Masked

by Lou Anders

  “Yet they are not like you. Yet this is your place.” She embraced me. “Listen. It’s wonderful here. We live as no human has before. And we aren’t limited to the Stack. Look again at our yacht. We sail on light, down to the Earth—away to the Moon, where the children play in the craters and kick up the dust. Some of us are talking about an expedition to a comet.”

  “A comet?”

  “Why not? We can live anywhere, anywhere between the planets and the stars.” She twisted so she was looking down. “We protect the Earth. That is why we are here. But sometimes the Earth looks very small. It is easy to forget it even exists. Those long-dead geoengineers didn’t mean it to be so, but that’s the way it worked out.

  “Some say that the adaptations of microbes and animals which the geneticists used to manufacture us are relics of a dispersal of life across space in the deep past. Now those same adaptations are being used to spread life once more, human life, across the solar system. We are the future, Vacuum Lad. Not those down below.”

  And she withdrew, breaking her long kiss.

  I fulfilled my obligations. I returned to the shuttle, and flew on to the Hilton. On a secure link I told Professor Stix of all that had happened to me.

  For now my life will go on. I continue to earn. I have my family to think of—even Muhammad. And for now Earth needs Vacuum Lad. That’s what the contracts and my agency agreement with Professor Stix say. And it’s what I believe, too. It is my duty.

  And then there is the Earth First League to be dealt with. My enemies have tried again to assassinate me, more than once. Mary Webb talks of war, war between the Damocletians and the League, between the sky and the ground. A resolution is approaching.

  Beyond that I am unsure.

  In space, I look down at the comfortable fug of gravity and air where my family lives. But on the ground, I look up to the stars where Mary Webb and her Damocletians swim, and my skin itches to harden, my lungs to empty of stale air.

  I often wonder how I will know when it is time for my ascension. Perhaps, as I ride another shuttle on the way to another routine money-spinning job, there will be another scratch on a space shuttle window. Welcome home, Vacuum Lad. And then I’ll know.

  I think I’ll keep the costume, however.

  Chris Roberson is the author of fourteen novels (and counting), among them The Dragon’s Nine Sons, End of the Century, and Book of Secrets, as well as X-Men: The Return. For DC Vertigo, he has written the miniseries Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love, and is the cocreator of the ongoing monthly title I, Zombie. Roberson is also the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies, and he is the editor of the anthology Adventure Vol. 1. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times—once each for writing and editing, and twice for publishing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and three times for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning the Short Form in 2004 with his story “O One” and the Long Form in 2008 with his novel The Dragon’s Nine Sons ). Roberson is currently writing the first “authorized prequel” to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for Boom! Studios, a twelve-issue comic book miniseries entitled Dust to Dust. A prolific writer across multiple media, Roberson always displays a strong pulp influence and a staggering imagination.

  A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

  CHRIS ROBERSON

  As the chimes of midnight rang out from the tolling bells above, a hail of argent death rained from the twin silver-plated Colt .45s onto the macabre invaders from the Otherworld, and the cathedral echoed with the eerie laughter of that silver-skulled avenger of the night—THE WRAITH.

  FROM THE SECRET JOURNALS OF ALISTAIR FREEMAN

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1942.

  I dreamt of that day in the Yucatan again last night. Trees turned the color of bone by drought, skies black with the smoke and ash of swidden burning for cultivation, the forest heavy with the smell of death. Cager was with me, still living, but Jules Bonaventure and his father had already fled, though in waking reality they had still been there when the creatures had claimed Cager’s life.

  As the camazotz came out of the bone forest toward us, their bat-wings stirring vortices in the smoke, I turned to tell my friend not to worry, and that the daykeepers would come to save us with their silvered blades at any moment. But it was no longer Cager beside me, but my sister Mindel, and in the strange logic of dreams we weren’t in Mexico of ’25 anymore, but on a street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side more than a dozen years before. And I realized that the smoke and ash were no longer from forest cover being burned for planting, but from the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that had ended her young life. “Don Javier will never get here from Mexico in time,” I told my sister, as though it made perfect sense, but she just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, Alter. This is the road to Xibalba.” Then the demons arrived, but instead of claws, they attacked us with the twine-cutting hook-rings of a newsvendor, and we were powerless to stop them.

  Charlotte is still out of town visiting her mother and won’t be back until tomorrow. When I awoke alone in the darkened room this morning, it took me a moment to recall when and where I was. In no mood to return to unsettling dreams, I rose early and began my day.

  I ate alone, coffee and toast, and skimmed the morning papers. News of the Sarah Pennington murder trial again crowded war reports from the front page of the Recondito Clarion, and above the fold was a grainy photograph of the two young men, Joe Dominguez and Felix Uresti, who have been charged with the girl’s abduction and murder. Had it not been an attractive blonde who’d gone missing, I’m forced to wonder whether the papers would devote quite so many column inches to the story. But then again, there were nearly as many articles this morning on the Sleepy Lagoon murder case just getting under way down in Los Angeles, where seventeen Mexican youths are being tried for the murder of Jose Diaz. Perhaps the attention is more due to the defendants’ zoot suits and ducktail combs than to Governor Olson’s call to stamp out juvenile delinquency. If the governor had the power simply to round up every pachuco in the state and put them in camps, like Roosevelt has done with the Japanese, I think Olson would exercise the right in a heartbeat.

  I didn’t fail to notice the item buried in the back pages about the third frozen body found in the city’s back alleys in as many nights, but I didn’t need any reminder of my failure to locate the latest demon.

  But this new interloper from the Otherworld has not come alone. Incursions and possessions have been on the rise in Recondito the last few weeks, and I’ve been running behind on the latest Wraith novel as a result. I spent the day typing, and by the time the last page of “The Return of the Goblin King” came off my Underwood’s roller it was late afternoon and time for me to get to work. My real work.

  As the sun sank over the Pacific, the streets of the Oceanview neighborhood were crowded with pint-sized ghosts and witches, pirates and cowboys. With little care for wars and murder trials, much less the otherworldly threats which lurk unseen in the shadows, the young took to their trick-or-treating with a will. But with sugar rationing limiting their potential haul of treats, I imagine it wasn’t long before they turned to tricks, and by tomorrow morning I’m sure the neighborhood will be garlanded with soaped windows and egged cars.

  I can only hope that dawn doesn’t find another frozen victim of the city’s latest invader, too. After my failure tonight, any new blood spilled would be on my hands—and perhaps on the hands of my clowned-up imitator, as well.

  The dive bars and diners along Almeria Street were in full swing, and on the street corners out front pachucos in their zoot suits and felt hats strutted like prize cockerels before the girls, as if their pocket chains glinting in the streetlights could lure the ladies to their sides.

  On Mission Avenue I passed the theaters and arenas that cater to the city’s poorer denizens, plastered wit
h playbills for upcoming touring companies, boxing matches, and musical performances. One poster advertised an exhibition of Mexican wrestling, and featured a crude painting of shirtless behemoths with faces hidden behind leather masks. A few doors down a cinema marquee announced the debut next week of Road to Morocco. I remembered my dead sister’s words in last night’s dream, and entertained the brief fantasy of Hope and Crosby in daykeepers’ black robes and silver-skull masks, blustering their way through the five houses of initiation.

  The last light of day was fading from the western sky when I reached the cemetery, wreathed in the shadows of Augustus Powell’s towering spires atop the Church of the Holy Saint Anthony. A few mourners lingered from the day’s funeral services, standing beside freshly filled graves, but otherwise the grounds were empty.

  I made my way to the Freeman family crypt and, passing the entrance, continued on to the back, where a copse of trees grow a few feet away from the structure’s unbroken rear wall.

  As Don Javier had taught me a lifetime ago in the Rattling House, I started towards the wall, and an instant before colliding with it turned aside toward an unseen direction and shadowed my way through to the other side.

  Don Mateo was waiting for me within. He’d already changed out of his hearse driver’s uniform and had dressed in his customary blue serge suit, western shirt printed with bucking broncos and open at the neck, a red sash of homespun cotton wound around his waist like a cummerbund.

  “Little brother,” he said, a smile deepening the wrinkles around the corners of his eyes. He raised his shotglass filled to the rim with homemade cane liquor in a kind of salute. “You’re just in time.”

  When Mateo speaks in English, it usually means that he’s uncertain about something, but when he gets excited—or angry—he lapses back into Yucatan. Tonight he’d spoken in Spanish, typically a sign his mood was light, and when I greeted him I was happy to do the same.

  “To your health,” I added in English, and, taking the shotglass from his hands, downed the contents in a single gulp, then spat on the floor a libation to the spirits. Don Javier always insisted that there were beneficent dwellers in the Otherworld, and libations in their honor might win their favor. But while I’d learned in the years I spent living with the two daykeepers, either in their cabin in the forest or in the hidden temples of Xibalba, to honor the customs handed down by their Mayan forebears, and knew that the villains and monsters of their beliefs were all too real, I still have trouble imagining there are any intelligences existing beyond reality’s veil that have anything but ill intent for mankind.

  When I’d finished my shot, Don Mateo poured another for himself, and drank the contents and spat the libation just as ritual demanded. Then, the necessary business of the greeting concluded, he set the glass and bottle aside and began to shove open the lid of the coffin in which my tools are stored.

  “Four nights you’ve hunted this demon, little brother,” he said, lifting out the inky black greatcoat and handing it over. “Perhaps tonight will be the night.”

  I drew the greatcoat on over my suit. “Three victims already is three too many.” Settling the attached short cape over my shoulders, I fastened the buttons. “But what kind of demon freezes its victims to death?”

  The old daykeeper treated me to a grin, shrugging. “You are the one with the Sight, not I.” His grin began to falter as he handed over the shoulder-holster rig. “Though Don Javier might have known.”

  I checked the spring releases on both of the silver-plated Colt .45s and then arranged the short cape over my shoulders to conceal them. “Perhaps,” I said. But it had been years since the great owl of the old daykeeper had visited us in dreams.

  As I slid a half-dozen loaded clips, pouches of salt, a Zippo lighter, and a small collection of crystals into the greatcoat’s pockets, Don Mateo held the mask out to me, the light from the bare bulb overhead glinting on the skull’s silvered surface.

  The metal of the mask, cool against my cheeks and forehead, always reminds me of the weeks and months I spent in the Rattling House, learning to shadow through solid objects, cold patches left behind as I rotated back into the world. I never did master the art of shifting to other branches of the World Tree, though, much to Don Javier’s regret.

  The slouch hat was last out of the coffin, and when I had settled it on my head, Don Mateo regarded me with something like paternal pride. “I should like to see those upstarts in San Francisco and Chicago cut so fine a figure.”

  The mask hid my scowl, for which I was grateful.

  Since beginning my nocturnal activities in Recondito in ’31 I’ve apparently inspired others to follow suit—the Black Hand in San Francisco, the Scarlet Scarab in New York, the Scorpion in Chicago. Perhaps the pulp magazine’s ruse works as intended, and like so many here in the city, they assume the Wraith to be entirely fictional. There are times when I regret the decision to hide in plain sight, fictionalizing accounts of my activities in the pages of The Wraith Magazine so that any reports of a silver masked figure seen lurking in the streets of Recondito will be written off as an overimaginative reader with more costuming skill than sense.

  But noisome as such crass imitators are, whether inspired by the reality or the fiction, as I tooled up this evening I never imagined that I’d be forced to contend with one here in my own city.

  Don Mateo recited a benediction, invoking the names Dark Jaguar and Macaw House, the first mother-father pair of daykeepers, and of White Sparkstriker, who had brought the knowledge to our branch of the World Tree. He called upon Ah Puch the Fleshless, the patron deity of Xibalba, to guide our hands and expand my sight. Had we still been in the Yucatan, the old daykeeper would have worn his half-mask of jaguar pelt and burned incense as offering to his forebears’ gods. Since coming to California, though, he’s gradually relaxed his observances, and now the curling smoke of a smoldering Lucky Strike usually suffices.

  This demon of cold has struck the days previous without pattern or warning, once each in Northside, Hyde Park, and the waterfront. When Don Mateo and I headed out in the hearse, as a result, we proceeded at random, roaming from neighborhood to neighborhood, the old daykeeper on the lookout for any signs of disturbance, me searching not with my eyes but with my Sight for any intrusion from the Otherworld.

  I glimpsed some evidence of incursion near the Pinnacle Tower, but quickly determined it was another of Carmody’s damnable “experiments.” I’ve warned Rex before that I won’t allow his institute to put the city at risk unnecessarily, but they have proven useful on rare occasions, so I haven’t yet taken any serious steps to curtail their activities. I know that his wife agrees with me, though, if only for the sake of their son Jacob.

  I caught a glimpse of the cold demon in the Financial District, and I shadowed out of the moving hearse and into the dark alley with a Colt in one hand and a fistful of salt in the other, ready to disrupt the invader’s tenuous connection to reality. But I’d not even gotten a good look at the demon when it turned in midair and vanished entirely from view.

  The body of the demon’s fourth and latest victim lay at my feet. It was an older man, looking like a statue that had been toppled off its base. Arms up in a defensive posture, one foot held aloft to take a step the victim never completed. On the victim’s face, hoarfroast riming the line of his jaw, was an expression of shock and terror. But before I had a chance to examine the body further, I heard the sounds of screaming from the next street over.

  There is a body, I Sent to Don Mateo’s thoughts as I raced down the alleyway to investigate. Had the demon retreated from reality only to reemerge a short distance away?

  But it was no denizen of the Otherworld menacing the young woman huddled in the wan pool of the streetlamp’s light. Her attackers were of a far more mundane variety—or so I believed. I pocketed the salt and filled both hands with silver-plated steel.

  Eleven years writing purple prose for The Wraith Magazine, and it creeps even into my private thoughts. Ernest
would doubtless consider his point made, if he knew, and that bet made in Paris decades ago finally to be won.

  The young woman was Mexican, and from her dress I took her to be a housekeeper, likely returning from a day’s work cleaning one of the miniature mansions that lined the avenues of Northside. She was sprawled on the pavement, one shoe off, arms raised to shield her face. Two men stood over her, Caucasians in dungarees, workshirts, and heavy boots. The older of the two had the faded blue of old tattoos shadowing his forearms, suggesting a previous career in the merchant marine, while the younger had the seedy look of a garden-variety hoodlum. With hands clenched in fists and teeth bared, it was unclear whether they wanted to beat the poor girl or take advantage of her—likely both, and in that order.

  The hoodlum reached down and grabbed the woman’s arm roughly, and as he attempted to yank her to her feet she looked up and her gaze fell on me. Or rather, her gaze fell on the mask, which in the shadows she might have taken to be a disembodied silver skull floating in the darkness. Already terrified by her attackers, the woman’s eyes widened on seeing me, and her shouts for help fell into a hushed, awestruck silence.

  The prevention of crime, even acts of violence, is not the Wraith’s primary mission, nor did the situation seem at first glance to have any bearing on my quest for vengeance, but still I couldn’t stand idly by and see an innocent imperiled. But even before springing into action, my Sight caught a glimpse of the tendril that rose from the shoulders of the tattooed man, disappearing in an unseen direction. No mere sailor down on his luck, the tattooed man was possessed, being “ridden” by an intelligence from beyond space and time. And protecting the people of Recondito from such incursions is the mission of the Wraith—and if the Ridden was in league with those whom I suspected, vengeance might be served, as well.

  “Unhand her,” I said, stepping out of the shadows and into view. I Sent as I spoke, the reverberation of thought and sound having a disorienting effect on the listener that I often used to my advantage. “Or answer to me.”