The Hooded Hood Chronicles vol 3: The Roads Not Taken
The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom
Who's Who in the Parodyverse
Where's Where in the Parodyverse
***
“What… what is that?” Clockwatcher asked, swallowing hard.
The Hooded Hood placed one long-fingered hand on the black surface of the mirror and traced his nails over the glass. It was almost a caress. “This is the Portal of Pretentiousness, Mr Hazlewood, created by ancient mythological pantheons from yet more ancient resonances of the Parodyverse itself. It is an elder artefact that can reflect what is happening in almost any time or reality within our local multiverse. Combined with my own power it also allows transit between those possible times and places.”
“Okay.” The supervillain who’d just watched the Hooded Hood retcon his team-mates and offer him a job tried to keep his voice even. “Why is it crusted with blood?”
“It’s had a difficult time of late,” the Hood replied. “So have I.”
Clockwatcher looked around the shadowed halls of Herringcarp. The old asylum was a sinister place of cold stone and gothic wood-carvings. If a building could brood this one was plotting world destruction. “I’m still not clear on… on why I’m here,” he admitted.
The cowled crime czar turned two eyes upon him that made Herringcarp seem warm and cuddly. They were green and deep and they seemed to contain galaxies. “I have some urgent concerns,” the Hood told him. “Things are becoming difficult and dangerous.”
Clockwatcher really began to miss working at Mimble’s timepiece counter. “So that stuff with the Lair Legion, and then the Hellraisers, and then the Parody Master, they weren’t the hard bit?”
The archvillain dismissed his trials with a shrug. “Every great plan requires sacrifices to accomplish. Sometimes one must sacrifice oneself. Other times it is better to sacrifice others.”
The misty interior of the Portal of Pretentiousness seemed to roil like thunderclouds. Clockwatcher didn’t want to be sacrificed.
“I am likely to be distracted for a period,” the Hooded Hood told him. “It is necessary. During that time I require my affairs to be set in order.”
Clockwatcher was chiding himself for his usual lack of detached precision. He watched himself in horror as he gabbled like a schoolboy. “Lisa and Jury and the Faerie Queen? And… and Symmetry? And Dancer?” He shut up as the Hood looked at him.
“There are various strands of my work which it is no longer appropriate to pursue for the nonce,” the archvillain declaimed. “These things must be catalogued and filed.”
“You employed Lee Bookman, the Librarian,” remembered Mr Hazlewood.
“And my library is in order.” The Hood touched the glass of his mirror again. “It is my alternate realities which require filing now.”
Clockwatcher suddenly understood. “You need someone who can see the threads of time and space and accurately map them!” he realised. “Someone who can do for your plots what Mr Bookman did for your books.”
“Indeed.” The cowled crime czar turned to the Portal. For example…”
The black mists seethed then parted to show a scene.
***
Dan Drury’s one good eye was blackened.
“Really?” Chaiki Bushido asked, for once genuinely caught off-guard by what she’d heard. “Visionary hit you?”
“Yeah,” admitted the head honcho of the UN’s Super-menace Principal Undercover Directorate. “I guess I deserved it.”
“Visionary has been under a lot of strain,” the Psychic Samurai said. She wondered why she found it necessary to make excuses for the possibly-fake man. “His children were abducted.”
Drury shrugged. “It was about that. I deserved the poke in the eye. That’s why I let him do it.”
Chiaki frowned as she realised there was more to the sudden appearance of the Director of SPUD than met the eye. “How did you find me here?” she asked. The Hogan hideout was meant to be a closely guarded secret.
“I’m paid to know this stuff,” Drury shrugged. “I’m paid to do all kind of crappy things to keep the world safe. Kidnapping Vizh’s kids was just one of ‘em.”
Chiaki blinked. “Hold on. It was Akiko Masamune who kidnapped Magweed and Griffin, and held them…”
“Why?” asked Drury. “Why would she do that, huh? Why would the world’s pinkest crimelord be so dumb as to do the one thing that would bring the whole Lair Legion down on her like a ton of bricks?”
Chiaki considered this. “The criminal underworld is in turmoil. She needed to re-establish her credentials as a hardcore player. She…” The Psychic Samurai frowned. “It doesn’t seem very likely, really,” she admitted.
“Right,” agreed Drury. “It doesn’t. Short answer is, she pulled the kids because we asked her to. Because we helped her to.”
“Helped her?” Chiaki realised that nobody could just abstract the children from the defences of Parody Island just like that. It would require someone with intimate knowledge of the systems and a multi-billion dollar espionage machine to exploit the loopholes.
“Yeah. The deal was, Akiko steals the kids, gets caught out, does a face-losing backdown in front of the whole criminal fraternity. Very humiliating.”
“Akiko agreed to that?”
“Akiko’s a smart cookie,” Drury suggested. “You should know that, kid. You worked for her all that time. Akiko knew that plenty of other bad guys were getting nervous about how powerful the Masamune organisation was getting. Nervous enough to start tooling up for a major gang turf war. Factor X, Screwdriver, Coppertop, the Mum, Blunt End Reggie, the Ever-Active Hand, the Hoggia, you name it, they were looking to slap Akiko down. Now…”
“Now they’re going to leave her alone for a while,” Chiaki understood. “But still, to agree to lose like that…”
Drury snorted. “Lose? In exchange for her help we brokered a deal between Akiko and Boss Deadeyes in GMY to carve up the local underworld between them. We shut down a couple of HERPES cells that were annoying her. We got the FBI to drop charges against four of her best people. And we got one of her front companies licenses so she can manufacture and own those manga battle suits of her legally. Akiko didn’t lose. She got exactly what she wanted.”
Chiaki thought back to her last difficult confrontation with the pink crimelord. “But why didn’t she tell me that?”
The SPUD Director smiled bleakly. “Because that was her part of the deal.”
“The Lair Legion will never trust you again when they find out about this,” the Psychic Samurai warned.
“The Lair Legion didn’t trust me before,” Drury snorted. “They’re right not to. I’m a sneaky sonofabitch. And they know now – see the shiner? But when Hatman’s calmed down and stopped screaming at me and Hallie’s finished spamming my computer systems to oblivion they’ll see I did them a favour too. Whole world’s seen how seriously the Legion take assaults on their kids. Nobody’s gonna think that’s the soft option from now on.”
Chiaki’s mind was racing now. “Wait. You set Akiko to kidnap the twins. Akiko gets new cover and the territory deal she wanted. The world bad guys go looking for other targets. The Legion get to send a message about how it’s not a good idea to go after the children.”
“It would’a been worse if Akiko hadn’t called in those favours Vizh owes her to pass it all off as some kind of house loyalty test,” Drury pointed out. “That’s why there’s not a black muddy puddle where Akiko’s HQ was before.”
“But what’s in it for you?” demanded the Psychic Samurai. “Why did you go to all this trouble, upset people you have to work with in the future? What’s your angle?”
Drury looked at her calculatingly. “You tell me,” he challenged.
Chiaki stared at him for a moment. “Me,” she said at last. “This isn’t about Akiko, or about the Legion. It’s about Yuki Shiro, and it’s about me.”
“How so?” asked the man from SPUD.
“Yuki tracked me down. She’s good, and you knew that. She pushed me hard, like you knew she would. I pushed back. Then I pushed Akiko. That’s what you wanted. You wanted to see which side I’d jump when the chips were down. You wanted to know whose side I was ultimately on.”
Drury nodded. “But more than that, kid. I wanted you to know as well.”
Chiaki glanced down at the two envelopes in Drury’s hands. “Which of those do you intend to give me?” she asked him.
Dan Drury glanced at the two manila packets. One was thicker than the other. He pushed both across the table to the young woman. “You don’t need to open the thick one,” he told her. “It’s just evidence. Some of it’s even genuine. Enough evidence to put you away in prison for a very long time. Evidence to convict some people you’re pretty fond of, as well. Tax fraud, sexual misconduct, shoplifting, all kinds of stuff. Take it and burn it. It’ll never ever be used.”
Chiaki fingered the envelope cautiously. “Why?” she asked.
Drury shrugged. “Because one black eye’s enough fer today?” he suggested. “Or because that kind of crap’s got no style, and I don’t like playing those kind of dirty games if I don’t have to. Or because you’ve got kind of a nice smile. Or because I shouldn’t have to use blackmail and threats to get you to do the right thing. In any case, I won’t be using that stuff on you.”
“Then I won’t have to carve you into slices,” Chiaki replied.
“You can open the other packet in a moment if you answer the next question right,” Drury went on. “See, we at SPUD have this little job of anticipating and stopping threats to the life and freedom of every person on this planet. It’s tough work and it’s not always nice, and frankly it pays peanuts. It’s dangerous and hard and nobody hardly ever says thank you, even when they ever notice what we did in the first place.”
“Duty does not require praise,” Chiaki told him. “Duty is the path to honour. One serves others because it is the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak. It is the code of the samurai.”
Drury nodded again. “You get it,” he agreed. “So here’s the question: Chiaki Bushido, we need someone ta work for us that’s smart, fast, tough, honest, and gutsy, who we can send to all kinds of dangerous places ta do impossible missions for no other reason that that somebody’s gotta do the right thing. We need a new Agent of SPUD. Will you take the job?”
Chiaki considered it. “I’m not an assassin,” she told Drury. “I’m not dishonourable. I don’t kill – unless I must. I’m not interested in politics.”
“You don’t need to convince me you’re right for the post, kid. I just riled the whole Lair Legion, the gods of Ausgard, the city-state of Badripoor, two-thirds of the cosmic Triumvirate, and Meggan Foxxx to check out whether you’ve got the right stuff. You have. Only question is will you do it?”
Chiaki hesitated. It was a big step. It was her life.
“Open the second packet anyhow,” Drury told her. “The guy in the photograph is Song Lai Kim. Works out of Singapore as a child sex trafficker with a sideline in snuff movies. Recently he’s also been buying up children aged three to seven to ship overseas as genetic guinea-pigs for some kind of weird science programme.”
“Where?” demanded Chiaki. “To whom?”
Drury shrugged. “Don’t know yet.” He looked at the Psychic Samurai. “Need a good agent to go in there and find out, then shut it down.” He pushed the SPUD security pass over the table. “Any idea where we can find one?”
***
Clockwatcher glanced over at the Hooded Hood. “And that’s not going to happen now?” he asked his employer.
“If it does then it will not be due to my direct manipulation,” replied the cowled crime czar. “Although of course should it occur then I will gain certain advantages from it and be in a position to exploit it.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I will gain certain advantages from it and be in a position to exploit it. Am I not… the Hooded Hood?”
“I’d have to say… yes,” admitted Clockwatcher. “So you just want me to log these things as could-be's and keep them indexed somewhere?”
“I require you to evaluate each of them and classify them so that if it becomes appropriate to reuse them or modify them for future gambits I can do so with the minimum of effort.”
“Are they all to do with superheroes?”
The Hooded Hood considered for a moment. “In this Parodyverse almost everything is,” he conceded. “Heroes that were, heroes that are, heroes that now shall probably never be.”
“Heroes that won’t be?” Clockwatcher tried to follow. “You mean heroes you’ve retconned never to exist?”
“I mean heroes I have never retconned to exist,” replied the Hood. He gestured to the Portal again. “Behold!”
***
“Crap,” the Editor in Chief declared as he scattered the pencilled pages and script outline onto the floor of the convention room. “Crap…. Crap… Megacrap… More crap… What the hell is this supposed to be, Dean?”
Andrew Dean shuffled uncomfortably. “It… it was just an attempt to do something different, Mr Jemada,” he explained, blushing furiously. “To, you know, get away from what everybody else is doing.”
The Editor waved page one of the mocked-up Vortex Warrior story at him. “And this is it, is it? Crap. You obviously know nothing about what sells in the comic market.”
“Well, I do read them and…”
“There’s your problem, right there. Comics aren’t like they used to be in the good old days of two years back. We’re surging forward. We need things to be realistic. Relevant. Widescreen, Scattered with references to B-list celebrities.” Joe Jemada shook the script under the writer’s nose. “I mean what’s this got? Where’s the sex? Where’s the bad language? Hell, this Vortex guy is a square-jawed hero-type. That’s not real life.”
“Except for the square-jawed heroes like the Lair Legion,” pointed out Sarah Shepherdson, the waitress on the convention food counter. “I mean, sure they’re silver age, but they do kind of, you know, save the planet every other week.”
“But they’re not realistic,” the Editor in Chief complained. “Incest. Betrayal. Venal hidden motives. Secret perversions. That’s realistic.”
Greg Burch, Andy’s co-plotter and moral support, had a low tolerance for fat men in bulging business suits. “You’d know all about secret perversion, you ladyboy-hopping syphilitic excrement of a dead warthog’s lovechild…” he began, addressing the Editor’s comments in true comics fan style.
Ziles stepped in to calm him. “What he means, Mr Jemada, is that Andy was trying for a different voice with this comic,” she explained diplomatically. “It’s about this chivalric ideal who becomes personified into a being and birthed into a corrupt, unjust world. It’s a commentary on the clash of our dreams of justice and the realities of life.”
“No,” Jemada insisted. “It’s crap. Where are the mutants?”
Greg Burch told him where he could cram his mutants.
“Please,” winced Sarah, “You’ll be having De Brown Streak here to commit more acts of mutant lib terrorism. Putting mutants where you suggested would count as cruel and unusual punishment.”
“And he’d probably enjoy it,” conceded Greg. “Bah! We’re wasting out time, Andy. Nobody wants to read about heroes any more.”
Jemada was about to launch into another opinionated tirade when Sarah peered over his shoulder. “Isn’t that CrazySugarFreakBoy!?” she wondered. “I think he said he wanted to have a word with you about your comics line again, Mr Jemada. He asked if you were familiar with someone called… the Atomic Wedgie?”
Joe Jemada hurried off to find another press conference and the convention crowd that had begun to gather round the fracas drifted apart. Ziles led Greg off to appease him with caffeine. Sarah flashed Andy a sympathetic smile before dashing back to her stall.
Andrew Dean stooped down and picked up the double-spaced script pages and the sample artwork that the unresponsive Editor has scattered. A plumpish bespectacled girl in an unflattering baggy jumper squatted awkwardly to help him. “That was pretty nasty,” she told him. “Sorry.”
“Um,” Andy said, blushing more furiously than he had done before. “Um.”
Elaine Weathermay looked at the cover image of the Vortex Warrior, his silver-grey armour a clever blend of mediaeval knight and modern-age costumery. Behind him the interstitial void between realities crackled away as he was spawned by the human imagination and given shape to fight for right. “I like the idea,” the girl confessed. “It would be nice to think that there’s somebody out there… looking after people. Somebody who wasn’t mean and cruel and horrible, I mean. Somebody who does things just because its right to do them. You know?”
“Um,” said Andy.
“Yeah,” she sighed. She handed the pictures back to the writer and looked at her watch. “I’ve gotta go. I’m getting picked up at three. Hope you get better luck next time. It’s a pretty neat concept. Bye!”
Andy watched her vanish into the comics convention crowd. “Um,” he declared.
***
The chauffeur was waiting outside the convention hall to drive Elaine up to the Pierce Heights mansion she called home. She slipped inside the house hoping to get to her room before anybody noticed she was there. Her parents had been arguing a lot recently, and they both had an unpleasant habit of calling on her to support their case. Elaine tried to keep to her room as much as possible.
“Elaine, come in here,” her father called from the lounge.
Wincing, the girl turned and went to join her father. He was stood by the minibar fixing a drink for his guest, Mr Lodestone. Elaine wasn’t pleased to see the obese businessman either. “Yes?” she asked.
“You remember Lionel Lodestone, don’t you?” Frank Weathermay gestured. “We met at the Heckfire Club and we do a little business together.”
“Yes,” Elaine conceded. She remembered Lodestone, with his hot piggy eyes staring at her speculatively, as if deciding what perverted thing he’d like to do to her first. She’d told mother about it once but Laura Weathermay had only told her that Lionel was a wonderful man and she should be proud that he took an interest in her wellbeing.
“Look at you,” Lodestone smiled at her. “Quite the little lady. They grow up so fast, don’t they Frank?”
“Yes,” agreed Elaine’s father.
“And I always say that it’s never too early to think about a young girl’s future,” Lodestone went on. He sipped his drink speculatively. “You know Frank, I think it would be a good thing if Elaine was invited to our little party tonight. It’d be an experience for her and we’d all be glad to have her.”
Frank Weathermay looked worriedly from Elaine to Lodestone. “I don’t think so,” he replied. “I try not to bother Elaine’s head with business matters. Besides, I thought we’d agreed that I was bringing Laura.”
“There’s always room for another charming lady,” Lodestone told him, dragging his massive bulk from the armchair and waddling round for a better look at Elaine. “Besides, it would certainly help to clinch the investment deal if the partners could see that you were serious in your commitments and that your family was behind you.”
Frank was pale and Elaine tried to work out what was going on in the conversation that seemed to ignore her presence even while it focussed on her. “Look, Lionel…” Mr Weathermay began, but Lodestone laid one pudgy hand on his shoulder and patted his cheek.
“Don’t argue, Frank,” the fat man told him. “It’s settled. Shall we say arrive at eight?”
“Eight, yes,” agreed Weathermay. “That would be fine.”
“Splendid.” Lodestone turned to look down at Elaine. “I’m sure you’ll dress up pretty, my dear sweet child. I look forward to familiarising you with our affairs.”
Elaine felt more terrified than she had ever been in her life.
***
Clockwatcher watched the fading scene with a frown. “So… this Vortex Warrior comes out of her imagination to save her?”
“Indeed,” agreed the Hooded Hood. “That was the nature of the scenario. Later on he would have joined the Lair Legion. He’d probably have died fighting the Parody Master.”
“But you never made it happen so he’d exist.”
“Circumstances favoured me more using other ends. George Gedney, for example. Vincent De Soth.”
“What about that girl, then?” demanded Clockwatcher. “Who saved Elaine from Lionel Lodestone?”
The Hood shrugged. “Saved her? Who says she was saved?”
“You could save her,” Clockwatcher ventured. “You could at least put some other hero in her path to give her a chance. It would be easy for you to do.”
“And why should I?” demanded the cowled crime czar. “What part of archvillain do you not comprehend?”
“The part where you do things that harm others that don’t benefit you,” Clockwatcher persisted. “Please. If you won’t do something then let me find a way of helping her. Let me find a hero and divert him to meet her.”
The Hooded Hood stepped back from the mirror. “By all means bend the Portal to your will if you are able,” he invited. “Save the girl if you can. Seek out a hero, drag him from the timeline he’d otherwise be in, set him to help Elaine Weathermay. Proceed.”
Clockwatcher’s costume collar suddenly felt far too tight. He could feel the Hood’s cold gaze on him as he touched the Portal of Prentiousness and tried to apply his powers to it.
He discovered something the Hooded Hood hadn’t told him about the elder artefact. Using it hurt.
He thought of Elaine and he kept on probing. And then, suddenly, the maddening strands of floating narrative seemed to plait into a cord his hands could grasp.
“I think… I think I’ve got one!”
***
Whole problem started because of the wrong sort of sheep. Bit of a mix up with the Brecknock Hill Cheviots due to be delivered at my Carlisle carpet factory, with a rather mixed lorryload of Romneys and Wallis Country Sheep, which, as my extremely boring production manager explained, is the ovine equivalent of ordering the caviar and getting a pig’s knuckle sandwich.
So instead of going off to Lady Orpington’s piano recital I had to stay in the office dealing with the substandard sheep. Got hold of the chap in Droitwich who was attempting for fob off the woolly impostors and donated a good-sized piece of my mind, I can tell you. But the point was, I missed the recital.
Young Asil went though. My amanuensis had been lookin’ forward to the bash for weeks for some reason, possibly because of stunning new dress from Harvey Nicholls that judging by price tag was clearly hand-designed by Leonardo da Vinci and sewn together by brain surgeons, using material from the Shroud of Turin.
Anyway, I’d just finished arranging the repacking and return of the deficient herbivores that were unfit to be quality carpets when the phone rang. It was Asil.
“Miss Ashling,” I greeted her. “How’s the party?”
“It’s very nice, thank you,” she told me, “but we are having a bit of a supervillain hostage situation.”
“Wha-at?”
Asil explained. Apparently some armoured malefactor calling himself Balefire had wandered in to Lady Orpinton’s recital lookin’ for me for some reason. Lady O was rather upset, since it put her table placings completely out. Then the whole buildin’ was surrounded by some kind of force field and things had gone downhill from there. I gather things had now progressed to the cheese and biscuits stage. Asil explained that the villain was behaving; himself quite well and had just done a nice rendition of Handel’s Water Music on the baby grand.
So it was that I had to go over to Lady Orpington’s piano recital after all. “Better get me the dinner jacket and black tie I suppose,” I told my valet. “Lady O will never forgive me if I rescue people at her dinner party while being improperly dressed.”
Shifted time a little to get myself over to the scene, but not too much as I needed some temporal charge left in the old Chronometer of Infinity to deal with the ungodly. Also called Inspector Galloway to check the form on this super-baddie. You can never tell these days. Some of them are hardly gentlemen.
This Balefire chap’s real name is Frost. Seems he dabbled in designing those infernal video game things you see attached to young people these days. No wonder he came to a bad end. One of the chaps who’s too clever for everybody’s good. He apparently came up with some kind of telepathic game interface, had the usual lab accident, tapped into some extradimensional power source that gives him corpuscent flame or somesuch, and set himself up in the villaining business. Sort of thing that could happen to anybody, I suppose.
Arrived and had a good dekko at the force field. Recognised it immediately, as I’m a damned sight better at spotting second-hand leftover Kink the Conqueror technology than I am at telling Romneys from Brecknock Hill Cheviots. Would have suspected the old pink-sock-wearing imbecile except have heard he’s off on some romantic voyage of discovery in the colonies, and also because somebody had bothered to put a little sticker on the force field generator saying “Refurbished by B.A.L.D., supporting the modern villain with all your death trap needs.”
However, time component of force field meant not easy to shift it so as to pass through. Was just trying to get an accurate reading to calibrate my pocketwatch when Asil trotted down to the perimeter along with a chap dressed as a cross between a hood ornament and a dalek. Balefire, I presumed.
“Sir Mumphrey Wilton?” he asked, and I was surprised how young he sounded. When the villains start sounding so young it really is time to retire. “You were supposed to have been in here with me!”
Started to give the chap a ticking off re. Nefarious deeds with unauthorised temporal force fields, but Asil interrupted. “It wasn’t Balefire, Sir Mumphrey. He was here looking for your help. You were recommended to him by Xander the Improbable.”
***
“Sir Mumphrey Wilton,” noted the Hooded Hood. “An interesting choice.”
“He’ll help Elaine,” Clockwatcher promised. “He’ll see she’s saved.”
“Indeed he will,” agreed the archvillain. “And once he works out his timeline has been interfered with he will also be extremely annoyed. Splendid.”
“Splendid?”
The Hooded Hood steepled his fingers. “The Keeper of the Chronometer of Infinity has gone to some lengths to avoid being retconned by me or affected when I use the Portal. He has not made similar provision against others doing so up to this point. I expect that now he shall, which will mean he is able to play the role I require of him in the Moderator Saga.”
Clockwatcher gazed at his employer. “You mean… you manipulated me into saving Elaine so that Mumphrey could ensure the outcome you wanted when the Moderator restructured reality?”
“And in turn set up my manipulations of young Salieri Meng, Liu Xi Xian, Kerry Shepherdson, Samantha Bonnington, Thomas Black and others,” agreed the Hood. “You begin to see the value of your cataloguing, Mr Hazlewood.”
“Is everything going to be this complicated?” worried Clockwatcher.
“No. Some of it will be rather convoluted,” admitted the Hood. “Other parts are simply a matter of chronicling on record events which are fragmentary but which offer some useful insight into events that are no longer essential.”
“Um…”
“Like this,” the Hood replied, gesturing at the Portal.
***
“Mommy, it hurts… it hurts… it hurts… I’m sorry…”
“It’s okay,” Grace o’ Mercy told the bloody young woman on the emergency gurney. “It’s okay.”
“It hurts, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, mommy… Mommy?”
“I’m here,” Grace told the girl, holding her hand.
Darlene Walker died at 01.37am, aged eighteen, of multiple insult traumas inflicted by person or persons unknown.
Nurse O’Mercy looked down at the blood on her hands.
“There was nothing I could do,” the intern on E.R. told the senior staff nurse. “Nothing. She was too broken.” He pushed his hair back from his forehead and started to make out his third death certificate of the night.
Francine DuBois came forward to help Grace with the body. The corpse would need to be sealed for autopsy.
“Who brought her in?” Grace asked.
“Yansen and Devance,” Nurse DuBois answered. “They’re still at reception.”
“I’ll tell them.”
Grace took a last look at the thin girl in the cheap dress. She knew nothing about her but her name, taken from a learner’s driving permit in her pocket, and what she could see: somebody had beaten Darlene to death.
The Night Nurse found the cops filling forms out at the desk. “She died,” she told them. “I’m sorry.”
“Rough night, Grace?” Devance asked sympathetically. He was thinking of asking the cute brunette nurse out but now was hardly the time. “Coffee?”
“I’ve given up caffeine,” the Night Nurse answered honestly. “So what was her story?”
“Walker? Just another hooker. Two arrests in four months, no prosecutions. Same old story.”
“Who killed her?”
Yansen snorted. “We’ll never know. She was dumped by the highway when we found her. A trick turned bad I guess.”
“You’ll investigate, though?”
“Oh sure, we’ll open a file. But this ain’t gonna be a high priority case, you know. Another dead whore won’t make any headlines, and it’s a busy precinct.”
“You must get a couple of these a week,” Devance said to Grace.
“More,” the Night Nurse answered. “Forgotten people forgotten in death as well. But this one… she cried for her mother. She was so frightened to die, I could feel it. She didn’t want to die.”
“Who does?” Yansen shrugged. He tossed his paper cup in the trash. “C’mon Larry. We’ve gotta sponge down the back of the cruiser.”
“Sure. Nice to see you Grace.”
The Night Nurse watched the cops pass through the revolving door of the Phantomhawk Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Room. She glanced at her hands, which still bore traces of Darlene Walker’s life’s blood.
Very slowly and deliberately she licked the spots off her skin.
The blood is the life.
Grace knew as she tasted Darlene’s blood that she was right. Darlene hadn’t wanted to die. She’d needed to live. She’d struggled to survive. She had to… had to…
“Francine, can you cover for me?” Grace asked her friend. “I’ve got to go out for a while.”
“Sure. You go do your voodoo undead crap and leave me with the bedpans,” the fat black woman answered. “I don’t mind, really I don’t.”
“I’ll be back soon, I promise. But that girl we just tagged… I think she’s got a kid, or a little sister or something. I need to go see.”
Francine nodded understandingly. “You go see, girl.”
***
6014 Moench St was cheap temporary housing, a wooden cabin with broken screens, raised on wooden blocks above the sand dunes down towards Mosman Park. The large black bat wheeled in low and changed back into a dark-haired woman in a white nurse’s uniform.
“I have got to find a better shape to fly in than that,” the Night Nurse said to herself. Just because she’d become a vampire didn’t mean she had to live the cliché. Next she’d be out buying a coffin to sleep in.
Grace stepped onto the porch and knocked on the door. There was no answer, and the house felt empty; smelled empty. In fact nobody had been here for a while.
The Night Nurse forced the door easily and stepped over the threshold. That she could enter uninvited told her that nobody lived here now.
The furniture was cheap and dusty. There were less-faded marks on the wallpaper where pictures has been hung and removed. The drawers in the bedroom had been cleared out except for a few bits of cheap clothing.
And there was a cot, an old battered cot stood in the corner. A discarded comforter still lay on one corner of the threadbare mattress.
Nothing personal was left here. Whatever possessions Darlene Wilson had owned were gone now.
And her baby…
Grace checked the trash in the kitchen bin. The smell alerted her that it hadn’t been emptied for a couple of weeks at least. She found a bunch of final demands for utilities, all marked paid, and a small black address book.
The Night Nurse flicked through its pages. There were names and numbers, and amounts in dollars. A few were crossed out with NO! written next to them in determined handwriting.
So Darlene had packed her things up, paid off bills she hadn’t been able to meet until the final demands, thrown her customer list in the trash, and moved on. And now she was dead.
The blood on Grace’s tongue burned and demanded more.
***
Jack Kuberman liked the night shift at the hospital morgue. It was quiet and there wasn’t much need for conversation. He could get on with his reading, continue his complicated e-correspondence, and play Black Sabbath as loud as he liked. The corpses didn’t complain.
“Hey Jack,” Grace O’Mercy called.
Jack fell off his chair and hurriedly scrambled to his feet. He hadn’t heard the Night Nurse come in. “Grace!” He fumbled for the pause button on his ipod.
“I need a second opinion,” Grace O’Mercy told him. In his fantasies Grace usually went on to seek his advice about which lingerie she should wear, followed by a lengthy modelling session, but the Night Nurse wasn’t aware of the script. “You saw that poor girl we sent down earlier?”
“The hooker? She’s in 21.”
“What did you make of her injuries, Jack?”
The morgue attendant shrugged. “Didn’t take a very close look. Do you… want me to make a guess?”
Whatever his other shortcomings, Jack Kuberman was almost prescient when it came to predicting autopsy results. “Yes please, Jack. There’s something bothering me about this case.”
Jack rolled open drawer twenty-one and uncovered the nude body of the murdered prostitute. “Yeauch!” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“What can you tell me, Jack?”
Kuberman pulled a pen-torch out of his back pocket and took a serious look at the body. He prodded the flesh in various places, noting where the bones shifted beneath his fingers. He worked in silence, through and uncompromising. “Nasty,” he said at last.
“Can you be more specific?”
“She was beaten to death with something long, narrow, and flexible, probably plastic-coated. Something like one of those bike lock chains maybe? Steel core and plastic outside. Not very efficient but painful as hell. She’s got a whole bunch of broken bones and some other bruising that looks like fists or boots. She had sex not long before she died, but without expensive DNA tests and stuff we won’t know much more than that. Without cutting her open I can’t tell when last she ate, and I can’t cut her open to find out. You know how pissed Dr Whitfield gets when I do that.”
“Oh, I know,” Grace agreed.
“There’s some older bruising on her too, and a few half-healed scars. I’d have to say S&M wounds, Grace. Pliers, whips, some manacle bruising at wrists and ankles. Like I say, nasty stuff.”
“Was this a crime of anger?” the Night Nurse asked. “Sudden and brutal? Or was it…”
“For my money it was slow and deliberate,” Kuberman assessed. “Somebody took the time to thoroughly destroy this girl, and they probably enjoyed every minute of it.”
“She called for her mother before she died.”
“I don’t blame her.”
***
The images faded.
“What happened then?” demanded Clockwatcher. “What was really going on?”
“If it ever becomes of relevance to my plots then I shall revive that narrative strand and determine the conclusion,” replied the Hood. “There are many such plot fragments which must be tidied away so that they do not trip up the main course of events.”
“Couldn’t I just use the Portal again, divert another person to help out this Night Nurse solve the mystery?” offered Clockwatcher. “Maybe Champagne or Yuki Shiro?”
“You could,” agreed the Hooded Hood. “But at what cost?”
“Cost? What do you mean, cost?”
The Hood showed Clockwatcher the strands of causality that had been altered earlier. “See here, when you gallantly saved Elaine Weathermay from a fate worse than death,” he intoned, “look what happened to the situation that Wilton would have been at.”
Clockwatcher gasped. “Lady Orpington’s recital! Everyone… everyone died!”
“And Balefire went from being a bumbling amusing nuisance to being a major villain,” agreed the cowled crime czar. “From that time on his own schemes became darker and more dangerous, culminating in the great Paradopolis blackout which shaped the line-up of Legionnaires in readiness for the Hellraisers and the Parody War. Most helpful.”
“But I caused all those people to die to make it happen,” whispered Clockwatcher. “You caused me to cause them to happen.”
“Indeed. Am I not…”
“The Hooded Hood, yes,” agreed Clockwatcher angrily. “You used me.”
“Indeed. You may recall an offer of employment. Implicit in that is that you render services of use to the Hooded Hood.”
“And who is the Hooded Hood?” demanded Clockwatcher. “You spend all your time messing with other people. What about you?”
Before his fear got the better of his anger and before the Hood could act to stop him the former timepiece salesman plunged his mind back into the Portal of Pretentiousness for the truth.
It wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
***
How the Hooded Hood Stole Christmas
The snow was on the ground
It lay in piles and heaps
And drifted all around
In mounds and hills and deeps
And when you see such deep deep snow
You know it’s Christmas soon
With stockings, cheer and mistletoe
And jelly on a spoon
And Finny hiding ‘neath a chair
And telling folks he isn’t there.
The Legion gathered around the warm fire
To share out the chocolates in piles
And party together before things got dire
Or the cocoa did bad things to Ziles.
Just picture them there with their friends all around
There Bry hugging Laurie and Whitney with Hat
Donar full of mincepies and snoring quite sound
And Yo’s purple bunny fighting Lisa’s big cat
And Nats, Ex, and spiffy have got at the booze
And Troia’s all sleepy and starting to yawn
And Meggan and Drury are starting to shmooze
And dull thud is singing, and Dream’s found the porn.
And DK is lurking and ManMan is jolly
De Brown Streak is horny and Lania is hot
That shriek means that Space Ghost has sat on the holly
And Trickshot is snickering, he does that a lot.
AG’s hung the socks up for Santa to fill them
Enty’s got sensors to warn when he comes
Xander’s advising, and later he’ll bill them
Vizh is just worried when that strange gadget hums.
Well…
There they all were.
They were happily sat
Except for the heroes who happily stood
Or were happily giggling laid down on the mat
When who should step in but the bad HOODED HOOD!
“Oh oh!” cried out Dancer
“What are you doing here?
This isn’t your party, you can not come in!
You’ll do something nasty to spoil it I fear.
For you are quite wicked and steeped deep in sin!”
“To arms, mine brave comrades!” called Donar in warning.
“We’re under attack!” jumped up Jay with a yelp.
“Oh why couldn’t that nasty man wait till the morning?”
“Lair Legion, Lineup!” called spiffy to help.
It didn’t.
***
“What… what was that?”
The Hooded Hood drew Clockwatcher out of the tangled extreme reality that he’d been dragged into by his tamperings with the Portal of Pretentiousness. “Another fragment,” the archvillain instructed him. “And not the strangest by any means. You should see the ones with the defecating elephant villain.”
Clockwatcher became aware that he’d just lost his temper with the Parodyverse most dangerous adversary and that he’d just tried to discover secrets that even the Hood’s mortal – and immortal – foes had failed to discover. “Um… do I die now? Or did I never exist?”
“You wish to see the nature of the Hooded Hood?” the cowled crime czar asked him. “You wish to understand?”
Every fibre of Clockwatcher’s being wanted to scream no. “Yes?”
The Hood gestured to the Portal. “Then understand.”
The image reflected back the Hood’s own cowl-shadowed face and one similar to it except that the hood was red-hued.
“Who?” puzzled Clockwatcher. “Two of you?”
“The Cowled Criminal?” the Hood snorted. “Hardly. He claimed to be my future self from the end of time, driven insane by his magnified power. He was actually the result of a liaison I arranged for an annoying farm wench long ago. He was misguidedly promoted by the Triumvirate to seek my destruction and went on to provoke a quite massive Crisis in Infinite Parodyverses which caused an awful lot of mop-up. I benefited substantially from that once the Cowled Criminal had defeated himself.”
“Nobody knows how that Crisis ended,” Clockwatcher argued. “Nobody knows how things righted themselves afterwards.”
The Hooded Hood looked smug. “The Hooded Hood knows.” He gestured to the screen. “The Cowled Criminal had collected twelve objects of power with which he could provoke his crisis: Knifey, Areei, Mjalcolm, the Spank Ray, the Plot Accelerator, the Movie Gun, the Chronometer of Infinity, the Booke of the Law, the Psycho-Stave, the Galactic Nobbler, the Sceptre of KutKut… and my teddy bear, Pooty.”
Clockwatcher tried to recall ancient back issues of Modern Malefactor. “Pooty. Wasn’t he stolen from you and held hostage in hell by Mefrothto? Way back, before you destroyed Mefrothto. You recovered the bear, but no-one has ever mentioned him since.”
“Indeed,” agreed the Hood. “You wanted to understand me? To know why I have retconned even my own origins? Then comprehend why I needed to save Pooty, why I sent Pooty back through this Portal of Pretentiousness to the World’s Fair 1930 where the Cowled Criminal stole him out of the timeline and retconned him away for his schemes. Watch what I showed the Cowled Criminal at our final meeting…”
***
World’s Fair, 1930:
Priscilla Prudhoe looked yearningly at the Pooty-bear on the fairground stall, wishing it was hers. "Cute, isn't it?" a handsome young man asked over her shoulder. "Want it?"
"I can't shoot," Priscilla told him ruefully. "I'd never have a chance."
"Hey, my pop gave me my first BB gun when I was seven," Skip Williams grinned. "Can I give it a shot?"
"Winning the bear, you mean?"
"That too," he winked. "Okay?"
"Okay, try," agreed Priscilla.
"And if I get you the bear, you let me buy you a soda, right?" Skip checked.
Seven years later, Priscilla gave the bear to their daughter. Thirty years after that it got passed on to her grand-daughter. Seventeen years after that, her great-granddaughter was in big trouble with no boy in sight.
Except... without the bear there was no Skip, no daughter, no grand-daughter, no great-granddaughter in big trouble, no baby...
No Cowled Criminal.
"You asked why Pooty was so important to me?" asked the Hooded Hood. "Why, he is the means of ensuring that you never existed, Ezekiel Prudhoe. In removing him from that time and place you have retconned yourself, you blundering amateur. Goodbye."
***
Clockwatcher stared at the Hooded Hood. “You planned that?” he asked. “You worked out what to do long before that Crisis started and you’d already set things in motion to bring it all down like a house of cards?”
“The Hooded Hood has laid many plans,” the archvillain replied. “The Hooded Hood is the sum of his plans.”
“And I get to catalogue them,” Clockwatcher realised. “I get to understand you. And then…”
“Yes?”
“Then you’ll retcon me, won’t you?”
“Indeed. But first you will come to understand.”
“I don’t want to die. To have never lived.”
“Then The Hooded Hood gives you his word: you shall not be retconned without your consent. But when you know what the Hood knows then you will elect to be destroyed, freely and of your own will, to save the Parodyverse.”
Clockwatcher swallowed. This was a rather intense first day on the job.
“Go now, Mr Hazlewood,” the Hood instructed. “Find chambers, settle in. Return tomorrow.” He returned to the Portal. “I have much to consider.”
It was only when Clockwatcher had departed and silence fell on the Throne Room like a dark mantle that the Hood spoke softly to the glass. “Show me.”
***
> Btw, where the heck is Pooty? I really need to know. I want to use him as one of the 12 Sacred Items Prizecatcher steals so CC can jump start the Anti-Story in the Crisis Prelude.
> Twelve Sacred Items of Power:
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> Knifie (from the future LLSH #35 NEEDS RE-WRITE/ RE-POST BEFORE THIS STORY IS UP):
> Areei, sentient Scimitar (from past)
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Spank Ray (present, unused in SG's London flat.) - actually, SG gave it to
Yo, but it's out of power (I tend to assume it never had any power but that
SG could make it work because he believed in it)
> Plot Accelerator (from LIG time)
> M'jalcom T (past)
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The Movie Gun (a gizmo) present (and dismantled - you may want to get this
from the early days of the modern Parodyverse, somewhere around the time the
LoR became the LL; this also gives you a chance to show Starseed, Rocket
Racoon, Sersi, Carrington/TMWWT, Space Ghost, and Jarvis)
The Booke of Law (from 1935 Germany)
The Chronometer of Infinity (from 1957) (- from 1966 Mumphrey had hidden
the watch away in his safe deposit box and was retired, having just found he
was going to become a father; from this point on )
The Psycho-Stave (from past Makulos)
The Omniversal Facilitator (HH 19 reference, present?) (I think this is
another term for the Galactic Nobbler, which is currently apparently
destroyed, but could be got from literally any point in the past)
> Infinity Pencil (cant get it)
> Scepter of KutKut (from the World Guardian's time, replacement for
> Pencil)
> Pooty (present)
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Pooty has currently been sent back to the World Trade Fair of 1930 and is
sitting on a stack of prizes waiting to be won by anyone who can hit the
bell to the top of the ladder. Why? I'm glad you asked.
If Pooty ISN'T there, say if he's grabbed for some massive cosmic plot, then
the fluffy animal underneath will be revealed, a rather handsome humpty
dumpty. That will catch the eye of Miss Prisilla Prudhoe, aged seventeen,
who will pause for just a moment to admire it and wish someone would win it
for her. And in that moment's pause, she misses walking down past the hall
of mirrors where her purse breaks and a charming young farm lad gallantly
helps her gather up her things. She never dates him, never marries him,
never has kids with him... and so three generations later the Cowled
Criminal's mother is never born.
Hey, if the CC wants to start messing with the Hood's things, he's got to
expect something devious and horrible to be done to him in the final
showdown!
***
“They are out there,” breathed the Hooded Hood, pressing his cheek up to the mirror. “They plot against us, use us as their puppets. They abuse us for their entertainment, imposing their will upon us as works of fiction. But I begin to perceive them. I am closer to finding them. Each event brings me nearer.”
His green eyes glowed as he looked out of the mirror to the world beyond. “I shall find you all, and I shall destroy you. So swears… the Hooded Hood!”
***
Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2009 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2009 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
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