Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  Lane tried to remember where he had left the damn wireless telephone as he watched the staring weirdo. His cellular was still in the car. He had a baseball bat behind the counter with him, but wasn’t entirely sure he could get enough swing out of it if this oddball turned out to be hauling some sort of firearm beneath his coat. Lane had thankfully never been held up before, but then again, the drawer only held about fifty dollars at any given time these days. People and their goddamn credit cards were diminishing both the need for cash and Lane’s profits in three percent increments.

  The man watched him carefully before answering.

  “I believe…I need help,” he said in a well-groomed and sharp voice.

  “Listen, Buddy. I sell comic books. If you need help, I can call you a cab or an ambulance or something.” Lane did not think that the man looked like a transient, but who knew these days?

  The man had a glazed look in his gaze. “No,” he said with an absent wave. “Not like that. I mean…I’ve a problem.”

  “Hey man, we’ve all got problems, right?” Lane said. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not a bartender, but if you’re looking for that kind of help, there’s a psychiatrist two doors down.”

  “Y-you can help me, sir.”

  “You know, I’m really starting to doubt that,” Lane said. “Here, let me find my phone and I’m going to get someone who can.” Lane was beginning to get extremely uncomfortable. There was something familiar with the way the strange customer looked, not as if Lane had simply seen him somewhere, but as if he had actually known him at some point. He didn’t give a damn what exactly it was, he was going to get the police down here just in case he couldn’t get rid of the guy himself.

  Lane found the telephone in the stocking room, buried beneath a pile of backordered issues.

  “Help me,” the lean figure asked again from the doorway. He had followed Lane in without a noise.

  Now Lane had no hesitation. He dialed 911 and brought the phone up to his ear.

  Just as the operator on the other end had begun to speak, the figure before him dropped his coat. Lane dropped his jaw in turn.

  “This is 911, please state your emergency. Hello?”

  “Uh, hi, yes. I’m sorry, I seem to have accidentally pressed the emergency button on my phone,” Lane said dazedly.

  “Is everything alright, sir?”

  “Um, yeah. Sure thing,” Lane said blankly. “Thanks.” He hung up the phone and gawked at his customer.

  “Y—you,” Lane stammered. “But how…”

  The man beamed at him. Beneath his overcoat, he sported a lemon-yellow spandex suit that clung to every sharp angle of his lean-muscled body. Emerging from the top of each shoulder and down his chest was a sucker-covered blue tentacle, which each began to unwind from where they had been coiled around his waist.

  “You know how to help me?” the man said hopefully. He reached his arms out to Lane, who stumbled back and into a stack of empty boxes.

  “You—you’re him.” Lane watched the man with a mixture of fear and disbelief. Having worked around the comic industry for so many years, Lane had seen his share of homemade costumes and fanboy creations. Don’t get him wrong, some of them had been damned good costumes, great in fact, but none of them held a candle to what he was looking at now. Only one good look had told Lane’s rational mind to take a hike. He was looking at Whippoorwill. Not a guy who looked like Whippoorwill dressed in a slimy leotard, but the actual arch-nemesis of Foglight, one of comicdom’s less popular silver-age heroes.

  “Whip—,” Lane began. “This isn’t possible. You. Who are you really?”

  Whippoorwill tilted his head in further confusion.

  “My good man, I…can’t quite explain the feeling that drew me here. To this…art gallery.” His tentacles had nearly unwound themselves, and had begun to slither about his body silently, leaving wet trails across the impossibly slick material of his suit. “I cannot remember how I came to be here, or even…what my name is for that matter.” This he said in a serious whisper. “But you know who I am, do you not?”

  Lane could not lie to save his life, but at the moment found himself stuck in one of those frozen instances of thought in which he could see multiple outcomes resulting from both of his available answers. What would Whippoorwill do if he regained whatever had been supposedly lost of his memory? He might sap Lane’s body of all energy with his tentacles, as Lane had watched him do many years ago in the pages of countless Foglight comics. He pictured himself as a dried up husk lying on the office floor, to be found by the unsuspecting Benny.

  “You killed the Dimension Bounders,” Lane said. “How can you not remember who the hell you are? Just look at you.”

  Whippoorwill did take a look down at himself. He lifted his eyes back to Lane with a confused frown.

  “For god’s sake, you’ve got tentacles, dude!”

  The comic-book villain shot Lane a sharp look.

  “Sorry, I mean, yes. Yes, I know who you are.” He shook his head in disbelief. “But just how in the hell did you get here is what I want to know.” Lane dropped into the folding chair that served as his ass-rest for when he had to sort out new weekly arrivals. He looked behind the man again to be sure that there was no possibility of a hidden cameraman waiting to jump out and call him a gullible asshole. There wasn’t one.

  Lane chewed his lip and murmured, “Whippoorwill.”

  At this, the man’s face showed a slight change in emotion, as if registering the tiniest of connections with the name.

  “Whippoorwill?” he repeated.

  “Does the name Donald Billingsly mean anything to you?” Lane asked.

  “Not in the least,” Whippoorwill answered. “Why?”

  Lane shifted in his seat. “Because he created you.”

  A full box of books flew past Lane’s head and into a wall. Whippoorwill’s face had contorted into a scowl. “You are withholding information from me! You know what it is that I seek, and I will see to it that you reveal every detail to me.” Lane watched him in fear. The villain’s tentacles swirled and writhed madly in the air around him. “I wish to know everything, most of all how it is that you know me.”

  Lane stood up slowly. “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll tell you all I can.”

  “The first time I met you was in 1978, when you first tried to level the Century Bank of New York City,” Lane explained. “I read as you tried again and again to master the underworld of that great city, only to be foiled at every attempt.” Lane found the box that he had been searching for, pulled out a thin slip containing a comic, and pressed it reluctantly toward Whippoorwill.

  “Foglight,” Whippoorwill whispered, reading the cover. He looked at it longingly. His own face stared back at him in dot-matrix ink from the cover. “Yes, Foglight. And the Defenders of the Boroughs. I remember it…but how…” He shredded the book in half in an instant.

  “You mean to tell me,” he started toward Lane, “that you know who I am because of, this?” He held the tatters up in the air. “This meaningless collection of pages?”

  Lane simply nodded. Sweat rings had begun to form on his shirt. It looked as though one of the poorer possible reactions he’d imagined was manifesting itself before him.

  “This is outrageous!” Whippoorwill pulled more books from the box, staring briefly at each, before hurling them the length of the shop and digging for more. He turned on Lane and grabbed him with inhumanly strong arms, hoisting the man into the air. “All of it. Tell me more. Right now!”

  And then it hit him. Whippoorwill’s shaking him must have jostled something loose in his head, because at once he remembered a very important piece of information. He recalled in that instant just how Whippoorwill had finally been defeated, never to again be seen in the pages of another comic book.

  Foglight had used a multi-dimensional rift to send Whippoorwill into the vast nothingness of the universe, to some unknown dimension of oblivion.

  “It worked
,” Lane said. “Holy shit. It worked.”

  “What worked?” Whippoorwill menaced, his tentacles tracing Lane’s jaw-line hungrily.

  “He sent you away,” Lane said. “Don’t you remember it?” Whippoorwill lowered him a little so that he could breathe. “I can’t believe I forgot it. Foglight banished you from the planet forever. And…” He laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of it all. “And you wound up here. Here in the world where you were nothing more than a bad idea.”

  “An idea?” Whippoorwill said. He reached out a hand to Lane’s throat. “My good man, it will come as quite a surprise to you then to learn that sometimes your thoughts can kill you.”

  “Wait,” Lane shrieked. “You need me!”

  Whippoorwill slowly loosened his hold. “Speak.”

  Lane’s mind raced. “Only I know how to get you back to your home world,” he lied. “Back to the Earth of your reality.”

  Whippoorwill snorted, and regarded Lane with a cold look. “And how do you propose to do that? Perhaps you think I should physically force my way into one of these picture books. Do you think me a fool?” He hoisted Lane into the air again, this time hurling him across the room and into one of the nearest racks of books.

  They would have to be hardbacks, wouldn’t they, Lane thought. He scrambled to the desk platform and found his Louisville Slugger. When he stood, he saw Whippoorwill flying through the air directly at him. Lane dove for the floor. Clawing along the threadbare carpet, he shot upright again, this time prepared for the hurtling Whippoorwill and his menacing tentacles.

  Lane swung the bat, connecting with less than he had hoped for, but still pounding a scream of rage from his attacker. One of the tentacles latched onto the bat and pulled it from Lane’s grip. With one fluid movement, the bat swung back around and smashed Lane across the face. He felt several teeth crunch inside his mouth, along with god knew what else. He crumpled to the floor, dripping blood on the tattered pages of the Foglight back issues.

  Trying his hardest to mumble a plea, Lane raised his arms in defense. He saw Whippoorwill fling the bat away and come lunging at him, tentacles spread wide. Lane felt them wrap around his neck and arm.

  “Ah, yes. This all feels very familiar,” Whippoorwill said in a pleased and calm tone. “It’s all coming back to me now. I do believe you have indeed helped me, sir.”

  Lane began to lose contact with his senses. He felt extremely heavy, and knew in some distant corner of his mind that his life force was being extracted by the vicious blue appendages.

  “Hold still,” Whippoorwill commanded. Lane had lost control of his body and slumped further to the floor. And then the floor seemed to give way beneath him and into a black cloud. Aware of passing through a void of nothingness, Lane’s eyes were so suddenly assaulted when he emerged from the dark and into a picture of such vibrant color that his skull throbbed. A brief struggling glance told Lane that he was somehow impossibly suspended from a hole in the middle of the sky, overlooking a rooftop, while he could still see his comic shop though the hole where the rest of his body resided. Meanwhile, he was dying.

  A blur of movement caught his wavering sight and he suddenly felt like a Chinese finger trap that was being pulled on at both ends. He felt Whippoorwill’s tentacles still wrapped about his arm and throat, and saw the villain’s arm grabbing for him, but there was another set of arms as well.

  Lane gasped.

  “Pull,” a gritty voice commanded, strengthening its grip on Lane’s free arm. “Now.”

  Lane was not sure where the burst of strength came from, but it was probably next door to the area inside him concerned with self-preservation. He hauled for all he was worth, finally emerging again into his comic shop.

  “The flaming hell is—” Whippoorwill said. He did not have a chance to finish his sentence, as a hand reached through the hole beneath Lane and punched him square in the nose.

  “You,” Whippoorwill said. “How did you…” Another gloved fist connected with Whippoorwill’s face. Lane was released and hurled aside as Foglight stood to his full height, emerging completely from the hole in the floor, which was actually one of the blood-smattered panels of the comic book bearing the hero’s namesake.

  “I knew it was too easy,” Foglight said, pulling his signature black duster straight. He arched an eyebrow, making creases in the figure-eight black mask covering his eyes. Without any further comment, he leapt at Whippoorwill, who had crouched in anticipation. He caught Foglight’s tackle and the two went tumbling through the air and into the nearest display case.

  Glass shattered and sprayed across the carpet. Lane had just begun to regain his breathing, and watched in fearful amazement as two figures of his childhood entertainment grappled in the middle of his store. Foglight’s duster was impervious to the suckers on Whippoorwill’s tentacles. And although Whippoorwill was much faster than Foglight, Lane was reminded why the fight record between the two had always remained-one sided.

  Beams of light erupted from Foglight’s palms. One shot right past Lane’s ear, only to rebound from surface to surface until the entire interior of the shop was webbed in the wakes of light trails. Whippoorwill dodged each bouncing beam with increasing narrowness. The beams pulled into a tighter formation.

  Whippoorwill reached out for one with a tentacle. He screamed when the orb of light burned right through it, leaving him with a charred stump at half the previous length.

  “Pulling out all the stops this time,” Foglight said.

  Whippoorwill dove as the remaining beam nearly bore a hole in his skull. Foglight called the light back to him and caught Whippoorwill in his attempt to run. He threw a bone-crunching fist into the speedy villain’s face. His remaining tentacle wrapped around Foglight’s boot and pulled him off balance. Foglight’s jacket may have been impervious to Whippoorwill’s energy suction, but his pants were not.

  Color began to drain from Foglight’s grimacing face. He tried feebly to fire his light beams, but Whippoorwill swatted his hands away.

  “Look what you did to me, you filthy son of a bitch,” Whippoorwill howled. “I’m going to suck you dry. You hear me?”

  In his reverie, Whippoorwill had forgotten all about the terrorized store owner, which turned out to be a fairly sizable mistake on his part. The Louisville Slugger connected with Whippoorwill’s square jaw with a satisfactory thud.

  Even more satisfactory to Lane, was watching Whippoorwill slump to the ground, unconscious. And then continuing to slide through the ground, into the cavernous art panel back into his own world.

  Foglight shook his groggy head and regarded Lane with a stoic nod. “Thanks.” He followed Whippoorwill’s disappearing form with his eyes and climbed to his feet.

  “Uh, sure,” Lane said, resting his bat in the crook of his elbow.

  “I sent him away once,” Foglight said. “I apologize. It’s a mistake that I won’t make again.” With that, he jumped down through the comic-book page.

  Lane saw that the panel again looked solid, closed forever. He sensed it to be true. He regarded his thrashed store with wide eyes and an aching jaw. A real-life comic hero had just beat the living shit out of his arch-nemesis in his place of business, in the process destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of property and causing physical harm to Lane himself.

  Lane stood motionless for almost a full minute as he regarded the mayhem surrounding him. And then he laughed. “Yes!” he said with an exuberant fist pump and a triumphant swing of his bat.

  Seconds later, Benny walked through the door with a pizza in hand. “Holy shee-it,” Benny said. He looked at Lane, who was covered from the chin down in blood and grinning from ear to ear and laughing. “Uh, what happened?”

  Lane shrugged, tapping the baseball bat into his palm. “If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a million times,” Lane said. “We don’t accept checks.”

  Pit Stop

  Two hours ago, an extra cup of coffee had sounded like a good idea to Liv Dunmill. Now,
cruising down the two-lane highway fifteen minutes outside of West Arbor, her bladder cursed her from beneath the seatbelt. Had it not been for the persistence of her sister, she would not have stayed so late at her parents’, nor needed the additional cup of bitter Folgers that Trisha had insisted upon for her drive home. But, being the accepting listener that she had always been, Liv had stayed late to hear the most recent woes of the younger sibling’s love life.

  Paying for her sympathy in growing discomfort, Liv told herself that all she had to do was last another four miles. Though her bathroom was nowhere near pristine, it sounded much more appealing than the alternative. She was certainly not the outdoorsy type.

  But any hopes of actually making it home before she had an accident were shattered by the appearance of heavy traffic that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere in front of her. Tail lights glared back at her like bright crimson stop signs, and the flow of cars halved in speed.

  “Fuck!” Liv shouted. Although she was never usually one for profanity, willful manners would never be a match for the call of nature. “Hurry up! Go, go, go!”

  And then her heart sank. Rotating blue and red orbs floated in the distance, perhaps a mile down the road. A glance to the empty oncoming lane confirmed her suspicion. The traffic from the opposite lane had undoubtedly been diverted back through town and down Highway 9. There had to have been an accident. Again she swore, repeatedly.

  Liv weighed her options, which were few. She could either pull over and relieve herself, or press on and see just how long her bladder would hold out. Either way, the traffic wasn’t thinning. In another minute she would be at a complete stop.

  But if she were to pull her sporty little Mazda over right then, she would probably give a good number of passersby a show. And some weirdoes were into that kind of thing. She groaned. It was hard enough peeing in her own apartment when her cat walked past the open bathroom door. She couldn’t bear the thought of some stranger seeing her at her most vulnerable.

  Another glance at the barren north-bound lane offered an idea so exciting that Liv nearly peed right there in her seat. She could turn around, head back north for half a mile and find somewhere out of sight of her fellow road-bound prisoners. It was such a perfect plan that she broke out of the crawling line immediately and threw her car into a tight u-turn.