agreed with him up to a point: there are two kinds of bad jobs, the screwups and the slaughterhouses. Worst kind of all is the kind that starts off as the one and slides into the other.