One second, it’s the 31st of August. Summertime. The sky is clear, the air is hot and dry, the bees are buzzing and the trees are green. I’m thinking of baseball and jazz music, of western movies and progressive journalism and how much sunblock I should apply before I walk down to the grocery store to pick up some oatmeal raisin cookies to have with my afternoon tea, a tea enjoyed while sitting in the sun that comes through my bedroom window, reading some book about narrow history or a travel magazine, accompanied by the sounds of crackling vinyl records and birdsong outside.

The next second, it’s the first of September, and everything changes.

Now the reality is that nothing really changes. It’s still hot and dry and full of bugs out there, the baseball season’s not over yet, the local public radio jazz station is still broadcasting, and oatmeal raisin cookies are available for teatimes year round. And my records certainly aren’t going anywhere. Except that’s not true. Something does change. I can feel it, in my chest and my gut and my arms and legs and behind my eyes. Shivers run up my shoulders, my bones chill and my skin creeps and a funny kind of veil seems to fall across my eyes. I can still see, bit it all becomes fuzzy, shadowy, faded at the edges, like a vignette shot through a very old camera. Sights and sounds and smells and flavors become sharper, more incisive, and I find I listen a little harder when climbing the stairs at night on my way to bed. And so it goes, every single god damn year.

Obviously it’s all in my head. That is, after all, where I keep my mind. Sometimes I try to adopt and objective perspective and look at the situation as though I didn’t know anything about autumn or Samhain or Halloween or the “spooky season.” If I were an alien aboard a ship orbiting the Earth and studying it for the first time, what would I see? A minimal drop in the temperature readings for certain areas? The tiniest shortening of the hours when the sun is visible above the horizon? Would there even be any noticeable shift in people’s behavior on a large scale? In all likelihood, no. The most I would be aware of would probably be due to my pre-existing knowledge that this planet rotates upon a titled axis, which can only result in periodic changes in the climate of the areas roughly halfway between the equator and the poles. It gets colder for one half of the year, and warmer for the other. Assuming that the inhabitants of the planet are intelligent enough to have figured out that this seasonal change is because of their world’s spatial orientation, the probably don’t think much of it beyond having to change how they dress it gets especially cold or hot, but doubtless in bygone days, before they developed advanced ideas about astronomy and physics, they mad have attached various supernatural explanations for these jarring shifts.

Imagine if this hypothetical alien being landed on Earth and, once the shock of learning about the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life had worn off, it began asking human beings about how these seasonal climate changes affected their culture.

“Absolutely,” the human would say, “the changing of the seasons is one of the main ways we mark the passage of time. In fact we have many annual rituals, festivals, and celebrations that observe them. Of course they vary culture to culture, and again it all depends on what part of the Earth you live on, but the patterns are fairly consistent.”

“Naturally, naturally,” says the alien, “but tell me, what sort of annual celebrations does your culture observe?”

Now our human representative happens to live in the northern hemisphere in one of the many regions long-since colonized by Europeans, so his answers will be familiar to us. “Well,” he says, “most people’s favorite is the one that comes in midwinter, where families gather together at home to cook feasts, sing songs, exchange gifts, and sort of bond together against the cold and harsh world outside. Sometimes this festival has a religious significance, but sometimes not. Then in the springtime we celebrate a sort of new life for the year, when the trees bloom again and the baby animals are born. You’ll see a lot of symbols like birds and rabbits and so on. Oh, and we play this game where we take chicken eggs, boil them, paint them in bright colors, and hide them for our young to find and gather together.”

The visiting extraterrestrial cocks and eyebrow at this, or at least his alien equivalent of cocking an eyebrow. “How curious,” he says. “What about your summer?”

“Where I’m from,” the human says, “our biggest summer celebration is the anniversary of the official founding of our nation, or at least the date we consider to be the official founding. People gather outside in the warmer summer air to cook food for each other play games, and especially watch the fireworks.”

“Fire works?” the alien asks.

“Big chemical explosions we set off in the sky,” the human explains, “they’re bright, colorful, and noisy. People love it.”

The alien shakes his alien head. How peculiar humans are! “And,” he says to his human friend, “what about your…” (he checks his list of human words, to make sure he pronounces it correctly) “…autumn?”

The human rubs his chin. “Well,” he says, “the autumn festival’s kind of a funny one. It’s a little hard to explain. We do lots of different things, but the one you’ll probably hear the most about involves people dressing up in various scary costumes and wandering their local neighborhoods, going from house to house, threatening mischief if they’re not given some kind of sugary food.”

This time the alien raises both of his eyebrows. Or the alien equivalent, anyway.

“You dress up,” he says with trepidation, “in costumes?”

“Scary costumes, usually.”

“Whatever for?”

Our human representative thinks for a moment, not really sure how to respond. “Well,” he says, “it’s…fun.”

“You think it’s fun to scare each other?” the alien asks. “But…I was given to understand that pain and injury is was something your species always tries to avoid.”

“Oh we don’t really harm each other,” the human says, “at least not most of the time. There have been a few incidents down the years. People used to try and set one of our bigger cities on fire every year—”

“On fire?” the alien asks in shock.

“But not anymore!” the human quickly assures his visitor. “Or at least, it’s quite rare nowadays. But really for the most part it’s just fun and games.”

The alien stares at the human with alien incredulity. “You just said it’s common practice to threaten people at their homes unless they pay you some kind of tribute.”

“Oh—I mean—well really,” the human says, fumbling, “nobody ever really does anything. I mean sometimes people get things thrown at their house or their yard or car gets vandalized.” Suddenly the human smiles in recollection. “I remember once, when I was a kid, we had this neighbor who decided to hand out toothbrushes and floss and things like that because it was better for our teeth than candy, so me and my brother and one of our friends threw toilet paper all over his house. Served him right, handing out toothpaste instead of candy on Halloween! He was cleaning it off his roof for weeks.” And our representative of the human race laughs. The alien, meanwhile, makes some hurried notes about how really and truly strange humans are, and wonders just how wise it was to make contact with them in the first place.

Now obviously this is just a fun thought experiment, but I also think it speaks to a larger question about why people celebrate this time of year the way they do, or, if I’m being honest, why I do it the way I do.

It’s a question I come up against every year. Why do I care so much? Why is it such a big part of my life? For that matter why does it seem to be such a bigger part of my life than it is for anybody else? There’s no question that my generation loves Halloween, and in some of my darker moments I worry that we’re going to do to Halloween what the Baby Boomers did to Christmas—turn it into such a social, cultural, and economic leviathan that people learn to hate it—but that’s a question for another essay. The present question here is why it means so much to me, should it mean this much to me, and am I taking it to an unhealthy level? Is it just some holdover from my youth that I’m unwilling to let go of, or is ti about something deeper and more meaningful? And if it is, what is that deeper meaning?

More than a few times have I thought it all might just be down to the culture in which I grew up. It’d be naive to think that the economic forces of pop culture don’t have a strong effect on the people we grow up to be. And growing up in the 1990s, I was inundated with artifacts of horror culture. And not just horror culture, but children’s horror culture especially. I don’t know what it was about the 90s, but for some reason it was decided, or perhaps merely logically arrived at, that children were interested in the macabre, the creepy, and the gross. I suppose we could speculate that with the end of the Cold War, American culture took on a more somber and sophisticated attitude, and as such the adult horror media boom that began in the late 1960s and peaked in the late 70s and early 80s now seemed immature and too simplistic, which could account for the decline in both book sales and box office returns the horror genre experienced in the early 90s. But as adult interest in the genre waned, the focus shifted to children, who have always loved tales of ghosts and monsters. That combined with the noted popularity of films like 1988’s Beetlejuice and 1991’s The Addams Family had with children and the increased availability of classic horror films on home video seemed to be creating a new generation of “Monster Kids,” much like how the children of the 1950s first became enamored with horror because of late-night television broadcasts of the old Universal Monster films. This resurgence led to two new holiday classics, Hocus Pocus and The Nightmare Before Christmas (both released in 1992), new animated television series based on the Addams Family and Beetlejuice, a rise in horror-themed video games, and of course it all peaked with the Goosebumps phenomenon that dominated children’s book sales throughout the decade. Naturally, Halloween being the holiday most associated with horror, its popularity exploded with young people, and that love for the spookiest time of year might just have ingrained itself so deeply into our psyches that we brought it with us out of our childhoods and into our adulthoods.

But you know, even with all that logical argument, I’m not sure it quite rings true. After all, there were plenty of things I was obsessed with as a child that I have not carried with me into my adult life. I have not, for example, maintained much of an interest in the Power Rangers or Pokemon, except for the occasional moments of misty-eyed nostalgia. And even things I have maintained an interest in, like baseball, Godzilla movies, Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes have nowhere near the same kind of hold on my life that my yearly observance of the Halloween Season has. But why? Again and again, why?

I’ll be honest with you—sometimes it feels like a burden. Much as I love and look forward to this time of year every year, there’s a growing part of my brain that longs to just skip it altogether. I’m not quite sure why that is; maybe I’m just getting older and the traumas of my childhood are getting further and further away, or maybe all the stories of supernatural death and menace seem a good deal less appealing when I have to confront real-life moments of death and menace every day when I read the news. It’s also probably to do with how vast and cumbersome of an undertaking it has become over the years. As my collection of Halloween decorations and accessories (things I have come to refer to as my “tokens”) has continued to grow and develop, I find the prospect of pulling it all out of storage and hanging it up and out to be ever more tiresome, especially since I have no found a much stronger sense of my own interior aesthetics in the last decade, and having to pull all of that down to make room for pumpkins and ghosts is both physically and emotionally taxing. I suppose I also simply crave to be free of this thing that has taken such a strong hold on my life. In some ways it feels like a monster I must feed every year, whether I really want to or not. But really? These feelings are small compared to the intense joy and excitement I still feel every year as the summer months come to a close. Perhaps a more trained psychologist would call that an addiction. I will say this—it has not yet, even once, ever caused a problem for me. Can an addiction really be called such if it only brings good things into your life? Again, questions for other essays.

There is, of course, the therapeutic element. In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King said that one of the primary appeals of horror in any form of media, be it books, comics, video games or cinema, is how it creates a safe space for us to explore our fears and anxieties. In the worlds presented in horror fiction, we can confront those elements of life we’d normally rather not confront—death, violence, madness, infirmity, dissolution, powerlessness, and the old favorite, the Unknown—from a place of safe remove, and this can help better prepare us for the time when we must ultimately confront them in our own real lives. Obviously most of us have very little to fear form masked hatchet-wielding serial killers, but we all have anxieties about not being strong enough, smart enough, or brave enough to save ourselves from a terrible fate. Personally I’m not sure sure that horror fiction really has that much of a “survivalist counseling” element to its appeal, but then again I’ve been a horror fan all of my life so maybe the reason I don’t see that much effect is because the effect worked rather well.

The issue with how horror relates to Halloween, however, has even less of this significance because horror is not what Halloween is all about. Despite its apparent centrality, it’s actually perfectly possible to observe and celebrate Halloween without exposing yourself to so much as a drop of fake blood or a single plastic vampire fang. You could just as easily dress as a cowboy, a princess, a pirate, and astronaut, a superhero, or a clown (not the scary kind) and get just as much as a candy haul as you would decked out like Freddy, Jason, or even the Shape himself. Piles of autumn leaves and dried stalks of corn, homemade candy apples and popcorn balls, hay rides and apple cider donuts have just as much a place in Halloween as spiders, skeletons, and bats. Jack o’Lanterns have just as many smiles as they do scowls. And so assuming that Halloween’s meaning is tied to directly to horror is to dreadfully narrow the scope of the festival.

In fact it’s worth pointing out that our modern Halloween is not, despite popular belief, a surviving ancient pagan rite, but rather a secular reinterpretation of a medieval Christian festival called Hallowmass (or sometimes Hallowtide) that took place on the first and second days of November and involved saying prayers to the saints and for the beloved dead. The word Halloween is, after all, a contraction of the phrase “All Hallow’s Eve,” a fancy name for the night before All Hallow’s Day, now more properly referred to as All Saint’s Day. And even though old Catholic customs can sometimes take a bit of a morbid stance on religion, it could hardly be said that a holiday rooted in solemn remembrance of holy figures has much in the way of horrific connotations, or at least it didn’t start out that way. One might even go so far as to say that a much more faithful way to observe the holiday is the way it’s done in Latin America, with the elaborate Dia de Muertos parties and parades. Bringing horror and monsters into it is in reality quite a departure from the holiday’s original purpose, so to suggest that horror is at the heart of Halloween’s meaning is putting the engine before the wheel.

But at the same time, I think it’s also a mistake to think of the day in purely religious terms. There’s simply too much gaiety, too much ferality, to much subversion of the social norms for any faith-based approach to satisfactorily comprise all of Halloween’s meaning. So, if at the end of the day it’s none of what we’ve talked about so far, then what is its meaning?

It’s been said that my generation, those people born in the final years of the twentieth century, have come of age in a world so totally and unrecognizably different from their parents’ world that we have very little in the way of useful guidance from our elders, and have instead been left to figure out the world on our own. That world has seen massive leaps in our technological capabilities and has resulted in huge cultural shifts that essentially no other generation of people have experienced, at least on this level, since the development of stable agriculture tens of thousands of years ago. As such, we are keenly aware of how the human ability to reshape the world through our rational intelligence has never been greater or more central to the human condition. However, human beings are not purely rational creatures. There’s nothing rational about creating art or music, making love just for the joy of it, climbing a mountain simply because it’s there, and least of all dressing in costumes and going door to door threatening people for candy. Perhaps, in our increasingly rational, regulated, computerized and digitized world, Halloween has become the one great refuge for that other part of ourselves the modern world tries to ignore, anesthetize, or outright euthanize. Perhaps this is how we reconnect to our ancestors who huddled around the fire and told ghost stories in the middle of the night at a time when ghosts were just as real as the soil beneath their feet or the stars in the sky. It’s the time of year when we can let those carefully contained and controlled monsters we keep in the back of our heads out for a bit of fresh, pumpkin-scented and misty air. Halloween is our intuitive mind’s refuge from the rational.

I mean it’s either that or the ghosts and monsters are actually real, and we know it deep down in our hearts, and Halloween is the one night of the year we let ourselves see them.

Probably one of those two.

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Tony didn’t really like going outside during the day. If necessary, like if he had to pick up groceries or something, he would go as early in the morning or as late in the afternoon as possible. Something about the bright, hot, directly overhead sun bugged him. Ever been around someone who just really, really wants to talk to you about something in which you have no interest, none, not even the most passing of fancies? Like a workplace scenario where one of your coworkers is compelled by higher forces than they can resist to talk to someone, anyone, about what happened on the latest episode of the latest brainless reality gameshow last night, and to your mighty misfortune you’ve been partnered with them for the next 8 hours, and no matter how hard you try to turn the conversation into any other direction, they just can’t stop telling you about who got into an argument with who, who’s got a crush some some other who, and most melodramatic of all, who was voted off the island or out of the house or what the hell ever? That’s kind of how Tony feels about the midday sun.

In point of fact he was fast asleep during that particular day. And in point of fact the midday sun was still a good hour or two away. Tony Herman didn’t seem to sleep at any specified, regular schedule. At times he could go for days without rest, and just as typically scarcely leave his bed for days more. He simply slept when he was tired, and he was tired now, and sleeping something that very nearly resembled peacefully, when a knock came to his front door. He didn’t hear it, and slept on. Another knock came to his front door. He continued to not hear it. A third knock. His eyes opened one millimeter and he thought of violence.

Not really, of course. Tony was not and never would be a violent man, when it came right down to it. But who among us hasn’t thought of vicious, gory murder when awoken from our mid-morning sleep? A dark, hulking, formless mass lumbered its way from the bedclothes and shambled out into the hallway, taking what felt like vigintillions of years to cross the floorboards on its way to the front door. A fat ginger cat stared judgmentally at the shifting shape from his perch on the banister, and shook his head in disgust. The shapeless thing reached the door and pulled it open.

On the doorstep stood a young man with a long, carefully sculpted beard that covered the logo on his t-shirt. He held in an outstretched hand a gleaming silver key on a burnished bronze keychain--the proud identifying token of the Silver Sentinels.

“Silver Fox!” the young man announced with practiced gravitas, “something terrible is happening. The city needs you!”

Tony Herman stared through the tops of his eyelids at his caller.

“It always makes me feel like an old man when you Sentinel people call me that crap. I’m thirty-seven! I’m not old!”

The young man’s face fell. He had clearly not been expecting this response. Perhaps he thought Tony would flip a switch on the wall that would activate a secret panel behind which a pair of firepoles would allow for descent into some fabulous secret lair, where he and this random dude would ride out to meet dangerous adventure together. It was exhausting just to think about.

“I--I’m sorry, I didn’t mean--I didn’t want to disturb you, but my name got drawn, you see--”

“Saints alive, it’s half ten in the morning. Half-ten! I’m never up at half-ten. If you didn’t want to bother me, why did you knock?”

“Well--I just--the key doesn’t work--th-they said it would--it’s a copy, a direct copy they said--”

Tony shook his head. These Sentinel fruitcakes don’t know anything about anything.

“My keys don’t open the door. The door wasn’t even locked. What do you want, waking me up at half-ten?”

The young man tried to get a hold of himself but his fingers slipped.

“There’s--Silver--I mean, well, sir, something awful is happened--has happened and is happening--”

“Mmhm?” Tony said. The knocker took a deep breath.

“An hour ago, a man armed with a rifle and two revolvers shot and wounded a man and a woman working at a construction site near downtown. He then took six people hostage and is threatening to kill them. We need your help!”

“Not really,” Tony said, “call the police. I’m not the police. It’s half-ten. Goodbye now.”

“But Silver Fox!” the bearded annoyance called out as the door began to close in his fuzzy face, “he’s asking for you!”

Only a few inches of door were left open, but it had stopped moving. A soft, almost scornful mew sound could be heard from within, followed by a pained sigh.

“You have a car, Beardy?” Tony asked from within.

“Yes sir!” Beardy said.

“Don’t call me sir. And don’t call me ‘Silver Fox’ either. Let me get my hat.”

* * *

Seventeen minutes later, cramped in the front seat of a crumbling Dodge Intrepid, Tony Herman was chewing on a bite of hastily-prepared dry white toast, his black ski mask rolled up over his nose to allow oral access. Beardy was driving towards downtown, and clearly seemed to be in the process of realizing one of his lifelong dreams.

“It was all over the news,” he said, “the police can’t get in close; he’s got them all grouped together in the middle of a huge flat clearing where the old Ponderosa Club building got demolished back in February, you remember? He says if he sees anyone he’ll start killing the hostages, and he’s staying close to the people so they cops can’t risk snipers.”

Tony checked the seams of his silver suit. They were as flawless as ever.

“What’s he wearing?”

“Sir?”

“Like what clothing has he got on? And don’t call me sir.”

“Um…well, the news cameras couldn’t see it too clearly, but it looked like a kind of dark suit jacket, dark jeans, and a big black hat, like a cowboy hat.”

“Hmph,” Tony said, painting a psychological picture in his vast, cavernous mind, “anybody know who he is?”

“No sir. Uh, I mean, no, no they don’t, at least not that I’ve heard.”

“Guess I’ll just ask him when we get there.”

They drove on in silence. Tony munched on his toast and stared straight forward out the windshield, feeling his driver stare at him. Even the silver suit couldn't protect him from that.

“So00…” Beardy began, with all the grace and refinement of a teenage boy leaking hormones out of his ears taking his crush on the first date of their ultimately doomed relationship, “have you really been to space?”

“Mmhm,” Tony said.

“And the center of the earth?”

“Not the exact center, but in the neighborhood. Keep your eyes on the road, Beardy.”

“What was it like there?”

“Warm. And there were big spiders.”

Beardy shot him a surprised look. “Spiders?”

“Eyes on the road, Beardy,” Tony said.

“Sorry,” Beardy said, turning his eyes back. “What’s your brown cloak made of?”

“A blend of wool and silk.” Tony couldn’t help but smile. He loved his cloak.

“Why do you wear a mask if everyone knows who you are and where you live?”

“Because it looks cool.”

Beardy laughed. “Where did you get your silver suit?”

“I found it.” This was a lie. Tony never told anyone the truth about the silver suit.

“Some of the other Sentinels say you’re from the future. Are you?”

“Nope. I’m from the past, like everyone else.”

Tony finished the last of his toast as they came to a police roadblock, around which were crowding a great number of excited people and an even greater number of irritated commuters.

“I can’t go any further,” Beardy said, “but the construction site is about a block further up. What are you going to do?”

“Well,” Tony said, pulling his black mask down over his mouth and adjusting his bug-eyed goggles, “I guess go and see what this cowpoke wants to talk to me about. Thanks for the ride Beardy. I’d say it was a pleasure to meet you, but it wasn’t. Bye.” He opened the car door to exit, but before he could, Beardy spoke.

“Wait! Can I ask you one more question?”

“Just one.”

“Was there…was there even anything on that toast you just ate? Did you just eat a plain piece of toasted bread?”

Tony shook his head. “I swear to God, nobody just likes bread anymore.” And he stepped out of the car and raced off into the crowd.

* * *

Captain Philip Swift of the police stood with his men behind two of the large pieces of concrete rubble left over after the Ponderosa Club building’s demolition, about ten yards from the edge of the big open lot where six of his fellow citizens were being held at gunpoint. They could just make out the shooter’s figure and the little huddle of hostages kneeling around him through a gap in between the two large slabs. He had two options--either order his snipers to take the shot and risk killing one of the hostages, or send in an unarmed negotiator to try to talk the shooter down. He didn’t like either option, which is why he was hoping the third option would turn up and take the problem out of his hands.

“Not really a way for me to do this without spooking your, Captain,” said a voice directly behind him.

Swift and three other officers wheeled around with guns drawn to see a silver-suited, brown-cloaked, black-masked, fedora-hatted figure with his hands in his pockets. It took several seconds before the shock wore off, and then the police department’s standing orders went into automatic effect.

“Anthony Herman,” Swift said, “you are under arrest.”

“Okay,” Tony said, extending his hands together. A nearby officer withdrew a pair of handcuffs, and locked them securely around the wrists. Tony jerked his forearms in a very odd and specific manner, and the handcuffs sprung open. He tossed them playfully back to the arresting officer. “Anyway,” he said, “has anyone else tried to get close?”

Captain Swift couldn’t decide whether this was funny or infuriating, so he simply shrugged and answered the question. “Not yet. That clearing is over a hundred feet wide, and he’s got those people crowded tight together almost in the middle of it. He’d see anyone coming a mile off.”

“So what does he want with me?”

“No idea,” Swift said, as the two of them stared out through the gap towards the gunman, “he just said he’s going to wait for you until noon, and if you didn’t show up he would start executing people. Thank God you’re here; we’d sent a squad car to your brownstone to pick you up but you weren’t there. One of my officers almost got mauled by your cat though. I guess your Sentinels got to you faster than we did somehow.”

“They’re not my Sentinels. What kind of weapons does he have?

Captain Swift would have laughed. “You’re not gonna believe this, but it looks for all the world like an antique Henry repeater and a pair of Schofield revolvers.”

“Hmph,” Tony said, “guess I’d better go start the scene.” And with that, he walked out towards the clearing before anyone could stop him.

* * *

The high overhead sun burned.

The sky was as blue as ever, but it wasn’t a calm or a cool blue, a quenching blue, a comforting or beautiful blue. It was a harsh, blaring, relentless, mocking blue, an empty and suffocating and agonizing blue. A blue of nothingness. And crowned atop it all was the howling, shrieking, searing sun, patiently waiting for all it could reach to dry up, melt away, or sizzle into the same nothingness.

Mervyn Christie squinted up at the sun and felt its unforgiving, unyielding inferno purify and clarify and simplify all things. Here, in this blotted, dry, sandy, lifeless wasteland, so wide and so open, all the clamor and the noise of modern life’s prison was far away where it could not reach him. All was quiet. Even the muffled sobs of the people he had captured only added to the quiet, the peace, the clarity of purpose. Out here in the hot, bare heat of the midday sun suspended by God over a barren waste, there was nothing but the heat, the sweat on his brow, the smell of the sandy air, the slight sound of the wind that threatened to grow strong, and the weight of the weapons on his hip and the repeater in his hands. He felt whole, he felt at peace. He awaited his great moment. The Duel.

Then the wind did pick up, sending clouds of dust swirling, and off in the distance somewhere nobody could place, a faint whistle could be heard, if only in Mervyn Christie’s mind. He lowered his eyes to the divine horizon and saw him. The Opponent.

The wind had sent his great brown cloak swirling about him like the storm-wracked sea. He bowed his head against the dust, concealing his face beneath the brim of his hat. Mervyn could hear the crunch of his shoes upon the gravel with every step he took, and it was heavenly--so deliciously real. At last, something real, something tangible, something he could feel and taste. In the periphery of his vision he could see the edges of the vast, circular clearing, grayish-white under the blaring sun, perfect for staining rusty red. The Arena.

This man--his Opponent--was like him, a fellow outsider, a wanderer, a man outside the law. A brother, though they be enemies. Mervyn could sense that they understood each other; could feel the bond of two men forever locked in the struggle to survive merely upon the sweat and blood and laughter of one’s own terms. They lived in the same world, one that didn’t have any place for their kind, no role for them to fill, so all they could is stride lonely across its surface, scraping out a few dollars more here or there where they could. Maybe, had things been different, they could have been the closest of friends, beloved comrades in arms. Maybe they could have ridden off together somewhere where the blue sky was a place of peace and not pain. But no. That just ain’t the way it ever is with men like them.

Mervyn did not raise his repeater. This big, loud, angry stick was useful for the beasts that cowered behind him, but against a fellow Man, it was too primitive, too inelegant, to crass and distasteful. The pistol--the holy handgun--their artist’s almighty brush--that was the only tool for one of his kind. The same kind.

He could not see his Opponent’s weapon. What would it be? Colt? Cattleman? A Schofield, like his? It didn’t matter. The proper steps, the ancient procedures must be observed. The Ritual. Mervyn spoke first.

* * *

“Hi there,” Tony said, just as the shooter seemed about to say something, “what’s your name?”

For a moment, Mervyn didn’t speak. He saw in his mind a tumbleweed roll in between them, but obviously there are no tumbleweeds in the city.

“Who’s askin’?” Mervyn finally said.

Tony turned his head, first to his left, then his right, then he checked the ground in front of him just to be sure. “Um…I am. I heard you wanted to talk to me. So I’m here. Hello. What’s your name?”

Mervyn smiled, and then slowly nodded his head. Really slowly. He really took his time to nod his head.

“Figured you’d come along,” Mervyn said, “s’pose I’m mighty glad to meet ya. I heard tell of what folks call the ‘Crimson Ghost’ what wanders the wastelands. I guess it’d only be a matter of time before ya came callin’.”

“I’m not--what?” Tony said. “My cape’s not red, it’s brown. Like a chocolate brown. Who said it was ‘crimson’?”

Mervyn narrowed his eyes, which was not in the least bit intimidating if we’re being honest.

“Listen, pardner,” he said, “you just stay cool, or I’ll have to cool ya down...”

“What?” Tony said.

“...by putting a hole in ya.”

“Oh,” Tony said, “it’s a sort of threat. Right.” He shook his head. “Listen man, you’ve shot two people, but they’re alive. You haven’t killed anybody yet. I’m not going to hurt you or anyone else. Get rid of your guns, and come with me. I won’t let anyone harm you. Believe me, I will not.”

Mervyn could see through the mind games his Opponent was trying to play.

“No more games, fellah,” he said, “don’t make me come over there and teach you a lesson.”

“What are you even talking about?” Tony said. “This isn’t a game, man. You’re not a cowboy. This isn’t the Old West. The Old West doesn’t exist and never did. I don’t know what you think this is, but you’ve assaulted two people, and the police are going to kill you if you don’t surrender now and come with me. Please. I want to help. Just let me help you.”

For a moment, Mervyn’s reason tried to fight its way back to the surface, wrestling with all the movies and novels and violent power fantasies, and tried to call out for help before it was too late.

“I’m--I’m not going--I won’t fail--I’m not a failure--I’m not--”

Tony could read the struggle on his face. He took a step forward, but the wind was making his clock billow around his feet, so he grabbed the corner and threw it over his shoulder to keep it out of his way.

Mervyn saw the gesture, and suddenly it all clicked. His reason high-tailed it out of his mind at last, and with a peaceful, calm heart, he threw down his repeater and stepped forward, his right hand hovering over the grip of his holstered revolver. The Ritual had begun.

It seemed, in Mervyn’s broken mind, to take an eternity. He could feel the weight of the moment. Everything he had ever done, every pain he had ever felt, every step he had ever taken on his long, tortured path, had led here, to his clearing, and to him, and to his gun on his hip, and to his Opponent, his fellow Man among mere men, out here, under the high sun of noon. The thrill was beyond description. It seemed like the angels were standing around them, blowing victorious trumpets to announce the start of the Duel, and then standing and watching and waiting. Oh, the waiting! Mervyn glanced carefully, slowly, directly at his Opponent. He measured how far away he was, felt the wind, felt the air, tasted the sand, smelled the moisture, taking in every detail that might affect the path of the bullet. And he could sense the Crimson Ghost doing the same. Both of them calculating every factor, and then slowly, painstakingly, micrometer by micrometer, moving forward. Mervyn’s finger twitched. The tension was unholy. He could feel every beat of his heard like it was thunder. And then, at last, so very long last, the time had come. Draw!

Quick as lightning, Mervyn pulled his revolver and fired, hitting Tony Herman squarely in the center of his chest. The bullet bounced harmlessly off the silver suit, but still, it was a pretty good shot. Then there was another, louder, cleaner crack, and a high-powered round passed clean through Mervyn Christie’s head. The second after he had stepped away from the group of hostages, the police snipers had a clear shot, and took it the second after he had drawn his pistol. He was dead before he hit the ground, but he still had a smile on his face, and his last thought was wondering if there was a Valhalla for gunslingers. In a merciful universe, perhaps there ought to be.

Tony, with the wind momentarily knocked out of him by the bullet’s impact, was bent over wheezing as the police rushed in with guns drawn to collect the hostages. Captain Swift came to his side. “You all right?” he asked.

“Oof,” Tony said, rubbing his chest, “that hurt, but I’ll be fine.”

“What the hell was all that?” Swift asked. “Poor guy just watched too many episodes of Gunsmoke, I guess.”

Tony shrugged. “A cowboy hat and a gun, or a hard hat and a hammer, or a suit and a tie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Swift asked. Then he remembered that Tony Herman was supposed to be arrested on sight, but before he could add yet another tally on the police’s long list of futile attempts, Tony had run off.

Later, when he made it back home, his fat ginger cat Cricket was waiting for him by his food dish, with an impatient look on his squashed orange face. As Tony poured food into the feline’s bowl, he pulled the flattened bullet out of the silver suit’s pocket, and thoughtfully rolled it around his fingers. And then Tony Herman, who was after all just another gent in search of a point to all of this, went back to bed, nursing a chest that would be sore for another week. But try as he might, he just couldn't sleep any more that day. The sun was just too bright.

THE END

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Let me start by saying that I have not seen Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation of The Odyssey, and frankly I’m not planning on it. I might catch it when it comes to streaming, but I don’t feel in any hurry. It’s not that Nolan isn’t a good filmmaker (more on that later), it’s just that I don’t always find his movies are worth the trouble and the expense of seeing on a big screen. I did the “Barbenheimer” double feature in 2023 and while I had a lot of fun with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, I found Nolan’s Oppenheimer underwhelming and a little bit too long for a comfortable theatergoing experience. So take what I’m about to say with however much salt your blood pressure can withstand.

A lot of people are having a lot of opinions about The Odyssey. If you peruse the internet it’s hard to find much in the way of unqualified praise for the movie, and many commentators have few kind things to say about it. But you know, it’s not too rare nowadays for the terminally-online to trash popular media for one reason or another, but in this case things feel somewhat different. What’s really been fascinating me about the public discourse around this movie has been how many people seem to vocally despise it at the very conceptual level, and more importantly, how many different cultural viewpoints are despising it for very similar but fundamentally different reasons. This movie seems to be bridging the cultural divide in some really interesting and revealing ways, and the whole scenario has evolved into a kind of very expensive and flashy social experiment that may indicate the direction our culture is heading in the near future.

So why are people made about this movie? It boils down to three basic issues: historical accuracy, fidelity to the source material, and paywalling. Opinions on these issues are divided along what have become the normal social/political lines, and it’s those lines specifically that have proved the most illuminating about where our culture is at the present moment. Let’s tackle each issue one by one, and see what we can learn.

Historical Accuracy: Probably the issue getting the most attention is the question of how accurately the film portrays the historical period during which the story of The Odyssey (and by extension The Iliad, which depicts the events of the Trojan War that are frequently referenced in the film) is set, and much of the noise has been centered around the film’s casting. Odysseus, the story’s main protagonist, is played by Matt Damon, a white man from Chicago, while Odysseus’s wife Penelope is played by Anne Hathaway, and hot young star Tom Holland plays their son Telemachus. Lupita Nyong’o, a black actress originally from Kenya, plays Helen of Troy, the woman whose kidnapping sparks the Trojan War, and transgender actor Elliot Page plays Sinon, a character not in The Odyssey or Iliad as written, but borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid. The cast immediately sparked controversy when it was announced, and that controversy can easily be described along those socio-political lines we mentioned earlier. Those of a more conservative mindset complained about the film being “woke,” particularly with the casting of Nyong’o as Helen. There’s no nice way to put this—the opinion was that a black actress was simply not good looking enough to portray someone who is supposed to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived. That is, of course, a terribly racist attitude, and as is usually the case, when people adopt bigoted opinions in public spaces, they try to justify them with more reasoned arguments. In this case, the claim was that Helen, a native of Greece and queen of the Spartans, would obviously not have been of African descent, and so casting Nyong’o in the part was historically inaccurate, and her presence was evidence of the “woke agenda” many conservatives accuse popular media of having. The same charge was leveled at the casting of Elliot Page, especially since his character was not original to the classic text upon which the film is ostensibly based, and therefore many accused the filmmakers of shoehorning the character into the story just to give a transgender person a platform.

People on the more liberal end of the political spectrum, however, also had problems with the film’s historical accuracy, but for very different reasons. The casting of white movie stars like Damon, Hathaway, and Holland in the central roles brought many claims of whitewashing. As both The Iliad and The Odyssey are both stories set in ancient Greece, it’s absurd to think that a single white person was anywhere to be found in either tale. Some on the left also complained, despite the presence of Elliot Page, about the lack of gender diversity in the cast, with many having problems with the sole transgender actor being relegated to a supporting role that was not even part of the original text. Further complaints about the film’s historical accuracy were leveled at the film’s production design, particularly the costumes, which were seen as highly anachronistic to the time period. If that last point seems flippant when compared with the more socially sparky topics of gender and race, well, it might be so. But it certainly seemed to me to be just as frequently talked about, especially from those of a more liberal persuasion, which I admittedly have a lot more exposure to in my day to day life.

Of course the question of historical accuracy when it comes to The Odyssey is a bit absurd in the first place. Certainly Troy was a real city that existed for many thousands of years, but the historicity of the Trojan War itself as described by Homer is debatable at best, and even if it did happen that way, the tales are filled with extravagant supernatural occurrences (not the least of which is Ares, the God of War himself, descending from Olympus to fight alongside the Trojans on the battlefield), which obviously set them firmly in the realm of fantasy. Arguing about the realism of Greek armor or the racial demographics of the Mediterranean peoples in a story where the hero outwits a Cyclops and men are transformed into pigs feels a little ridiculous, but at the same time a larger question about how responsible the filmmakers are to the cultural waves their films will make is worth raising. Does presenting the hero of this famous tale as a white man reinforce the centrality of white people in the minds of the public? And since if Odysseus ever really existed he almost certainly would not have been white, does the act of casting a white actor to play him border on cultural appropriation? Of course, logically the same question can be leveled at casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, who would not have been likely to be black either, and we can only speculate on the gender identities of people who lived thousands of years ago, if they really lived at all.

The real question is whether a filmmaker’s job is to create a cultural artifact that will have the most positive impact on that culture (regardless of what that culture’s values are), or if their first priority is to their artistic vision. For all we know, Nolan, a white man himself, might have read The Odyssey and seen only white people in his own imagination, much as director Peter Jackson did when he was planning his much-beloved adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. In the minds of many, artists are public servants—their purpose is to create art with the needs and wants of their audience first in mind. Artists, naturally, often feel differently, and want to express what is in their own minds and hearts before anything else. I mean they’re the ones who create the art, after all.

Fidelity to the Source Material: Another bugbear many people seem to have against this film is how much of the story’s most famous moments have been excised, including what is probably the most famous, in which Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody” so that when the Cyclops is blinded and his brothers ask who did it, all he can say is “Nobody has blinded me!” The story also changes the ending of the tale, altering the final fate of Odysseus and Penelope, and overall the film is somewhat sexless, which contrasts with original poem’s many lovemaking scenes (I suspect this may have been Nolan’s reaction to his inclusion of a rather gratuitous sex scene in Oppenheimer, which drew some criticism). Even historian Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey served as Nolan’s basis for the film, felt the movie was little more than an action blockbuster and had little of the original story’s nuance and complexity of character.

I’m reminded of a review of Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights that came out earlier this year: “This movie is many things—sumptuous, stylish, clumsy, contrived, beautifully shot and boringly paced, but one thing it certainly isn’t is Wuthering Heights.” Again we come back to the question of what a filmmaker’s real role in society is—are they duty-bound to adapt a work of literature as faithfully as possible, or should they follow their own artistic muse? Fans of the books upon which these films are based will always, always claim that the best movie adaptations of books are the ones that follow those books the closest, but then the history of cinema is replete with films that are ostensibly highly unfaithful versions of classic tales and yet have become treasured classics in their own right (you only have to be a Frankenstein fan to know what I’m talking about). Literature and film are simply different forms of media, and what works in one form will not necessarily translate evenly into the other. But it’s a double-edged sword—some filmmakers have used this axiom as an excuse to commit a kind of cinematic fraud; essentially hitching their movie onto a well-known literary property’s good name and using that to bolster its box office numbers while paying little attention or respect to the classic they’ve been tasked with bringing to the screen. I suppose you can’t have one without the other.

Paywalling: Talking of box office, this is, to me anyway, the most infuriating aspect of Nolan’s movie, and indeed Nolan as a director in general. See, I’m something of a stickler for quality and have even occasionally been accused of being a cinematic purist, and I’d be lying if there wasn’t some truth in that. I sort of feel like you haven’t really seen a Van Gogh painting until you’ve actually seen in person, right in front of you, where you can make out the little brushstrokes and uneven texture of the painting’s surface area where he actually applied his colors to the canvas. I think reading an English translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment loses something compared to reading it in the original Russian. I feel like seeing a picture of a famous place can’t do justice to actually being there yourself. However, Christopher Nolan apparently feels like seeing a film cropped down from its original aspect ratio is pretty much the same as seeing it in its original form, or at least he’s willing to charge a lot more for the original version.

Ah yes. IMAX. As I’m sure most of you know, Nolan shot The Odyssey on 70mm IMAX film, which always projects an image in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, or an image that is almost completely square in shape. However most movie theaters are designed to show films shot on 35mm film or its digital equivalent, which project a rectangular shaped image in the 1.85:1 or even 2.39:1. Now, only a couple dozen movie theaters in the world are equipped to show true 70mm IMAX movies (infuriatingly, one of them used to be about a twenty minute bus ride from where I now live, but it was closed years ago), and that means there are only a couple dozen places ON EARTH where one can watch The Odyssey “as Nolan intended,” as the saying goes nowadays. Everywhere else? The image is cropped down to fit onto the rectangular screens. About 30% of the image is lost in this process, meaning that the vast majority of moviegoers will not see this film in the way it was “meant” to be seen, which makes one wonder why anyone would ever pay for a Big Mac without the bun or a car with only three of its four wheels, and why the filmmaker would knowingly shoot his big-budget summer blockbuster with a camera that would only allow part of it to be seen by his audience. And then you look at IMAX ticket prices, and it begins to make a lot more sense.

Typically IMAX tickets cost almost twice as much as a normal movie ticket, which means movies show at those theaters generate almost twice as much revenue as standard ticket sales. Now if a filmmaker were to widely publicize that their film was shot in a format that was best experienced in a far more expensive setting, that movie would be set to make a lot more money. Yes, I fear that the IMAX format may be little more than a moneymaking scam. I don’t deny that films shot on 70mm film can look far better than those shot on standard 35mm or something digital, but I certainly deny any movie’s right to scalp people out of their money, no matter how good it is. The whole thing reeks of elitism and crass capitalism, and in my opinion doesn’t bode well for a film’s prospects as a piece of art. I mean if it was really that good, why would you need to go to all the trouble of shooting it on such expensive film and showing it in such expensive theaters? Surely a really good movie will work just fine in any format?

But here’s the real devil of it all, and why I find this whole debacle so very interesting—despite all these problems so many people, including myself, seem to be having with this film, it’s still making tons of money. Within its first two weeks the film has earned over six hundred million dollars, and it’s expected to cross a billion before the theatrical release wraps later this summer. Even taking the inflated box office numbers IMAX ticket sales bring into consideration, that’s a massive profit for a film that cost $250 million to make. All the seeming online animosity, and yet it’s still bringing in the bucks. What does this tell us? After all, critical opinion and artistic merit is one thing, but ultimately what really denotes a film’s quality is how many people want to watch it, and based on the numbers, damn near everybody wants to watch The Odyssey. Does this indicate that the culture wars are beginning to abate? Does this mean that the highly-publicized divide is just an illusion, and most people don’t care much about things like race relations, gender politics, history or literature, and just want to watch a great story told by a master teller?

I haven’t seen The Odyssey, but I have seen many of Nolan’s other films, and sometimes I wonder just how good a filmmaker he really is. I mean his films usually look rather bland and have a hollow emotional core. Like many modern filmmakers, his seems most interested in the geometry of the frame and the composition of the image as opposed to the actual appeal of the story, more like how a photographer thinks than a storyteller. It’s filmmaking reduced to mathematics and formulas, rather than actual creative playfulness. I’m not sure he’s that great a making a movie that’s actually deeply appealing to watch over and over again. But, when you look at how he crafted his version of The Odyssey, casting who he cast, designing it how it was designed, shooting it how it was shot, and presenting it in the format in which it is presented, and then you look at the box office numbers? I wonder if Nolan’s real gift isn’t filmmaking, but film marketing. And in the money-digesting machine that is Hollywood, that’s the real sign of genius.

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So I recently read a book, rather comically, about the history of book bans. Starting with the earliest days of illuminated folios and going right up to the e-book era, it talks about all the most famous and infamous books that have endured attempts on their lives, and the reasons behind the vehemence. It is, to put it mildly, a wacky ride. Hearing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass mentioned in the same breath as 120 Days of Sodom and Mein Kampf makes for a turbulent experience, but it does underline the central point about book bans and how bizarrely ubiquitous the practice has been throughout history. Christians, Muslims, Jews or atheists, conservative and liberal, old and young, black or white; every meaningful population has at one time or another attempted to keep a work of literature from reaching the eyes and minds of the people of the world. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, has been challenged all throughout its history, first by conservative whites horrified at the idea that a white boy and a black man could be friends, and then later by neo-liberal parents horrified by the idea that something so awful as slavery, and God forbid the N-word, could be shown to their precious innocent children. Nothing makes those among us privileged enough to lead placid and peaceful lives clutch at the pearls like books containing horrifying ideas.

Is the peculiar and psychologically revealing nature of parents’ reactions to books with challenging content that particularly fascinates me. I’m always hesitant to wade into the topics of childcare and parenting, because as soon as I, a committed childless adult, say anything at all regarding the practice or process of child-rearing, inevitably someone swoops down from the sky like Batman bellowing at the top of their lungs, “you just don’t understand how hard it is” and “don’t talk until you’ve tried raising a kid yourself” and “we’re doing the best we can” and so forth. And you know? That’s a bit of fairness. I confess that I do not, and if my luck holds I never will, really know what it is like to raise a child in the world today. I have no doubt the task is fraught with challenges I couldn’t imagine, and to be honest I’m quite happy to maintain that level of ignorance. All I know about the process of parenting is taken from my own experience as a child who was parented and how I felt about it then and how I feel about it now, which I admit is an incomplete perspective. It’s a bit like judging how good a teacher is based on how much their students actually learn.

I wish I could remember to which book this quote pertained, but more than any other it stuck in my head when researching the history of banned books: a concerned parent stating, “I don’t want thoughts like that in my child’s mind.” It struck me as an extraordinary thing to say. The first question that explodes within my brain is a howling, “Who do you think you are that you get to decide what is or isn’t in your child’s mind?” I really struggle to wrap my mind around the notion that a parent—someone tasked with helping a child grow to be the best version of themselves possible—would, or even could, be possessed of the sheer hubris required to even entertain a concept like that. I feel like it also begs the question as to exactly what kinds of thoughts do they want in their children’s minds? Perhaps I’m speaking from a standpoint of personal frailty; I’ve always viewed the thoughts and feelings of most others with a kind of perplexed, consternated bewilderment, but I don’t think I’d ever fathom presuming to dictate what sort of thoughts a person ought to have, or worse, to imagine I could have any say or influence on what they might be. To do so would strike me as a tremendous demonstration of disrespect, even disdain, for the person in question.

The next question I find myself asking is “What exactly are the thoughts you don’t want in your child’s mind?” This is where I really wish I could remember the specific book this parent was pitching a fit over, but for the sake of this discussion let’s assume it pertained to the good old, tried-and-true point of disturbance that has brought so much fret and rabble to parents and people in power in every quarter down through the centuries—sex. Ah yes, sex. The way some people talk about it, you’d think it was the greatest evil ever visited on mankind. Not genocide, not the destruction of the natural world, not enslavement, not dictatorial authoritarianism. Sex. Boning. See, it comes down to the simple fact that childhood is, by its very nature, temporary. Provided the person in questions lives to reach it, they will become adults in a comparatively very short amount of time, regardless of what their parents may or may not want. And the vast majority of adults, if the quality of the entertainment industry is anything to go by, enjoy sex quite a lot. They like it so much that most of them expend a huge amount of time, energy, and resources to get it, and get it as many times as possible. Obviously this doesn’t apply to aesexual people, but even they find themselves in situations where they have to navigate their own lack of sexual impulses, especially in a culture that makes the subtle, subtle art of the smash into such a big deal. Now one would think that a parent, presumably being a person who has some experience with sex themselves if the existence of their child is any indicator, would be aware of the nature of this situation and therefore want to make their child’s eventual encounter with sexuality on some level more enjoyable, or at least less challenging. Finding an opportunity to breach the subject is quite the achievable goal, especially nowadays with the glut of media access we’ve all come to know, but that’s assuming breaking that ice is something you want to do in the first place. Of course it can be awkward talking to anybody about something so intimate and usually treated so private, but of course a loving and committed parent would find the will to overcome that hesitancy for the sake of their child’s wellbeing, and make the effort to adequately prepare their offspring for the day when that moment inevitably comes round; to discuss the importance of things like consent, hygiene, boundaries and the spectrum of human sexuality, so that the prospect of confronting one of the most important elements of adult life isn’t so daunting. Well, one would think that, wouldn’t one?

One of my socio-cultural bugbears has long been this very distinct line between the world of children and the world of adults that many people believe must be maintained at all costs, but is in fact largely imaginary. The idea seems to stem, as do a great many bad ideas, from the Puritans and their biggest fans, the Victorians. The concept of the idealization of childhood into this sacred and magical time during which anything is possible through the power of whimsical innocence, and especially the notion that such a thing must be lovingly tended and protected, is a grand fantasy that lies at the roots of much of the mental and emotional turmoil felt by so many adults in the world today. It is as though childhood takes place in a wonderful land of fairy tales where good always prevails and evil is always thwarted, and it’s only upon reaching maturity that the cruel, hard, dirty and dangerous “real world” asserts itself, but it’s all hogwash. The reality is just that—reality. Children live on the same planet hurtling along the same curves of the same universe as adults. They encounter the same challenges, face the same struggles, and deal with the same varying complexities as do we all. They see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the same existence. The only difference is that they’re a good deal newer to it. They haven’t yet accumulated the experiences that reinforce the web of knowledge adults take for granted when they navigate the world. We all know what to do, or at least know what we do, when confronted with a challenging or unexpected situation, but children do not. All seas are uncharted in their eyes. That necessitates the presence of parents, who help to guide children through a world that is filled with delight just as much as despair, where both are simple at times and complex at others. Adults, with a few decades of survival under their belts, can share what little knowledge they’ve gained to facilitate their emotional and mental growth, and at the same time see to it that they don’t bang their bodies up too badly along the way either.

This is the practice of adults who understand that they share the same world as their children. But those who try to segregate children into their own little world with its own rules, free from the perceived “contaminants” of adulthood, only serves to hinder them when their adulthood is inevitably reached. It implants the idea that things like joy, fun, play, and imagination are exclusive to childhood, and “adult” concepts like sex, violence, despair, futility and conflict are things children should never know. This only leads them to expect their adulthoods to be nothing but a quagmire of endless toil and struggle, which it can be very easily made if they go into it with that mentality. How many of us feel that way every day? How many of us bitterly wish we could return to our childhoods, just to recapture that feeling of joy and safety we feel like we’ve lost? A grand illusion.

And so banning books that contain elements typically deemed “adult” because children might see them is a result of this mentality. People who try to censure or outright obliterate these works, many of which are seminal pieces of the world’s literary canon, are feverishly trying to maintain this imaginary sacred barrier between the two worlds. We can’t allow children to read books like James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain for fear of introducing the thorny topic of race relations into their lives. We can’t allow them to encounter The Awakening by Kate Chopin, or else they might start asking questions about same-sex relationships or (God forbid) the fluidity of gender. And we mustn’t allow them to see any version of The Lord of the Flies, lest they understand that children are just as capable of violence and hatred as adults, and are therefore just as responsible for the consequences of their actions. Because if we allow any of these thoughts into their minds, their magical, innocent childhoods will be effectively over, and we will have failed as their guardians.

Fred Rogers once said that society only values the adults children will grow up to become, not the children themselves. As such society tends to dehumanize children; to view them as little better than animals to be corralled until they grow up, grow some sense, and can start contributing to that society. This attitude fundamentally misunderstands the human condition. Children are living and breathing and thinking and feeling people, just a little less experienced, a little less learned. The instinct nearly all of us feel to protect and nurture our young is a good one, but it can easily be mangled into a compulsion to “shield them from the world” as the saying goes, and too often that shielding comes in the form of banning and censoring anything that might allow the terrible world of the Adult into the precious world of the Child. But there isn’t an adult world or a child’s world, there’ s just the world, and children will encounter within it things they do not understand, just as adults do. And when we have these encounters and questions are inevitably raised in our minds, we turn to those we trust for answers. The hard part is, of course, to have those answers. Sometimes those conversations will be awkward and uncomfortable ones we’d probably rather not have. Sometimes we will find that we don’t understand the world in which we live nearly as well as we like to think, and that in the process of guiding a child through these topics, we will have to do some learning ourselves. Hard work. But the good news? There are books about it to help us along the way. In the immortal words of Dr. Henry Jones, Sr.: “goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.”

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7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

   

   I’ve inherited a couple pieces of my pop culture pantheon from my father, and one of the more notable bequests came while my family and I were sitting around the dinner table one night when I was 10 or 12 years old. My dad’s always been a good storyteller, and he would occasionally tell my brother and I stories from things he’d read or watched throughout his own life. I don’t remember precisely how we got on the topic, but at a certain point he began recount the events of a certain movie about UFOs. I remember him telling me about the movie’s main setpieces—a group of government men finding a huge ocean liner in the middle of the Gobi Desert, an old Mexican man talking about how the sun came out in the middle of the night and “sang to him,” a huge crowd of devout Hindus all chanting the same five-note tune and dramatically pointing to the sky when asked where they heard the sounds, and a tense scene of an aircraft controller directing two planes as they try to avoid colliding with an unidentified aerial object. But what I’ll never forget was how he described the main character’s first encounter with a UFO. Using the tips of his index fingers to illustrate a pair of headlights coming up behind the protagonist’s truck in the dark, he slowly raised them into the air to show the hair-raising moment where the audience sees that they’re not a pair of headlights at all, but the lights on the front of a hovering alien spacecraft. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I hunted the movie down and watched it many, many times.

   Close Encounters is notable for being one of the first major examples of visiting aliens portrayed as friendly and benevolent instead of malicious and destructive, perhaps indicating a changing attitude in the public consciousness towards outsiders (not to mention the “chariots of the gods” hypothesis that was still quite a popular idea at the time), or perhaps just allowing director Steven Spielberg a way to talk about a subject from the perspective of childlike wonder, as he has so often loved to do. Either way the movie was a massive hit, and coming out the same year as the original Star Wars signaled a new revitalization for science fiction cinema that would carry the genre well into the 80s and 90s.

8. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

   

   Between the ignominious cancellation of the original Star Trek series in 1969 and its revitalization as a movie franchise a decade later, many, many attempts were made to bring the franchise back. A movie was discussed as early as ‘69, and all throughout the 70s multiple film projects were attempted, but in the end the decision was made to bring the series back as a television show. Scripts were written, actors were cast, and sets were built for Star Trek: Phase II, which was planned to start filming some time in 1977, but when it became clear that the planned new Paramount TV network would not be financially viable, and following the gigantic success of Star Wars, it was decided to recycle the cast, sets, and script for the planned pilot episode into a feature-length movie. The movie that eventually made it into theaters in 1979 was praised for its visual effects imaginative scope but was otherwise not very warmly received by critics, and while the Trekkies of the world turned out in droves as they always do, the movie wasn’t exactly a box office smash, although it was profitable enough to warrant a sequel that, not to put to fine a point on it, did extraordinarily well and the resulting goodwill it generated carried the franchise forward for the next twenty years.

   But that doesn’t mean The Motion Picture isn’t any good, and in all honesty it’s long been my personal favorite of the six films featuring the original cast. The other five movies all focus more on personal drama and action, which is obviously more appealing to a general audience, but my lifelong Trekkie heart that loves to watch the Enterprise crew encounter strange, new worlds finds the big mystery at the heart of TMP a lot more compelling. Combined with the huge scope of the film and its tremendous visuals, the first film always feels like a more satisfying narrative experience. More so than any other film or episode in the franchise, my love for all things Star Trek stems from this fascinating tale that asks the immortal questions—is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?

9. Blade Runner (1982)

   

   Blade Runner is one of those movies you hear a lot about over the years, and while I was always curious about it, it wasn’t until I was into my mid-20s that I finally sat down to watch it. Like a lot of people, I didn’t care for it much upon first viewing—found it too dour and dense to make for much of a satisfying film. But you know, there was something beguiling about the story and the world in which it takes place, and I found it to be one of those films that are difficult to get out of your head once it’s there. And so I went back and rewatched it. I liked it a little better the second time, and was better able to appreciate the poetry of the script and the visuals. And then I watched it again. And again. And again. And again.

   It’s what I like to call a “sleepy” movie, but I don’t mean that in a derogative way. There’s a difference between sleepy and boring. Sleepy movies are calm, contemplative, transfixing and meditative, rather than your typical Hollywood adrenaline-fueled thrillride. It’s a movie that encourages you to think, and to feel, and to wonder and to question. Now I’m not normally one for post-apocalyptic stories, but with Blade Runner I find the apocalypse in question not to be one of the government, the economy, or the environment (though the movie hints at all of these), but one of culture and society. Watching the movie’s famous scenes set on crowded city streets have always intrigued me. I see whole masses of people, all dressed in fashions outrageous and attention-seeking, and I wonder about how that world must be. There doesn’t seem to be anything resembling normal, average or commonplace. Everyone is a flamboyant character, which of course suggests that nobody is. I view the society the film suggests as a kind of hypothetical progression of so-called “outsider chic” taken to its extreme, where everyone is trying with all their might to scream their personalities out as loud as they can to mark themselves out as something special or worthy of attention, but there is of course a limit to how loud people can scream, and if everyone is all yelling their aesthetics at the tops of their voices, it kind of just all grays out into this dismal and exhausting world where there’s no source of calm or quiet to be found anywhere. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it, but what is Blade Runner if not a film that warrants a deep reading?

10. Ghost in the Shell (1995)

    

    Talking of slow, meditative films about the nature of existence and the thin line between the human and the machine…
    There’s no question that both Blade Runner and the anime classic Ghost in the Shell share a lot of thematic DNA, but while Blade Runner is like a lonely night spent with a bottle of whiskey and a radio tuned to staticky jazz as the world goes on not caring outside, Ghost in the Shell is a slow waltz with the self and the meaning of identity. The particulars of the plot, involving rogue AI, physical augmentation science, government bureaucracy, and hyper-violent police procedure feel less important than the questions it makes you ask, such as “is my identity really all that precious?” or “am I defined by how different I am from others?” There are of course no definite answers to these questions, as is usually the case with any question worth asking, but the fact that this film forces you to confront them is a big part of its artistic worth. It’s also important to note how visually influential the movie has been on world cinema—the widely-celebrated Matrix films borrow from it heavily, as do most of the action-dramas that cluttered rental shelves and DVD bins throughout the 2000s. But none of those films, not even The Matrix, manage to capture the quiet, almost apathetic self-doubting identity crisis this movie tends to inspire. Movies like this are hard to parse out to the uninitiated; really it’s just one of those you have to sit with and let it have its way with your thoughts and emotions. Artistic experiences like that aren’t for everyone, but if you’re one of those for whom it is, it’s rarely done better.

11. Tomorrowland (2015)

    

    The strangest movies make me cry. It’s never the ones you’d expect.

    Tomorrowland tells the story of Casey Newton, a teenage girl with an unshakeable belief in a better tomorrow. One day, she finds a strange enamel pin that, when she touches it, shows her a vision of the bright, shimmering future she’s always known humanity can achieve. In her quest to uncover the mystery of the pin’s origins, she learns of a secret high-science organization that, decades ago, had set up shop in an alternate dimension where they could work on new inventions and research unfettered by society’s restrictions. That organization had planned to bring those discoveries to humanity, but something went wrong and the whole operation was scrapped. Without spoiling too much, the reasons why beg yet another big sci-fi question: do we shape the future, or does the future shape us?

    What first drew me to Tomorrowland was the peculiar nature of the marketing (any movie poster that makes me go “huh” in a puzzled way is always a winner), but what made me fall in love with it was its unflappable optimism, especially during a time when optimism about the future was not exactly at an all-time high—it’s worth remembering that this film came out the same year as Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the most popular pessimistic dystopian movies in recent memory. For me, the movie crystallized much of what I was feeling at the time in regards to how the world was evolving into a downward spiral, but rather than telling me that nothing could be done and I might as well start designing my future warpaint now, it challenged me to do something harder: try to make things better. For better things are always possible; only a fool believes otherwise. Pessimism is, as is always the case, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and all you have to do is decide to go the other way. The other way is, of course, harder, and there’s no guarantee of success, but if you’re going to toil anyway, you might as well toil in the pursuit of a better tomorrow. A message that powerfully positive and hopeful, especially at a time when hope wasn’t in much fashion, brought me to tears in the theater, and it’s a message the movie still brings every time I watch it.

12. The Martian (2015)

    

    “I’m not gonna die here.”

    That’s my favorite line; my favorite moment in the entire film. It comes early, and for me is when the movie really begins. Not when it starts of course, NASA astronaut Mark Watney has already been struck by flying debris during one of Mars’ many regular dust storms, been left for dead by his five other crewmates on the planet’s surface, awoken with a sizeable piece of aluminum antenna sticking out of his abdomen, and had to confront his dire situation—alone on a planet 140 million miles from Earth, with limited resources and no way to call for help or even let the rest of the human race know he’s alive. He understandably takes a day or two to mope around the temporary habitat his crew had erected on the Martian surface, probably contemplating any number of things, before stating the matter purely and simply.

    “I’m not gonna die here.”

    And because of that moment, everything else in the movie happens. Mark may or may not be able to survive and get off Mars, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do everything he can to make it happen. It’s a simple moment of intention, a demonstration of will. It’s also a marvelous bit of filmmaking, because it makes all the extraordinary things he does to survive for the rest of the film a result of his intention, his will to live, his determination not to surrender his fate. He’s not gonna die here. And (spoilers), he doesn’t, but it’s never easy, although it’s often very strangely funny.

    Much like Destination Moon, it’s almost a misnomer to call The Martian science fiction, and even more so in this case. Destination Moon did it’s best to be scientifically accurate, but it was hindered by the time in which it was made. The Martian had decades of crewed space travel and the combined resources of the mighty internet behind it, and as a result we are presented with one of the most scientifically plausible sci-fi films ever made, to the point where it’s not too difficult to imagine the movie as a dramatization of some real-world, albeit alternate universe, events. This is one of the movie’s great strengths, but even beyond the movies portrayal of one man’s determination to “science the shit out of this,” you can easily go in with no knowledge of the workings of planetary botany or astrodynamics, or really any appreciation of science at all, because at the end of the day this is a story of the human will to survive in the face of overwhelming odds, and there aren’t too many people in the world who don’t resonate with a tale like that, especially one as well told as this.

    If you love a list of favorite stuff thrown together when the author hasn’t managed to get his real work done on time, don’t forget to subscribe to Nyctophilia, share this post with other insufferable nerds, and tell me why you think I was nuts to include Tomorrowland in the comments.

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FROM THE PERSONAL JOURNAL OF DARREN HUNGATE

It’s ten o’clock in the morning. Why am I up so early? I’m exhausted. Head’s pounding. I woke up at something like 4 A.M. with tears all over my face, from a dream I don’t remember. I’d only just gone to bed but it felt like I’d been lying there for hours, or days. Everything hurts. Every single part.

I showered and I showered and I showered when I got back to the room. Water was so hot and I scrubbed so hard I’m sure I left a full layer of skin in the tub, like a growing snake. That Black Stuff sticks to your skin like the stank of gasoline or a pissed off skunk. I felt raw and sensitive as a newborn baby when I got out of the shower finally; it was all I could do to make it from the bathroom to the bed and keel over onto the pillows like an old man. I was so tired I thought I’d sleep forever, but here I am, nursing what I imagine a hangover feels like and staring at this paper.

Later--It’s been a couple days since I got out of the police station and had to leave town. That’s one of the many endless perks of my work--lots of travel. I just had time to shower off the Black Stuff, burn the Wurdulac in the sacred fire, and get out. It was too cold and dreary, even this time of year, to stick around much in the Pacific Northwest anyhow, so I decided to head south. I missed the sun. Another perk. And there might be work for me in one of those gentrified old cities in southern California. So I spent a day driving. A brisk 16 hours.

Sometimes gentrification is just plain old capitalism at work. Rich folks buy up all the pretty houses in a picturesque town, then rent them out at what ought to be imprisonable rates. Then they buy all the commercial spaces and lease them out to boutiques, cozy restaurants, spas, coffee houses. Turn it into a tourist sink and haven for the overwealthed--endlessly visitable and absolutely unliveable. Not a bank, post office, drug store, butcher shop, health clinic or school in sight. Lots of places to spend money, but nowhere to use it. And wouldn’t you know it, those kinds of places also tend to be hotspots for vampires. And that’s not just a knock on the rich.

That was one of the first lessons I was taught--”Vampires need money,” Dad said, “just like everyone else.” They need money to fund their lives because those lives depend on things that aren’t easily available, plus they usually can’t go outside during the day. The trick of telling the difference between a gentrified area that’s a haven for rich people and one that’s a haven for rich vampires is to pay attention to the location and the attractions. Usually, but not always, they avoid areas with lots of sunshine all year, like southern beaches and coastal towns, and usually the kinds of touristy places will be clubs, bars, restaurants--the kinds that can be open late without arousing suspicion. Nobody thinks twice about a tavern open until one or two in the morning, but a bookstore doing business at that hour would be a little strange. It’s obvious if you know what to look for.

But you know? Something that happens when you do any job for a long time, I suppose--I guess I don’t know for sure; this is the only job I’ve ever had--is that you start to develop a sixth sense about things. When I got to this part of town, even if it is a beach town, even in California, even at the cusp of spring, even here I had a feeling. Thre are just a few too many old, weathered houses maybe, a few too many little nooks and crannies in between the bars and restaurants. A little too ramshackle. Pretty, elegant, with an odor of wealth, comfort and class on the air, but ramshackle. Shallow. Faux. A kind of approximation. An easy thing to miss for the untrained eye. First job--find a motel, out of the way, on the edge. Then we’ll go for a walk.

The Next Day--How does one go about killing a vampire? It all depends on the vampire. You have to know them all, and each one is unique, working by its own rules. “There are as many different kinds of vampires,” my father used to say, “as there are brands of gum.” He seemed to find that notion funny, and I don’t know where he picked it up--maybe from his own father, or somewhere else in the world, I don’t know. The man had a way with words. Not always a nice way, nor a terribly helpful one, but still a way. He told me once that it was like being a kind of doctor. A doctor never knows what’s going to be wrong with his patients until he gets the chance to see and examine them. He’s got to look and listen closely, and draw upon all of his years of knowledge to find out the best solution, the best treatment. It’s not so different with us, except that our patients are usually trying their best to keep what’s wrong with them a secret, and most of the time they’re also trying to kill us. But other than that it’s the same kind of work, or at least that’s the way my father saw it. Or how he told it anyway. Like I said, he had a funny way with words.

The salient point is that you have to know each variety, you have to know their strengths and weaknesses, their habits, needs, aversions, and be able to recognize all the little tells that give them away. And never forget that you’re only human; you can’t stop them all, you can’t be everywhere all the time. So you’ve also got to know when to walk (or run) away, you’ve got to know when something is a serious problem that needs addressing straight away or if it’s something you can deal with later, if it even needs dealing with at all--some vampires are, for all intents and purposes, harmless really. And you’ve GOT to master the fine distinctions. Many are very similar and knowing which is which can mean the difference between life and death, for either of you.

I bring all of this up because it bears heavily on what happened last night. Suppose I’d better get all of the details down here: after I’d checked into the motel, a very small place called the Sleepy Inn, I made my way down to the town’s tourist sink by the water. It was fully dark by then, and as usual being out after dark made the hair on the back of my head prickle and I felt as wide awake as ever. It always reminds me of home. Anyway, the road I turned down eventually was lined on both sides by bars, clubs, eateries and open-late shops, all too overpriced to be decent. I strolled as casually as I could up and down, trying to see everyone without really looking at anyone. That is not a skill easily come by, trust me, especially since I seemed to be the only one doing the strolling. There were other people there obviously but there was a weird and honestly familiar feeling about the place, because people seemed eager to get indoors as soon as they arrived, and to get gone as soon as they were back outside. Clearly the area had a reputation--maybe bad things had happened here, and the people coming and going didn’t want to linger over thresholds any longer than necessary. Like most places with a reputation like that, people flocked to it, or at least certain kinds, but they were still wise enough at least to not waste time outside after dark. That’s what I was thinking anyway, but before long I saw someone come out of one of the shops and lean up against the outside of the building, in one of the more receded parts of said wall, with his hands kept in his pockets.

Something my dad, and probably his dad and his dad’s dad if the family legends were true, instilled in me as best he could was that vampires are evil and need to be destroyed. Now that evil comes in many forms--many brands of gum, I guess--and each one will challenge you in different ways, but that doesn’t make them any less evil and any less worthy of destruction. I remember once asking about that, about why they all had to be destroyed. “They hurt people,” I was told, “they’re predators.” And I asked about the people who didn’t decide to become vampires and can’t help themselves, and I was told that it was very sad and very unfortunate, but they still needed to be stopped because they were still hurting people, and they only way to stop them was to kill them. And when I asked if there was any way to help them instead, I was told there wasn’t. I didn’t believe it for a long time, but you can only be proven wrong so many times. I never stop feeling bad about for those people though. At least the ones I think of as people. I suppose I ought to think of them all as people, because they were all people once, or almost all. But even the ones who weren’t I still feel bad for. I still do what I do because my parents were right after all, but I never stop feeling bad about it.

Every couple of months I buy a pack of cigarettes and throw three of them in the trash but keep the rest. I don’t smoke but my mom made sure I knew how, because walking up to someone and asking for a light is a good way to initiate contact, or in this case, see if he takes his hands out of his pockets. I strolled up to this man and asked for my light, but he didn’t have one or so he said. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it made for a good excuse to get a better look at him. Late 30’s face, maybe early 40s. Short light-colored beard and hair, buzzed all to the same length, but untidily done, as if he’d done it himself. Complexion was fair but face was pudgy, which is an unusual combination and a possible telltale sign, but there are other explanations and with something like this you have to be absolutely sure. There is no one trait that all vampires have in common, you have to look for the patterns and know what they mean when you see them.

Anyway, I couldn’t just keep standing there staring, so I moseyed over to a convenient lamp post about forty feet away and pulled out my phone and pretended to read something on the screen while keeping one eye on this wall-leaner. He kept on not doing anything, just leaning against the brickwork, his hands staying frustratingly in his pockets. Something about his hands in his pockets was sticking with me. There are so many kinds, I can’t be expected to remember them all that easily. It’d be convenient if I had some kind of book with all this information recorded, but it would be a dozen Bible’s worth of pages and anyway you can’t risk leaving that stuff lying around. What we do is illegal in pretty much ever civilized country. So most of it we have to memorize, and we jot down notes and keep personal journals, like this one here, for what we can’t easily remember. I don’t think anyone has ever had a complete knowledge of vampires, there’s just too much variety. But you remember what you can, and at that moment I thought I was remembering an image my father had described to me as a child that gave me nightmares back in those days when things like that still caused nightmares and not just dreary stress dreams. So instead of pretending to be on my phone, I decided to actually use it and do a bit of searching for nearby cases of assault and unsolved murders.

It wasn’t very likely I’d come up with anything, of course. Typically in gentrified areas, there’s some kind of influence in local government and law enforcement, enough to persuade people to look the other way or not look too deeply into things when someone goes missing or somebody sees something strange. But look long enough and deeply enough and the patterns emerge. It’s crazy, now I think about it, how much of this job is about looking for patterns. Obviously I couldn’t do any kind of in-depth investigating in those circumstances, but I did notice something on social media about a local woman who went to the police about a man who attacker her not too far from that part of town. She said he grabbed her by the throat and tried to choke her. It was when I read that that my memory kicked in, and it was also right when someone else came out of the shop.

It was a young woman, brunette, maybe 27 years old, and the guy leaning against the building smiled and greeted her, and she put her arm through his, and together they started walking up the road towards a nearby park, presumably for some kind of romantic stroll. She’s a brave woman to go for a walk through a park at night in a part of town like this, especially with a man who did not, even when she took his arm, ever take his hands out of his pockets. I don’t know, maybe she’s new to the area, or maybe she’s just especially stupid. Either way, I followed them as closely and as quietly as I dared, all the while trying to remember all of mom’s boring, boring Latin lessons. Latin is about the most tedious and numbing language you can ever be forced to learn. I hope it sounded better in ancient Rome than it did when I mumbled my way through it.

To be continued…

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1. Things to Come (1936)

   

   I’ve talked before on this blog about my lifelong love of the works of H.G. Wells, and that’s a major source of my fascination with this very unusual movie. At a time when science fiction films were out of vogue in the movie business (mainly due to the box office disaster of 1930’s Just Imagine), this big-budget British film was ostensibly directed by special effects maestro William Cameron Menzies but the real driving creative force behind the scenes was H.G. Wells himself. Producer Alexander Korda was a massive admirer of Wells and his work and promised that Wells would have complete creative oversight during production. The film is loosely based on his 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come combined with similar elements from 1899’s When the Sleeper Wakes, the 1899 novella “A Story of the Days to Come,” and Wells’ theory of human progress as described in his influential non-fiction book The Outline of History. And according to legend, much of the aesthetic inspiration derived from Wells’ vocal distaste for Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic Metropolis, which Wells described as “pretty much the opposite” of what he wanted for Things to Come.
   The resulting film, originally titled Whither Mankind? (which I’ve always preferred), is unquestionably uneven and lacks in dramatic punch, especially with all of its scenes of characters giving monologues about the horrors of war and the importance of scientific progress. But Wells’ fiery social consciousness and boundless imagination is ever-present, and there’s no denying that the presentation is unforgettable. Wells correctly predicted the coming of the second World War—indeed he was only off by four months as to when it would start—and his understanding of how catastrophically violent and destructive that war would be, and how its aftermath would reshape the world, was certainly prescient. His thinking that WWII would last thirty years, lead to the dissolution of national sovereignty, and bring about a unified world state led by scientists and engineers, was obviously off, but the point of science fiction is not to accurately predict the future but to analyze and comment on the present. I think what Things to Come is really saying is that a unified utopian world is always possible, even if you start with humanity at its lowest point. The drive to explore and persevere that lies at the core of the human spirit is simply inextinguishable, and we can either accept and embrace it or spend the rest of our lives ignoring it. Which shall it be?

2. Destination Moon (1950)

   

   After WWII’s explosive end and the economic boom brought about in its aftermath, the prospect of human-crewed spaceflight was becoming more and more realistic, and it was at this time that noted science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein composed his novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” which told the story of an American business tycoon’s attempts to be the first to reach and possess the moon. Elements of this story were borrowed by film producer George Pal, a noted animator of visual effects who wanted to branch out into feature films, and who eventually brought Heinlein on board to develop the script and act as technical advisor.
   With its two years of production and over half a million dollar budget, Destination Moon is certainly an impressive technical film for the time, featuring the best depictions of space travel that Hollywood special effects could conjure at the time, what really makes it so striking today is just how plausible it all seems. Indeed, it’s so plausibly constructed that’s it’s almost a misnomer to think of this movie as science fiction at all. Filmed a decade before NASA was even founded and released eleven years before the first human traveled into space, it’s remarkable today how accurately the movie depicts the nature of riding a rocket into space and the unusual physics of a zero-gravity environment. The four men who travel to the moon experience tremendous force when launching, struggle to master the effects of weightlessness, have to contend with extra-vehicular spacewalks to repair their ship mid-flight, explore the rocky surface of the moon and have fun with the much weaker gravity, and must make crucial decisions about the cost of weight when calculating their chances of returning home—all factors that current astronauts deal with every day. The movie didn’t get everything right, of course. It was government-led, publicly-funded organizations that got humans to space and onto the moon, not private industrialists. The actual rockets used to get into space are many times larger and more complex than the sleek and shiny silver ship in the film. And of course the surface of the moon is a good deal less visually interesting in reality than what’s portrayed in astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell’s luscious matte paintings. But in essence the film does an excellent job of portraying the harsh, challenging realities of space travel that the United States would face in the coming decades, and that combined with its clipping pace and punchy dialogue always makes it a fun watch, so long as you can skip through the Woody Woodpecker sequence.

3. Forbidden Planet (1956)

   

   The 1950s were a golden age for sci-fi movies, but my favorite, hands-down, has always been Forbidden Planet. For one, it’s the most impressive looking science fiction movie of the decade and, until 1968, probably of all time. It’s also probably the most influential sci-fi movie ever made, with a legacy that can be felt in movies like Star Wars, Alien, The Fifth Element, even Denis Villeneuve’s adaptations of Dune has some similar shots. Its use of an all-electronic score was groundbreaking and many of its elements, especially Robby the Robot, have become pop culture icons. But what keeps bringing me back to Forbidden Planet is the imagination, the wonder, and especially the bizarre dreamlike atmosphere of the whole affair.
   For despite all its robots, ray guns, space ships and short skirts, this is really a movie about the mind and the conflict between the conscious and unconscious. There’s something strangely surreal about Forbidden Planet, especially for the young men who were the film’s main intended audience. The hyper-masculine atmosphere of the United Planets Starship C57-D, the magnificently desolate titular planet of Altair IV, the psychosexual charms of Anne Francis as Altaira, the tantalizingly fascinating secret history of the Krell aliens, and the menace of an invisible monster all contribute to give the film an atmosphere of something primal and psychological, like a fever dream that makes sense when you’re experiencing it but can’t quite recall upon waking, especially when set against the atonal electronic score that makes the scenes of alien landscapes and technology even more disorienting. It’s cheesy and a bit juvenile in places, much like most movies of this period, but the themes of mind over matter and the mind-blowing implications make for a beguiling watch even today.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

   

   No list of sci-fi movies is complete without it. Here’s my thought—in an essentially infinite universe, where unthinkably massive forces heave entire clusters of galaxies along elegant paths throughout empty space, the scale of human achievement becomes so remote it essentially does not exist for all intents and purposes. It’s not unlike when we humans struggle to detect events at the quantum level of reality, where things so unimaginably tiny happen so immeasurably fast that they can hardly be said to have occurred at all. This is the reality of things at the grandest cosmic scale, and no other film has made its audience feel the weight of that immensity like 2001.
   I’ve watched it many times throughout my life, but a few years ago I finally got the chance to see it on a big screen. It was a fascinating experience, mainly because of an interaction with a fellow member of the audience during the movie’s intermission, which takes place roughly two-thirds of the way through the film. Like most, I took the opportunity to make a trip to the men’s room, and as I was standing there gazing fixedly at the wall, the gentlemen at the station beside me turned in my direction and asked me, perfectly seriously, if I’d seen this movie before. Now speaking to anyone, ever, in a men’s restroom is something of a severe breach of etiquette, but I figured it would be a little too rude on my part to just ignore him, so I said that I had seen it before many times. His response was to ask me what was going to happen next. Would HAL try to kill the crew? Would they get to Jupiter? What was that big black rectangle all about? I responded, perhaps a bit more curtly than I normally would have, that I wasn’t going to spoil the plot of a movie we were literally in the middle of watching, and one that’s been out for well over forty years at that point. I then zipped myself up, made quick work of washing my hands, and found my way back to my seat. Once the movie was over and we were all collectively reeling from the sensory overload, I thought I heard a familiar voice say from somewhere in the back of the theater, “Well what the fuck does that mean?” I took this as my cue to make a quick exit, since I was afraid that my bathroom companion would try to find me in the crowd and interrogate me about the meaning of the movie’s ending. I didn’t want to have that conversation, and besides, I don’t know what it means any more than anybody else who’s ever seen the movie. But it certainly seems to mean something, and that might be what keeps drawing all of us back to 2001: a quest for meaning.

5. THX-1138 (1971)

   

   I first heard about THX-1138 in a documentary about the making of the original Star Wars. “George Lucas made a science fiction film before Star Wars?” I thought to myself, “I’ve got to seek this out.” I eventually found a copy of it at a local video store on VHS, and so rented it, took it home, and spent the next eighty-eight minutes feeling about as uncomfortably baffled as I ever have been watching a movie. I must have watched it five or six more times in that first weekend.
   It’s really an experimental, artistic film that tries to talk about the future of human society if we let our fixation on making and following rules overcome our authentic human selves. In the dystopia of THX-1138, everyone is on sedating drugs all the time, partly to keep people from doing anything rebellious and partly so they can perform their increasingly stressful jobs, for which they are paid in colorful foam blocks whose only purpose is to be thrown away or traded for other, equally worthless foam blocks in other shapes and colors. All babies are test tube babies and honest, emotional human intimacy is prohibited. Everyone shaves their heads and wears the same white pajamas, and it’s all enforced by an army of robotic police officers who frequently malfunction. And the most interesting part? There is no evil overlord ruling this drab and lifeless world, no scheming emperor for the people to overthrow. In this world, society’s greatest enemy is society itself, and the only way to escape it is to leave the “safe” subterranean cities for the surface world that may or may not be habitable after some barely-remembered catastrophe that forced humanity underground. There are metaphors and symbolisms around every claustrophobic corridor in THX-1138, not all of them clear and none of them pleasant to think about, and while it can be a confusing mess to many people, it can also be a tremendously thought-provoking mess to others.

6. Jodorowsky’s Dune (sometime in the late 1970’s?)

   

   All right, this is not actually a science fiction movie. Sort of.
   Back in the early 1970s, Chilean arthouse filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky secured the rights to adapt the extremely famous science fiction novel Dune into a feature film. Jodorowsky had made a couple of avant-garde movies exploring the nature of consciousness and spirituality that had become cult hits and had expanded the language of cinema, which one would think would be an odd choice to direct a film about a complex political narrative about warring families in a distant future on a desert planet, and as it turned out, you would be quite right, because this proposed film stalled before production began in earnest (literally right before), and the movie never got made. But the near-making of that film had arguably the most seismic fallout of any other unmade film in history, and profoundly shaped the direction of science fiction films to this day.
   I’m gonna start by going on record to say that I’m not really a big fan of Dune, either the novels or any of the movie/TV adaptations. I respect the imagination and the geopolitical themes, but I don’t like or care about any of the characters and don’t find any of the stories in any way appealing or compelling. Which is why I think I would have liked Jodorowsky’s Dune, because much of what I don’t like about the book was apparently going to be excised from his version, especially the extremely downbeat and dour ending. It also would have featured special effects far ahead of what anyone else was capable of doing at the time, a soundtrack by some of the best psychedelic rock bands of the era (including Pink Floyd), a cast of famous actors mixed with eccentric celebrities and unknowns, and artwork by some of the best science fiction artists in the business, including a then little-known Swiss painter charged with creating the look of the evil Harkonnen clan named H.R. Giger.
   The pre-production of Jodorowsky’s Dune, often referred to as “The Greatest Science Fiction Film Never Made,” was chronicled in a 2013 documentary titled, appropriately, Jodorowsky’s Dune, which explores how the fallout of the productions disintegration led to movies like Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator, among many others, and how if it could have been made and released as planned, it might have been a transformative event at a time when the future of the movie business was uncertain. What if the film that changed the course of cinema hadn’t been something like The Godfather or Jaws—traditional dramas and adventure movies made by American men with classic film school educations—but rather a transcendental space fantasy from a foreign director with no formal film training, a true outsider? Who knows.

   ---

   Well! This list seems to have gotten away from me a little. Only six movies in and we’re already closing on 3,000 words, so in the interest of keeping the Substack email guideline gods appeased, I’m going to split this list into two parts, with the next six films coming next week. Until then, I can tell you this—these first six films are all ones that I like very much, but the ones I really love are yet to be revealed. Suspense! It sells. Bye.

   I’m so tired. Share this post and leave a comment. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses; they need them to survive.

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Her face bore all the signs. Well not all all, but enough for a sturdy conclusion.

Her hands too had the little bits of scar tissue and flowing patterns of porous wrinkling that bespoke regular bruising. There might have even been evidence of bone fractures, but that was harder to tell from just a glance.

Tony’s interest in the strange look and feel of the spacecraft’s interior had waned and waned until he was all but oblivious to it. Even this room, a vast shimmering stone hall of greens and reds, with a ancient-looking and formidable-feeling dwarf lord sitting upon a throne of marble and surrounded by his axe-wielding guards, just slid from his sight like beads of rain on a window. Clark Bastion and his wife Vicki were sitting next to each other on a low, cushioned wooden bench, but for all their bearing they might have been sitting on opposite ends of the Earth, and probably felt that being on different planets would be even more agreeable. Frogger, upon entering the room and seeing his parents unharmed, ran up to them in tears of relief, and to their credit they seemed likewise relieved, if very bewildered, to see their young son. It was Vicki who bore the signs of physical injury, and Tony knew enough about the patterns to know they were human-inflicted.

He left the Bastions to their awkward reunion and went over to talk to the dwarf lord, a fellow called Moritorius the Thunderer. Tony was never and will probably not become very deferential to symbols of authority, but he gave it his best and bowed as low as his opinion of himself could manage. He spoke quietly and softly to Lord Moritorius, who at first started to explain the reasons behind their medieval fantasy-inspired aesthetics, but Tony waved all that aside and instead asked about why they had taken the Bastions.

“The taller, less hairy of the two,” his Lordship began, “whom we believe to be the male, was in the process of enacting violence against the other. Physical strikes, aural harassment, possibly other forms of abuse we would not understand. I had to act to preserve welfare.”

“I’d have too, if I’d been there,” said Tony, “have they spoken to each other much since you brought them here?”

“We endeavored to make them comfortable,” said Moritorius, “they were clearly mentally distressed by the Summoning Light’s effect. It can cause curious bodily moods for those unprepared or unaccustomed. They resisted any and all attempts we made to assist in their relaxation, and finally I brought them here to my Hall of Kings. I thought I might speak to them directly in their own tongue, but the male especially was simply too overwrought and would not hear my words. The female was perhaps even more frightened but apparently also more accepting of my explanation.”

“You told them you were aliens?” Tony asked.

“And the male refused, and I believe refuses still, to trust my words. Learned as we are in your Terran tongues, he used many phrases that none of us knew, but from his tone of voice we could guess their lack of affection well enough.” He looked past Tony at the Bastion family, especially Frogger. “Is that their offspring?”

“Mmhm,” Tony said, “I call him Frogger. He’s very clever and has a lot of daring.”

Lord Moritorius nodded. “A useful combination. But I fear he may be in some danger.”

“I know what you mean. I didn’t understand before, but I do now.”

The dwarf king raised his great, gray, bushy eyebrows slightly. “One so wise, so learned as you? I would not have thought there was much you did not understand.”

Tony shook his head. “Trust me, my Lord. I don’t understand much of anything.”

Moritorius signaled one of his guards, and exchanged a few words in a soft, high pitched language. The guard then departed the hall, and Moritorius said, “We shall return you to your city, and the family to their home, using the Light of Banishment. It will carry you safely back to the surface of your land. I can trust, I think, you to ensure that no further violence will come to pass among them.”

Tony thought this over very quickly. He did not like to insert himself into other people’s lives more than he had to. Would he have to now? Would there be another way to work through this? He wasn’t sure. And he sure didn’t like not being sure.

“I’ll do what I can,” was all he said.

“Will you, now?” Moritorius said, his great beard concealing a smile. “I believe there are very few limits to what you can do, so that ought to be something extraordinary.”

Frogger was not altogether pleased to be leaving. Once he’d found his parents safe and sound, his fear evaporated and his curiosity about the spaceship and it’s inhabitants took full control. He wanted to know everything about all of it, but Tony insisted that it would only be polite and proper to leave when they were asked, and he further insisted, even more vociferously, that none of it was all that interesting anyway.

“But I thought you liked all this?” Frogger asked as the four of them were being led down yet another long stonework corridor.

“Eh,” Tony said, his cloak billowing around his shoulders as they walked, “I lost interest quickly. I lose interest quickly in lots of things. Or maybe I just can’t sustain the energy necessary to stay enthusiastic for very long. Enthusiasm is exhausting. It’s also invigorating. But that doesn’t make any sense. But it’s still true. Now that is frustrating.”

Frogger didn’t really understand what Tony was talking about, so he changed the subject. “I wanted to go back out into space on our way home. Do we have to be beamed down?”

“It’s not beaming, Frogger,” Tony said, “it’s space warping. It’ll be safer and easier. Besides, I left my spacesuit with Thorgrim by way of an apology for our scuffle in the room with all the gold. He called it a charming curiosity.”

“But don’t you want to see the stars again?” Frogger asked.

“I’ll see them again,” Tony said, “the silent stars will go by with or without me.”

* * *

The sensation of sliding down a warp in the fabric of space is one best experienced with your eyes closed, your fingers in your ears, and ideally an empty stomach, since even without the looking and seeing the overthrowing of your sense of balance is enough to dredge up the remnants of your most recent cheese sandwich. I suppose it would be best described by comparing it going down a spiral slide, but you don’t feel any momentum, inertia, or centrifugal force. Instead the rest of the world and indeed the whole of the visible universe seems to be whirling around you, as though you were the lone fixed point in all of creation while everything else spun around and around and around, nauseatingly. The absolute worst case of motion sickness you’ve ever experienced, but mixed with that sense of boundlessness of the mind that only the heroic hippies of the 1960s tripping on the purer forms of LSD ever really knew. And it only lasts a few seconds.

Tony had known all of this but had never experienced it for himself; fortunately his mask was enough to muffle his ears and eyes against the insanity of what his senses were unsuccessfully trying to convey. The Bastions had a harder time, with all three vomiting upon returning to the solid surface of the Earth right beside their house, though Frogger seemed to hold up the best, with his mother holding up the worst, needing to lie down on the cold grass for a good fifteen minutes before she could bring herself back to her feet. His father seemed buoyed by the fury at the state his house had been left in (the roof was still missing after all), and he made quite a racket with his ugly language. After apparently deciding that he could wait no longer for his miserable wife or son to come to their senses, he tried to storm into the house, but found the massive hole in the living room ceiling only aggravated him further, and so he had to content himself with stewing in the garage.

Tony bent down next to Frogger after the young man’s nausea had passed.

“You’ll be okay. Just drink some water, maybe eat some crackers. It’ll pass. Here,” and he passed over an orange business card. “Give this to your parents when you can. It’s the number of a construction contractor who will fix your house good as new, and he wont’ charge you a penny for it.”

Frogger frowned. “I don’t wanna take your money…”

Tony scoffed. “I’ve never paid money for a thing in my life. Don’t worry. And Frogger,” Tony said, kneeling down beside his young friend so as to speak to him face-to-face, “I need to ask you a question, and I need you to tell me the truth. Does your dad ever hit your mom?”

Frogger’s face froze in fear and his recently disturbed insides squirmed all over again. He couldn’t decide what to do or say. But Tony could guess the answer easily enough.

“I promise I won’t tell another person in the whole universe if I don’t have to. Does he ever hit you?”

Frogger quickly shook his head with obvious relief.

“All right then. Take this.” And he handed Frogger a simple brass key that felt strangely heavier that it ought to.

“What is it?” Frogger asked.

“A key to my house,” Tony said, “you can come over any time you want, day or night, no matter what, even if I’m not there.”

“Okay,” Frogger said, feeling uncertain but solemnly pocketing the key. “Are you leaving?”
“Yeah,” said Tony, “I’ve got to feed my cat. See you around, Frogger. Keep the spacesuit. It’s a good look on you.”

And indeed, it would be a long time before Ryle Bastion’s parents or teachers could persuade him to wear anything else.

* * *

Clark Bastion sat angrily in the corner of his garage as the night outside wore on. He’d been sitting there for the last hour and a half, ever since they’d returned home, seemingly unable to go anywhere or do anything. All sorts of thoughts were racing through his mind, few of them pleasant, pretty much none of them justifiable. But the overarching trajectory of his mood was to punish someone, somewhere, anywhere for what had happened, and if the past patterns of his life were anything to go by, he would find someone soon enough, regardless of whether or not they were responsible. For people like Clark Bastion, the point of punishing others isn’t to correct bad behavior or establish a more just world, it’s simply to soothe the pain of humiliation and defeat.

Suddenly, the electric door of the garage opened. This was perplexing, because the door did not have any outdoor control panel, and the only remote opening device was inside Clark’s pickup, which was inside the garage with him. He hopped to his fee and saw standing in the driveway, half-lit by a nearby street lamp, a figure in a brown fedora and shimmering silver suit, his face covered by a dark gray mask and his eyes concealed behind bug-eyed goggles that glowed in moonlit night. His massive, seemingly endless cloak, the color of a melting dark German chocolate cake, flapped and flowed around him in the midnight wind, but he stood stock still as though poured out of cement.

“In spite of all the biological complexities,” Tony Herman said, “the human body is quite simple. Just a wet mass of flesh, blood, muscle and bone. A very fragile thing.”

Clark swallowed dryly. He was not the sort to be easily intimidated by any man, but figure standing a mere twelve feet away from him was by no conceivable definition just any man.

“I could stand here and describe to you all the horrible, painful, deeply interesting things I could do to hurt you Mister Bastion,” Tony said, “and you must believe me when I say they are captivatingly interesting, but to be completely honest? I don’t really care much for violence. I can do it when necessary, but in reality that’s not as often as most people think. So instead, I’m gonna talk about your son Ryle. He’s very clever and very spirited. I’m guessing he inherited the cleverness from your wife and the spirit from you, based on how you acted today. I gave him my old green spacesuit because I could tell it meant a very great deal to him, and I gave him a business card for a contractor who will fix your roof for free, and I gave him a key to my house because it’d be nice to have some company from someone who isn’t trying to arrest or kill me for once. And my cat likes him. If nothing else, that makes him my friend.

“You are seriously harming my friend every time you hurt your wife. I’m interested in most things but one thing I couldn’t care less about are the dingy details of your marriage problems. If you hate your wife, divorce her, share custody of your son with her, and move on. Ryle will take it hard, but not nearly as hard as whatever awful things you’re doing to keep things together. If you don’t hate your wife then stop beating her, stop abusing her, and start listening to her. You’ll be happier, and so will she and so will your son.”

Clark’s pride was severely stung, and as was typical with his character, he tried to bully his way out of it.

“You can’t tell me how to live my goddamn life or how I raise my goddamn kid or how I talk to my goddamn wife!”

For a moment it seemed that Tony would not react to this outburst, but then he took a single step in Clark’s direction, and Clark involuntary leaned back.

“Please do not give me cause to return here, Mister Bastion. Because if cause is given, I will. I do not have many friends and will not allow those few I possess to come to any harm. Ever. No matter the cost.”

A shiver ran down Clark’s back and he said nothing more, but to his credit he did not back away. Then, against all sense and reason, the garage door closed again, seemingly all on its own. Stranger still, the automatic overhead lights did not activate as they usually did, and the closing of the door plunged Clark into total darkness. It took him a long time to find his way to the communicating door into the house, and he had plenty of time to think about plenty of things while he did so.

* * *

To be continued

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“Not what I expected,” Tony said with a grin beneath his mask, “which if you ask me is bloody marvelous. I expect pretty much everything.”

Once Frogger had been extricated from his own space helmet (he’d kept the rest of the suit on; it made him feel safe and he liked the color of the chipped glow-in-the-dark green paint), he turned around to see the rest of the ship upon which they had found themselves. The great metal door Frogger had seen close was some kind of airlock hatch apparently, but nothing else in the room was metal, or at least not metal in the more refined sense. I guess you could call it raw metal? Unprocessed metal? But you would probably use the word “stone.”

The walls were made of what appeared to be huge gray bricks of granite or some other such mineral. The floor was composed of similar stones, and the room was lit with nothing more or less complicated than burning torches, which gave the place a flickering, smoky quality that was terribly atmospheric. The nearest exit was a stone archway that lead into an inviting darkness beyond.

“Tony,” Frogger said, “this is a spaceship, right?”

“Sure looked like one from the outside,” Tony said, “big and shiny and round. All the usual aesthetics.”

“I’m confused. Did we go back in time somehow? Are we in the past?”

“Manifestly absurd,” Tony said with an expression of disappointment that Frogger could not see, “if we’d traveled in time we’d be nowhere near a spaceship. And I’m certain time travel is impossible.” He shrugged. “Pretty certain.”

“But this looks like the inside of a castle or an old dungeon or something.”

“It does. Isn’t it beguiling?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Tony stared at his young friend. “It’s not important. Let’s see what’s through this arch. You wanna carry a torch? Because I want to if you don’t want to.”

A moment later Frogger was following behind a torch-wielding Tony Herman as they made their way through the archway, which led into a tunnel made of the same kind of stones as the supposed airlock room. The tunnel went on for another sixty feet or so, with Tony “oooh”-ing and “aaah”-ing at every step. He seemed to find the entire place deeply fascinating and diverting. Frogger was certainly feeling curious about their surroundings, but after a time he began to feel more and more worried about his parents.

The tunnel ended with, as you might expect, an old-fashioned wooden door. Tony was tickled.

“Look at this!” he exclaimed, reaching out and touching the door with enthusiastic interest. “Is that real wood? And the ironwork holding the planks together! Extraordinary attention to detail. I bet it creaks deliciously when you open it. I hope it does, once we manage to get it open.” For indeed the door did not swing open, despite the fact that the old-fashioned latch seemed to move freely, albeit with no rusty creaks, which Tony seemed to find a little disappointing.

“Is it stuck or something?” Frogger asked.

“Or something,” Tony said, “doesn’t appear to be locked. I bet there’s something pretty tantalizing on the other side. Probably not a big monster or anything, not this early. But something to motivate us onward no doubt.”

“A monster?” Frogger said in a voice shook with fear. “Is there going to be a monster? What did you say?”

“Oh no, no no,” Tony said, still studying the door, “not this soon. I mean maybe a light skirmish or some kind of risky encounter, but unless the advanced lifeforms who designed an interstellar spacecraft just happen to be lousy at narrative design, I wouldn’t think so. Probably a trap?”

“Tony, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frogger said. “What design? What’s a ‘skirmish?’ Where are my mom and dad?”

“Well this place has obviously been designed to look like the interior of a medieval fortress or castle, like you said. And a skirmish is a quick, fierce fight, but one that doesn’t usually do a lot of damage to either side. They’re bad tactics, really. And I’m thinking your parents are beyond this door, if only I can find a way--”

With a frighteningly delicate click sound, several false stones dropped from the walls around the door, and dozens of small projectiles shaped and colored like peas shot out into the corridor. Tony, faster than Frogger had ever seen anyone move in his life, let go of his torch and whirled around with a powerful spin of his brown cloak, shoving Frogger backwards as the tiny devices pelted the ground and walls. At each point of impact, the surface fizzed and sizzled as a greenish liquid ate quickly away at the stone, leaving a tiny cloud of greenish gas. One of them went right through the brim of Tony’s hat, leaving a small smoldering hole in the felt, grazed the edge of his bug-eyed goggles, leaving a small gash in the corner of the glass, and finally bounced harmlessly off the sleeve of his silver suit and smacked into the wooden door, where it left a tiny black crater in the timber.

“What?” Frogger hardly had the breath to ask after Tony’s impact had knocked some of the wind out of his lungs.

“Acid!” Tony shouted. “Classic!”

After a few seconds, the corrosive liquid in the tiny capsules had been spent and the sizzling had ceased, leaving plenty of little pockmarks and holes in the stonework.

“A trap,” Tony said, “I might have known.”

“What were those?” Frogger asked.

“Oh, some kind of little acid globules or whatnot. Door ought to be openable now, I’d think.” And sure enough, when Tony attempted to lift the latch, the door now swung freely opened. The mad genius cheerfully picked up his torch from where it had fallen and strode confidently through the doorway. Frogger, a good deal less confidently, followed behind.

This chamber was much larger than the previous rooms, although it too featured the same stone walls and were again lit by torches, but here the ceiling was high and arched and held aloft by thick stone pillars. The floor too was different, composed of huge marble tiles, all black and red and luxuriant. Or at least what parts of the floor could be seen, for most of it was covered by piles upon piles upon piles of gold.

Most of it was coins, intricately minted and designed, with each little detail glittering in the torchlight. They were gathered together in mighty heaps like cones of grain, and each mound was dotted with gems and jewels that glittered with candy colors. Every so often a heavy wooden chest was half-buried in one of the mounds, its top hanging open and stuffed to bursting with silver and platinum artifacts so delicately and preciously wrought that they looked as if they would melt in the palm of your hand. The whole place had that crisp, tingly odor metal on metal on metal.

Frogger stood in amazement and wonder at the sight of it all. Mere youth as he was, he could not begin to estimate the value of what he was seeing, but even a seasoned adult, scarred and limped by the ravages of business, would struggle to calculate the riches housed within this chamber of wealth indescribable.

Tony looked around and shrugged. “Nothing of much use here I guess. They ought to organize this mess. But look here! Another door, and this one made of stone. How curious.”

At first, distracted as he was by the mountain of treasure, Frogger hadn’t registered that the stone recess in the far wall was actually a door, but as Tony walked past the incalculable horde as though it were piles of so much gravel, he saw that it was indeed a kind of door, five feet wide and nearly ten tall, with no handle, latch or knob to speak off but rather a sort of lever halfway up the right side of the frame. The surface of the door featured a vast and ugly face hewn into its surface.

“It’s not trapped too, is it?” Frogger asked.

“Eh? Oh I should hardly think so,” Tony said, “two consecutive trapped doors would be beyond boring. But it’s the carving that’s most curious to me.”

Frogger took a closer look at the door’s graven image. A thin nose, narrow eyes, and a vast mouth full of teeth in a permanent grimace leered out at the both of them with unshakable contempt.

“He looks pretty scary,” Frogger said.

“I’ve seen worse,” Tony said, “but the unexpected thing, although I suppose it ought to be more expected all things considered, is that it’s a human face, or at least an interpretation of a human face. But then, oughtn’t it to be? Medieval stone walls, torches, wooden doors, and a fat lot of treasure right out of Arabian Nights. The whole thing is a good deal more anthropocentric that I would have expected from an interstellar species, in spite of its anachronistics.”

Sometimes, very smart people do this thing where they use a lot of high-end polysyllabic words, because after all words like that are a lot more precise and very smart people often think in very precise terms. These words come leaking out of their minds like sewage from a cracked toilet, and the people around them who find words like “cool” to be more than serviceable when “splendorous” would be more accurate often have a hard time making head or tail out of their inane babble, especially a twelve year-old with a limited vocabulary to begin with. Point is, Frogger didn’t and probably still doesn’t know what “anthropocentric” or “anachronistic” mean, and ordinarily he would have brought this up with Tony had not all of his attention been very seriously attracted to the dwarf who came through the stone door.

“Thieves!” it shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the both of them.

“Balderdash!” Tony replied, courageously pointing a finger back. “If anything, you’re the thief. You stole a couple of people. Or are we expected to believe they just smashed through their own roof and took off into space for the devil of it?”

Frogger’s mouth hung agape. The little man stood no more than four feet high, wore a little leather cap on his bald head and a lime green tunic on the rest of him that was a little hard to see as it was mostly obscured by a mighty red beard that hung nearly down to his stumpy knees. His face was a peculiar mixture of outrage and surprise at seeing these two odd characters pontificating around his treasury.

“Lies!” the dwarf shouted, not lowering his Finger of Accusation one millimeter. “You’ve come to steal our precious horde, heirloom of the house of Torbek, dozens--hundreds of generations hence!”

“Hogwash!” Tony yelled, taking a step forward towards the dwarf’s accusing finger. “We’re in the depths of space, shortstack! This whole production is a front, a forgery, a falsehood, call it what you like! You kidnapped this boy’s family and you’re trying to distract us with some kind of pastiche!”

“Villains!” the dwarf hollered, and he tried to extend his phalange j’accuse even further, as though it were a rifle he was moments away from firing. “I’ll alert the Lord of the keep to your mischief, and he’ll have your heads on a pike for defiling our ancestral halls!”

Tony moved even closer, until both his and the dwarf’s pointing fingers were nearly tip-to-tip, like Adam and God on the ceiling. “Poppycock!” Tony belted. “Enough of the ‘lords’ and ‘castles’ nonsense. We didn’t come all this way to LARP. Tell us where you’ve got the Bastions before I think of something interesting to do.”

“Knaves!” the dwarf exclaimed, but before Tony could come up with another synonym--“codswallop” was on the very tip of his tongue--four more dwarves burst into the room, and these brandished long-handled axes. One or two frozen moments elapsed before the nearest dwarf took a swing at Tony, who twisted nimbly to his left to dodge it, then another swiped his axe right, which collided with Tony’s shoulder. The silver suit sent the blade shattering into confetti but the force of the impact knocked its wearer backward in an untidy stumble that ended when Frogger caught him heavily in his space-suited arms. The boy was beginning to panic, but Tony had gotten back to his feet and was leaping like a panther back into the storm of bearded warriors.

Every time one of them swung an axe, he simply stepped around it, this way, that way, calmly and lackadaisically, as though he was dancing to a favorite slice of freeform jazz. None of the axes could make any kind of contact with him, and before long the dwarves were huffing and puffing with exhaustion and frustration. More than once they banged into each other with the axe handles and knicked one another with the edge of the blades. Finally one of them held his axe straight ahead like a spear and charged at Tony, who swooped aside in a flurry of chocolate-coated silver, sending the hurtling dwarf directly into a heap of gold coins, which came showering down upon his bald head. The other four, shouting various versions of “criminals!” and “vagabonds!” and seeing the fight was hopeless, backed away through the stone door, which boomed shut after them. Tony stood upright with pride and turned to smile brightly at Frogger who, I must again emphasize, could not see it because the mad genius was wearing a mask. Quite absurd, the lot of it.

The creature immersed in the treasure was squirming and flopping around like a beached catfish, and making no small amount of noise. Tony reached down a unearthed--um, un-treasured--it from the mound of wealth and held it at arm’s length. It was not the same as he who had engaged in the pointing contest with Tony but one of those who had come in axes a-blazing. He had more blonde in his beard and his head featured a few whispy curls of strawberry hair.

“Listen you,” Tony said with danger, “no more games. Are the Bastions aboard this spacecraft or are they not?”

The dwarf, possessed of a gast far too flabbered to protest or put up any more fight, sighed out the words, “The boy’s parents are indeed here. But we meant no harm.”

“Neither here nor there,” Tony said, “you abducted them. An interstellar race, advanced beyond all human comprehension, and you show up to kidnap people. Shameful.” He shook his head disapprovingly.

“No harm was meant!” the dwarf insisted. “We prevented harm, in point of fact!”

If anyone could have seen his face, they’d have noticed Tony cocking an eyebrow. “Explain,” he said.

“There would have been violence!” the dwarf protested. “The two of them were on the point of injuring one another! Another moment without our intervention, and it would have been a tragedy! We were only observing from afar under Cloak of Concealment, but when we saw and heard through our Lord’s Seeing Stone what was about to befall, we had no choice to but to use the Light of Summoning to bring them into the keep!”

Tony turned to look at Frogger. If he needed any confirmation, it was written all over the boy’s face. He was looking down at the glittering tile floor, trying to avoid Tony’s gaze, his face a mask of embarrassment and guilt. A series of locks opened in Tony’s mind.

“Where are you holding them?” he asked.

“Below,” the dwarf said, “they are unharmed. Please, we did not come to do battle, only to escort you to our Lord, who would speak to the boy. He is filled with concern for him. We only attacked at Thogrim’s behest when he accused you of thievery.”

Tony nodded, pulling off his fedora and scratching at his head. “Interesting. I think I owe you an apology for any harm I might have caused you in our little altercation.” He gingerly released the little figure and returned his pike-axe to his hand from the floor where it had fallen. The dwarf took his weapon back, and nodded gratefully.

“I am still to take you to the Lord of the Keep. Please, accompany me.”

“We’ll follow you,” Tony said, “Frogger?”

The boy looked up at the mad genius, his face a little wet from tears. Tony knelt down beside him and placed a hand on his spacesuited shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Tony said, “I think I understand now. Let’s go with this little fellow and we’ll all go back home very soon, all right?”

Frogger shrugged and allowed himself to be led by Tony’s hand, and together they followed the dwarf guard out through the stone door and into another corridor of careful masonry lit by wall-mounted torches. If there was any answer to the mystery of these peculiar people’s taste in interior decor and cultural leanings, it would have to wait until some rather unpleasant domestic worries were straightened out.

* * *

To be continued…

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A bright light was trying to force its way through his eyelids, and he instinctively raised his hand to block it. For a moment he forgot where he was, but the feeling of the hard branch under his spine brought it all back, and in a flash he opened his eyes and sat bolt upright, or at least as close to it as he could manage in a tree, and looked about him.

He was still in the forest, but it was very clearly not the same forest. The endless pines and coarse, grassy underbrush were nowhere to be seen. Instead, he was surrounded by…well, by every tree. Multitudinous species, some of which he recognized but most were entirely unfamiliar to him and would be, he suspected, equally unfamiliar to the highest experts botany and dendrology could provide. No two trees looked quite the same--it seemed each had differently shaped leaves, different branch configurations, different kinds of bark and grains of wood. Some were brown and some were gold, some green, some red, some black, some white. From his perch in the oak he could see trees that were as tiny as a bonsai, and others so tall that the sight of their distant tops, almost lost in the sticky white clouds that slid by overhead, made his knees shake and his head swim. Some trees were covered in bright orange leaves so tiny that it looked like nothing so much as ginger fur from a distance, and others with gigantic greenish-yellow leaves three feet in length, so heavy that they hung almost straight down and glistened in the morning light. One or two that he could see didn’t seem to have any leaves at all. Some trees had branches that stuck straight out from their column-like trunks at perfect perpendicular angles, with each limb ending at a sharp spike of wood. Others were so gnarled and convoluted in their grown that their trunks seemed to curl in on themselves several times, and each branch followed the same mad, winding path until the whole thing resembled a massive fractal tumbleweed thicket, covered in hundreds if not thousands of violet-colored leaves from the very base of the trunk all the way to the tip of the last branch, each leaf exactly the same size. But even all of this bizarre foliage was nothing compared to the mushrooms.

Randall had, of course, been expecting mushrooms, but even his deep study and mediation had not prepared him for this spectacular array of mycological wonders. The entire forest floor seemed to be coated in them like grass. Every last kind of fungus he had ever heard of, seen illustrated, or even heard vaguely described represented possibly a tenth of what he was seeing. Simply from his vantage point in the oak he saw a chocolate brown specimen with lime green spots that was short, maybe no more than three or four inches in height, and perhaps three feet in width, as thought it were some kind of huge dinner platter lying on the forest floor. Another was skinny and white like an enoki, but well over four feet tall. And the colors! Every shade, every gradient, every pigment the human eye was capable of perceiving could be found somewhere. A few trees were covered not in leaves but in mushrooms shaped like leaves, and many had numerous growths winding their way up their trunks and scattered throughout their branches.

The sight of the place was highly stimulating to Randall’s mind and imagination, but nonetheless a bit overwhelming, and he found the climb down from the oak into the endless fungus a good deal more difficult than the initial climb up. As he stood there, trying to wrap his mind around this near-nauseatingly expressionistic art explosion of a forest, he occasionally found himself hit by a bout of mild dizziness and vertigo, but he knew he was nearing the end of the journey that had defined his life, and so he began to walk forward through the forest, trusting his instincts to take him in the right direction.

With every step, he crushed another mushroom beneath his feet, and sometimes a little poof of spores would erupt as he did so. The logical side of his brain, never terribly strong to begin with and recently having undergone a severe beating in these enchanted surroundings, tried to muster some reasonable anxiety about the potentially poisonous effects of these countless unknown varieties of mushrooms, but he was too lost in the whimsy to listen, and instead wandered through the fields of fungus as though it were a drifting dream, all peace and comfort and safety. There was no danger to be found or felt here, in this land where he could almost feel True Magic rise up from the ground like a volcanic vent. How could he, a born mystic, feel any fear in this land of mysticism, where he and people like him belonged? The sun was high over head and hot, but the uncountable trees provided plenty of shade and their bizarre and fascinating foliage gave the air an effect that he managed to convince himself was sweet, lush, and nourishing, and not merely aromatic the point where one’s eyes nearly stung, rather like being stuck on a bus sitting next to a woman wearing too much perfume or a young man who seemed to have recently taken a bath in pure cologne.

He could not say exactly what he was looking for. Windegard’s secret lair, Shromshutt, was described as residing in a fairy circle of enchanted mushrooms, but the ground upon which he tread seemed to be composed of nothing but mushrooms, and although many were of strange and unfamiliar shapes, sizes and colors, none appeared particularly enchanted. How would he know when he found it? All of the esoteric and hermetic texts he’d studied had focused mainly on the process of crossing over into this sorcerous bubble of a universe, but what exactly he should do from here he was never able to discover. After all, none who had made the journey had ever returned, or at least had never spoken about what they found.

As he made his way without any real sense of where he was going--or whether he ought to stray too far from the oak that had brought him here, and which his instincts were hinting would be his way back, perhaps his only way--he found himself wondering about this. When probing into the secret histories of what little remained in the world of the True Wizardries of the past, he had hoped to gleam some of the knowledge arcane from accounts of those who had at least discovered some of them secondhand as it were from attempts to journey across the Planar Divides (these sort of chemically-induced transcendental voyages were some of the lowest, basest forms of magic and in the olden days the True Wizards were mostly above resorting to them as a form of extraplanar travel) to Shromshutt, but despite all of his searches, there was not one reliable account of anyone having reported anything they’d seen or heard. Why? His first suspicion was that the whole story had been fabricated--you had to sift through a lot of lies when studying magic--and then later he began to wonder if the crossing had been somehow botched by many who attempted it, and they had ended up somewhere in the Dark. Randall, despite the warmth of the overhead sun, shivered at this thought. If he himself had gotten one step wrong in the process, he might have ended up somewhere Else in the vast multiverse with no chance escape or hope of rescue, never to be seen again. Magicians fear becoming lost above all else, funnily enough. Then of course there was the possibility he fancied the most--that the voyagers had actually found Windegard and communed with him, and that they had simply stayed here in this land of magic to pursue the ancient art of True Wizardry at the foot of its last master. It was an appealing thought that he might find a group of like-souled minds waiting to welcome him into their fold, where he could live out his days as a member of a sacred order of Mages engaged in the one really worthwhile work human beings can undertake. Wishful thinking no doubt, but what else is magic?

The sun was beginning to lower in the sky when Randall, his feet sore from days of wandering alone in first one forest and then another, sat down upon a wide, flat toadstool the exact color of dandelions to rest and wonder, and try not to think too hard about how hungry he was beginning to feel. How long would it take to find the Shromshutt? Days? What would he eat? Where would he find fresh water? His determination was hardly lessened in the face of these questions; after all he’d come this far and wasn’t about to quit now, but the practicalities of his predicament were beginning to congeal around him, and nothing is more dangerous to magical thinking than practicalities, and even in that moment Randall’s faith began to waiver. He started wondering if maybe he’d made some kind of grave mistake; if he’d undertaken a quest he would never be able to complete, and that he, like the hopeless sailor, would spend his life in fruitless pursuit of the horizon that can never be brought any closer, let alone reached.

This is the point in any tale when the laziest storyteller in the history of existence, Destiny, decides to stir things up.

These woods of another world had heretofore been almost entirely silent, which made the sudden and easily recognizable croak of a raven stick out like a boat on the ancient ocean. Randall almost jumped out of his skin with surprise when the silence so broke, and he felt his neck crick when it whipped around to look at the source. It was indeed a raven, with shiny black feathers and a silver beak, perched in a tree with bark the texture of oatmeal, branches that seemed to flow out in waves from the trunk, and leaves that were thin and pale, like scraps of paper. For a moment the man and the bird stared at each other, sizing each other up, waiting for one to make the first movie. Then the raven hopped down from the branch and landed on a bright blue mushroom the size of a melon, which caused a slight poof of dark purple spores to be released from its gills. The bird then turned and began walking away from Randall along the fungus-choked ground, and Randall, knowing an omen when he saw one, followed.

The bird hopped and scampered along in between the trees, occasionally taking a short wing to get over a particularly thick or oversized mushroom, while Randall kept ten or twelve feet behind. He was wary of getting too close to the bird for fear it would fly away where he couldn’t follow, but he never let it get any further away in case he lost it in the thick trees or mushrooms which, now he began to notice, seemed to be thinning as they went. The air itself also seemed to be growing slightly colder and more damp, and he thought he could detect a gentle downward slope as they progressed. Suddenly, his foot collided with something much harder than any mushroom, and in his surprise he lost his balance and fell forward, fortunately landing on a soft patch of toadstools. He looked down at where he had stumbled, saw what it was that had tripped him, and immediately jumped to his feet again and scampered backwards until he bumped into a tree that was something between a pine and a willow, but not quite either.

The unmistakable outline of a human skull was poking up from the ground, with bits of the rest of the skeleton visible above the surface as well, as though this person had fallen dead and been partly covered by years and years of forest debris. Randall had apparently caught his shoe on the jawbone, judging from the gruesome crack and fragmentation it had apparently recently undergone. The skeleton’s bony right hand was protruding slightly above the ground, with the fingers still clutching at a very old, rusty knife.

As Randall looked down in horror, the raven fluttered down and landed beside the human bones, gazing back and for the between them and Randall with an inquisitive tilt of the head. Who was it? Why was it here? Why the knife? Is it Windegard? No, Randall told himself forcibly. It could not be. True Wizards were not beholden to the normal laws of life and death. And a mere knife would be a child’s toy in his mystic hands. The raven took another look at the bones, with what might have been a pained and forelorned look, and then continued to hop and skitter its way along the forest floor. Randall was feeling fear well up inside him, but he didn’t dare lose sight of the bird, and shaking himself hard he turned and clambered after it, keeping a better eye on his footing.

For another hour they trudged through the forest together, this man and this raven, with the sun sinking lower and lower in the sky, and Randall was becoming very thirsty and exhausted from the hike, so much so that he might have tripped again over the bird when it suddenly stopped, but he noticed in time.

They had come to a clearing in the middle of the forest. Of course there was no way to know for certain if it was the middle, but in all thematic respects Randall felt if any place in this forest ought to be the center, this would be it. The trees encircling the clearing were clearly of a tremendous age, perhaps hundreds of years, but they were far more recognizable--a common spruce, a simple elm, a standard maple. The ground was all but devoid of mushrooms now, with one very notable exception. In the very center of the clearing was some kind of large, bulky mass--an old tree stump perhaps, or an outcropping of some rock--it was hard to tell for certain here at the edge of the clearing, because whatever it was was positively coated with tiny white mushrooms. Mushrooms that seemed to glow with a pale light that made the clearing shimmer faintly in the lessening light.

Shromshutt.

Hesitantly, with bated breath, sweaty palms, and eyes as wide open as his poor exhausted body could manage, Randall Boone stepped over the threshold he instinctively sensed was there and approached the fungus-encrusted bulk slowly, reverently, silently. He felt it ought to be precluded with a ritual of some kind, but he was too tired and too emotionally overwrought to think of anything grand enough for this ultimate moment.

He was only six feet or so away when the shape turned its head and looked him in the eye.

Its eyes were of a color, that much was undeniable. Randall somehow was reminded of a hot purple, but it was only that--a reminder. This color was something more, something beyond, something he could feel more than he could see. The thing looked at him with eyes that were searching, distressed, surprised to see Randall and yet disappointed in him. It was a look that conveyed a very, very great deal. The kind of look that only comes from eyes that have seen far too much; more than any eyes were ever meant to see.

And then it spoke.

“What are you come here?”

Hearing that voice, Randall was very nearly moved to tears. It was a voice that pulled on the string of a memory so deep inside of him, so ancient and primal, that he doubted he, his father, grandfather, or who knows how many generations back had ever heard anything like it, but it was familiar. It was the voice we all have in our heads when we are unhappy and confused and despondent. The voice of the old man, everywhere, everywhen.

For Randall could see it now--the mushroom-covered figure was a person; a very old man, bent and stiff and curled with age, with his teeth and hair long fallen out and his skin little more than a loose bag that hung upon a withered frame. But the eyes were still just as alive as ever, if not more so. The raven took wing and flittered gently down upon his shoulder and chirped something very quietly into his ancient, primordial ear.

“Wh--who--who are---are you?” Randall managed to sputter, though he knew what the answer would be.

“Windegarten, by some called,” the old man said. His voice felt so absolutely right that it was terrifying.

“You--you are. You are!” Randall’s voice was hushed with awe. His heart was exploding with emotion within him. All the years, all the struggle, all the doubt, all the searching, to at last be stood here. It was the kind of feeling so many people waste their whole lives trying to attain.

The Last True Wizard reached up with his withered, ancient hand and plucked one of the thousands of little mushrooms from his temple with the tips of his fingers wincing in pain as he did so, and flung it away from him. Randall followed with his eyes, expecting to see the mushroom come to a rest on the ground, but instead it landed, bounced, bounced again, and kept on bouncing all the way to the outside of the clearing and into the trees out of sight. Windegard sighed deeply and turned his sad eyes upon the raven on his shoulder.

“Aitch,” he said, “another is brought by you, poor brute. Dare not your work despair you, his own is his folly. We with now him converse, the ass.”

Randall simply stood and listened. What was he to say? His own mouth, his own words, his own mind seemed like a fly buzzing in God’s ear next to this primal figure of myth.

“So?” Windegard said, looking at his visitor.

Randall took a deep breath and sank to one knee, bowing his head reverently, and spoke as best he could. “Windegard, Last True Wizard of Earth, I have come here with all humility and respect in my heart, and would ask to become your humble servant and pupil. I will devote myself, by my life or death, to your teachings, your wisdom, and your knowledge, if you would grant me the highest honor of your acceptance.”

“No,” Windegard said, “go away.”

Randall did not rise from his kneel. “Windegard, to serve you and to learn from you have been the purpose most dear to my heart for as long as it has beat within me. I seek the old knowledge, the True Magic, and I will do whatever you ask, undertake any task and undergo any trial, to prove myself worthy of it. Tell me what it is I must do.”

“Stand,” said the Last True Wizard.

Randall stood slowly, carefully, paying attention to every muscle, every ligament, etching this act into his memory. He stood fully before the ancient sage, who looked back at him.

“Good,” Windegard said, “now get out. Leave me alone.”

The Wizard turned away, but Randall remained frozen in place. He felt as though the most valuable, precious treasure he would ever hold was beginning to slip through his fingers, and he tried to grip onto it tighter.

“…any task…any trial…I’ll do whatever you want…”

“What I want,” Windegard said, “is for you to leave.”

“But…but…no!” And Randall burst into agonized tears. He made to rush forward and grab the old man by the shoulders but stopped short--the act seemed mad, cursed, blasphemous. His whole world was falling apart underneath him. “Master, please, I’ll do anything, I’ll be your slave forever, I can’t leave you, not now, not after everything I’ve been through--”
“Been through!” the old man said with a scoff. “You--how many years?”

“What?” Randall said.

“How many years have you? A score and six and seven hundred years I’ve been. How many have you?”

Randall thought for a moment, and then he understood. “Oh,” he said, “I’m…I’m thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two!” Windegard said. “And look upon it--young. Vim. Still a color in the hair. Go back. Go home. Forget it all. Love and marry a woman, rear a crop of bairns, die old and beloved in a bed. Be a man.”

Randall felt as though he organs had been pulled out of his body. But even amidst the crumbling of his entire sense of self, he felt a spark of indignation at hearing his life’s pursuit so easily mocked and thrown aside, regardless of who said it.

“How can you say that? You, of all people! You’ve done so much, I only wanted to be follow you! I only wanted to have a taste of what it means to be something even a little like you!”

“You’re a dullard then,” Windegard said, his ultraviolet eyes flashing. “What did I do? Naught. Buggered about a half dozen centuries and nothing for it. Love? Joy? Peace? Content? None of it. The great damned fool I only was. Magic is a game for little boys, and I ought never kept to it. Hear me, young stranger--magic is for fools. A grand service to thyself do and drop it now while you yet can live like a man…” a pained expression came over his lined face and he ceased speaking, reached up with his right hand and plucked a little white mushroom from the back of his neck, flung it away with a sigh, and watched it bounce along the ground right out of sight into the forest, just as the other had done. Randall, who could not face nor accept what he was being told, seized on this like a life preserver.

“What is this place? Why are you covered in…in those things?”

Windegard scowled. “As rain they were all right, the philosophers, the brave new men of science. Physicks. They understood the world. Not a playland for babies but the real world. They said of me that I Worked. Bah! Study of the world and its ways is the real work. I saw it true enough, too late of course. And so I came here, and these little bastards, the little mush’ums, they’re killing me at last.”

Randall gaped. “Killing you? But why?”

“Pulling all of the magic out of me. Slowly. Centuries. But in the end, when they’re all picked and I’m clean of this filth, I can die. Pain beyond pain, but I’ll die a man at least. At least that.”

“But why would you do it? You are so powerful--you could live forever!”

Again the old man scoffed. “Why? To be alone forever? Despair forever? A brain in turmoil until trumpet sound? Sod it. No point to a life everlasting like that. Hardly it’s purpose. Power I chased hundreds of years, ultimate power, God’s power, and aye, I had it. But it was all I had. And it was naught enough.”

But Randall stood fast. Something in him had settled into a resolution. He would not accept this. He could never accept this.

“You’re wrong,” he said to the Last True Wizard, “magic is the path to ultimate knowledge. You don’t want to share it with me? Fine. Stay here and let the mushrooms eat you. I’ll learn it on my own. I’ll piece it together, bit by bit. You might have given up, but I will not.”

Windegard shrugged. “As you like. A better handle than the last visitor is at least what you have. He ran off in a weep and cut his own throat. Aitch tells me you stumbled upon him.”

A chill slithered up Randall’s spine.

“Now get the devil’s hell out of here. Follow Aitch. Fall asleep on the oak again. You’ll awake back across the Divide. Chase power if you like. If you’re a fool. An ass. You look one.”

And with another shrug and another sigh, he turned away, and did not move nor speak again.

Randall Boone followed the raven back through the forest of many different trees, wading through the fungus--the corpses of the magic of Windegard, the last True Wizard--and settled himself back on the branch, just as the sun was setting. He was so exhausted by the ordeal that it was hard to keep awake as it was.

Perhaps he awoke back in the forest of our world, walked out of the woods, went home, drank a gallon of water, had a long shower, and decided to give up magic and become a history teacher. Perhaps he devoted his life to trying to piece the old knowledge of True Wizardry back together, and died an old failure. Perhaps he succeeded and became the most powerful and terrible sorcerer in a thousand years, and was only eventually defeated by a brave farm boy who led an uprising against his tyranny. Perhaps he made it back to our world only to die of thirst and exposure because he had been, after all, lost in the woods when he found the old oak. Or perhaps he never made it back at all and became lost in the Dark Else, suffering the fate all magicians fear most. Perhaps perhaps perhaps. Perhaps the answer to a question isn’t the most important thing about it.

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Randall Boone had been hiking for three days and nights alone in the oldest forest within a hundred leagues of where he was born, just like the ancient scripts had instructed. If he had transcribed the runic manuscripts correctly, that forest, and only that forest, would be where he would find the lair of Windegard, the last True Wizard.

According to the Strũkenvhide text as read in its original Finnish, Windegard had been an active wizard, or “worked” as it was said in the practice, over a thousand years ago, and his were the last truly great works of Magick before he vanished into his hidden lair of Sromshutt, which was supposed to be a house disguised as a fairy circle of enchanted fungal growths, and was never seen nor heard of by the wide world again. But the adventurous seekers of the Wisdom Arcane, it was said, could still discover him and learn what he had to teach--the long-lost secret of True Wizardry. Modern magical craft in the centuries after Windegard’s vanishing had degenerated into a sad parody of what it had once been, and wherever he was, Windegard, whose eyes were said to shine in ultraviolet light and who made the air about him tingle like the static on your teeth just before a thunderstorm, was the only one left who could do it like it was properly meant to be done. None of this earthy wiccan nonsense like crystals and tarot cards and altars of foraged animal bones. Real magic. Commanding the elements to do one’s bidding. Throwing fire and lightning like stones across a pond. Summoning beasts and demons at will. Calling objects out of the air. Taking the fabric of reality itself by the proverbial horns and forcing it to do what you and only you wish.

From his earliest childhood, Randall had dreamt of being a wielder of powerful magic. He no longer clearly remembered when or from whence the idea had first come to him and thus far purposeful probing into his subconscious via mediation, hypnosis, and near-dangerous levels of psychotropic hallucinogens had failed to bring the memory back, but he did remember trying to imitate the movements of Merlin the Magician in the classic Walt Disney animated film The Sword in the Stone to no effect. By age seven he was learning every magic trick he could, desperately trying to discover the hidden mystical secret he knew in the bottom of his soul was his destiny, but it was all nothing more than slight-of-hand and distraction, not real magic. He dived headlong into fantasy fiction during his ‘tweens, reading so much and for so long that his eyesight was almost permanently damaged, but in none of the pulpy pages of even the most obscure bits of fiction could he find anything that he allow him to cast a real spell or see into the future in any definite way. His teenage years were lost to studies and practices of the more banal forms of witchcraft and warlocketry--burning various herbs, mumbling various chants, drawing all kinds of absurd circles and symbols on the ground in salt, staring into shiny rocks and endless hours of prayers to everything and nothing, and all it brought him were headaches, sleepless nights, and loneliness. None of the true power he knew was out there was revealed to him.

But he made a breakthrough when he was 25 when he discovered the works of the notable alchemists like Anqi Sheng, Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelcus, and Nicolas Flamel. There he gained his first gleamings of knowledge of how the physical world is connected to and influenced by the spiritual world, and how through a manipulation of the former one might be able to influence the latter. Through these studies, which became almost the sole focus of his life, he began to understand the absolute basic nature of True Magic; of the push and pull between the forces of Order and Chaos and the delicate balance between the Material and the Ethereal. But even through all of his careful study and research, enough to earn him an honorary degree in mythology and esoterica had he been at all interested in such paltry things, he could see that real magical power lay in manipulating the Spiritual in order to influence the Material, and that art was simply no longer extant in the world, and so far as he could discover, the only one left in the whole wide world who might possess the knowledge would be Windegard, if indeed he himself still existed at all.

He had first learned of Windegard in Seamus Ceasar’s Alchem Mysticonomy, an exhaustingly exhaustive compendium of virtually every serious magical practitioner from the earliest records in Gilgamesh to the practice’s downfall just before the Renaissance. Windegarde was born in England and was apparently a disciple of Merlinus Ambrosius before Ambrosius’ eternal imprisonment, and while Windegarde lacked the innate sorcerous power of his mentor, he still learned a great deal of the nature of True Wizardry and practiced it far and wide, apparently being notably involved in the Low Wall Siege that nearly ended the reign of King Edward IV prematurely, but with the onset of the Enlightenment the tide began to turn against magic and towards empirical science, or at least this is what Windegard reputedly believed, and so he declared to his only close friend, Sir Thaindon Wilkes, that he was abandoning the world to pursue a deeper understanding of magical thinking hidden away from a world that no longer valued it.

But Randall had valued it; he had always voraciously valued it as drowning man values the air, and Windegard, the last True Wizard, became his obsession. It was clear from his researches that True Wizards could live practically forever if they wished, and indeed Windegard had apparently lived for centuries before his self-imposed exile, so it was an even bet that he was still alive and still probing the finer mysteries of magic, somewhere in the hidden wilderness. Exactly where he might be hiding was a far more difficult matter to discover. The ancient forests of England were long-since cut down and paved over, but he’d long since discovered that things like time, distance and even material reality are small matters to True Wizards. WIndegard would have secluded himself in a secret place removed from our reality--a sort of pocket mystic dimension, only accessible through a scant few and very tricky doorways.

First, you had to prepare mentally through meditation for seventeen days, a strenuous task that Randall helped along with the advent of some potent lysergic acid diethylamide he’d picked up from a shady record store. The use of psychotropics in conjunction with magical experimentation has a long-established tradition and Randall found the experience highly compelling. Once the meditative period was complete, he was to wander out with only the most meager foodstuffs into these woods, alone and unguided, heading as best he could guess directly for the center of the forest, for three days and three nights. On the third and final night he was to sleep in a tall tree ringed with white lichen he would find, if he had done the meditation properly that is. Upon waking from his enchanted sleep, the lair of Windegard would supposedly be revealed to him.

He was not he first person to undertake this mystic quest, but despite his best searching, he could find no accounts of what previous questers had found when they had crossed over, as the few that had reportedly managed it either refused to speak of it afterwards, or simply never came back. Randall felt, upon deepest and most intimate reflection, that he was fine with either outcome.

The sun had long since set on the third day of his journey, but still he ventured in the direction he thought most likely to be the center of these ancient pine woods where everything smelled sweetly of sap and rich ferns. He was properly lost and knew in the back of his rational mind that he would have the devil of a time finding his way back out if he would be able to at all, but the runic scriptures had instructed him to keep his mind focused on the quest and to subdue any fear, lest the ritual fail. So he walked on and on, deeper and deeper into the wild, waiting for the sign he believed with every inch of his heart he would find. The night wore on, becoming cold and clammy. It was moonless, and the only source of light he had was a small battery-operated flashlight used to scan the ground in front of him so as to avoid tripping hazards. He had no means of communicating with the outside world and if he seriously injured himself…so after dark he walked slowly and carefully, for hours and hours, still trying to maintain as much purpose in his mind as he could muster.

Astrology is one of the degraded magical disciplines; what we today take for the study of the stars and planets and how they relate to our lives is little more than sideshow hokum. Real astrological arts were lost to history like the rest of True Wizardry, which is why Randall was at sea when looking up at the dark, starry sky and trying to ascertain his own time and place. After sunset, he would have no idea of how long he had been walking or how late (or early) it was getting. All he could do was have faith that, when the midnight hour was reached, he would see the sign--

THUNK

He collided nearly head-first with a tree that he could have sworn upon his soul had not been there a mere moment before. Staggering backward, he fell onto his backside, rubbing his chest which had struck the tree first. The impact had knocked the wind from his lungs, and it took several minutes before he caught his breath and managed to shine his flashlight at the thing he had struck.

It was a tall tree, but not like any of the countless pine trees that surrounded him. It appeared, at least in the dim light of his torch, to be a huge oak, with massive thick branches curling away like giants snakes from its vast trunk. A trunk encircled with the absolute whitest lichen fungus he had ever seen. It almost shimmered in the dim beam of his flashlight.

Joy expanded in Randall’s heart, and almost without thinking, he clambered up into the branches, managing to find his way along partly by the light of his torch and partly through feeling his way along the branches’ curves. He didn’t know where exactly in the tree he was meant to lie, but thought someplace closest to the center would be best. Laughing with elation and exhaustion from the hike and the climb, he threw his flashlight to the ground and saw the beam extinguish as it collided with the forest floor. No abominations of modern technonology would be of any use to him where he was going. Finding a wide branch that sloped slightly upwards near the tree’s central trunk, he carefully laid his body down upon it, staring up at the starry night sky, breathing hard, his head almost swimming. He was so tired from the exertion of the last few weeks, let alone the last couple of days, that it was hard to stay awake as it was. But all the same he found it a struggle to quiet his mind enough for sleep. Was he so close? Were all his lifelong dreams about to be realized? It was rather the same emotion a child experiences when they go to bed on Christmas eve, waiting in eager anticipation for the next morning, but this seemed to be hundreds of times more intense. It was an excitement the likes of which he had never known.

But he knew he would have to sleep, and forcing himself to close his eyes, he managed to slow his breathing and clear his mind enough for deep, dark well of unconsciousness to take him. It was, despite evidence to the contrary, a very comfortable and peaceful place to sleep.

To be continued…

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The last morning Kevoric would ever see was very cold. It was the middle of winter and pinpricks of tiny wet snowflakes shot down from above, and they seared his skin. The thick knitted clothes might have been enough to keep him warm if they’d been dry. The fire he’d managed to crackle up wasn’t helping much; he couldn’t make it large enough to be of any real warmth. He might as well have been crouching over a single hot coal for all the difference it made him. The sky was pallid, smooth gray, without any semblance of a cloud shape or a break through to the sacred blue. It had been a while since he had seen the sacred blue.

He stared around at the others at the campsite, trying not to count how many of them were left. He just wanted to see other people looking something like alive. A smile, a pleasant voice, a spring in some step. But he couldn’t find one in any of the faces that, despite his attempts, seemed to be fewer than he had seen the day before. So he just stooped over his little fire and failed to warm himself, but what else was there to do? He was trying not to think about a very great many things, and instead trying to focus on those things that had brought him a modicum of joy or at least comfort, long ago. Dadelions in spring. The sound of running water. Oatmeal with brown sugar and raisins. The warmth of the sun. It had only been a couple of months since it started to get properly dark and cold, but he was aching for a return to spring and summer; an ache he could feel in his bones that mingled with latent terror that he wouldn’t get to see them again.

Again Kevoric though about leaving the camp behind--just packing up what he had and heading off into the woods, away from this horror--and then immediately despaired. He didn’t know the way. He didn’t know how long he would be able to survive before he found other people out there. He didn’t know how to survive. He’d never killed an animal for food before, never foraged for nuts or berries or mushrooms. A few very brave souls had left when things started to get bad and then worse, but nobody knew what happened to them. They might be alive and healthy and happy somewhere, maybe only a day or two’s walk away, or they might be lying dead of thirst or exposure in a ditch somewhere, maybe only a day or two’s walk away. Too many uncertainties. It couldn’t be chanced.

When his clan had been led here, initially he hadn’t wanted to go. It was folly, he thought. Isolated and unknown in some part of the forest none of them had ever been? And why? Because they’re newly-chosen leader, Shackspur, had insisted they do so. This would be their new home, their new paradise, the first settlement of what would grow to be a new, grand kingdom. Here they would be free of all the old enemies and threats and be able to live exactly how they wanted, and once everyone else saw how well it was going, they would come crawling back and beg to be let in. Many people, like Kevoric, had seen the insanity of this. They had no guides as to how to find food or water, they were hopelessly understaffed with crucial people like doctors or craftsmen who would provide essential services--it all seemed highly suspicious to many. But enough people thought Shakspur was right, and were going to follow him anywhere, and the rest just couldn’t leave. After all, there were friends and family among his followers, and they couldn’t simply be abandoned, even if survival outside the group were possible.

And so they had all packed up their tents and their belongings and made the long trek through the forest until they had arrived here. At first it wasn’t so bad; people were excited and optimistic about the future. People set up their homes and workplaces, met their new neighbors, became more familiar with the landscape, and planned for a bright future. Nobody was more optimistic about it that Shakspur; indeed he acted tremendously unsurprised, as though this was naturally going to work out fine and the fact that it was looking like it might was too obvious to remark upon. But it didn’t last. Before long people started to feel the difficulties in finding food. Getting hurt or sick became a much bigger problem with decent medical attention. There weren’t very many who could repair things like a rip in a tent’s canvas or a broken hammer, and those that could were being overworked past the point of exhaustion. Then the weather started getting worse, and the food situation along with it. People started to grumble, even those who had supported the move, but none of it made any impact on Shakspur. He had this uncanny ability to deflect any blame for anything--if there’s not enough to eat, people ought to work harder at looking for it. It people got hurt or sick, they needed to be stronger and not whine about it. If something broke, then people would just have to make do with less. Looking back on it, Kevoric felt the scariest thing wasn’t how Shakspur would lie to cover his own errors. It was how many people stayed on his side despite it.

Then people began to disappear.

The first to go, or so many thought, were those who had decided to leave the clan before things got any worse. None of these had really expressed much discontent before, certainly not enough to make one think they would be liable to get up and go, but initially it seemed the only explanation. It was the only explanation Shakspur ever agreed with, at any rate. But that theory only carried for so long. It very quickly became obvious that something else was behind it, and more than a few people in the clan were beginning to suspect what it was.

For Shakspur had begun to change. Or not change, precisely. He was the same old loud, bloistering man he’d always been known to be, but somehow he was becoming more of it. One would be tempted to say he was getting worse, if one were to take a decidedly negative view on his leadership, but it would be more accurate to say he was becoming more acute, more chronic, more emphasized. His confidence was larger and more encompassing, his force of personality was stronger than ever, his beliefs had become so imperturbable that nothing short of his own death would stop him. Kevoric felt he seemed to become something near to a fixed point in all the turmoil of pain and fear and despair, even being, as Kevoric and many other certainly thought, the author of it all in the first place. And Shakspur had taken to addressing the clan directly in sunset speeches that would expound on the glorious future of the clan. They would become a great power, he said to them with all the certainty in his howling voice like a Christ on the mound, that would rise and spread across every visitable inch of the land like the light of the rising sun filters through the grass and the trees, and that they would dominate and dictate the lives and customs of everyone in the whole world until ultimately there would be nowhere left one could go where they would not find the same people and ways as theirs. Their will, their wishes, would become the one and only Truth. And if anyone with more of a skeptical mindset would dare to ask how this would be possible if the people of the clan were sick and starving, Shakspur would denounce these ideas as defeatist and counterproductive, and question the asker’s loyalty and commitment to the certainty of the clan’s glorious future. Nearly every evening at sunset he would deliver one of these sermons, and in the moment, sitting and listening to his words, even Kevoric could feel his mind being swept away by visions of impenetrably secure power and glory for him and his, but at night, when the campfires burned low and the wind would whisper the music of dread into minds sluggish with sleep, something else would come.

Stories began to circulate among the skeptical and faithful alike in hushed tones carefully hidden away from Shakspur’s lavish tent. People had heard something moving about in the forest at night, or seen a dark, bulbous shape outlined against canvas by the dying firelight, or felt a frightening, intentful presence hovering nearby. And come the morning, another person would be gone. Their numbers dwindled slowly but steadily. The faithful only stood stoic and resolutely believed as only the truly faithful can that all was as their leader had said--people had given up on their glorious future and walked away from the clan. And when asked why even people who had been the day before among those faithful, the rest only shook their heads over how hard it is to trust what anyone says of themselves these days. And when asked why those missing would leave in the middle of the night, abandoning their tents and apparently all of their possessions, even basic things like clothes and food, they were scorned and bullied and accused seditious.

Kevoric’s own sister, Leglin, had vanished only two nights previous. She had been becoming increasingly afraid for days, desperate to get away from the clan. Kevoric had told her over and over that it would be almost certain death if she left, but she only responded that it would be much graver matter than death if she stayed much longer. And then a night had come and she did not meet him outside her tent as they usually did, and upon inspection she was as gone from the clan, and perhaps the world, as all the others had been. In his terror and despair, venturing out into the forest as far as he dared in desperate search, Kevoric finally swallowed what was left of his pride and went to Shakspur. It was rare for Shakspur to be seen out of his very large tent much these days except to make his twilit proselytizations, but on gloomy, overcast winter’s day, he was found standing stonily just outside, staring up at the sky.

“My sister, Leglin, has disappeared,” he told their leader.

Shakspur drew a deep, slow breath. He looked thicker set than last Kevoric had seen him, and there was an energy and vitality in his face that struck uncanny notes.

“You should probably search the forest,” he said, “don’t overlook any trees or ditches, don’t take shortcuts or do a lazy job of it, you’ve got to be thorough and diligent.”

“I have searched. There’s no trace of her anywhere.”

“It’s unfortunate that people walk away; it’s unfortunate that people are willing to leave this great clan of ours. It’s important for people who aren’t being scared off to work twice as hard and to stick with it so we can make this clan--”

“Shakspur, where is she?” Kevoric interrupted, becoming angry. “Where is Leglin?”

Shakspur stopped midway through his speech and looked Kevoric in the eye for the first time, his face wrinkled with concentration, as though he was trying to understand something very serious about Kevoric.

“Why would you think I know?” he asked. Kevoric stared into the older man’s face, reading deeply into his eyes, searching for evidence of the truth his instincts were shouting into his ear.

“You…you do know.” Kevoric said quietly, then raising his voice to a yell, “Where? Where is she? What have you done with my sister?”
His raised voice drew the attention of surrounding onlookers, including the devout group of those faithful who felt compelled to keep close to Shakspur at all times, who at once rose from their own seats around a campfire. Kevoric could feel the tension in the air build like a headache before a sudden great fall off a cliff. Shakspur said nothing, but retreated carefully into his tent. Kevoric was inclined at first to go after him, but the challenging looks from his circle of followers were enough to convince him it was a fight he wouldn’t win. He had no choice but to continue looking for his sister, and searched and searched and yelled and yelled until well after dark, but she was simply gone.

That was the night before. There were even more people gone today, even if Kevoric refused to take the time to count. How many more would disappear? How many have to vanish before even Shakspur’s most devout acolytes saw this “glorious new life” for the suicidal sham it was? And what did Shakspur know about Leglin? What did he know about everyone who had gone? Sitting around his little fire, he was more than ever tempted to leave the clan. Perhaps his sister was right; perhaps it would be a far graver matter than death to stay, even if leaving meant death. But somehow, he could not make himself take that step. He felt as though he was frozen, and not just because of the cold wind and icy snow. Somehow, he could not really confront the prospect of being away from the people around whom he had always been. This group, this clan--they were a part of who he was for good or ill, and he could no more leave them behind than he could walk away from his own legs. Perhaps that was why he was really afraid of venturing too far into the forest, even to search for Leglin. It wasn’t that he was too afraid of getting lost and dying of thirst, hunger, or the elements. Deep within, what he most feared was letting go of not only his past but the future he had always imagined he would experience, and the people who would be there alongside him when he did. That he could never walk away from.

And so he sat there next to his fire, as the people around him did around theirs, with none speaking much to each other, let alone doing anything to ward off starvation or worse. For no comfort in this life can equal the serenity of a certain future, even if that future only holds doom, and getting at it is easy enough--you simply give up every last Hope you ever had.

It was late into the night, when the dark winds of winter flowed through the camps like viper poison through the bitten blood, that Kevoric lay in his tent, listening and waiting for something he could neither name nor picture but knew in his heart was coming. And when he finally heard the noise of something moving outside, he did not waste energy on wishing it to be a neighbor stepping out of their tent to relieve themselves or some animal like a deer or coyote sniffing around. He simply did his best to prepare himself for facing the oldest and strongest kind of fear--of the unknown.

It was absolutely human steps. Or at least, it was something that walked slowly and carefully on two legs. There was no fear in its tread, simply a slow, deliberate and measured pace, as though it knew it could take its time and wished to savor the experience. It was a heavy step, and it came from precisely the direction Kevoric had felt most confidently it would come, and came every closer with each footfall towards his tent, as though it knew exactly which of the many tents was his own. The underbrush cracked and creaked underfoot as it walked, and inwardly he wondered how many other tents it passed to get to his, and how many of the others were as awake as he, listening as intently as he, their breath catching in their throats as the tread came close, then a silent exhalation of relief as is passed by.

He would not scream. With all the disappearances, one thing was sure--no one had heard any screams or sounds of a struggle. Leglin’s own tent had been close enough to hear her snore on the more humid nights. Kevoric would hang on to his dignity and keep silent and perish like a decent human being. This Thing could not take that from him, whatever happened.

The footsteps halted, just outside the canvas flap of his tent. His campfire had burned out to ash hours ago and there was next to light outside to see anything by, but even so Kevoric thought he could detect an outline of a shape he recognized. Even there, lying still in his terror, the shape filled him with distaste.

The flap on his tent was pulled open, not slowly or cautiously as by one who was a careful hunter, nor quickly and dramatically as by one who sought to shock and paralyze its victim. No, it was opened with all the casual arrogance of one who felt that they were naturally entitled to this tent and everything in it, and even the ground upon which it was staked. The intruder locked eyes with Kevoric, which Kevoric could only see in the darkness because of the curious greenish-yellow light the Thing’s eyes seemed to be reflecting from no naturally imaginable source. He, or It, was not here because of hunger, but because it was the natural order of things for Kevoric and all the other insects like him to bed consumed, and it was his place to do the consuming. And besides, the Thing thought to itself--as it dragged Kevoric’s limp body away into the forest by his neck, Its long sharp teeth already lapping up the blood that dribbled from his arteries--it is his own fault for not working hard enough.

“I am blameless, forevermore.”

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Throughout the Izad1, there are a great number of religious views and practices that simultaneously compliment and contradict each other, as in the case of the Vamilorian Elfs2 and the Telrathysian Dwarfs3 whom, despite their cultural and ideological differences, both hold statutory beliefs in the superiority of their respective races (despite archeological evidences to the contrary) that compliment each other--the Elfs believe that they are BaghNegh’s4 chosen race of beings, ordained to survive long enough5 to escape the world’s confines and join them among the stars as the “true” Many6, while the Dwarfs hold the same views for themselves, although they see themselves as less “chosen” and more “most worthy” because of their attitudes towards the world and its other peoples (even the Black and Brown Elfs of the South7 figure into this more inclusive worldview). One would therefore assume that these two nation-races8 would have little sympathy towards each other, but the interesting point is how each ideology allows for a second race that will make the mistake of seeing itself as the true Many, and that this misguided race must be treated with kindness and sympathy both before and after the revelation of their true place in the order of the world occurs. As such, both the Elfs and the Dwarfs of the North view each other as poor misguided fools, but fools that must be treated with civility and grace as they do not yet understand the real nature of things. This of course is the basis for the alliance between these two nation-races that form so much of the economic and militant power of the Northern Alliance9, but the salient point here is how this relationship illustrates how two seemingly conflicting belief systems can compliment one another peacefully and amicably to the benefit of both.

But by far the most widely-held belief in known existence is the legend, or rather prophecy, of Leglathian10. Many stories and ideas about Leglathian exist and circulate amongst the varied faiths, but the primary and most common element that concerns this discussion is how they will find the Four Lost Wands of the Sajicki11 and reunite them, which will grant them enough power to defeat a powerful evil force that will rise out of the South and reunite all the peoples of the Izad. Vaguaries of the exact nature of this “evil force” or how exactly this battle and reunification are to transpire vary group to group, but the remarkable consistency in regards to those particular elements underline the nature of religious beliefs--and their complex relationships with each other--all across the Izad.

Gorseyn12 has no officially recognized faith, but the most predominantly-held belief among the more religious Gorseynians is that Leglathian will be of human descent (a view considerably at variance with the generally-held belief in the North that they will be Elfen) and will be born in the North, where the Lost Wands are reputed to be hidden. Speaker13 Comly Dikolai of the First Free Castlelight14 church in Philview15 puts it in these terms in his essay “How The Lighted-Child Will Forge A New Future for Gorseynians” [The Castlelight Bulletin, Vol. 6 No. 1, 42 Caspidea 267 4E16]:

“...all the scholarly evidence suggests the Lost Wands will be found in Northern Galindell if they will be found anywhere, but even if they are found elsewhere, much like the Great Evil, it is not for the mortals of the world, Elfs among them, to even suppose from whence the Great Evil will rise, be it from the North or the South or anywhere else, but to hold our faith in what Goch’ron17 of the Sajicki foretold in the Tome of Eludin18--that it is going to arise, and that we will not know Leglathian when they come and so must raise our world to best allow his works to take place.”

Secular scholars remain skeptical about the inherently magical nature of the Sajicki; they unquestionably existed and had a tremendous impact on the Izad’s current racial and ecological dispersion, but this has been gleamed from actual historical evidence beyond the Tome of Eludin’s spiritual leanings, and what Speaker Dikolai refers to can’t be seen to be representative of all religious views on Leglathian or even all Castlelightist views, but again, the striking nature of the similarities between this and a vast array of other attitudes on the philosophy is enough to make even the most skeptical wonder.

Naturally it is absurd to assume that the degree to which a belief is widespread has any bearing on its factuality, but one fact that it does unquestionably demonstrate is the value and merit of the savior archetype in Izadian beliefs across the board. Equally ubiquitous is the belief in the Lost Wands, although as already implied, the exact location where these lost relics may be found is as varied as the nature of Leglathian, but the idea is still just as prevalent, if not more so. Like Leglathian, the tales of the Lost Wands comes down to us through the esoteric Tome of Eludin, which includes descriptions of their likeness and their area of effect in terms of magical power. Second Era19 historian Aston Paperwin of the Lornia Academy of Sciences20, along with most of his collegues, maintain that the Lost Wands are in fact a degraded reference to the Ctelifar Artifacts21 discovered by the King’s Company22 of 256 4E during their successful campaign against the Keeper Alliance23, and they certainly seem to fit many of the thematic descriptions present in Eludin, even they are certainly not wands by any stretch of the definition. However, as Paperwin was quick to remind me when I sat down to talk with him on the subject, taking an inherently religious text literally is a pathway to catastrophic intellectual error, and he’s not wrong. The famous pictograms in Eludin even seem to be visually reminiscent of these artifacts, particularly the Spiken Flame Gem24, lending credence to Paperwin’s hypothesis, if not much in the way of actual evidence.

What this all says about the prevalence of the Leglathian concept in so many religious views (indeed at least some version of it is present in every major faith-based system I was able to research) is, at least to me, that the many peoples of Iza-Dûn are more linked in philosophical and spiritual ideologies than we might nowadays think, particularly in light of the strong racial and political disparities that have been in place since the signing of the Continental Division Treaty25 over 200 years ago. It may not be possible in the current geopolitical climate to hope for anything resembling continental reunification, but what is clearly evident based on the beliefs held by virtually every sapient inhabitant of the Izad is that, at the very least, a hope remains. And what is the belief in Leglathian but a belief in hope and a unified future?

“Capital!” Tony said, thoughtlessly.

“Where are my Mom and Dad, mister Herman?” Ryle Bastion asked, tearfully.

The air in the living room of the Bastion residence--a standard half a duplex with every inch of the walls, even the metal furnace grates, more whitewashed than Florida’s history--stank of the interstellar. It’s a very specific, particularly noticeable stank. Tony could smell it even through his mask. If you’ve ever drank a strongly grape-and-blackberry flavored soda, sixteen ounces let’s say, in one gluttonous, breathless downing, then belched all the resultant gas up through your nose and nose only, you will have some idea. Stings the nostrils, eh?

There was also a very large hole in the roof of the living room through which eldritch starlight filtered down blue and wavy. But there could be any number of explanations for that.

“What did you see?” Tony asked.

“Nothing,” Ryle said, “I was up in my bedroom, playing Donkey Kong. I’d made it to the pie level.”

“Impressive,” Tony said, “the pie level’s no joke. What did you hear?”

“Well, I was halfway through the pies when I heard a backwards explosion.”

“Naturally, naturally” Tony said, nodding sagely so as to better impress his young companion, “but what sort of explosion?”

“Atomic bomb,” Ryle said. Inwardly, Tony scoffed. Of course nobody really knows what an atomic bomb sounds like; no audio recordings were ever made of their use. The distinctive “powm-BOOOOOOHM” noise we’ve all grown up hearing in Nickelodeon cartoons are recordings of fusion bombs from the 1950s, long after old Oppenheimer’s babies had become outmoded. But Tony got the gist of it. He nodded even more sagely.

“Smacks of lightspeed,” he said, “and of course the roof exploded up and in, not up and out like a normal bang. It’s all to do with space-time warping, so far as I can figure out. Gravity directing. The great universal Lever.” He saw that his young fried was only looking confused by this, and shook the cosmological musings from his head like snow from the mountaintop. “And then what?”

“Well, I came downstairs, and saw the living room like this. I looked everywhere for my Mom and Dad, but they were gone. I sat and I was really scared, but then I thought that it was aliens; I thought they must have taken them up through the roof. I thought about calling the police, but I don’t like the police. They scare me.”

“Meh,” Tony said.

“And then I thought of you, because you can do anything. Everyone says that about you. Anything. So I got onto the Silver Sentinels page and found you and, you know, we came here after that.”

Tony stroked his chin, thinking. His chocolate brown cloak should have been billowing dramatically out behind him, but there was no wind. Life is disappointing too often.

“What do we do?” Ryle asked fearfully. “How do we save them?”

“Assuming they need saving in the first place,” Tony said, “and weren’t just invited on a pleasant drive by beings too advanced to understand the need for doors and walls and windows, really the only thing to do is to either wait for them to come back or to go after them.”

Ryle’s eyes lit up like a toy robot’s. “Have you got a spaceship?” he asked, almost tremoring with excitement.

“Not anymore,” Tony said. “I used to, but heavens what a fuss it kicked up. I spent eight months building a rocket in my uncle’s Idaho farm’s barn, and there was no problem with anyone until I ordered the six thousand pounds of rocket fuel, and then whoosh, bureaucrats and sunglassed toughos started crawling out of the woodwork. Even after I launched and orbited the Earth they would not stop pestering me. So I scrapped the thing. Only used about half the rocket fuel; still got piles of the stuff lying around somewhere. Anyway, we don’t need it. You’re what, just shy of five feet tall?”

“Um,” said Ryle, looking down at himself, “I don’t know. I guess so.”

“Ah it’ll work. Come on, back to my house, I need to feed my cat first. Then we’ll go find your folks.”

* * *

“Cricket,” Tony said, “where did I stash that spare spacesuit?”
The fat ginger cat mewed, and licked his paw.

“Oh duh,” Tony said, “I remember when we rearranged the Faraday Closet, I stuffed it into that box with the extra Halloween decorations. Too bad that Scooby Doo costume party ended in such bloodshed.”

Ryle Bastion was just…baffled. There were so many things in this house to look at that he couldn’t think of where to start, which didn’t matter a jot anyway because he didn’t even know what half the things in the front hall alone were that he was looking at. And so he closed his eyes, turned in a random direction, and opened them. Stacked against the wall in four neat columns were sixty-two teacups, each made of a different material from the Periodic Table of the Elements and labeled with its atomic symbol.

Tony was on his hands and knees, his black mask and goggles stuffed into his back pockets as he began rummaging in a closet at the far end of the hall, with its door interior and walls lined with insulated metal and complex wiring that made it a perfect electromagnetic cage. At the moment it was being used to store boxes of grimoires and and baking recipe books, and a huge box overflowing with plastic pumpkins and rubber masks had been unceremoniously throw atop the lot. He was spilling black paper bats and plastic spiders all over the hardwood floor as he pulled out bits and pieces of a small spacesuit, with its layers of glow-in-the-dark paint chipping and fluttering to the ground as he did.

Ryle spun round with eyes closed and opened them again, and saw a vivid fresco painted onto the wooden walls of the goddess Pallas Athena, with the standard spear and owl accompaniment, entirely nude. Ryle blushed furiously and turned to see what Tony was doing.

“Here,” he said, attempting to shove all the yarn cobwebs and miniature skeletons back into the now much lighter box, “get into this, and I’ll go get mine in a second.”

Ryle’s eyes flashed again. “Is this a real spacesuit?”

“Yeah,” Tony said, shutting the door of the Faraday Closet, “I made it when I was a lot younger and smaller, and was gonna go to this Halloween party. Ugh.” He shivered visibly. “Terrible tragedy. But it ought to fit you. Might be a little baggy around the waist I guess.”

“You built a real spacesuit for a Halloween party?” Ryle asked as he began to fit his legs into the suit’s pants.

Tony shrugged. “Authenticity!” he said with a smirk. Cricket mewed from direction of the kitchen. “Ah yes, din din. Get the rest of it on, Frogger, and I’ll go get the cat some food.”

“Frogger?” Ryle asked.

“Yes. Frogger. I’m calling you Frogger from now on.”

“Like the video game?”

“Well no, I was thinking of your initials--R.B.--and it made me think of the word ‘ribbit,’ you know, the sounds frogs make? And now I can’t stop thinking of frogs when I see you, so you’re Frogger now.”

“Um…all right.” Ryle said. He was deeply confused, but he’d always wanted to wear a real spacesuit. The chipping glow-in-the-dark paint even looked a little green.

Tony was pouring a very, very generous amount of catfood into Cricket’s dish--a polished red ceramic piece he had made himself--and the cat mewed delightedly and began to munch. Tony stroked the cat’s back, and bent his head down to listen to its heart, which beat as strongly and rhythmically as ever, though it was hard to hear over his soft purring. Tears suddenly came to the distant corners of Tony’s eyes, and he picked up the cat and held it close to his chest. He cradled Cricket softly in his arms for a moment, and kissed him atop his head.

“I love you very much, kitty.”

The cat purred affectionately and licked the back of Tony’s hand. And the two of them simply sat there in a warm embrace with Tony gently weeping into the animal’s bright orange fur.

“All right,” he said, placing his beloved pet back onto the linoleum so it could finish its meal, “let’s go to space.”

* * *

“You ready, Frogger?” Tony said.

“I don’t know,” Frogger said, “how does this work?”

They were both spacesuited and hanging in a pair of complex harnesses, suspended in between two very large electronic devices that looked like solar panels after two years at the gym. Tony was clinging to a remote control in his left hand. Both of them had a kind of metallic bandolier strapped across their chests with thick red buttons in the center, so they could easily operate them through their thick space gloves. Tony was wearing his black mask and goggles beneath his helmet, and of course dressed in his silver suit inside for safety, with his glorious brown cloak tied around the back of the suit so that it could billow freely.

“Essentially,” Tony began, “we’re gonna teleport into Earth’s orbit for a short period. My thinking is that the spacecraft that abducted your parents will probably still be hanging around, and as we’re going to be the only human bodies floating freely in the Void, they should spot us quickly and easily. Then we can start working on getting your parents back, if back is where they wanna get.”

“Wait,” Frogger said, “isn’t it like…physically impossible to teleport stuff?”

“Hogwash,” Tony said, “quantum particles do it every day.”

“But aren’t there other astronauts floating in space too? How will the aliens know which one is us?”

“It’s okay because there aren’t any spacewalks scheduled today. I mean I guess there’s always a chance that they’ll have to do one on the fly, but those are rare. I can’t foresee everything, Froggo.”

“Frogger,” Frogger said.

“Frogger, sorry.”

“How do we get back?”

“The straps we’re wearing will invert the graviton catheter and pull us back to the lab. Just push the button.”

Frogger hesitated. “You…you’re positive it will work?”

“I’m always positive. You’re going to feel your body turn into fondue for a second as we get squeezed through the warped spacetime fabric, but it will only be a second. Ready?”

Frogger experienced a curious moment that some psychologists refer to as an “out-of-body experience” but really is just the mind resetting itself before a really strenuous expected moment, like turning your computer off and on again before you boot up a video game’s final boss level. He felt as if he could see himself and Tony--the Silver Fox, the Gray Gorilla, the Chocolate Ghost, and a million other silly names--and understood most clearly for the first time the severity of the danger they were both about to be in. Tony Herman was insane. He was a genius, but he was insane. He was always right and could do anything, or at least that’s what people always say about him, but even so, insane. Could he trust a crazy person? Wasn’t this crazy? Shouldn’t he have just gone to the police? What was going to happen? Was he about to die? Or would he just drift away into space forever? Or would he go anywhere at all once Tony pushed that button? So many unknowns. When are there not?

“Ready,” he said, “but can I ask a question?

“Please do,” Tony said.

“Why do you wear such a big cape? I mean, doesn’t it get in the way all the time? And why not just wear it inside your spacesuit? Or why wear it out into space at all? Why do you always wear it?”

“For the same reason I do literally everything else, Frogger,” Tony said, pressing the remote’s button, “because it’s cool.”

* * *

All matter and energy is illusion. Everything is Silly Putty.

So here’s the thing about Silly Putty--that stuff is quite durable, and yet infinitely flexible. It’s been used as a tool to build hand strength and dexterity every since it was introduced to the toy markets back in the 1950s, and because of the silicates of which it is made, it will flow like a liquid over a long period of time, but remains bouncy and stiff in the short term. You can bend and stretch and fold and distort it into any number of shapes, given enough force. The fabric of spacetime essentially works the same way, only it requires a degree of force so many times higher than that required by silly putty that the author just cant’ be arsed to research the actual number. But it’s a biggun.

In order to distort the fabric of space enough to allow near instantaneous travel across distances measured in light years takes almost all the energy in the entire universe, so obviously that is beyond even Tony Herman’s prodigious abilities, but a measly one hundred kilometers to the Kármán line? Easy peasy. A bit of atomic energy tickled just under the floating rib in just the right way, and boom, you’re in space. But it’s not pleasant. Because you’re essentially traveling the equivalent of 62 miles in the time it takes you to make a single step, your body will still feel that distance traveled, but only for a second. Tony can only describe it as turning into fondue and being squeezed through a toothpaste tube before you emerge just fine on the other end, which is, as you might imagine, entirely accurate.

Frogger managed not to throw up immediately, but he really, really wanted to. One instant you’re under the yellow lights in Tony Herman’s basement atomic laboratory, the next you’re a semi-solid mass of melted cheese under indescribable pressure, the next you’re floating in the silent dark. He turned his head back and forth to try and see…well, anything at all really, but only found himself looking at the inside of his space helmet. The only window of visibility was directly out the front, and out that there wasn’t anything to see besides the absolute purest black, as though someone had thrown a blanket over his head. He wouldn’t have been sure he was even in space at all had he not been experiencing the exact feeling you get when you go over a big bump in the road in a car at high speed, and then while you’re in the air your stomach goes up into your throat for a moment until you come back down on to the ground, only up here there is no coming back down.

Then, about eight feet away or what seemed like it, a white form drifted into view like a fat, falling flake of snow. Tony Herman, his great brown cloak billowing in the non-existent wind, was doing what looked like a slow-motion cartwheel in the vacuum, but in reality he was motioning towards his left hand at a black button on his wrist, and pointing to Frogger emphatically. Looking down, Frogger saw the same button on his own wrist and pressed it.

“--ger? You getting me, Frogger? Ground control to Major Frogger?”

A staticky voice was playing out of the speaker just beside his right ear.

“Tony? Is that you?” Frogger asked.

“I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you how to switch on the radio before we left. How you doing?”

“I feel sick. I almost threw up already.”

“Try not to, if you can. Otherwise you’ll be smelling your own barf for the next half hour. How was the trip?”

“Terrible.”

“Ain’t it just? I try not to get around this way if I can avoid it. I prefer my own two feet. Nothing like a run out in the open city air to make you feel alive. Up here there’s no resistance against which to…resist. You just float like a duck in a bath.”

“Don’t ducks float on top of a bath?”

“And we’re floating on top of the surface of the universe,” Tony said, “stuck to it, sliding across it. Gravity is weird.”

Frogger tried to make sense of this but he was nauseous enough as it is. “Where are we?” he asked. “Are we really in space?”

“Only just. I didn’t want to send us out too far. A mere sixty or sixty-five miles above sea level. Or something like that. It’s not a terribly accurate way to travel. Hey look, an alien spaceship.”

Frogger tried to turn his head to look, but again his helmet didn’t move with his neck. Tony was pointing to something behind him, and by the look of the shadow that was beginning to fall over the both of them, it was quite a big something. Then he experienced yet another funny physical feel, as though he were falling backwards. A strange light the same color as blue raspberry candy glass was enveloping them, and through his helmet’s window he saw Tony drifting in the same direction he was falling.

“What’s happening?” Frogger yelled.

“We’re going aboard, by the looks of it,” Tony said.

“Are they beaming us up?” Frogger asked.

“What? No, that is manifestly absurd. It’s not a beam of any kind. We’re falling up the curve of a warped bit of fabric.”

“What?”

“Fabric!” Tony yelled.

“I heard you! Don’t yell, you’re right in my ear!”

“Well why did you ask ‘what’ then?”

“I didn’t understand--”

A gigantic metallic object slid swiftly into view behind Tony and connected with something. Then a huge FWOOSH noise filled Frogger’s helmet, and suddenly his arms and legs and head felt heavy again, and he fell about six feet onto a hard floor. Beside him, Tony fell, apparently a lot further, and landed with a loud metal THUNK.

“Ow.” Tony said.

“What happened?” Frogger asked.

“We’ve been abducted too,” Tony said. Then, with a panicked “Oh my god!” he began furiously pulling off parts of his spacesuit. His helmet when rolling across the floor. His boots flew in opposite directions as he tore them off. He almost shredded the zipper up the back as he struggled mightily to be free of it. Then there was a period of dead silence, and Frogger listened with all his might for the slightest sound.

“Tony? Tony? You okay? What happened? Tony?”

Then the silver-suited, black-masked figure of Tony Herman stood up, adjusting his brown fedora, and attaching his gigantic, absurd, glorious brown cloak around his neck. If there had been any wind to billow the cape, he would have looked amazing.

“It’s okay,” he said, “my cape is find. On your feet, Frogger, and let’s go find some aliens.”

* * *

To be continued…

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