(18+ for language and violence)
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Young William used the flashlight on his keychain to search the warehouse. He held his skateboard by its wheels in case he should have to use it as a weapon. The building smelled of ash and standing wates; its joints groaned and creaked as old buildings often do. The noises reminded young William of the apartment he used to live in back in Chicago. William’s father was still alive back then; he managed the jewelry shop below the apartment where he specialized in timepieces and watch-repair. William was a much happier boy back then. His mother was still a school teacher and their home was decorated with the most luxurious chronometers from around the world. And best of all Young William’s eyes were both in perfect working condition.
There was a sound far end of the warehouse of something made of wood knocking over something made of metal. William concealed his flashlight and held his right hand in front of him before moving in the direction of the sound. He took very small steps in case he bumped into something. As he moved across the warehouse floor he heard the sound of heavy breathing. William slowed his pace even more until his fingers found a large wooden crate. He edged his way around the crate until his wrist bumped into a rusty tin can which fell to the cement floor with a loud clang.
“Who is there?” cried a high-pitched voice, “Reveal yourself or I shall destroy you!”
William tightened his grip on the skateboard. “Um…It’s me, Will Griffin.”
The person belonging to the high-pitched voice did not know who that was. William explained that he was a fairly well know kid detective in Acre City.
“Not that well known,” laughed the voice, “seeing as how you don’t even have a nickname.”
William asked the voice who he was as he pulled out his keychain once more.
“Who am I? Why you insolent brat! I am the face of evil! I am terror incarnate! I am the sorcerer of doom who has shaken this city to its core time and time again for the past—”
William shined his flashlight in the direction of the voice causing its owner to cower, shouting curses at young William. The speaker was a tall old man wearing light blue sweatpants, a pair of white slippers and a blue bathrobe. He demanded that the boy turn off his flashlight, “right this instant!” William did not follow the old man’s order but instead demanded that the stranger tell him who he was.
The man was cowering in a corner next to a wooden work bench. The skin on his bald head was smooth and covered with brown spots. His fingers were thin and spiderlike and his translucent skin was sagging from his old bones. The man held his hands over his face to protect his eyes from the light, begging young William not to hurt him.
“I won’t hurt you if you tell me who you are.”
With that a malicious grin crept across the old man’s face. He stood straight up and held his left hand over his heart and pointed his other hand toward the ceiling.
“I am the face of evil! I am terror incar—“
“You’re Doctor Mysterion, aren’t you?”
The boy shined his flashlight on the old man’s face once more. He recognized the thin white mustache and the devilish goatee. His face was like a skull. The boy took a step forward as he recalled the elderly villain’s past exploits.
“Stay back!” cried Doctor Mysterion, backing into the wall, “or I’ll…I’ll…” he looked at his naked right hand with a malicious grin, “I’ll strike you down with my electrified gauntlets of doom!”
William stopped walking when the elderly villain said this. He knew of the gauntlets to which the doctor was referring; they were a part of his old costume. According to the microfiche at the public library, Doctor Mysterion’s costume was composed of a bullet-proof-glass helmet shaped like a fishbowl, an iron vest, a pair of metal boots, a purple cape and electrified gauntlets. The doctor had engineered the gauntlets himself to deliver varying degrees of electric shock. The lowest setting delivered enough voltage to incapacitate an average sized adult; the highest could set a man’s head on fire just like “Old Sparky,” the frequently malfunctioning electric chair formerly used at Gattica State Penitentiary.
William knew he was ill equipped to contend with such dangerous weaponry but when he studied the old man closely he could see that he wasn’t even wearing his deadly gauntlets. Still the doctor held his hand above his head as if he were ready to zap young William to death at any moment. Will politely asked the doctor if he could ask him a question.
“I don’t know,” replied the doctor in a coy tone of voice, “can you ask me a question?”
Young William sighed. “May I ask you a question please, Doctor Mysterion?”
“You may, my boy. But the answer shall cost you dearly!”
“Do you know where you are right now?”
Doctor Mysterion laughed in his insidious tone. “You aren’t a very bright child are you? Why my boy, we are in the abandoned subway tunnel beneath the Chase Bank in Shiloh.”
William asked Doctor Mysterion, in a most polite manner of course, what sort of caper he was planning beneath the Chase Bank. Mysterion explained, in a rather rude sort of way, that he was planting explosive charges beneath the vault so that his cohorts could use the tunnel as an escape route. When asked who his cohorts were the doctor laughed once more and told the boy that he would tremble in the wake of the infamous King Ghidra.
Here’s what was running through young William’s mind when he heard that name: …
“But Doctor,” said William, “King Ghidra’s in prison.”
King Ghidra was the alias of a Japanese gangster who was once well known for being every bit as stylish as he was ruthless. He committed his heinous acts while dressed in his pinstriped three-piece suit with matching fedora hat and Kato mask. His most famous photographs showed him enjoying illegally imported Cuban cigars while flirting with high profile actresses at lavish parties. These days the King’s attire is far less formal; he wears only the baggy prison blues issued to all the prisoners of Gattica. Ghidra is now confined to a wheelchair in the prison, serving more than a dozen concurrent life sentences.
“Preposterous!” stated the doctor, “Ghidra, in prison? What nerve! No prison on earth can contain the combined might of the Midnight Marauders!”
William kicked at the dirt beneath his shoes, trying to decide how best to deliver this next bit of information to the doctor. “Um…Mysterion? Except for you and King Ghidra all the Midnight Marauders are dead.”
The doctor’s lip quivered. In an instant the fearsome villain appeared to young William as a small child who had just discovered his favorite toy smashed and broken on the bedroom floor.
“Im—impossible…Impossible! … You’re lying, you loathsome street urchin! What about the Cybernetic Kid? I designed his robotic exoskeleton myself, he’s practically immortal!”
William explained that the Cybernetic Kid’s battery-pack was damaged in the explosion thus melting his core processor. He thought it strange to be explaining events which occurred decades before his own birth to someone much older than himself.
“But surely Madame Cobra…or The Black Dagger…”
“Gunned down by police, both of them.”
Doctor Mysterion shook his head. Tears were forming in his eyes as he backed away from William; his shoulder wiped away a decade’s worth of dust from the brick wall. In a last ditch effort to disprove young William the villainous doctor raised his fist and professed his faith in the muscle of the Marauders, the seven foot tall, five hundred eighty-six pound behemoth known as “The Boulder.”
“No amount of bullets can subdue The Boulder! Just you wait, you detestable child! When The Boulder arrives he shall crush you like an ant beneath his—“
“Suicide,” said William, “he died in his cell the night they arrested him.”
Young William was kind enough to leave out the gruesome details of The Boulder’s death, how he rammed his own head into the bars of his cell until he died of brain hemorrhaging. He did not mention those details because it was a most unpleasant topic, not the sort of thing a young detective should discuss in everyday conversation. With this last revelation Doctor Mysterion looked into his own bony, wrinkled hands. William was uncertain if the villain was realizing that he was without his gauntlets or that his once young hands had become weak and feeble.
“Curses!” shouted the doctor, “My enemies have finally defeated me! What wretched affliction is this?!”
Doctor Mysterion buried his spectral face in the palms of his hands. He fell to his knees and began to sob. William felt a coldness slither into the pit of his stomach. Though he had defeated many villains himself he had never seen one in such a pathetic state, especially one so universally feared as Doctor Mysterion. There was something disturbing about the sight of the elderly villain, something disenchanting. It reminded young William of the early mornings before the sun had risen. He’d be awoken by the throbbing phantom pains on the left side of his face. In the morning when he would first open his eyes he was unable to remember that his left eye was no longer functional.
The boy set down his skateboard and cautiously approached the weeping villain. The doctor began lamenting over his fallen cohorts. He said that The Boulder was like a son to him and that he had planned to propose to Madame Cobra after their final heist was completed.
“We would have been the perfect family,” cried Doctor Mysterion, “The Boulder, that dear sweet boy, he truly loved his work. He was an artist of destruction. And Madame Cobra, there’s never been a woman who possessed a love of evil as great as she!”
William offered a hand to Doctor Mysterion who then ceased his crying and stared at him suspiciously. The doctor smelled like the soap dispensers in the boy’s bathroom at William’s school.
“Where am I?” begged Mysterion, “I don’t remember how I got here. What was I supposed to be doing?”
William studied Mysterion’s clothing for any clues. He paused when the light touched the doctor’s white slippers. There was something unusual about them, something oddly institutional in the way they were crafted. William kindly asked the doctor to remove one of his slippers. The doctor complied, handing the ragged piece of footwear to William and then quickly drawing his hand back as if the boy were booby trapped. William used his flashlight to study the slipper from every angle. When he looked inside he saw written on the inside of the sole, in black letters, the words “St. Thomas Aquinas Home for the Mentally Ill.” Will knew the place; it was just a few blocks away from his apartment.
William returned the slipper to its owner and then tucked his skateboard into his backpack. Half of the board was still poking out the top. William held Mysterion’s hand as he led him out of the warehouse. As they walked down the street the villainous doctor scanned the boarded up store fronts and the ominous tenement buildings, remarking on how very fascinating everything was, “very fascinating indeed.”
As they passed the stone terrace Mysterion pointed one of his bony fingers at the General Motors Tower in the center of Palmdale and asked the boy what city that was. William told him that it was Palmdale, Acre City. The doctor stopped walking for a moment and studied the skyline. William was certain that it must have been an unfamiliar sight after all these years.
At once the doctor burst into a fit of maniacal laughter. “Did you know that I once held this entire city hostage with an atomic bomb?”
“I know, doctor.”
“I counter-engineered it using the blueprints for the nuclear weapons used against the Japanese. The difficult part was determining whether or not to use the gun-assembly-type bomb or the implosion-type. The former is much easier to construct but its kill radius wasn’t nearly as high as the latter.”
William just nodded his head and continued walking. He thought of reminding the doctor that the bomb he used turned out to be a dud, but he decided that it would be too rude for polite conversation. William knew that he must have looked silly, walking down the sidewalk while holding hands with a decrepit madman, but he felt a need to protect the villainous doctor. He was like a very old, very ragged book that had been sitting on a library shelf undisturbed for many years. It needed to be handled delicately lest the information it contained be lost forever.
With his free hand young William touched the small circular scar on the left side of his neck, just below his jaw; there was a much larger scar on the back of his neck on the same side. “May I ask you a question, Doctor?”
“You certainly may,” said Mysterion, “But the answer shall cost dearly! Yes, quite dearly indeed.”
William put his hand into his pocket and asked the doctor why grownups do evil things.
“Ha! I thought you were going to ask me something difficult. I assure you, my dear boy, that the realm of evil is populated not by adults alone, but by children as well. One might even go so far as to say that children, due to their underdeveloped sense of empathy, are more susceptible to evil than adults. You see, the one thing all human beings have in common is that we each harbor within us a natural predisposition for evil. We have evil thoughts and desires; it is part of our very nature. But alas most men choose not act upon their baser instincts because they abide by the silly notion of goodness. You see, my boy, goodness is a delusion, just like Santa Clause or a benevolent God. To do good deeds is to deny one’s true nature; it is the very definition of self-deceit. But to reject the ideals of moral society and embrace one’s evil nature, that is what it truly means to experience reality in its purest form. And that, my dear boy, is why we commit evil.
“I see.”
“Now,” said Doctor Mysterion, “You do realize that I shall have to take your life?”
“Yes,” said young William, “but let’s wait until we get you back to your home. Then you can kill me.”
“Very well.”
Part 3: topic70676.html
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