GALLERY artefact #013
picture by Kristan Morrison - 2013 - Sydney
LIBRARY artefact #009
OLD FOX DREAMING Part 2
And all around, drowsy self-aware lights remembered the sole purpose of their existence, fluorescing to attention one by one to display the length of the corridor. Welcoming their master with tinny little voices, even as they illuminated a cavernous trophy room at the far end of the moving walkway - a space dominated by relics in upright display cases arranged in perspective. Chief among the artefacts was the dramatic jet-engine silhouette of Captain Power's ray projector. Slung from a giant overhead boom, the fortifying lens was now occulted and sticky with drifts of spider-web and dander.
This ray device, once capable of rendering the human body invulnerable to harm, wasn't worth shit these days, except maybe as sculpture, or scrap. Its young inventor, John 'Skipper' Grant by name, had elected to destroy his miraculous machine after petulantly declaring humankind 'too greedy and too, too hateful' to benefit from such an invention, though not before he used it to endow himself, his troubled younger brother and the brother's flighty blonde wife with physical indestructibility and super-human strength of course. Elitist bastards, equipped with jet packs, x-ray goggles, anti-gravity belts and atomic pistols, they'd taken it upon themselves to ruin the lives of various alleged super-criminals.
The Old Fox lifted a gamma-ray gun from its rack and, taking aim at a front-page photo of the smug trio, recalled with an inward lizard chuckle how he'd finished off the handsome, brilliant Captain Power once and for all. For all his supernatural strength, the Captain was vulnerable to the same thing as every other arsehole on the planet: scandal. Hacking the hero’s personal super-computer yielded spectacular results when it turned out Captain Power had somehow managed to conceal a mind-bending three-way affair involving his sister-in-law and a remarkable semi-sentient aircraft he'd christened “Miss Hotshot”; an obliging all-terrain, all-element omni-vehicle with the brain of a randy bonobo.
While innocent Tommy Grant slept, dreaming a world without crime, his atom-powered wife and amoral genius brother were hard at work redefining the sweaty, oily boundaries of man-machine fusion with a jet plane in fishnets.
The fallout blew the family apart, cuckolded Tommy Grant, AKA Atommy, dropped his bundle and farted himself into outer space, propelled on a blast wave of shame. He was never seen again, although radio hams have claimed that his mournful, undying cosmic howls of dissolution can still be heard on frequencies in the 200 to 300 kilohertz range. His wife, the young heiress who called herself Lynn the Atom Girl, lost her inheritance, turned to uranium abuse, and was last seen selling her sordid story to the News of the Sun.
"GOTCHA!"
The Old Fox sniggered, miming a pistol shot. He'd got them all in the end. Well...almost all…
Every exhibit, carefully maintained in its own glass cabinet, triggered a fresh acid-reflux of sour nostalgia. He'd preserved a poignant relic of every encounter, every campaign, every smackdown, every victory. All that remained was pop-art memorabilia - here a blood-stained flag of three primary colours, there an art-deco coat of arms, of wings and lightning bolts. A stuffed and mounted Yowie, the misshapen skull of a Bunyip, the disembodied head of Zane, the Metal Man, with his mournful fire-hydrant face.
Every last hero and monster come a cropper. Brought low, humiliated twice over in public. Flame Man? Coal-addict. Captain Justice? Tax evader.
Captain Buck? Bigamist. Captain Katseye? Back-door bandit... Captain this and captain that, self-appointed officers in whose bloody army? Whose navy?
And yet, with nothing but simple down-to-earth words as his weapons, the Old Fox had put paid to the whole tawdry carnival crew.
COMETMAN ATE MY HUSBAND!
That classic banner had swiftly ended the fin-headed vigilante's so-called career and earned him a well-deserved 30-year stretch in the Violent Offenders Wing at Long Bay. Happy days.
And there was the featureless hood, once worn by the enigmatic Mask himself.
MAN OF MANY FACES! ALL GUILTY!
And the old man's personal favourite;
MOLO GETS IN TROUBLE WITH HIS WILLY-WILLY!
Beneath his crust of worldly sophistication, the Old Fox liked the stupid, dirty ones best. Builders’ jokes, rugby humor. And that particular gag had an unfortunate pun-slinging conclusion when rumors of the suspect relationship between the mighty visitor from the planet Zotian and Willy Willy, the young Aborigine lad who'd risked his own safety to nurse the massive otherworldly warrior back to super-human health, turned out to be entirely without foundation. When Molo took his own life, first by removing the miraculous headband that supplied his alien powers then by closing his streaming eyes and walking into a speeding bus, it was no more nor less than death by headline; the deadly equivalent of the pointing bone.
Still - sometimes you need to break a few eggs if you like the look of smashed egg up and down the walls - as his father used to say.
Born and reared like spiky spinifex in a land with no room for heroes, the Old Fox had struggled hard to rid his world of stuck-up, holier-than-thou bastards. And if that made him a master villain in the eyes of some, so be it. He'd earned the trammeled-in lines of his face, the laden saddlebags beneath his eyes, the Blofeld lifestyle, the ex-supermodel wife, the orbiting satellites and the corporate death-grip on the balls of nations. One day, the Great Work would be accomplished. One day, this land born in spunk and fire and rum would be free of all traces of heroism. One day, everybody would be equally famous, and all exactly the SAME. Fair goes, we're all in this together.
Heroes, and especially super-heroes, threatened that fundamental rule. The Old Fox never could stand a poser. One by one he’d brought them low, buried them.
All except one.
Stark, isolated beneath a harsh spotlight was a fancy yellow Bakelite crown, mounted like a trophy head. Close-up, the helmet's layers were cracked into a thousand tiny fractures. The Old Fox wrinkled his nose to peer at the prominent 'A' on the brow. A stark, black letter framed in a juicy red atomic starburst.
The one that got away.
Captain Atom. The Atomic Warrior, The Atom Man. He used to chant some magic word and swap places with his quantum-entangled super-powered brother.
Years ago, now it was. What was that word again? Excelsior? Exeter? Evita? How could he, the soon-to-be owner of every word in the dictionary be lost for words, the Old Fox wondered. The irony was thick enough to choke on…
exenor! feels like a cross between using exeor and exonerate