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“Stupid killer radio,” she muttered as she backed away to join the others in the corner, peering into every patch of darkness and flinching at every shadow and rustle. “No combination, he said. How could I be so dumb --?”

A stealthy, springy squeak from above was her only warning. Gum Belle looked up, just in time to see the spider release its cutlery claws from the plaster ceiling and fall on them, its legs reversing in mid-air to carve the Phyllis the secretary’s face off. Gum Belle drew herself up, threw back her shoulders, puffed out her chest --

The spider slammed into a tough, rubbery dome with a sound like a balloon batting a cutlery drawer. It bounced off -- BLOOMPH! -- limbs flailing, and clattered to the ground. As it gathered its legs beneath it, the balloon-dome whispered back into a human shape, its civilian clothes now transformed into a vigilante’s jumpsuit, its pretty face now half-veiled by a crimson domino mask.

The mystery woman glanced over her shoulder at Phyllis. “Sorry about that. I usually like to make a bigger entrance, but, you know, desperate times call for blah, blah, blah.”

“Th…that’s okay.”

“Gangbusters.”

The spider sprang at them again. Gum Belle whisked out one flail-arm in a liquid ripple, hurling the mechanical monster back against the wall with a tinkle of broken vacuum tubes. It twitched there feebly. She threw herself into a roll, tucking her knees against her chest, compressing herself into a red-gold bowling ball to crush the prone robot to scrap. The resilient little thing reversed its joints and scrambled for the laboratory. The bowling-Belle rebounded lightly off the wall, kissing a crater into the plaster to remember her by, unfurling as she flew back towards the secretary and Isaac. Her limbs shot out and hooked against the doorframe; she slingshot herself backward meet it, her frame swelling to fill the role of the door before the spider could cross the threshold. The little bugger skritched to a stop, its radio-dial gaze whirring up to look Gum Belle in the face.

“Hi there, short stuff,” she said, and spat a rill of gum right into that mechanical eye.

The dial shattered with a brittle crunch, and the spider-crab screamed, a high, unreasoning buzzing sound that made Gum Belle’s head hurt. Blind, it danced wildly up her body, too many sharp points scribbling pink lines across her costume. She just sighed, waited for it to get up about halfway, then pursed her lips and blew. The tendril of gum that ran from her mouth to the spider’s body rounded into a rubbery pink bubble. Within, the robot flailed wildly, its spiky limbs making deadly bulges in the bubble’s surface, while Belle shrank back down and bit the gum off with her teeth, snatching the sphere before it could drift to the ground. It looked as though she was about to go shopping with an angry purse.

“Heel, boy,” she drawled, and the bubble-purse clenched. There was a sharp metallic squeal, a grinding, sparking sound, a flare of light, and the gum slithered back into her palm. A twisted, dead heap of metal tinkled to the floor as it withdrew. Gum Belle didn’t spare it a second glance as she bounded across the office to rejoin Isaac and the secretary.

“You folks okay?” she asked.

Phyllis gnawed her fingernails, her eyes round. “Omigosh,” she half-sobbed. “You’re her. You’re Gum Belle.”

The woman in question rolled her eyes. “What gave it away, the hair band or the spaghetti arms?”

“Please don’t kill me.”

The vigilante quirked her head to one side, but before she could say anything, Isaac stepped forward. “Don’t worry, honey. If she’s going to kill anyone, it’ll be me. I deserve it.”

Gum Belle slumped and made an exasperated face. “I know you believe everything you read, Miss Shorthand, and I know you love beating yourself up, Gruesome, but no matter how much you expect it or want it, I am not going to kill either of you.” She brandished her fists, one in each face. “Is that clear?”

Isaac blinked. Phyllis raised her hand, like a frayed-nailed schoolgirl. “Um…but the papers said…”

“Oh, screw the papers! That was a frame job. A frame job!” Gum Belle stomped her foot and threw up her hands. “The lights go out, a giant skull in the sky takes over the airwaves and declares himself master of the world, I’m the only one who stands up to him, and you think I’m the bad one? What’s wrong with you people?”

“Sorry,” Isaac mumbled.

“Don’t be sorry,” Gum Belle snapped. “You’re not the one who let herself play patsy.” Her eyes fell on the safe. With its guardian gone, it was empty…save for a manila envelope. She picked it up, slit the seal with her thumbnail, and tipped it over. A sheaf of crinkly blue paper dropped into her hands.

“Blueprints?” she whispered.

“Schematics.” Isaac seemed grateful for a chance to change the subject. “Lemme see.” He took the feathery sheets in his hands and spread them across the floor. They looked like a mix of building cutaways and squiggly nonsense to Gum Belle, but Isaac seemed to know what they were. Maybe Sorenz had picked him for more than how much he could dead-lift.

“It’s the electrical system for Tomorrow Tower,” he concluded. He pointed out different notations. “These are the conduit lines. And there are the outlets, circuit breakers, wiring. Understand?”

“Sure,” Gum Belle lied. She peered at one of the cutaways, showing a cavernous, pyramid-roofed room with a huge bundle of squiggles near the roof. “What’s this?

“The penthouse.”

She gave him an arch look. “I can see that. What’s with all the heavy-duty stuff on the ceiling?”

He made a sound like a curious hog. “Redundancy cables. See those big capacitors in the basement? They store backup power. The redundancies can distribute it through the system if there’s ever a blackout.”

Phyllis raised her hand again. “Then why aren’t they working now, Isaac?”

Gum Belle smirked. Isaac’s opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe it’s because the redundancies are also hooked up to the city’s power grid, but that shouldn’t matter, not with those big capacitors…”

“Let me ask you something, Isaac,” Gum Belle put in. “Why do these so-called redundancies just happen to meet at the top of the pyramid?”

“I don’t…um…”

Her eyes lit up. “One other question, pally.” She tapped her finger at the top of the penthouse roof. “What’s this?”

Gofer-boy squinted. Phyllis edged under his arm to look. There was a spire atop of Tomorrow Tower. It resembled the sort of ornament that architects frequently tack on to buildings to break height records. Only this one was capped by a bizarre ornament. It resembled a tuning fork crossed with a Tesla coil, but Gum Belle knew better. She’d eaten its pint-sized cousin just this afternoon.

“It looks like the EDO,” Isaac breathed. “The redundancies all plug into it.”

Gum Belle chuckled admiringly. “Tomorrow Tower’s just one big lightning gun, complete with the hookups to the power grid to suck the lights out across town. And here I thought there was just a supercharged version mounted somewhere in the building. Wow, is that ever slick.”

“But Dr. Sorenz would never authorize that,” Phyllis said. “He hated the EDO.”

“He was always trying to decommission it,” Isaac added. “He’d never let something like this stand.”

Gum Belle peered at the schematics. “Not if the designer had leverage on him,” she said. “Like, say, if he were a disgruntled partner.”

She pointed at one corner. There, nearly hidden in a hedge maze of calculations and scientific notations, was a tight, intense little signature:

Dorjan Miksa.

“Dr. Miksa’s died years ago,” Isaac said. “Everyone says so.”

“Everyone says I’m snuggling with the Phantom Skull. You don’t believe that, do you?”

Silence.

“Oh, come on! What do I have to do, put on a strip-tease for you?” She raised one warning finger. “Don’t you dare answer that question, gofer-boy.”

Phyllis’s eyes shot daggers at her boyfriend. Someone was getting a second slap to the face before the night was out.

Gum Belle straightened up, tossed her hair back. “All right, you two. I want you to get out of Tomorrow Tower as fast as you can. It’s not going to be safe here for very much longer. Yes, Phyllis, I know the elevators are busted. You’ll have to take the stairs; oh, don’t pout, Isaac, the exercise will do you some good. Or is that a medical condition you have instead of a beer gut?”

“What about you?” the secretary asked. “Aren’t you coming with us? It…it’s dangerous out there.”

She smiled sweetly. “Are you asking me to protect you, Phyllis? I thought I was -- how did you put it? -- ‘in cahoots with the Phantom Skull.’”

Phyllis blushed. Gum Belle patted her on the head.

“The rioting’s not bad Uptown,” she said gently. “You’ll be fine. As for me,” she raised her eyes heavenward, “I’ve got a city to free.”

With a jaunty salute, she dived out the window like a spring-loaded serpent. Phyllis squeaked and rushed to the threshold, only to recoil as a flat, garishly colored shape, similar to a giant kite, banking past her face, swooping up, up, towards the roof.

“She’s crazy,” the secretary whispered.

“Yeah, so we better not find out what happens if we stick around.” Isaac took her by the arm and they headed for the front office.

As they passed the heap of junk that used to be Sorenz’s secret guardian, none of them saw the shattered eye flicker, first three short blinks, then three long blinks…three short blinks, three long blinks…

S.O.S…S.O.S…S.O.S…

                                                         * * *

In the hidden boardroom of the Plaza Nightclub, the Phantom Skull’s visage flared with frightful force.

“It cannot be!”

Vincent Salucci shielded his eyes with his hand. “I didn’t know you could do a searchlight impression.”

“Silence!”

Despite the prodigious amount of liquor coursing through his head, the mobster obeyed. There was a new note of urgency in the Skull’s sepulchral voice. If Salucci didn’t know better, he’d say it almost sounded like…panic.

“The schematics…someone has found the schematics!”

“Who’s found what, now?”

The boardroom was bathed a bloody vermillion. “The schematics for my ultimate weapon, you fool! Were they to fall into the wrong hands, all my plans would be unraveled. The Generator, the receiver array…without the weapon, they are all but toys.”

Salucci rolled his shoulders. “So? Just atomicize them, or whatever it is you did to the police.”

“It is not so simple.” The Skull flickered, his voice remote, distracted. “I cannot see inside. But there is something…a shape…”

The white glow darkened, turned a throbbing blood red. Salucci shrank back in his chair as the Skull’s eye sockets flared a baleful orange.

“Gum Belle! She lives!”

In the pulsating crimson light, a slender, pale shape snapped to life. Madame 415 bowed. “Where would you have me go, Ghost Tiger?”

                                                         * * *

Everyone is afraid of the dark.

This is an absolute truth. It is only a matter of degrees. Children, who are guileless enough to admit that they look into the blackness and see, suffer most from this fear, but their sufferings are only superficial, ripples in the surface of the imagination: goblins, ghouls, the capering things in the night. When sleep comes for them, it comes with gentle kisses to soothe the unwrinkled brow. In time, age sets in. Childhood demons are banished by the power of reason, slain by the arms of logic, crushed in the inexorable march into that blinkered serenity called adulthood.

But the fear lurks still, made hungrier and more dangerous by a diet of lies and self-delusion, the man-shapes of the imagination twisted beyond recognition under the pressure of the beige bugaboos of the waking world. The bogeyman becomes a burglar, the closet changes into the car crash, the undead rises anew as the deadline. The dark, which remains the sole immutable, is shackled in copper wire and caged in tungsten and glass: electricity, the marvel of modern times, brings the blessed blaze of artificial light to dispel the natural shadows.

Yet late at night, when the house settles, when the wind picks up, when the branches skitter against the window, the dark creeps back, and the adult remembers what the child never forgot. Behind our armor of tempered progress, without our neon-bulbed battle standards, we are soft and weak creatures, clinging to the lies we tell ourselves, hugging the secret parents that we call our egos. And when the darkness strips even these away, all that is left is will and God against the shrouded, gibbering terrors of the dark.

Ricketts realized this as he tiptoed through the musty, cavernous gloom of the City Library. The tiptoeing drove it home for him. He had no reason to tiptoe. No one was here but him and the dust bunnies. The library was tucked away in a comfortable corner of Midtown, miles away from City Hall, the Plaza Nightclub, and the Shingles; the Phantom Skull, Vincent Salucci, and the Hanged Man had no reason to be on the lookout for him here. The neighborhood was so quiet that not even the rioting had reached this part of the city. The librarians had gone home long before, and he had clambered into the basement from the sewers; no one would shush him if he stomped up and down the stacks like a book-crazy gorilla that stank like a latrine. Overall, there was no logical reason why he should feel afraid.

Except for the dark.

It was all around him, dangling from the high, vaulted ceilings like a nest of bats, squeezed between shelves like tar, draped from walls and corners like spider webs. It made the old, overstuffed reading chairs resemble hunched trolls, turned the spiral staircase leading up to the second floor into a giant python. The G-man kept his lighter held high, but it was a tiny globe of reason in a universe of phantoms.

So he tiptoed.

In the silence of the library, his policeman’s brain chugged furiously away, beating back night terrors with extreme prejudice, keeping him barely focused on what he was looking for, steering him past fiction, biography, nonfiction, reference, until…there. Periodicals.

As far as he knew, Lionel Ricketts was the only member of the Bureau who used the library for research. Everyone else relied on the Bureau’s growing information base in Washington, or pumped the boys in blue for word on the street. But Ricketts had grown up here, and, what was more, he had the craftsman’s admiration for simple legwork.

The Sentinel had been around for over half a century, and the library had every issue catalogued and pasted into heavy, leather-bound volumes that crouched in an arcane cubbyhole of the building, where they threatened patrons with fifty-plus years of old news. Most of it was sensationalist garbage, as expected, but Ricketts had often turned up nuggets of valuable information by turning those yellowed pages. Tonight, he hoped his pan wouldn’t come up empty, because sifting through old news was his last hope of finding his son in time.

There was a lounge near the periodicals section, and it had a big bay window with an excellent view of the river. Tonight, that window pulled double duty by letting in that weird ghost-light that the Phantom Skull was giving off outside. Ricketts was no fan of the Skull, but he was in no mood to read by his lighter. Picking out a little round table that was close enough to get some light, but far enough away so that he wouldn’t be visible from the street, he thumped his first stack of volumes down in front of him and started to read.

He only looked at the headlines, watching for the biggest and the smallest; if the Hanged Man had really torched a tenement, as Eddie the Rat had claimed, the paper would either milk the event as a horrible tragedy, or shunt to the back page as a “Shingles affair.” Ricketts was acquainted with the Sentinel well enough to know that it all depended on how slow the news had been that particular day.

Only which day had it been? As the pages crinkled in the silence, and he moved through his first stack, then his second, then his third, Ricketts found himself gnawing his lower lip and tapping his fingers along his kneecap, nervous habits for a nervous man. A jittery, bouncy sensation rolled through his stomach, and the weird, rolling radiance from outside made him queasy.

The outside. He didn’t want to think about the outside. Outside, there was a whole city in danger. Outside, there were dead cops that weren’t even corpses anymore. Outside, the city was in panic. Outside, Vincent Salucci held his boss captive.

Outside, the Phantom Skull was forcing the city to its knees, and here he was, cooped up in a library, flipping through ancient history, looking for a possible arson with a possible connection to the man who had possibly kidnapped his son.

What was he willing to sacrifice for his boy? His own life? Gladly, without regret. But Abrams? Gran Zarkov? Bum Frank? The city? Could he let them fall into the Skull‘s grasp, all to save one child?

He flicked another page aside. The terrible thing about those questions was that he had already answered them. The proof was in the mountain of bound newspapers all around his chair. He had betrayed everything that he had sworn an oath to protect. And he wasn’t sure he regretted it.

Would Belle have done the same? Ricketts thought of her smirking, snark-laden grin and her saucy wink and sighed. No, she probably wouldn’t have. That little matinee queen was so full of pulp propaganda that she would blather something about “all those poor innocent dopes out there” and charge right for the Skull. Hell, she’d probably use the situation as an excuse to avoid her grandmother for a while.

The thought raised a bitter smile to his lips. Wherever Gum Belle was, her grandmother was the least of her worries. She had gone after the receiver array; she’d told him that much before her bug had burnt out. That she had failed was as clear as the bony mug plastered on the night sky. At best, she was incapacitated somewhere, though Ricketts doubted she could be locked up anywhere for long.

At worst…Well, there had been three members of the Board who had not been at the Tomorrow robbery: that paper woman, Kolodka, and the fat man with the hypnotizing headgear. Ricketts didn’t know which thought worried him more: Gum Belle chopped into frozen vigilante cutlets, or Gum Belle twisted into the Phantom Skull’s enforcer. Between the three of them, maybe they had even found a way to kill her…

His eyes stung. Reading fatigue, that was all. Ricketts wiped his eyes on his sleeve, closed them for a second.

When he opened them, he saw the story he had been looking for.

As he expected, it had been buried between a story about a talking dog in Missouri and a Hancock’s department store ad (“Spring Dresses 20% Off! Look Sweet for your Sweetheart this Valentine’s Day!”). Even so, the headline was striking:

                         ARSON SUSPECTED IN TENEMENT BLAZE
                             Only Catholics and Slavs Die in Fire

Ricketts grimaced. “Nice, Sentinel, real nice.”

Continued from Page 1.
Hundreds perished overnight in a terrible fire in the Shingles,
and arson is a possible cause, according to a police
detective that refused to be named.

“The department’s going to call it an accident, but that’s
because they aren’t interested,” the Sentinel’s source said…That brought a derisive snort. “They aren’t interested” was police shorthand for “there’s no money in it.” Either Salucci had bribed the department to gloss over the whole thing, or no one in the Shingles could scrape up enough cash to get the department’s attention. Either way, Ricketts felt a pang of sympathy for the poor anonymous detective; the old guard had probably drummed him out of the force for squealing to a rag like the Sentinel.

Eyewitness accounts claim that the fire began in an upstairs
apartment, but soon spread rapidly to encompass the entire
building. Witnesses testify that the screams could be heard
“for miles,” but that is most likely an exaggeration. Curiously,
none of the tenants were able to reach the fire escapes
or the front door, probably due to bad maintenance
on the part of the landlord, who had been called into court
twice for building violations…Tragic details, tragic details. And, between them and behind them, lurked Vittorio Salucci’s twisted professionalism. He had chosen a building in the Shingles because the police would be disinclined to launch an in-depth investigation. The fire had spread rapidly and evenly for maximum efficiency. No one had escaped, because he had probably sealed the exits before he lit a single match. The owner was a well-known slumlord, making him an easy scapegoat until the trail went cold. Reading the article was like sitting down in a Shaker chair.

The thought of such thorough, methodical cruelty applied to his boy rose up in his mind like a bloated corpse, and the musty air seemed too close. Fighting down his nausea, Ricketts furiously scanned the article, looking for an address, a street name, a landmark, any tidbits that might have had a passing resemblance with a lead.

But there was nothing. Why should he be surprised? After all, it was just the Shingles, and this was just the back page. The Hanged Man had done his homework too well.

His policeman’s brain picked this time to clear its metaphorical throat. Now that you’ve done yours, maybe it’s tie to go out there and fight the Skull.

“After I get Ted back,” he muttered, but the words tasted foul and false on his tongue. “The Skull can wait.”

Ask the other families in your building. See what they think.

Ricketts closed his eyes. “He’s my boy.”

Some of those cops at the stationhouse had boys, too. What about them?

He bowed his head and sighed. “I can’t let Salucci go work on him. I can’t.”

Can’t, or won’t?

“What’s the difference?” Ricketts snapped open his eyes and stood up, intending to open a window, get some fresh air, clear cobwebs of conscience from his skull. He was just about to close the big book and pick up his things when his gaze happened to land on the top of the article again.

Continued from Page 1.
Hundreds died overnight in a terrible fire in the Shingles…Continued from Page 1...

Ricketts smacked his forehead. “Of course!” he growled as he thumped back down, turning five, ten pages with one sweep of his big hands, plowing through sports, recipes, the funnies, classifieds, news…

The front page. Page 1. A big splashy story about a scandal on the City Council, a blurb about the political situation in Europe, and there, on the lower half of the page, hidden where no one would see it until they bought the paper at the newsstand, was a grainy black-and-white photograph of what might have been a squat, square multi-story building. Fiery arms boiled out of its beady windows, and smoke blotted out the rest of the neighborhood in a great, cloying cloud. It was like a snapshot from hell. His eyes traveled down, read the caption.

Whole families burned to death last night in a tenement
blaze at 1125 W. 181st Terrace. SEE FULL STORY ON
PAGE 18DRicketts settled back in his chair, his breath rushing out in a tired whoosh. Relief, and something more apprehensive, rushed through him as he tore the page from the book and folded it into his breast pocket. Now he knew where to go.

If he could only convince himself.

The library’s dead air stirred restlessly. Ricketts froze, his face pale and taut as he heard the whine of old hinges and the scuffing and rustling of moving bodies from the lobby.

Then someone worked the chamber of an automatic pistol. It cleaved through the pristine quiet like an axe.

Ricketts gently got to his feet withdrew Deadeye’s revolver.

It looked like someone had come to get him.

                                                         * * *

As he slid a length of chain through the handles of the library’s double doors, Jenkins glared at Eddie the Rat.

“What’th wrong?”

The inside man padlocked the links together and jerked his chin at the mobster’s pistol. Eddie flushed.

“I wanted to be prepared,” he said. “Ith that a crime?”

Jenkins shook his head, then delivered orders with sharp battlefield simplicity: his fingers snapped from man to aisle, from eyes to floor, and the baker’s dozen of Vincent Salucci’s best knew what they were supposed to do: fan out, move through the stacks, flush Ricketts out.

“Reference,” Jenkins hissed as they set out. “He’ll be in reference. No lights.”

He plucked his Thompson from the floor, double-checked it, and padded into the darkness.

                                                         * * *

Description
“Stupid killer radio,” she muttered as she backed away to join the others in the corner, peering into every patch of darkness and flinching at every shadow and rustle. “No combination, he said. How could I be so dumb --?”

A stealthy, springy squeak from above was her only warning. Gum Belle looked up, just in time to see the spider release its cutlery claws from the plaster ceiling and fall on them, its legs reversing in mid-air to carve the Phyllis the secretary’s face off. Gum Belle drew herself up, threw back her shoulders, puffed out her chest --

The spider slammed into a tough, rubbery dome with a sound like a balloon batting a cutlery drawer. It bounced off -- BLOOMPH! -- limbs flailing, and clattered to the ground. As it gathered its legs beneath it, the balloon-dome whispered back into a human shape, its civilian clothes now transformed into a vigilante’s jumpsuit, its pretty face now half-veiled by a crimson domino mask.

The mystery woman glanced over her shoulder at Phyllis. “Sorry about that. I usually like to make a bigger entrance, but, you know, desperate times call for blah, blah, blah.”

“Th…that’s okay.”

“Gangbusters.”

The spider sprang at them again. Gum Belle whisked out one flail-arm in a liquid ripple, hurling the mechanical monster back against the wall with a tinkle of broken vacuum tubes. It twitched there feebly. She threw herself into a roll, tucking her knees against her chest, compressing herself into a red-gold bowling ball to crush the prone robot to scrap. The resilient little thing reversed its joints and scrambled for the laboratory. The bowling-Belle rebounded lightly off the wall, kissing a crater into the plaster to remember her by, unfurling as she flew back towards the secretary and Isaac. Her limbs shot out and hooked against the doorframe; she slingshot herself backward meet it, her frame swelling to fill the role of the door before the spider could cross the threshold. The little bugger skritched to a stop, its radio-dial gaze whirring up to look Gum Belle in the face.

“Hi there, short stuff,” she said, and spat a rill of gum right into that mechanical eye.

The dial shattered with a brittle crunch, and the spider-crab screamed, a high, unreasoning buzzing sound that made Gum Belle’s head hurt. Blind, it danced wildly up her body, too many sharp points scribbling pink lines across her costume. She just sighed, waited for it to get up about halfway, then pursed her lips and blew. The tendril of gum that ran from her mouth to the spider’s body rounded into a rubbery pink bubble. Within, the robot flailed wildly, its spiky limbs making deadly bulges in the bubble’s surface, while Belle shrank back down and bit the gum off with her teeth, snatching the sphere before it could drift to the ground. It looked as though she was about to go shopping with an angry purse.

“Heel, boy,” she drawled, and the bubble-purse clenched. There was a sharp metallic squeal, a grinding, sparking sound, a flare of light, and the gum slithered back into her palm. A twisted, dead heap of metal tinkled to the floor as it withdrew. Gum Belle didn’t spare it a second glance as she bounded across the office to rejoin Isaac and the secretary.

“You folks okay?” she asked.

Phyllis gnawed her fingernails, her eyes round. “Omigosh,” she half-sobbed. “You’re her. You’re Gum Belle.”

The woman in question rolled her eyes. “What gave it away, the hair band or the spaghetti arms?”

“Please don’t kill me.”

The vigilante quirked her head to one side, but before she could say anything, Isaac stepped forward. “Don’t worry, honey. If she’s going to kill anyone, it’ll be me. I deserve it.”

Gum Belle slumped and made an exasperated face. “I know you believe everything you read, Miss Shorthand, and I know you love beating yourself up, Gruesome, but no matter how much you expect it or want it, I am not going to kill either of you.” She brandished her fists, one in each face. “Is that clear?”

Isaac blinked. Phyllis raised her hand, like a frayed-nailed schoolgirl. “Um…but the papers said…”

“Oh, screw the papers! That was a frame job. A frame job!” Gum Belle stomped her foot and threw up her hands. “The lights go out, a giant skull in the sky takes over the airwaves and declares himself master of the world, I’m the only one who stands up to him, and you think I’m the bad one? What’s wrong with you people?”

“Sorry,” Isaac mumbled.

“Don’t be sorry,” Gum Belle snapped. “You’re not the one who let herself play patsy.” Her eyes fell on the safe. With its guardian gone, it was empty…save for a manila envelope. She picked it up, slit the seal with her thumbnail, and tipped it over. A sheaf of crinkly blue paper dropped into her hands.

“Blueprints?” she whispered.

“Schematics.” Isaac seemed grateful for a chance to change the subject. “Lemme see.” He took the feathery sheets in his hands and spread them across the floor. They looked like a mix of building cutaways and squiggly nonsense to Gum Belle, but Isaac seemed to know what they were. Maybe Sorenz had picked him for more than how much he could dead-lift.

“It’s the electrical system for Tomorrow Tower,” he concluded. He pointed out different notations. “These are the conduit lines. And there are the outlets, circuit breakers, wiring. Understand?”

“Sure,” Gum Belle lied. She peered at one of the cutaways, showing a cavernous, pyramid-roofed room with a huge bundle of squiggles near the roof. “What’s this?

“The penthouse.”

She gave him an arch look. “I can see that. What’s with all the heavy-duty stuff on the ceiling?”

He made a sound like a curious hog. “Redundancy cables. See those big capacitors in the basement? They store backup power. The redundancies can distribute it through the system if there’s ever a blackout.”

Phyllis raised her hand again. “Then why aren’t they working now, Isaac?”

Gum Belle smirked. Isaac’s opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe it’s because the redundancies are also hooked up to the city’s power grid, but that shouldn’t matter, not with those big capacitors…”

“Let me ask you something, Isaac,” Gum Belle put in. “Why do these so-called redundancies just happen to meet at the top of the pyramid?”

“I don’t…um…”

Her eyes lit up. “One other question, pally.” She tapped her finger at the top of the penthouse roof. “What’s this?”

Gofer-boy squinted. Phyllis edged under his arm to look. There was a spire atop of Tomorrow Tower. It resembled the sort of ornament that architects frequently tack on to buildings to break height records. Only this one was capped by a bizarre ornament. It resembled a tuning fork crossed with a Tesla coil, but Gum Belle knew better. She’d eaten its pint-sized cousin just this afternoon.

“It looks like the EDO,” Isaac breathed. “The redundancies all plug into it.”

Gum Belle chuckled admiringly. “Tomorrow Tower’s just one big lightning gun, complete with the hookups to the power grid to suck the lights out across town. And here I thought there was just a supercharged version mounted somewhere in the building. Wow, is that ever slick.”

“But Dr. Sorenz would never authorize that,” Phyllis said. “He hated the EDO.”

“He was always trying to decommission it,” Isaac added. “He’d never let something like this stand.”

Gum Belle peered at the schematics. “Not if the designer had leverage on him,” she said. “Like, say, if he were a disgruntled partner.”

She pointed at one corner. There, nearly hidden in a hedge maze of calculations and scientific notations, was a tight, intense little signature:

Dorjan Miksa.

“Dr. Miksa’s died years ago,” Isaac said. “Everyone says so.”

“Everyone says I’m snuggling with the Phantom Skull. You don’t believe that, do you?”

Silence.

“Oh, come on! What do I have to do, put on a strip-tease for you?” She raised one warning finger. “Don’t you dare answer that question, gofer-boy.”

Phyllis’s eyes shot daggers at her boyfriend. Someone was getting a second slap to the face before the night was out.

Gum Belle straightened up, tossed her hair back. “All right, you two. I want you to get out of Tomorrow Tower as fast as you can. It’s not going to be safe here for very much longer. Yes, Phyllis, I know the elevators are busted. You’ll have to take the stairs; oh, don’t pout, Isaac, the exercise will do you some good. Or is that a medical condition you have instead of a beer gut?”

“What about you?” the secretary asked. “Aren’t you coming with us? It…it’s dangerous out there.”

She smiled sweetly. “Are you asking me to protect you, Phyllis? I thought I was -- how did you put it? -- ‘in cahoots with the Phantom Skull.’”

Phyllis blushed. Gum Belle patted her on the head.

“The rioting’s not bad Uptown,” she said gently. “You’ll be fine. As for me,” she raised her eyes heavenward, “I’ve got a city to free.”

With a jaunty salute, she dived out the window like a spring-loaded serpent. Phyllis squeaked and rushed to the threshold, only to recoil as a flat, garishly colored shape, similar to a giant kite, banking past her face, swooping up, up, towards the roof.

“She’s crazy,” the secretary whispered.

“Yeah, so we better not find out what happens if we stick around.” Isaac took her by the arm and they headed for the front office.

As they passed the heap of junk that used to be Sorenz’s secret guardian, none of them saw the shattered eye flicker, first three short blinks, then three long blinks…three short blinks, three long blinks…

S.O.S…S.O.S…S.O.S…

                                                         * * *

In the hidden boardroom of the Plaza Nightclub, the Phantom Skull’s visage flared with frightful force.

“It cannot be!”

Vincent Salucci shielded his eyes with his hand. “I didn’t know you could do a searchlight impression.”

“Silence!”

Despite the prodigious amount of liquor coursing through his head, the mobster obeyed. There was a new note of urgency in the Skull’s sepulchral voice. If Salucci didn’t know better, he’d say it almost sounded like…panic.

“The schematics…someone has found the schematics!”

“Who’s found what, now?”

The boardroom was bathed a bloody vermillion. “The schematics for my ultimate weapon, you fool! Were they to fall into the wrong hands, all my plans would be unraveled. The Generator, the receiver array…without the weapon, they are all but toys.”

Salucci rolled his shoulders. “So? Just atomicize them, or whatever it is you did to the police.”

“It is not so simple.” The Skull flickered, his voice remote, distracted. “I cannot see inside. But there is something…a shape…”

The white glow darkened, turned a throbbing blood red. Salucci shrank back in his chair as the Skull’s eye sockets flared a baleful orange.

“Gum Belle! She lives!”

In the pulsating crimson light, a slender, pale shape snapped to life. Madame 415 bowed. “Where would you have me go, Ghost Tiger?”

                                                         * * *

Everyone is afraid of the dark.

This is an absolute truth. It is only a matter of degrees. Children, who are guileless enough to admit that they look into the blackness and see, suffer most from this fear, but their sufferings are only superficial, ripples in the surface of the imagination: goblins, ghouls, the capering things in the night. When sleep comes for them, it comes with gentle kisses to soothe the unwrinkled brow. In time, age sets in. Childhood demons are banished by the power of reason, slain by the arms of logic, crushed in the inexorable march into that blinkered serenity called adulthood.

But the fear lurks still, made hungrier and more dangerous by a diet of lies and self-delusion, the man-shapes of the imagination twisted beyond recognition under the pressure of the beige bugaboos of the waking world. The bogeyman becomes a burglar, the closet changes into the car crash, the undead rises anew as the deadline. The dark, which remains the sole immutable, is shackled in copper wire and caged in tungsten and glass: electricity, the marvel of modern times, brings the blessed blaze of artificial light to dispel the natural shadows.

Yet late at night, when the house settles, when the wind picks up, when the branches skitter against the window, the dark creeps back, and the adult remembers what the child never forgot. Behind our armor of tempered progress, without our neon-bulbed battle standards, we are soft and weak creatures, clinging to the lies we tell ourselves, hugging the secret parents that we call our egos. And when the darkness strips even these away, all that is left is will and God against the shrouded, gibbering terrors of the dark.

Ricketts realized this as he tiptoed through the musty, cavernous gloom of the City Library. The tiptoeing drove it home for him. He had no reason to tiptoe. No one was here but him and the dust bunnies. The library was tucked away in a comfortable corner of Midtown, miles away from City Hall, the Plaza Nightclub, and the Shingles; the Phantom Skull, Vincent Salucci, and the Hanged Man had no reason to be on the lookout for him here. The neighborhood was so quiet that not even the rioting had reached this part of the city. The librarians had gone home long before, and he had clambered into the basement from the sewers; no one would shush him if he stomped up and down the stacks like a book-crazy gorilla that stank like a latrine. Overall, there was no logical reason why he should feel afraid.

Except for the dark.

It was all around him, dangling from the high, vaulted ceilings like a nest of bats, squeezed between shelves like tar, draped from walls and corners like spider webs. It made the old, overstuffed reading chairs resemble hunched trolls, turned the spiral staircase leading up to the second floor into a giant python. The G-man kept his lighter held high, but it was a tiny globe of reason in a universe of phantoms.

So he tiptoed.

In the silence of the library, his policeman’s brain chugged furiously away, beating back night terrors with extreme prejudice, keeping him barely focused on what he was looking for, steering him past fiction, biography, nonfiction, reference, until…there. Periodicals.

As far as he knew, Lionel Ricketts was the only member of the Bureau who used the library for research. Everyone else relied on the Bureau’s growing information base in Washington, or pumped the boys in blue for word on the street. But Ricketts had grown up here, and, what was more, he had the craftsman’s admiration for simple legwork.

The Sentinel had been around for over half a century, and the library had every issue catalogued and pasted into heavy, leather-bound volumes that crouched in an arcane cubbyhole of the building, where they threatened patrons with fifty-plus years of old news. Most of it was sensationalist garbage, as expected, but Ricketts had often turned up nuggets of valuable information by turning those yellowed pages. Tonight, he hoped his pan wouldn’t come up empty, because sifting through old news was his last hope of finding his son in time.

There was a lounge near the periodicals section, and it had a big bay window with an excellent view of the river. Tonight, that window pulled double duty by letting in that weird ghost-light that the Phantom Skull was giving off outside. Ricketts was no fan of the Skull, but he was in no mood to read by his lighter. Picking out a little round table that was close enough to get some light, but far enough away so that he wouldn’t be visible from the street, he thumped his first stack of volumes down in front of him and started to read.

He only looked at the headlines, watching for the biggest and the smallest; if the Hanged Man had really torched a tenement, as Eddie the Rat had claimed, the paper would either milk the event as a horrible tragedy, or shunt to the back page as a “Shingles affair.” Ricketts was acquainted with the Sentinel well enough to know that it all depended on how slow the news had been that particular day.

Only which day had it been? As the pages crinkled in the silence, and he moved through his first stack, then his second, then his third, Ricketts found himself gnawing his lower lip and tapping his fingers along his kneecap, nervous habits for a nervous man. A jittery, bouncy sensation rolled through his stomach, and the weird, rolling radiance from outside made him queasy.

The outside. He didn’t want to think about the outside. Outside, there was a whole city in danger. Outside, there were dead cops that weren’t even corpses anymore. Outside, the city was in panic. Outside, Vincent Salucci held his boss captive.

Outside, the Phantom Skull was forcing the city to its knees, and here he was, cooped up in a library, flipping through ancient history, looking for a possible arson with a possible connection to the man who had possibly kidnapped his son.

What was he willing to sacrifice for his boy? His own life? Gladly, without regret. But Abrams? Gran Zarkov? Bum Frank? The city? Could he let them fall into the Skull‘s grasp, all to save one child?

He flicked another page aside. The terrible thing about those questions was that he had already answered them. The proof was in the mountain of bound newspapers all around his chair. He had betrayed everything that he had sworn an oath to protect. And he wasn’t sure he regretted it.

Would Belle have done the same? Ricketts thought of her smirking, snark-laden grin and her saucy wink and sighed. No, she probably wouldn’t have. That little matinee queen was so full of pulp propaganda that she would blather something about “all those poor innocent dopes out there” and charge right for the Skull. Hell, she’d probably use the situation as an excuse to avoid her grandmother for a while.

The thought raised a bitter smile to his lips. Wherever Gum Belle was, her grandmother was the least of her worries. She had gone after the receiver array; she’d told him that much before her bug had burnt out. That she had failed was as clear as the bony mug plastered on the night sky. At best, she was incapacitated somewhere, though Ricketts doubted she could be locked up anywhere for long.

At worst…Well, there had been three members of the Board who had not been at the Tomorrow robbery: that paper woman, Kolodka, and the fat man with the hypnotizing headgear. Ricketts didn’t know which thought worried him more: Gum Belle chopped into frozen vigilante cutlets, or Gum Belle twisted into the Phantom Skull’s enforcer. Between the three of them, maybe they had even found a way to kill her…

His eyes stung. Reading fatigue, that was all. Ricketts wiped his eyes on his sleeve, closed them for a second.

When he opened them, he saw the story he had been looking for.

As he expected, it had been buried between a story about a talking dog in Missouri and a Hancock’s department store ad (“Spring Dresses 20% Off! Look Sweet for your Sweetheart this Valentine’s Day!”). Even so, the headline was striking:

                         ARSON SUSPECTED IN TENEMENT BLAZE
                             Only Catholics and Slavs Die in Fire

Ricketts grimaced. “Nice, Sentinel, real nice.”

Continued from Page 1.
Hundreds perished overnight in a terrible fire in the Shingles,
and arson is a possible cause, according to a police
detective that refused to be named.

“The department’s going to call it an accident, but that’s
because they aren’t interested,” the Sentinel’s source said…That brought a derisive snort. “They aren’t interested” was police shorthand for “there’s no money in it.” Either Salucci had bribed the department to gloss over the whole thing, or no one in the Shingles could scrape up enough cash to get the department’s attention. Either way, Ricketts felt a pang of sympathy for the poor anonymous detective; the old guard had probably drummed him out of the force for squealing to a rag like the Sentinel.

Eyewitness accounts claim that the fire began in an upstairs
apartment, but soon spread rapidly to encompass the entire
building. Witnesses testify that the screams could be heard
“for miles,” but that is most likely an exaggeration. Curiously,
none of the tenants were able to reach the fire escapes
or the front door, probably due to bad maintenance
on the part of the landlord, who had been called into court
twice for building violations…Tragic details, tragic details. And, between them and behind them, lurked Vittorio Salucci’s twisted professionalism. He had chosen a building in the Shingles because the police would be disinclined to launch an in-depth investigation. The fire had spread rapidly and evenly for maximum efficiency. No one had escaped, because he had probably sealed the exits before he lit a single match. The owner was a well-known slumlord, making him an easy scapegoat until the trail went cold. Reading the article was like sitting down in a Shaker chair.

The thought of such thorough, methodical cruelty applied to his boy rose up in his mind like a bloated corpse, and the musty air seemed too close. Fighting down his nausea, Ricketts furiously scanned the article, looking for an address, a street name, a landmark, any tidbits that might have had a passing resemblance with a lead.

But there was nothing. Why should he be surprised? After all, it was just the Shingles, and this was just the back page. The Hanged Man had done his homework too well.

His policeman’s brain picked this time to clear its metaphorical throat. Now that you’ve done yours, maybe it’s tie to go out there and fight the Skull.

“After I get Ted back,” he muttered, but the words tasted foul and false on his tongue. “The Skull can wait.”

Ask the other families in your building. See what they think.

Ricketts closed his eyes. “He’s my boy.”

Some of those cops at the stationhouse had boys, too. What about them?

He bowed his head and sighed. “I can’t let Salucci go work on him. I can’t.”

Can’t, or won’t?

“What’s the difference?” Ricketts snapped open his eyes and stood up, intending to open a window, get some fresh air, clear cobwebs of conscience from his skull. He was just about to close the big book and pick up his things when his gaze happened to land on the top of the article again.

Continued from Page 1.
Hundreds died overnight in a terrible fire in the Shingles…Continued from Page 1...

Ricketts smacked his forehead. “Of course!” he growled as he thumped back down, turning five, ten pages with one sweep of his big hands, plowing through sports, recipes, the funnies, classifieds, news…

The front page. Page 1. A big splashy story about a scandal on the City Council, a blurb about the political situation in Europe, and there, on the lower half of the page, hidden where no one would see it until they bought the paper at the newsstand, was a grainy black-and-white photograph of what might have been a squat, square multi-story building. Fiery arms boiled out of its beady windows, and smoke blotted out the rest of the neighborhood in a great, cloying cloud. It was like a snapshot from hell. His eyes traveled down, read the caption.

Whole families burned to death last night in a tenement
blaze at 1125 W. 181st Terrace. SEE FULL STORY ON
PAGE 18DRicketts settled back in his chair, his breath rushing out in a tired whoosh. Relief, and something more apprehensive, rushed through him as he tore the page from the book and folded it into his breast pocket. Now he knew where to go.

If he could only convince himself.

The library’s dead air stirred restlessly. Ricketts froze, his face pale and taut as he heard the whine of old hinges and the scuffing and rustling of moving bodies from the lobby.

Then someone worked the chamber of an automatic pistol. It cleaved through the pristine quiet like an axe.

Ricketts gently got to his feet withdrew Deadeye’s revolver.

It looked like someone had come to get him.

                                                         * * *

As he slid a length of chain through the handles of the library’s double doors, Jenkins glared at Eddie the Rat.

“What’th wrong?”

The inside man padlocked the links together and jerked his chin at the mobster’s pistol. Eddie flushed.

“I wanted to be prepared,” he said. “Ith that a crime?”

Jenkins shook his head, then delivered orders with sharp battlefield simplicity: his fingers snapped from man to aisle, from eyes to floor, and the baker’s dozen of Vincent Salucci’s best knew what they were supposed to do: fan out, move through the stacks, flush Ricketts out.

“Reference,” Jenkins hissed as they set out. “He’ll be in reference. No lights.”

He plucked his Thompson from the floor, double-checked it, and padded into the darkness.

                                                         * * *