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“So what happens next?” The first Captain Kismet story had gone down a storm with their editor at the magazine, and Charles had jumped on his offer to commission more short serialized comic adventures featuring their new hero.
“Captain Kismet defeats the Prox, of course.” She circled the small desk to face Charles. “But not before Princess Sura is tragically killed in battle.”
“Oh no!” Charles looked genuinely wounded. “But she has such gumption.”
“I know, I like her, too. But Ranger needs to return to Earth, and he can’t do that with a purple-skinned sweetheart tagging along.”
“Why does he have to go home?” Charles asked. “Why can’t he stay on Zalia?”
“Because,” Iris said, a wicked glint in her eye, “the real enemy has yet to reveal himself.”
“Go on.” Charles propped his elbow on the desk and rested his chin on his hand.
“Do you remember how Sura helped Ranger climb that mountain so he could use Zalian science to send a message back through the wormhole and let his superior officers know that he was still alive?”
“Of course.”
“Well, Professor Oswald intercepted that message before Ranger’s loyal friend Penny Haven or anybody else back home could hear it. So he alone knows of the wormhole and its uncanny effects. And now, unbeknownst to Ranger, back on Earth, Oswald is attempting to re-create the flight of the Kismet, to give himself the same powers.”
“And will he succeed?” Charles was aware he sounded like a little boy at bedtime, begging for another story. And then what? And then what?
“After a fashion,” said Iris. “But it changes him in different ways. His abilities are all mental, and Oswald becomes so malformed that his body can no longer support his engorged head. He must wear a special mechanized exoskeleton and helmet at all times. Something quite monstrous.” Charles made a note of this as Iris adopted a reedy, pantomime-ish tone: “If Ranger represents the next stage of humankind, I am its apotheosis! Let them hail Ranger as the Alpha…for I am the Omega!” She smiled and returned to her usual speaking voice. “A being of pure, terrifying intellect, unburdened by conscience, who is able to anticipate Ranger’s every move. He is to be Captain Kismet’s ultimate nemesis moving forward. A hero is nothing without a good villain, after all.”
She paced as she spoke, although there was not exactly very far for her to go. The Ambroses’ apartment, a walk-up in Flatbush, consisted of a bedroom, a narrow bathroom that was always freezing, and a living area they had converted into a shared studio, with Iris’s typewriter on one side of the room, Charles’s drawing desk on the other, and a beaten-up old sofa in between. It was just short of a flophouse—far less than Charles would have liked to offer his new bride—and Iris was in a constant war of attrition with the mouse that had taken up residence behind the stove, but it was theirs.
“This is all excellent,” said Charles, already jotting down ideas for how best to visually accompany the wild fruit of his wife’s imagination. “Haywood will love it.”
“Do you think he’ll love it enough to let me put my name on it?” Iris asked. The way she said it was offhand, but Charles knew she resented being forced to publish her contributions under a male pseudonym. It was unfair; he knew it was—the entire story was hers, after all! But Charles knew that if Iris kept insisting on bringing it up to Walter Haywood, the editor would soon be less receptive to publishing their work. And at present, his drawings and Iris’s writing were what kept this pockmarked, mouse-ridden roof over their heads.
“I know, I know,” Iris said, seemingly reading his mind. She shook her hands in the air as if to waft away a bad odor and continued her circuit of the living room. “Anyway,” she added, “I have been ruminating on something else.”
“Oh?”
“In addition to a villain, there is something else every hero needs,” she said.
“And what’s that?” Charles inquired.
“A faithful sidekick, of course.”
Chapter 7
Will was in the screaming cupboard for less than a minute before he heard the bell chime over the front door of the shop. The screaming cupboard at Gilroy & Sons Rare & Secondhand Books long predated Will’s employment there, as integral to the smooth running of the place as the stacks of musty volumes on its cramped, crowded shelves. On his first day, April had even pointed it out during the “grand tour” of the narrow, single-floor space, as if giving him directions to the loo: “Stockroom on the left, little fridge and kettle at the back—we take it in turns buying milk—and then we’ve got the screaming cupboard next to the sink.”
“Sorry,” Will cut in. “Screaming cupboard?”
April had just given him a bright smile and said, “You’ll see.”
At the time, he thought she was joking—after all, how stressful could selling secondhand books possibly be?—but gamely ate his words after having his first customer-related meltdown, making full use of the shop’s screaming facilities within a week of starting.
It wasn’t that the job came with a particularly heavy workload, or even that Yvonne Gilroy, widow to one of the “& Sons,” was a bad boss: She mostly left Will and April to their own devices. But he had underestimated the challenges of dealing with the more finicky collectors, and the painstaking work of verifying provenance before they would even consider making a purchase, not to mention the chancers who would come in with their childhood copies of The Famous Five, complete with Crayola scrawls and missing pages, expecting a windfall and kicking up a fuss when none was forthcoming. Bookselling was still retail, after all, and the average customer seemed to still be under the impression that they were always right.
Aside from inventory, these fruitless, maddening conversations took up the lion’s share of Will’s working day. But rarely was he ever truly rushed off his feet: In between the occasional “decompression session” in the screaming cupboard, he was still able to spend hours behind the counter reading some doorstopper or surreptitiously planning his next gig. Frankly, he wasn’t sure how the Gilroy family made any money at all and was nursing a suspicion that rare books were simply a less conspicuous front for money-laundering than vape shops and bubble tea.
Today’s visit to the screaming cupboard was a combination of hangover—Will started each of his nights at the Village with the intent to stay sober, but like any family, the local gays were easier to love with a drink inside him—and lingering embarrassment from his run-in with Ry.
The chime of the door that drew Will back to the present signaled the arrival of April, who was placing two coffees and a bag of pastries on the counter as Will emerged.
“My hero,” he whispered, as much to the coffee as to April.
