Caped Fear: Superhuman Horror Stories

Introduction

Mark Waid

Generally, when you think about superheroes, you think about capes and toothy grins and bright, primary colors and spandex, all of which is pretty much the antithesis of this book’s remit: horror. And that, to my mind, is what makes this collection of stories so enticing. Anybody can imagine Superman saving a kitten from a tree. It’s kind of his thing. It takes a special kind of writer with a special kind of mind to twist a feat like that into a moment of abject dread.

And, honestly, despite the mental imagery they immediately evoke, superheroes haven’t always been totally synonymous with Truth and Justice. The earliest adventures of Superman characterized him as a no-nonsense maverick social activist who was plenty scary if you were a negligent mine owner or a cruel orphanage mistress or a crooked banker. Absolutely true anecdote: in Superman’s first story in the Sunday funnies, these exact words came out of his mouth as he was holding a safe over his head: Nice bank you’ve got here. It would be a pity if anything happened to it. That man knew the value of fear.

The early days of superheroes were also flush with any number of macabre, unsettling figures: the Spectre, a ghost whose cold gaze could flay skin and turn a crook into a skeleton; The Face, who spooked criminals with his ghastly green mask; even the original Black Widow (not that one), who viciously slaughtered evildoers in her role as Satan’s ambassador to Earth (more fodder for the hellpits). I can think of two kids who were unquestionably scarred by creepster heroes such as those. Just look around the central pages of this book for a rarity from 1970—an original comic book story starring the macabre Dr. Weird, as written and drawn by two young tyros determined to make something of themselves someday—George R.R. Martin and Jim Starlin. (Achievement unlocked.)

But there’s more to horror than turning crooks into skeletons. In these pages, by and large, the authors recognize that wanton violence and gore isn’t as fearful as suspense, paranoia, and good old existential fright for fright’s sake. Check out Colleen Doran’s tale for a subtly wicked turn on not only the concept of superheroes but of the traditional superhero team. Let her introduce you to the dark side to a group of ostensible do-gooders not-strangely-similar to another one for which she and I share a longtime mutual affinity.

Jim Krueger, one of comics’ most inventive minds, creates a weapon of ultimate fear, at least if you’re a caped crusader. Jim’s story is less in-your-face horror and more of an eerie melancholy, weighing in on the literal and figurative ghosts of superheroes and what extremes one might have to go to in order to finally end a never-ending battle.

The legendary Robert Bloch, himself a longtime friend to DC Comics editor Julie Schwartz, brushes up against the wish-fulfillment aspect of superhumanity, with a reminder that your dreams are sometimes someone else’s nightmares.

There isn’t any leaping of tall buildings in Robert Silverberg’s disquieting story. Instead, taking his cue from the old saw that superheroes are modern myth, Silverberg reaches back to the original superheroes, if you will—the Greek gods, who were not terribly kind and whose own quiet anxiety is the discovery that they are merely fictions today.

Jonathan Maberry has his own take on superheroes—as seen through the eyes of ordinary law enforcement officers. Would they be wondrous of superpowered vigilantes? Jealous? Terrified? Or, perhaps, all three...?

William F. Nolan is clearly no stranger to superhero conven­tion, refusing to settle for simply namechecking a famous comic book right off the bat. Instead, he twists the familiar trope (germane to dozens of masked manhunters from Blue Bolt to Captain America to Deadpool) of the we’re-not-going-to-come-right-out-and-say-he’s-a-reformed-Nazi scientist who uses medical science to transform an ordinary guy into a being with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Nolan’s tale answers the disturbing question, In order to be made a superhero...what has to be taken out of you?

In the eyes of Brian Lumley, the alarming side effect of super­heroic power is that there’s always a want for more, and the junction of want and ethics is almost never a safe place to stand.

Joe R. Lansdale is historian enough to know that superheroes existed in pop culture before the Big Red S outraced his first locomotive. The precursors to comic books, the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s (so named because of the cheap, rough-textured paper on which they were printed), were the laboratories from which science fiction as we know it today was birthed, just as their mechanical men, bronze-skinned dynamos, and vengeful champions were direct ancestors of today’s caped crimefighters. Lansdale closes us out pitch-perfectly with a yarn—there’s really no better word for it—paying homage to the evil-busters of that era.

Barry N. Malzberg, Jack Dann, Karen Haber, Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney, Heather Graham, Ramsey Campbell, Janeen Webb...they’re all here with their own unique glimpses of super­heroes and fables as viewed through a dark, warped lens. The tales in this book are weird, quirky, and downright scary, as superheroes very much can be. In fact, the next time you hear someone shout, Look! Up in the sky!, pray that it’s an exclamation of celebration and not a scream of terror.

Prologue: A Post-Moon-Age Nightmare

Christopher Sequeira

You open your eyes and discover you are seated on a lichen-covered tree stump in an odd clearing with a floor of natural stone, surrounded on all sides by irregular rock formations. The vast daytime sky glows azure above you, down through a canopy of branches and leaves. It’s a cave, you realize; a vast cave. But this portion has no ceiling, the rocky walls open to the air via a natural skylight, so trees and grasses have developed here. Several tunnels snake out from this natural amphitheatre into the darkness of true, enclosed caves and tunnels. You have no idea how you got here. The last you recall you were sitting in a subway car heading home after an unusually easy day at the office.

You have so many questions: about the abrupt gap in your memory, about how you came to be here. You can think of no geographical location within a minimum of many hours of travel from where you were that might resemble a place like this. And yet a terrible fear of certainty grips your insides. You are here because They brought you here. Because, somehow, even though you have not breathed a word to anyone, They know you have figured them out. They: the beings that are haunting your dreams.

And suddenly, your eyes no longer see what surrounds you in the cave, but as in a dream when the scene shifts in a compressed blur, you’ve suddenly been transported and all you see now is a featureless, white infinitude, a blank-walled chamber of unknown size. And into this canvas of the mind human figures begin to materialise; to form from the atoms in the air. THEY are now here.

Standing, or floating above you, forming a startling, living panorama in the white-room of your mind; in many ways they are like a come-to-life version of such deities as were once carved into the walls of Egyptian temples. And this seems an eternal truth. In our image-obsessed, over-armed, modern world, these are our era’s immortal superiors; our latest iteration of gods. They represent the fusion of celebrity to militarisation, might-makes-right exemplars wielding an array of weaponized physical attributes, festooned with perfect abs and perfect teeth. The superheroes who walk among us with identities obscured, their true names and faces shrouded in darkness and mystery, the ones who, of course, act only for our collective and individual good. Of course…

But with the quickening of a pulse-throb in your temple, the dream changes, like flowing water, and you see what you could not see before but was surely always there. Reason begins to wrestle with instinctual revulsion in your dream-mind: What if, just as a serial killer wears the mask of a benign, pedestrian occupation, the primary-coloured personae of superheroes—living gods—were used as cover for horrifying crimes and vile manipulations? What if the narrative of public saviour was mere camouflage, hiding the fact that these hyper-mortals wield their power primarily for outcomes of fear, and grotesquerie? The voice that is your higher self in a dream yells at you like a parent: No! The shine and the spandex hide terrible, awful truths!

It is a chilling insight, but more than that, it is a dangerous knowing, that, until now, you thought was safe and secure as any of your most private thoughts. Clearly no longer private.

And so you find yourself re-awakened with awareness, and back in that odd, natural cave, surrounded by rock under a clear sky. Alone. But one is never alone for long in a Meeting Place.

You hear a soft step to your left and turn to see little glints of light emerging from the tunnels that empty into the clearing; glimmers of reflective, body-hugging costumes and sleek, metal weapons. Then, bathed in a mist as if they had indeed stepped from the clouds of a deep fever-dream, a troop of magnificent beings—of incredible stature, developed musculature, and radiant beauty bedecked in swirling capes of vivid hues—enter the cave to surround you, and block every exit. You glance above, and there are more there, falling like feather-light meteors, raining from the blue expanse, slipping into being from gossamer streams in the heavens.

And you know They know; They know that you have pierced the paradigm, uncovered their cabalistic secrets, and arrived at previously unthinkable conclusions…about them.

Not all of their stories are tales of the hero’s journey. Some are…horror tales.

So, you aren’t dreaming anymore. You have entered a night­mare. Worst of all, you now know it’s only one of many that inhabit the darkness.

The Towers of Eden

Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann

7216 Anno Domini: Rusticating in the Desert,

Driving on the Wine Red Sea

And here, with extraordinary punctuality: here the millennium comes to die.

Michael Evreux Brevard driving along the hardpan packed channels of his ever-receding desert, driving at what once would have been considered to be a hundred and ninety-two kilometres an hour (top speed), driving what once would have been known as a 1963 Cadillac De Ville Series 6300 Convertible: a plum-coloured streamlined megalith, a small-finned shark that inhaled petroleum and exhaled the most sensual and poisonous hydrocarbons and particulate matter. Brevard inhaled, luxuriated in the irradiated wind soughing over the windscreen, tasted the acrid fumes, the desiccated dryness of the ever-mobile desert, which rushed past him as if he, the president, king, owner, and ruler of sky and sand were sitting still in this leather and chrome accoutred living room. Ahead, twisting like sand devils in the dying sun were the desert’s fairy chimneys, enormous amorphous extrusions of stone, as mobile—and as stationary—as Brevard in his Cadillac. As the tuff cones and heady spires danced for Brevard’s pleasure, so they also changed colour and texture: the kaleidoscope desert.

Are we there yet? asked Zahia Falaise, his ghost-creation who had the guileless face of a child made perversely sensual—an ultimatum of sensuality—by her poise and presence. She sat next to Brevard, her long bare legs squelching on white leather as she crossed and uncrossed them annoyingly. She wore an iridescent blue Bali gown with a sheer black top. Her breasts were too large for such couture, but she was Brevard’s creation. Although he was father and lover, she was her own. He could not inhibit, nor channel her behaviour.

As a creator he was a merciful, if broken god.

Brevard didn’t answer her, and the two startlingly beautiful women in the bolstered back seats laughed, asked the same irritating question, and then continued their intense discussion of the topology of six-dimensional manifolds.

Thus for minutes hours perhaps days of concentrated pleasure, for time itself, for the soft subtle thrill of anticipation did Brevard drive. He drove until their chimed question was answered in the darkness of a moonless night, answered by the constellations of city lights in the great distance, a haloed phosphorescent cloud, which imitated the coruscating stars above. There…there were his towers, his mechanical city, which, should he will it, would move like fog or settle like dust; and as he drove on, the sun rose purple and red, blinding the enormous glass city of sky-tipped towers.

Are we there yet…?

No, he said, seeing a sudden flare in the distance, No, we are not, and we had better hope that we never will be.

Naked Lunch Redux

Having reached the desert, his penultimate goal, Brevard decided to prepare a picnic for his ghosts. Zahia was to his right: his archangel, his muse perched like a flamingo on an extrusion of silica. To his left, reclining on the soft blanket of ferrite sand were his back-seat angels: Leandra Cassiel and Denise de la Calle. The two sylphs had Brevard’s complexion and features. They were his adolescent fantasies of self transformed: his sisters, his lovers, himself. Their long blonde hair was braided and piled atop their heads, their skin—his skin—was faultless. Brevard was indeed his own Botticelli. He removed his clothes to allow his body to burn in the sun; and Leandra and Denise, his differentiated selves, repeated his every movement. Only Zahia remained as she was; and as a result, Brevard’s desire could not be shared: it was forcibly focused entirely on her; and as the promised platters of food materialised around them, she stared him down.

Leandra and Denise continued to argue topology, Denise insisting that she was unique, that the mathematical paradigm of the many in the one did not—could not—hold true here; and when they all finished eating, when they finished sunning themselves and comparing blisters, they made love.

Later, as Brevard perceived the undetermined flow of time, he stared at the women, unblushing in his own nakedness. He had long ago, eternities ago, moved past lust to a kind of safe, sterile place in which desire and departure commingled: the radiation suntan, burns, and attendant crepuscular sickness had no context in this consciously generated, post-apocalyptic place.

Wake up, Michael, Zahia said forcefully. "You are not dreaming this. This is happening…this is how the ruins of the millennium speak."

Leandra and Denise giggled. They had since agreed that each was indeed singular. Brevard felt the itch of radiation as a warm wash of light. Ruins of the millennium? he said. "There is no millennium."

Zahia laughed at him. What an utter fool you are, Michael.

Once, perhaps, her laughter would have disconcerted him, but not now, not in this known landscape, not in this endless desert where moments trudged past like little messengers.

Zahia: Redacted Time and Unintended Consequence

In the last hours (that is how he described it to himself) Zahia had been all insistence, all strategy as she argued him toward what she took to be the only possible protocol. We cannot do this alone, she said. We must not do this alone. We need help, lest we repeat what was and will be.

Brevard continued to quote Genesis to her—the first gospel of events that followed the Towers of Eden—but she was dismissive. We need to expand the perimeters of possibility, she insisted. You need to expand the perimeters of possibility."

I already have, darling, Brevard said, laughing ruefully, which is probably the reason why we are back here once again. Later again, when they were in the car driving west, ever west, he said to her, Oh, by the way, we are utterly and absolutely alone.

On the Matter of Being Absolutely Alone

Hands on the clock of his destiny, Kennedy preens before a large crowd of reporters, nosy parkers, and fans on the tarmac at Love Field in Dallas. Perhaps you will remember me, he says to Bob Walker of WFAA-TV 8, or perhaps this is how I will be remembered: as the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris. He flushes with satisfaction, nods to the thin applause. It is going well. Everything is going well. Soon he will be eating a good Texan steak and delivering a speech to the local government, business, religious and civic leaders at the Business and Trade Mart downtown and his triumph will be complete. Someone hands him a hat, one of those enormous, grotesque constructions which the Texans seem to equate with being a really great fucker. Kennedy knows better. Being a really great fucker has more to do with prestige and positioning than a silly hat. He feels a twinge in his back and is suddenly reminded of old perils. We are joined together in a great task, he says to nobody in particular and everyone in general. The Mayor gestures: he wants Kennedy to don the hat. Screw that, he thinks. I’ll take it home, wear it in Washington, he says. Perhaps he is imagining this, perhaps it has not happened; or, then again, perhaps it has already happened so drastically that he was/is/will be impelled by its ragged consequence. Is he standing on the tarmac or has he just given his Chamber of Commerce breakfast speech at the Hotel Texas? Is he enjoying his steak at the Dallas Business and Trade Mart luncheon, or is he sitting with Jackie and John and Nellie Connally in the Presidential limousine approaching Dealey Plaza? Complex and twisted, all of it.

Whether here, there, or everywhere, someone invisible as clean air whispers into his left ear: "Destroy time and chaos may be ordered."

A Twentieth Century Literary Reference

With Attendant Footnote

Destroy time and chaos may be ordered, whispered Norman Mailer’s ghost, the aforementioned Sergius O’Shaughnessy, to the hapless Svoboda in an infinitely distant century. That had seemed like good advice in the penumbra of Nagasaki, only a dozen years earlier; but this was a new gleaming era, an era in which technology had become interchangeable with both death and life. Didn’t matter! Brevard knew that Mailer’s strange and megalomaniacal ghost had had it right for this century as for every century: Destroy time and chaos may be ordered is was and will be inevitable truth. But Brevard had a powerful intention. He could and would destroy chaos by re-enacting a new sequentiality, a glittering new sequentiality for an ever-new eighth millennium. Thus, for example, sacrifice John Fitzgerald Kennedy again and again (and again) until you get it right, until the act through repetition is rendered numb to any past, present, or future emotive significance. Until it is remembered by no one but perhaps a first citizen/president/god/creator/king such as Brevard. Then (now? before? after? ah, sequence, where is thy sting?) kill the king and kill him and kill him until he is no longer the king and in fact no longer dead but merely a character or a scrap of dialogue in the story. But Kennedy was the century…was the story, the life the death, the character, the scrap of dialogue. Born in one wartime, came near death in another, a projectile then to the boundary of what could have been the third and last war but was instead talked off that peak, screwed the sister deities who spun the threads of fate and destiny with single-minded abandon if with no real emotion (like a grounded V-2 rocket he could only be a simulation of flight and flame) and then, as a kind of gift to the hundreds of millions of future observers, left with a flourish. The mission was always to leave with a flourish, then exit left and leave ‘em laughing; and if Sergius O’Shaughnessy had uttered the utter truth, the ‘golden rule’, then the ‘mission’ was its corollary: destroy the weavers of chaos and (the threads) of time may be ordered.

Dimensions of Memory in a Standard 4/4 Time Signature

Breakfast in that huge, closed hotel restaurant space, then the empty air itself, everything heated like stones in a fire, and then, and then the great limousine prowling to the edges of consciousness. Most of the time now he had to fuck passively because of his goddamned wrecked back, but he comforted himself: this was an age of fundamental passivity, of submission, of diminished resistance to the waves lifting into a tsunami of implacable force. On the ocean, clinging to a raft, he had learned of dimensions of passivity so cruel that inert fucking by comparison was a goddamned pleasure.

The 1812 Trackless Steam Powered Symphony

Of course Mailer’s ghost, the doomed O’Shaughnessy, might have been dead wrong. Nothing could be certain in Heisen­berg’s world, a world refracted by the sprawl of the Grassy Knoll.

So much, more than enough, for Brevard being all knowing…so much for the frailties of omniscience, the vicissitudes of the godhead, the mediated difficulties of the local imperator creator. Perhaps Zahia was right: perhaps he was not creator-in-chief, the isometric dreamer of realities; and perhaps he might be existentially rather than absolutely alone. But alone or multitudinous it was (or would soon be) a crowded solitude containing all manner of ghostly constructions, all or some or perhaps none of his own making; and what a troupe-band-bevy-collection it would be: geologists, paleontologists, physicists, astronomers, et al.; a diverse collection of expertise from the applied, earth, life, and natural sciences; and, too, all manner of philosophers, religious quacks, and humanitarians. All these ghostly constructions willingly contained in the twelve caboose-red first-class carriages of a steam train powered by a Salamanca locomotive that is being driven by none other than its inventor Matthew Murray of Holbeck, Nottinghamshire, Great Britain, England, Europe, the great globe itself, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, the mind of God. Address a letter to him in this way and await its return: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN.

As yet unseen by Brevard or his angels, Murray is chasing Brevard, the coupled drive wheels of his locomotive and the free wheels of the carriages following in the fused indentation trails of the atomic Cadillac. Matthew Murray of Holbeck has enormous plans of his own. He follows Brevard not as a supplicant approaching his god, but as a spider running along its web after its prey.

However, it might also be noted that Murray is no less grotesque or dangerous than the atomic catalogue driving them all to a disaster so encompassing, so final, that it will render irresistible its fetching answer to this iterated century of flame.

A Short Pause Before the Recrudescent Crash

It should be noted that (if O’Shaughnessy is right and Zahia wrong) all which occurs previously and prospectively has been planned, researched, extrapolated, simulated, and engineered by Brevard. Of course the crux is whether this depiction is a (fictional) reconstructed simulation or an authentic iteration of the great work of time and possibility. Either way Brevard is trapped. Whether he is a god controlling or simply one of his created angels cannot be answered and probably should not be answered. Better to be god from Brevard’s perspective, even if a recurring string of ‘facts’ mitigate against desire.

But for our selective purposes, it is probably sufficient to know that Brevard’s obsession with time and events thousands of years in his putative past, his need to model events irrelevant to his time without end, cannot be really understood out of his time. We can only create and substitute a metaphor—in our case, no less than that of the about-to-be-foreclosed JFK, we chose a sexual metaphor—for his driving needs and frustration, needs and frustration which he vents into a fractured reflection of a time when ending is commonplace and death is itself something of a metaphor. A difficult take-down, to be sure: a puerile minimisation rather than a deconstruction of the profound.

You may, of course, substitute a metaphor of your own. For our part, we like the (sexual) metaphors of the ancient incidents of the assassination of JFK and 9/11, for they are time tangible and contain a seductiveness which Brevard himself had hoped would mimic the desire which had shaped the creation of his experiment. And we should not forget the still puissant metaphor of sex: the plunge of objects into the unassailable, the assailable, the impermeable, the damned.

The Near and Distant Experience of Event

It’s time. Pasts, presents, and futures are all right now, all here at exactly 8:19 on this cobalt blue morning. Reflecting the sunlight like a black mirror, the plum coloured Cadillac is now parked just beyond the glass suburbs of the towered city. The city sparkles and flashes and gleams in geodetical splendour. The desert shimmers as night chill meets morning warmth, and the sand swirls into newly shaped dune concretions as if shivering in anticipation (if, indeed, anticipation can even be considered as a state of mind in this interleaved time).

The convertible top is down. Brevard and Zahia Falaise are in the front seat. Leandra Cassiel and Denise de la Calle are holding hands in the back seat.

Well? asks one or the other. Leandra and Denise are twins, after all. Their voices, if not their thoughts, identical.

Shut up and wait for it, Zahia says.

A voice crackles in the sky, loud as a god: The cockpit is not answering. Somebody’s stabbed in business class. And I think there’s mace. That we can’t breathe. I don’t know. I think we’re getting hijacked.

That would be Betty Ong, a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, Zahia continues.

Ah, says Leandra and Denise in chorus.

But Brevard doesn’t move, doesn’t say a word. It’s as if he’s dreaming time, experiencing the events unfolding forward and backwards simultaneously, seeing from the perspective point of himself sitting in the car and from inside the cabin of the Boeing 747 airliner. He sees the airliner arcing out of the blue, another mirror reflecting the blue day, a mirror arcing toward another mirror, or, rather, toward two other mirrors: the tallest glass towers in this crystal city, which Brevard has named Eden. (His prerogative, for—according to his lights and purposes, at least—he is god.) Now we shall return to memory, Brevard said to himself, his reconstructed heart beating like a metronome. "Now we shall finally and conclusively acquire sequence and significance."

But Zahia overheard him. She always overheard him. She laughed and said, Oh, so you think, my dearest darling. She straightened herself, a lascivious look on her face as she touched Brevard, who was already excited. Wait for it…one…two…three…

And right on time (?) another voice of the gods crackles across the sky, echoing through all the circles of time. Something is wrong. We are in rapid descent. We are all over the place. I see buildings. We are flying very low. We are flying way too low. Oh, my God, we are way too low.

That’s not Betty, says Leandra.

That’s must be Betty, says Denise.

No, that’s Amy Sweeney, says Zahia. I caressed her just before… Her tone has shifted from the seductive to the satisfied. Meanwhile—

The 747 crashes silently into a glass tower, or, rather, from the vantage of the Cadillac, it looks like the glass tower has swallowed the forward part of the plane; and Brevard and Zahia are now in the aircraft (it’s all simply a matter of perspective, after all); they can smell fear, can hear the screaming; and they can’t help but cling to life, cling to these very last seconds before oblivion, oblivion, oblivion receding, oblivion turning backwards; and Brevard and Zahia are transported instantly back into the car. There, Zahia naked and glowing in the morning. Zahia touching him as he responds against his will, as he realises she is right and he is wrong, that the dreadful is happening even as he breathes in ecstasy and exhales misery, for before the second aircraft can strike the second tower, before the first tower can collapse like a million breezeblock dominoes, time reverses.

The 747 is ejected/rejected from the tower and flies backwards into the blue.

Zahia removes her hand from his lap as all their clothes press once again upon their bodies like winding sheets wrapped around corpses. The twins giggle and then descend into a fierce argument about the types of infinities that