Doreen took the fuses and left the room.
"How was this other magician going to call up the Immutable Abyss?" Johnny asked.
"I have no idea. I can't find him, so I can't ask him." Max shouted. "Hey Doreen! You didn't see Blake today, did you?"
Doreen's voice came back, far away.
"What?"
Max shouted the question again, louder.
"Sure," Doreen shouted back. "I told you. He's the one gave me these light bulbs."
The sun was beginning to come up. Oak trees, cabbage palms, and gaunt pine trees were surfacing in the dishwater dawn. Smoke from the Wards' home rose crookedly into the sky.
The magician was emptying his pockets of the last, unused bulbs. One fell, bursting on the coffee table, and a small, metallic lizard skittered over the mahogany surface, barking mournfully.
"Holy Jesus," the magician croaked. He stood up. "Doreen!" he screamed.
It was too late. The hum of the refrigerator, the thin voice of a radio announcer, the labored wheeze of the air conditioner – all these announced the return of electricity to the household. And, of course, the lights, the lights went on. They snuffed out the approaching dawn. They emitted a darkness thicker than tar, deeper than black plush velvet lining the inside of a coffin.
Johnny realized that he had never, in fact, encountered darkness. There was the darkness of a moonless night, the darkness of a windowless, midnight room, but this new darkness dwarfed them all. And already, although it could not have been anything but his imagination – many hours would pass before they came – Johnny thought he heard the first thundering footfall.
Doc Aggressive, Man of Tin #2
Je
rey Ford
From his Fortress of Solitude deep beneath a five-and-dime store in Newark, New Jersey, Doc Aggressive, that superior intellect, whose mind, an infernal combustion engine of mechanical imagination and brand-X Dupin ratiocination, fed on an elixir of masticated wax teeth and Fizzies, man of tin, with skin the color of a tarnished dime and resilient as the can around a cylinder of baked beans, man of vast adventures in his mission to rid the world of evil with his bulging muscles and wardrobe of torn shirts and frayed trousers, his widow's peaked hairdo like a skull cap of short shorn silver broom ends, his trademark grimace as if forever caught in the act of shitting rivets, puts the call out to his matchless posse of bizarre constituents – Ham Fist, a guy with a fist that is a big Easter ham able to serve a gathering of twenty, who pounds bad guys into submission and tightens his buddies up to slices of his smoked fatty goodness; Shyster, world renowned attorney and consummate ambulance chaser, who more than once extricated Doc's legal tin ass from nasty suits like the time Aggressive got a little too so with an innocent old codger he mistook for The Grim Hasbeen, slapping the old coot silly and putting the Tin Landslide on him; Jon Creep, creepiest guy in the world, who creeps out evildoers more often than they, themselves, are able to creep out Creep; Elastic Willie, rubber appendage specialist, wrapping up bandits with encompassing hugs, whose way with the lady villains is legendary and who consults Doc on matters of the heart, breaking down the whatsoever of birds and bees for his employer and recasting the intricacies of romance in the language of Tin; Deadeye, whose expertise is shooting guns, all kinds of guns, rifles, derringers, pistols, machine guns, staple guns, and killing people at long range so that nobody has to care too much or get messy – assembling his pentacle of associates in order to sally forth to Queasy Cay, and engage in battle against the Immortal Morgoloop, an ancient evil Neanderthal with the brain of an Isaac Newton, wrestling him under a red sun with a storm of bats flying crazy, machine-gun rounds spraying, tin biceps flexing, sweat like beads of mercury falling, so as to capture the craven caveman, giving Doc an opportunity to administer a good cheek fluffing and such a pinch in the name of Justice.
Bagged 'n' Tagged
Eugene Byrne
Call me stupid – I deserve it – but when Phyllis persuaded me to join what she called "the movement" I really thought she fancied me. I didn't realize how treacherous she was until it was too late. And no, we never did get to do the nasty. She saw to that.
They came for us all in the wee hours of a Sunday – a slack day for news, and with a general election due the Thursday after. I saw some of it at the Ealing branch of Cop-U-Like. Me and a few of the others were handcuffed to the bull bars of the vandal-proof Coke machine in the reception area when that oily bastard of a Home Secretary came onscreen to say a major terrorist group had been busted, that it was a great day for Law and Order, vote for us on Thursday, thank you and goodnight.
You'd swear The Margin were Sword of Allah, Angry Brigade, SNLA, and The Society for the Preservation of Hundred Acre Wood all mixed up. Those of us not preoccupied with irregular bowel movements managed an ironic titter.
I knew this wasn't about due process of law as we were each hauled into a little white-tiled room with a stout chair and some sinister looking equipment in the middle. It was like a dental surgeon had set up in a public toilet, only with more blood on the walls.
We were being tagged before we'd been tried.
My turn: A pair of mountainous rent-a-cops strapped me into the chair while the doc lit a cigarette and explained it was best not to struggle as it hurts more that way. He was at least seventy and didn't offer a general, but to smell the Tadjik Scotch on his breath you wouldn't need one. I got a local on the back of the neck, and one on the finger.
I'd heard that Phyllis had grassed us up. I didn't blame her; one of the guys had said they'd waved actual prison, or maybe the fruitcake tin, at her. So she sang. I'd have done the same. Wouldn't you?
The man in white lifted away most of the nail on my left index finger. I screwed my eyes shut and tried not to yelp. I failed.
Somewhere else, a few of the others sang a dirge about how they would overcome some day. This while a back-street Kildare on Minimum Wage was mutilating me in the name of the law.
Phyllis had been handing out leaflets on a street corner; from the way she talked I could tell she was a hot revolutionary babe – who fancied me!
So I went to a meeting of the Water Margin.
Someone said the name had been dreamed up by Iron John, the nearest thing this strictly nonhierarchical organization had to a leader. Someone said you got a Water Margin on high-quality writing paper, but I didn't buy that. "IJ" was, I would guess, in his fifties, a veteran of countless environmental and anticap campaigns who had spent too much of his leisure time with his head in the pharmaceutical cupboard, so he wasn't really capable of dealing with a 16MB concept like that.
There were about thirty of us scattered around London; punks, phreaks, tree-huggers, Earth mammas, elves, fairies, ravers, sociopaths, crusties, dolphin-fanciers, and at least twenty-eight different flavors of anarchist. And me. Each wanted something a little different from the next, and the only way they avoided long nights of futile ideological blether was to focus on nonviolent direct action.
That was hard enough; at the first meeting I'd been to, a damaged girl who lived in a black woolen sweater fifteen sizes too big for her suggested a kid might chase one of their flyers across a windy tube platform and fall on the electric rail. So the manifesto was changed to "relative nonviolence."
There is nothing relative about having all your property confiscated (no big deal in my case, but IJ would surely miss his Velvet Underground vinyl) and being tagged. Babylon and market forces can't handle relativism.
The Marginals I agreed with wanted to show people there was an alternative to junk consumerism, junk entertainment, and junk religion. That meant letting the corporations wither, creating sustainable communities, and ensuring that everyone who wants it gets some kind of real inner life, et cetera et yada and so forth. You know the deal.
I had no problem fitting in, but, for all that, I'd never have joined if not for the commotion Phyllis was causing in my underpants. I was sort of getting by; I still got occasional supply teaching jobs, though school budgets got smaller every year. I'd also do a bit of cash work here and there, cramming some rich kid, that kind of thing. And I had a half-decent bedsit that hadn't been burgled for eighteen months. No, it was simply that I was in between girlfriends, and Phyllis came along and . . .
"This will hurt," snarled the smaller of the two goons, his nose 2mm from mine.
At the back of the chair was the gizmo that sticks the chip in. It was just as well. If the drunken doctor had been using his hands, I'd be paralyzed or dead.
For a nanosecond, the pain was intense. The agony started in my back, went into my head, then shot on down through the rest of me.
Then it was gone again, before I'd had time to think about screaming.
Now the doc (I assume he was a doctor, although he'd probably been struck off at some stage) was in front of me with a little paintbrush in one hand and, in the other, a pair of tweezers holding my fingernail. Both his hands were shaking. Agonizingly slowly, his trembling fingers brought nail and brush together to paint on the magical glop that would hold it over the hole in my neck and stop it deteriorating.
