The Lavender Menace

by Tom Cardamone

  But that familiar fake emotion, which had always faded as easily as the imaginary rope bridge, did not fade. I could almost see Professor Buchard, and my anger was suddenly, unusually real. My chest seized. I couldn’t catch my breath, which terrified me. I felt my knees bending, and the bark scraping under my feet. The sky seemed to darken.

  Long seconds later, I heard myself gasp. I was finally taking a breath, and as I listened to myself draw it in, I realized that it was the first sound I’d heard since this started. Was this a seizure? I had seen my aunt Janet have a seizure at a family reunion two summers earlier, but she had been twitching uncontrollably.

  Not me. I was still. Unbelievably still. The spongy damp of moss against my legs told me I was straddling the log. I could hear the sounds of the forest now, and the sky was bright again. My chest though… the pain was gone, but I could still feel something there, as though I was being pulled. The panic was rising. I really could feel something grabbing my chest and pulling. Toward the cave?

  I looked up then, and for the first time I saw the thing that would change the entire shape of my life.

  Of course, it wasn’t much to look at. Not yet. Hardly more than an unsettling dark stain across the creek, floating above the leaves and sticks that carpeted the ground. A stain in the air, like an oily drop of ink in a clear bowl of water.

  “Overactive imagination”. It was a refrain I had heard more than a few times, and maybe it was true. But I knew the difference between what was real and what wasn’t. Logic told me that what I was seeing couldn’t be real. Something had to be wrong with my eyes, like when the sky had appeared to darken a moment ago.

  The trouble was that I could feel that dark spot, a connection, as if my own nerves ended in its shadow. The stain just hung there, I could see the mouth of the cave right through it and I could feel it tugging at my chest.

  Seconds later, the stain was gone. I was snapped like a rubber band, knocked backward and rolled off the log. I didn’t remember falling, but my knees were in the creek. The abrupt pain of rocks cutting into my kneecaps brought my mind back into focus. When I opened my eyes, I was looking down at the dirt on the bank. I smelled my own vomit, and took comfort that I could smell again.

  Somehow I knew that what happened to me wasn’t normal. I loved my family, but instinct told me that I was better off keeping this incident to myself, so when I ran home I only admitted to falling off the log.

  “It was nothing, really! Wet moss and soft bark, that’s all.”

  And gravity, added my mother, tying her hair back with a quick motion. She gave me a smile, and then turned to grab the first aid box she always kept to the left of the sewing table. Whenever she wanted to talk, or spend time together, or bandage my knees, my mother always took me into her sewing room. That’s what she called it, but the room was really much more special to her than that. The sewing machine was beside a long table that held all of her little projects, and they both faced a picture window that looked out over the woods. She loved to work in there. Two walls had large shelves filled with fabrics, sewing notions, art supplies and other things that I grew up thinking of as “Mom stuff”—because if you needed something, she always had it. The shelves also held her books, which included many photo albums, and a growing collection of mementos from my childhood. What I remember most vividly of that room, though, is the other wall, loaded with family photographs. My grandparents were represented here, with all of their children, every wedding, every birth. Most of these photos captured moments that happened a long time ago in distant places, but she told their stories so well that I felt like I knew each of these people as well as my own parents.

  The sewing room was a comforting place where I always felt important. All of my school pictures were given positions of prominence; each moment of my life was valuable to her. She had framed images from every ultrasound. In my innocence I wondered if I was an only child because there would never be enough room for pictures of two of us. Once upon a time I had even asked, but Mom only picked up an ultrasound and gazed at it for some moments. “There would always be room for more,” she said, “but it just wasn’t meant to be for us.”

  Surrounded by such love it was hard to keep the truth to myself, but I did not know what had really happened, much less how to explain it.

  It would be a long time before I ventured back into those woods.

  I was changed that day. Terrified that the incident might repeat itself, I avoided the two things that my eleven-year-old logic regarded as triggers: the woods, and my own mind. I was afraid to play. I became a very serious boy, keeping few friends and limiting my leisure time to activities like watching television, which discouraged imagination. In this way, I delayed another occurrence until I was thirteen, when my unbalanced hormones made it impossible to keep myself under control.

  The worst part of my teenage school day was the mandatory PE period. A thin kid with no interest in sports and no social circle was fair game, and in PE the girls weren’t around to keep the jocks from going too far. The best I could hope for was to hang back and try to be inconspicuous. That’s what I was doing that Wednesday, sixth period, on the football field.

  My goal was always the same: stay as far away from the ball as I could. Despite seven years of public school, and being born a male in the USA, I had never learned the rules of football and I wasn’t about to start now. I stood near the edge of the field, many yards away from what I believed might have been called the “line of scrimmage,” watching my classmates struggle without really knowing the point. Then, out of nowhere, it happened again, almost exactly the same as before. The sky darkened, and I was dragged forward by my chest. I fell across the twenty yard line and watched as the sun reignited. The familiar grip on my chest did not release, and I looked toward the source. Toward the boys at the line of scrimmage.

  I was scared, but mostly I was just so sad that it had happened again. It was almost two years since that day in the woods, and I’d begun to think I had made the whole thing up. But I hadn’t. Directly in front of me, right behind the players, was that cloud of ink again. Not quite a shape, maybe darker than last time, but I could still see the other boys through the shadow.

  Again, only a few seconds passed before I was opening my eyes, face-down on the football field. I barely threw up this time. Since it had appeared behind most of my team and lasted so briefly, nobody seemed to have noticed the shadow. But some of the boys had seen me faint, bringing a lot of unwelcome attention my way. I was sent to the school nurse. In half an hour I was on my way home, diagnosed with mononucleosis, which guaranteed me several days off from school. Now that my condition had returned, I was determined to use those days well.

  I needed to know what was happening to me, but I was afraid to ask anyone. So exercising my best National Honor Society instincts, I waited for my parents to leave for work, and then I hopped on my bicycle and rode to the public library.

  I held onto a dim hope that my situation wasn’t as unusual as I feared, and that this trip to the library would end with the textbook explanation I needed. There are plenty of things that people don’t talk about, but surely the books would divulge what I sought. Maybe adults just kept the weird stuff under wraps, because they don’t want to frighten their children with all the bizarre things our bodies might do to us. Or maybe it was simply that a surplus of hormones can cause delusions, and they would eventually pass. The only good thing about not knowing was that I wasn’t sure, yet, that I was some kind of freak. Not completely sure.

  Even the card catalog embarrassed me. Somehow, I thought, the librarian could see that I was looking up the word “puberty”. I slunk off toward the stacks, grabbing a couple of other books along the way, not even looking to see what they were. It didn’t matter. I just needed something to hide behind.

  I found the section I needed, uncomfortably close to the main reading area. Crouching, I tri
ed to shield the embarrassing shelf with my body while reading the titles off the spines. There were few books that seemed to deal directly with my predicament, and a cursory inspection revealed little to recommend one over another. If I was going to choose, I would need time to examine them more carefully, and privacy to do it in. I took them all, sandwiched them between the decoy books and tried to look nonchalant as I meandered a circuitous route to the bathroom.

  Once inside, alone, I locked myself into a stall and began to pore over the indexes and chapter headings, searching for some kind of explanation. But even the promisingly-titled What’s Happening to My Body? offered nothing pertaining to mine. These books were all the same. After spending hours in the bathroom I had found only hormones, hair, and growing pains. Nothing about recurring hallucinations, cardiac seizures, or apparitions.

  Another thing the books had in common is that they all recommended that any farther questions be addressed to a parent, doctor, school official, clergyman or other trusted adult. As much as it pained me, I resigned myself to taking just this step. I would talk to my father.

  My father and I, we didn’t have a lot in common but I always knew he had my back. I can only imagine what he thought when I came into his den and asked if we could turn off the football game. When I recall the way I told him that “I need to talk to you,” my own grimness almost moves me to laughter. Any child that serious must seem comical to an adult mind. But Dad stifled the smile and obligingly muted the television. He gave me a chair and if any part of a smirk remained, he didn’t let it extend beyond the borders of his mustache. He asked, “What’s on your mind, son?” When I think of his voice, I remember only the sound of concern.

  As I sat down, I realized my mistake. Putting all my effort into finding the courage to talk to my father, I’d forgotten to figure out what I was going to say.

  “Something’s been happening to me,” I told him, with great effort. “Something I don’t understand. These… feelings. They make me sick. But I don’t seem to have any control over them!”

  My father started to nod, and for a moment I felt hopeful again. Like he knew what I was talking about. Like he was going to tell me the secret that the library books wouldn’t share.

  “These feelings,” he asked. “Have you had them long?”

  “Only a couple of times,” I confessed. “The first was a long time ago, and I thought it was gone, but then it happened again this week! It was during PE. I was standing in the field watching the others play football when it hit me.”

  “Son, I can see that this is hard for you to talk about, and I think I know what you’re going to tell me. It must have been scary for you, realizing how it made you feel to look at those other boys. You’re so young, and your hormones are just beginning to flood your body with urges you’ve never had before. But I’ll bet you thought you knew what to expect.”

  “Dad–”

  “Its okay, Son. It’s no wonder these feelings confused you. Every day you watch television, and you see stories about young men and their interest in young women. You thought you were going to be just like them, and you’re not. But I promise you, there is nothing wrong with a young man who develops an interest in other young men. It’s less common, but you are normal.”

  His eyes searched mine. He was trying so hard to give me comfort, offering so much understanding. The irony is that he was right. I’d known for years that I was gay, but I was so obsessed with figuring out the shadow and its effect on me that I never even thought about the fact that being gay was unusual, or that my parents might be concerned about it. I wasn’t hiding it from them. I was hiding something else, which was so huge that I forgot to worry about the normal stuff.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, trying to look… relieved, maybe? He gave me a hug.

  “Son, I love you. And I’m proud that you came to me with this. I want you to know that I will always support you, and if you ever have any problems you can always ask for my help.”

  And that’s how I sort of came out to my father. The good thing was that, as far as my parents were concerned, it explained my last two years of increasingly strange behavior. They were wrong, but they only wanted to help me.

  Skullkick’s parents separated him from the rest of his family once they knew what he could do, and that’s just what I was afraid of. But later, as a super villain, I conducted myself like my folks were watching, and I wanted to make them proud. I realize now that my family never would have betrayed me, but if you aren’t so lucky, turn to page 146 right away. Skullkick has indispensable advice about the trials that may await you.

  To my adolescent mind, the conversation with my father was all the proof I needed that no book or trusted adult could help me. I was going to have to solve this problem on my own. That Saturday after breakfast, I entered the forest for the first time since I was eleven years old.

  All of my old trails had grown over, but I pushed through by habit along the same paths I had always taken. The farther in I went, trampling the new ferns and huckleberries, the larger the knot in my stomach became. But I pressed on, because it made sense to return to the place where it all started: the old log across the creek became my research station. That Saturday I sat on the log, closed my eyes, and tried to remember exactly how I felt the first time it happened. I thought about that sensation of something gripping the inside of my chest. Of darkness crowding in from the edge of my vision. The snap of the rubber band.

  For an hour or more I just sat on the log and thought about it, freaking myself out but accomplishing nothing. Something was wrong. Something was missing, something so unbelievably stupid that it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Professor Francois Buchard of the Royal Institute. My imaginary nemesis. He had been there the first time, and maybe he needed to be here now.

  So I imagined him.

  I was a little out of practice, but I remembered the way Professor Buchard had always looked: his thin ginger hair, his wire glasses, that impractical sweater vest he wore even in the jungle. Sitting on the log, holding onto the memory of that tightness in my chest, I could almost see the professor standing there in front of the cave.

  As soon as I could see him, the sky went dark. My breath grew shallow, but I knew what was coming. This time I didn’t fall, I did not stop breathing, and I kept my eyes open.

  It was a sideways means of getting there, but it worked. This was the first time that I summoned the shadow on purpose.

  This time, I saw it happen. The darkness came out of me. It slithered out of my chest as though drawn along a string, and I felt it leave my body like a splinter being pulled. Once outside of me it hovered close, confusing my senses. It was a ghostly part of me and I could almost feel it. Like seeing a friend get hurt and experiencing a flicker of sympathetic pain.

  I was able to stay calm though, to watch the shadow… and it did nothing. The shadow just was. So I did the only other thing that I knew was within my power. I tried to put it away.

  I concentrated on the tug, that tension stretching outward from me, toward the darkness. I tried to imagine pulling it back inside. Nothing happened at first, but eventually the rubber band went slack. The shadow funneled back down the line. I felt a jolt when it smashed into my chest, but I was braced for it and I kept my seat on the log. A wave of nausea washed over my body, but I held my breakfast down.

  In a way, I started to come out of my shell after that. I still didn’t know what any of this meant, and maybe the shadow could still appear involuntarily, but I knew it was possible to turn it off again. I still had to figure out the mental mechanism that controlled it, but I was far less afraid, and waning fear led to an increase in confidence. Not that I became a popular kid or took up sports, but I was no longer afraid to be seen. I walked the halls with my head held high. Nevertheless, most afternoons and all through the summer, I tended to retreat into the woods. I wasn’t always summoning the sh
adow, but I was always thinking about it, and wondering. Wondering if it was alien or mutation, if there were others like me, or if I had a specific purpose that I hadn’t figured out yet.

  And almost every day, I wished that one of those books in the library had some advice for me. I was lucky my particular ability developed quite gradually, giving me time to cope with each new change. Such good fortune is not very common in this business: take Harshmallow’s testimonial from chapter eight as a chilling example. We all know about the terrible effect she can have on human skin. But did you know that she used to be a harmless wall-crawling cat burglar called Scuttlebug before that signature “roasting” power manifested in the middle of a heist?

  I kept testing my limits. I learned that I could keep the shadow out as long as I wanted, more or less. It got easier to summon and retract, and while those actions took some effort, it didn’t seem to require any significant amount of energy just to maintain its presence. As time went by, the shadow became more defined, and though not yet fully formed, the general human shape was undeniable.

  My first real clue, it turned out, was hiding in plain sight. One day, while I was in my mother’s sewing room, I noticed that the earliest image of my ultrasound was different from the others. The picture clearly showed two small blobs joined together. It seemed significant, and I couldn’t think of a better way to find out what it meant, so I asked my mother.

  “You could have been twins,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that she had thought about it often. “You started out that way.”

  “But what happened?”