Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (34 page)

Before anything else could be said the roof imploded, raining stone and dirt on us. Jaguar raised her weapon, but it was too late. A large figure dropped on top of her, knocking her to the ground. It wasn’t Captain Stupendous but Grizzlyman, his bear mantle hiding his face, his deadly claws gleaming in the sunlight, shining down through the new skylight.

Jaguar reached for her gun but it was gone, snatched in a blur by the lightning-quick SuperSquirrel, his tail vibrating happily at the shiny new toy in his tiny hands.

For the first time it wasn’t the Captain who saved me. I wish he had, because what Grizzlyman did to Jaguar in their ensuing fight brought tears to my eyes, and still does. Only SuperSquirrel intervening stopped the savage giant from killing her.

They carried her unconscious bloody form to their supercharged Cormorant helicopter, with Ice Flow waiting in the pilot seat. Even her cold heart melted upon seeing Jaguar, her tears turning to icicles as they touched her blue cheeks.

I stayed beside Jaguar for the flight home, I’m not sure why. Maybe it was her adamant belief that she’d been wronged, or the glib way that Grizzlyman joked with SuperSquirrel while a woman he’d beaten half to death lay behind him.

I held her hand, wanting to speak with her more, wanting to understand.

As if she heard my thoughts she opened her swollen eyes. Gripping me tightly she asked, “Is she here? Did she come?”

“Who? Ice Flow?”

“No, no…” And then she passed out.

When I got back to Vancouver I cried in Mikey’s arms for hours. He held me tight, whispering over and over how happy he was to have me back, safe and sound.

“You never have to worry again, Mikey. I’m done with superheroes.”

“Good. I’m tired of you getting kidnapped.”

I laughed through my tears. “Yeah, gets pretty old, doesn’t it? Mikey, what they did to Jaguar, it was awful…”

“Was it? She’d kidnapped you, Ace. As far as I’m concerned she got what she deserved.”

“Don’t say that, please. You weren’t there, you don’t know.”

And neither was the Captain, I thought to myself. Why hadn’t he come?

The story of my rescue was front-page news, but it wasn’t written by me. The papers described a scene I don’t remember: bold heroics from the heroes and awful villainy from the villainess. The news channels even placed the Captain at the scene, which was a total lie.

Jaguar got what she deserved, they said, reminding me of Mikey’s words from the night before.

I can admit it now, with no shame. As an investigative reporter I sucked. The pieces should have fallen into place right then and there, but they didn’t. Not until the day of the wedding.

When they announced that Captain Stupendous and Sufferjet were getting married my editor begged me to write one more superhero story. But I refused. I couldn’t get what happened to Jaguar out of my head, and Grizzlyman was going to be best man. Nothing “best” about that brute.

Like every other normal person in the world I read about the wedding online the next day. But I merely glanced at the photos of a beaming Captain Stupendous holding Sufferjet in his arms and barely skimmed the article about the lavish party and the who’s who in attendance. What caught my attention was a small sidebar attached to Mikey’s picture from the day Pherognome had tried to marry Sufferjet.

After undergoing rehabilitation treatments under the watchful eye of Captain Stupendous, Pherognome had been released from prison. Though the reporter who wrote the article wanted a comment from the little villain about the super nuptials, Pherognome had disappeared.

My mind went back to Jaguar sniffing me. She’d smelt Pherognome on me, but I’d never been anywhere near him.

I stared at the old picture for a while before returning to the main page and searching through the wedding photos. One in particular caught my eye, showing the Captain standing with his groomsmen. In the background stood Sufferjet, her head resting in her hand, looking dazed.

Even though I’d sworn to Mikey that I’d never investigate superheroes again, I needed to know the truth.

The so-called “reporter” who wrote the wedding article was primarily a blogger and even worse at investigative journalism than I was. Finding Pherognome was simply a matter of making a few long-distance phone calls. Before his career as a supervillain Pierre Ferrer had been a world-renowned perfumer based in Montréal. Soon I was on the trail of a short man who’d leased a luxury storefront in Old Montréal.

I convinced my editor Tony that I had a great lead on a Captain Stupendous story, and he got me on the next flight to Montréal. I found the shop in a narrow stone building on Rue Saint-Paul. Its entranceway was half the height of a normal door, the only signage the word
Parfum
etched in glass above the frame. The door was locked. I rang the bell and waited, my heart beating rapidly.

The door swung inward, revealing a small man with a face not quite as ugly as the one being choked in that notorious picture. “Ms. Moon, I wondered when I’d be seeing you. Come in, please.” Without waiting for my reply he retreated into the darkness.

Crouching low I entered and was immediately greeted by a museum of scents. Lavender, rose, and other hints of spring filled the cool air in the entranceway, even though the city was suffering from a suffocating heat wave. Carefully I ventured down the hallway into his shop, where more scents wafted from the exotic bottles lining the cabinet shelves. Closing my eyes I inhaled deeply. Memories of my trips to Istanbul, Zanzibar, Shanghai, and Bombay engulfed me. I thought I caught the aroma of a wet summer night in Vancouver, a day at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, even the hint of the time I rafted down white rapids in Austria. Then I caught the musky scent of a certain Brazilian Jaguar. It gave me pause, reminding me of where I was and with whom.

He climbed a small set of stairs to a raised platform behind the shop counter. Wearing a fine blue suit and carrying a shiny wooden cane, Pherognome appeared older than I remembered, his eyes showing dark rings of insomnia. He sat in a chair by the cash register and studied me intently, scrunching his nose with distaste. “Ms. Moon, you reek of passenger jet and the sweat of a humid day,” he said, producing a bottle from behind the counter. “Please, have a sample, your pungency offends my sensibilities.”

“Is it the same spray you used on Sufferjet, Monsieur Ferrer? If so, I will pass, thanks.”

Pherognome made a
Pffft
sound then sprayed the air anyway. It filled the room with the scent of cloves and a trace of chocolate that made my mouth water. “Is that why you have come, to speak of the past? Not talk of the present?”

“Both actually. I had a run-in with Jaguar recently.”

“Ah, yes, the buxom feline,” he said, his eyes rolling briefly into his head as he recalled her. “What a creature! I managed to capture her musk in our last entanglement, before she went bad, of course. Shame what those so-called heroes did to her. I hear she still lies unconscious in the prison hospital.”

“Yes, it is a shame, on that we agree. It’s why I’m here, in fact. She had some interesting things to say about you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oui? And what was that?”

“She said you’d done something to Captain Stupendous, that she could smell you on him.”

A pause as his beady eyes watched me closely. “And is that what you believe?”

“No. I think you gave him your love perfume in exchange for your freedom. What I want to know is why he needed it.”

“Isn’t it obvious? He wanted Sufferjet but she did not want him, so he took her by force. Would you care for some tea and cookies? They are freshly prepared.”

“What? Um, okay,” I said, nonplussed by the sudden change in topic and the shock of hearing my worst fears confirmed. A part of me had hoped he would deny it, tell me I was a fool to doubt the Captain.

A pot of tea had been steeping, as if waiting for company to arrive. As Pherognome placed a fine bone-china tea set on a tray with some chocolate biscuits I wondered if anyone else had ever ventured inside his shop. The back wall was neatly lined with bottles, shining bright, free of any dust or fingerprints. Each jar was neatly labelled:
Joie, Haine, Passion, Confort, Jalousie,
and more.

“Do those really work?” I asked, nodding my head as he served me a cup. “Can you really make someone jealous with your perfume?”

Pherognome shrugged as he sipped his tea, a pinkie raised in the air. “I can produce emotional triggers with these scents, yes, but the power inside me used to amplify the effect to terrible proportions, the curse of an experiment gone wrong in my youth. Biscuit?”

“Yes, thank you,” I replied, accepting one from the offered tray. “You said ‘used to.’”

“Oui. The Captain took the power from me, using the same genetic splicer that turned that poor man into a twitchy mutant squirrel.” He smirked at the look on my face. “Don’t you know his origin? The Captain made SuperSquirrel, back when he was trying to create heroes to form his league, before Sufferjet arrived on Earth.”

I reached into my purse for my recorder.

Pherognome paled upon seeing it. “You cannot record anything we say here, Ms. Moon, I thought you understood that. Captain Stupendous would kill me if he found out I’d been talking to a reporter, especially you.”

“The Captain has never killed anyone.”

“Not yet, but it is inevitable that he will. To silence me, or Jaguar if she ever wakes. Maybe even you, Ms. Moon, if you insist on learning the truth. Too many will know what he has done.”

“But why do it at all?”

“Because he is infatuated, just as I was. Did you know that Sufferjet was designed by her alien people to represent the perfect woman, giving her all the attributes we desire in the female form? He confuses his lust for her with love, and feels he deserves her love back. But she will never love him, for no man can have her.”

“Is that some rule of her people? I heard her planet is ruled by a matriarchy.”

“No, it’s because she’s a lesbian.”

“Oh.” My hand itched to reach for my recorder, but I resisted. “How do you know that?”

He smiled. “I knew even when I tried to marry her, but my lust interfered with my reason. Jaguar is not the only one with a superhuman nose for scents, you know. I could smell the buxom feline all over Sufferjet.”

“Jaguar and Sufferjet? But that makes no sense, Jaguar turned evil—” I stopped mid-sentence. Jaguar said the Captain had taken something from her, and asked if
she
had come with the rest of the CSL to rescue me. I’d thought Jaguar had meant Ice Flow, but she meant Sufferjet, the woman she still loved.

“Did you hear what happened when Sufferjet found out about Jaguar’s injuries? She ripped off SuperSquirrel’s tail and threw Grizzlyman out the window of their penthouse headquarters. I’m sure her anger was only assuaged when the Captain used my pheromones to calm her.”

“If this is true then someone has to stop him!”

“I agree,” said Pherognome, reaching into a drawer and pulling out a wooden box. He opened the lid, revealing a small nondescript spraybottle. “Unfortunately, Captain Stupendous is nigh indestructible in his superhuman form, immune even to my pheromones, even if I still possessed the power to amplify them.”

“It’s his alien physiognomy. They were all like him, back on his home planet.”

“Ms. Moon, your Captain isn’t from an alien planet. That is a cock-and-bull story to impress the world. I believe he was born in Hamilton.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s ridiculous.”

He regarded me with a mixture of sympathy and disgust. “Oh, you poor thing. I believe he found his powers while travelling through the Middle East. Maybe a genie granted them, or he found some ancient Egyptian amulet, whatever made the old Pharaohs like unto gods. His power is magical. It changes his appearance, makes him look chiselled, strengthens his jaw. When he doesn’t feel like being ‘super’ he simply turns back into his everyday form, and no one can recognize him. Not even you, Ms. Moon.”

I felt queasy while listening to him, wondering if he’d put something in my tea. But it wasn’t the tea. My face felt wet. When had I started to cry?

“The day before my wedding I foolishly decided to announce my impending nuptials to the world, thinking that if I had witnesses then my marriage wouldn’t be such a pathetic sham. I didn’t mention who I was marrying so no one attended. Except for him. I think as a lark, nothing more. But when he saw us exit our limo, saw her, he flew into a rage. Transformed into Captain Stupendous right in front of me then attacked while his camera automatically clicked away on its tripod.”

“Mikey,” I said.

He nodded. “At least he never used my pheromones to get you, right? You’ve been together for years. A small comfort at least.”

* * *

The newspapers reported that Captain Stupendous and Sufferjet had returned from his home planet, their honeymoon finally over. Since his alien backstory was a lie I wondered where they’d really gone. Not that it mattered anymore.

I told Mikey I was in Stanley Park, sitting at our favorite spot overlooking English Bay. He said he’d meet me there soon. I sat on the bench with Pherognome’s wooden box on my lap, my eyes closed as I listened to seagulls cry for food above me.

“Hey, Ace,” he said, plopping down on the bench and placing his arm around me. I leaned against him, resting my head on his shoulder, taking in his smell. A hint of fragrance I didn’t recognize clung to his clothes, but that could just as easily have been new soap. Aside from that he seemed no different from the man I thought I knew. “Beautiful day, hey?”

“Yeah, it is. Did you bring me back anything from your trip?” I asked, almost adding,
A magic genie in a bottle, perhaps?
, but kept my mouth shut.

He grinned, producing a small box. Inside was a necklace with a single blue stone. “Got this in Cairo,” he said as he placed it around my neck.

“I thought you were in Jerusalem?”

“I was, but they sent me to Egypt on the way home. What’s that on your lap? Tony said you’d gone to Montréal on an assignment. You never told me you had a new story in the works.”