Horace was twenty-five minutes late to their meeting.
He'd spent the better part of an hour in the bathroom of his motel room, tending to the bullet wound he now bore. The thing had been a lucky miss, that was for sure… a clean in-and-out that had ruined his clothing but wouldn't kill him. Or, at least, not yet.
Horace had splashed it with disinfectant, but perhaps it was too little too late… the upcoming days would tell. He'd then managed to stitch himself using a fishing hook and the dingy bathroom mirror, remembering back to watching his father help stitch a cousin after a rifle accidentally discharged on one of their hunting outings. It burned like the devil, but a few pain pills later and he started to feel himself once again.
After washing the blood from his hands and changing into something dark—for camouflage, and also so that it wouldn't be ruined by further bloodstains—he made his way to the boy's chosen intersection. He found it empty save for the occasional pedestrians milling their way among restaurants serving dinner as night set in.
Suddenly, a voice whispered to his ear, crystal clear despite the apparently empty corner. "Alley, fifteen feet behind you."
Smart kid, he thought. Cautious, too.
Horace made his way to the alley, where he watched the boy materialize out of thin air. "You ok?" Shaun asked, gesturing to where Horace had been shot.
"I should live," he said. "You?"
Shaun nodded. "My leg got hurt but I think I'll be ok."
Horace put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "It was a brave thing you did today."
Shaun nodded again. "Logan… did he…" the boy began, before trailing off before the weight of the question.
"I've actually got some things for you, here," Horace said, opening the latches on his case. He opened it to reveal it was replete with papers and letters in sealed envelopes. Horace took out the entire stack of documents and handed them to Shaun.
"I made a promise to a mutual friend of ours… these papers will help explain what's going on. I've got to go do a very dangerous thing, now, and I don't want to risk these. You take care of them, yeah? And if I don't come back to this corner within four hours, you read them, and you give this sealed envelope to Nora Campbell. Can you do that?"
Shaun stared at the sealed envelope, its wrinkled paper the color of oatmeal. On its front, a single word was written: mom.
"That can't be from," Shaun began, trailing off again.
"You give me four hours. I'll either explain everything myself, or the letters will. One more thing, son. Can I have that invisibility toggle of yours? It'll make my work much easier, being able to use stealth like that."
"You're gonna go after Logan, aren't you?"
Horace nodded gravely. "I've gotta finish this. And when it's done, I'll gather the lot of these things and destroy them all. They're dangerous, and we don't deserve them."
Shaun bit his lip. This device was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in years, if not his whole life… a chance to be a superhero. A chance to be powerful. But he also knew that not everyone used power for good. Maybe something that made superheroes also was bound to make supervillains. If heroes necessitated monsters, maybe the world was better off with just people.
He gave Horace the Invisibility Plug, and it truly felt like he was giving a part of himself up with it. He'd never read another comic book again, though he didn't know that yet at the time. He put aside his childlike notion of heroes as he looked at the bleeding, haggard man before him… a man who had made compromises to his beliefs to chase out what he thought was right. What he'd do next wasn't good, but perhaps it wasn't bad, either. He clutched the documents in his hand and wished him luck. "Be careful," he added.
"I'll see you soon," Horace said. And then he was off, walking down onto the street with his hunting rifle slung over his back.
* * *
An entire page of Jim's writing had discussed the structure Horace now headed towards. The letter had described a small cabin, hidden out in the woods, where Logan would sometimes go shelter from the world. The letter detailed how Jim—as a child—had once found the troubled youth hiding away in that cabin while the rest of the town thought he'd run away for good. Now, with the law having good reason to apprehend Logan, he'd surely have few places to go. The cabin seemed like a great candidate to check.
So convinced was Jim Duncan that the cabin would be significant for Horace's work that the old man had gotten his late-life caretaker, Brianna, to take him for a stroll through the woods beside Boone in his best off-road wheelchair. He'd told her that it was all for his study of poetry, and that he wanted to immerse himself in nature. Truth be told, Brianna didn't seem to mind the outdoor hikes, as she grew to dread Jim's stale bedroom air.
That had been back in the 60's, according to the letter. He'd left town from the closest landmark he could remember and directed her the best his distant memory could guide. After the second day of hiking around, he'd found the small shack, which actually stood cleaner and sturdier than he'd remembered. It was a recent thing in those years.
He wrote down detailed instructions to locating it, which Horace had long ago committed to memory. He knew the landmarks to seek out, several of which had featured accompanying drawings in his instructions: there was a tree that had absorbed a bicycle tire near its base, a stone formation that resembled an alien UFO, a miniature stream that ran through a corridor of stone and tumbled into a small valley ten feet below. Now, in the dark, he found those landmarks by flashlight's glow and made his way deeper into the woods, closing in on the cabin. For the final stretch, he clicked off his flashlight and navigated by moonlight alone. He worried about this part, wondering if he might miss the thing entirely. However, it was a cloudless night, and the crescent moon's light soon glistened on the sloping metal roof of a lone structure ahead in the gently creaking woods. Bingo, he thought.
Horace set his briefcase at the base of an ash tree. In it, the Time Watch sat wound and ready for his contingency plan, but Horace wouldn't dare wear the cursed thing. He then toggled the Invisibility Plug, plunging himself into that strange etherealness. Despite the complete dark of the rural woods, his vision became even darker, murkier somehow. He could see just about nothing but the faint glimmer of light on the structure's roof, but that would have to suffice. He held that light in his eyes and crept towards it.
He froze in place as his boot clanged against something metal. If the boy had been awake, and listening, he might have heard that abnormal jolt in the night… Horace peered down at the black swirling murk near his feet and couldn't see anything. He knew that if he turned the invisibility plug off, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the moonlight, he could probably discover what his foot had glanced against. But if the boy were awake and listening, re-materializing right outside his cabin door would not be the wise course of action. Horace knew the cabin had a window on its side, but he couldn't see it in the murky darkness. Invisibility was his cloak, and he drew it tight about his shoulders as he stood silently in place. Is there a pair of eyes there, staring out into the night, searching for me with wicked intent?
* * *
Logan held his breath, peering out the window towards the innermost of the four bear traps he had set. Those small circles of metal glinted faintly in the moonlight, and as his eyes strained against the shadows he could see the jaws hadn't snapped shut on any of them. All four were still primed. Still, something had struck one and roused him from his fitful half-sleep; the sound of that metal was unmistakeable. And now, as he glanced at the four traps, he could see no nearby solid object that might have struck them. There were no pinecones that might have tumbled from a tree, no collapsed branch that might have rattled one. His stomach dropped as realization set in. Shaun is here, and he's invisible.
He looked around the cabin, scanning for a powder he could throw to find the invisible attacker. Seeing none, he then looked for a suitable liquid. Logan had used all of the sodas and drinks he could find to help wipe away all the blood that had pooled here from Skinny's murder and the deer carcass both… he'd have no help there. Exasperation rising, he instinctively reached for the Empathizer, but then he paused. A glowing battery could give me away, he reasoned. I need to think. His fingers dropped to his pocket and pulled out the Intelligence Ring. He avoided wearing the thing, as it kept his thoughts racing like a sprinter running downhill, always threatening to tumble flat onto his face. When he wore the ring, his mind lapped back to the horrible things he'd done, and it always summoned that horrid four-part melody that set his teeth grating: buzz, rattle, patter, click, buzz, rattle, patter, click. It summoned to his mind the wet crunch of an ax biting into Parker's shoulder, and of the helpless fear the eyes of a boy bleeding out on a kitchen floor in the arms of someone he'd once thought his friend. No, Logan couldn't wear the ring and retain his sanity. But oh, how he needed it now.
As he slid the Intelligence Ring onto his right hand, which hung limply from his lame right arm, he felt the electric sensation of pain mingle with a jolting of a new energy that pulsed up his arm, right up into his spine, and straight into his brain. The ineffable buzzing of his boosted thoughts made the room spin, and immediately his mind stumbled around in sloppy disorientation, fixing on the demons he had banished to the darker portions of his psyche. But within seconds, he tamed the rampaging thoughts like the calming of some bucking mustang, and he temporarily felt the beast once again under his control—even if only for a time. He gritted his teeth and willed that ring now to grant him with some kind of idea, anything to save his life. It was a prayer not to God but to himself, to his own wisdom—or to the cleverness of the ring, if there were such a difference. And then, a smile cracked across his face so wide that Horace might have seen the moonlight glinting off his teeth if not for the artificial darkness of invisibility. The idea he'd needed had come, and it was so deliciously simple he was astonished he'd not thought of it before.
Logan imagined then the infernal eye of Sauron that towered over Mordor on its onyx-black column of hellish rock, peering for the sneaking hobbits that crept towards Mount Doom. When the hobbits slipped on their ring and went invisible, the eye could sense their presence… if not in sight, in mind.
Logan's hand gripped the Thought-Enunciator in his pocket and his smile bled with self-satisfaction, recalling the poem from the Lord of the Rings as he set to his work.
One Ring to rule them all,
He raised the device and pointed its satellite dish towards the furthest bear trap. Only silence returned.
One Ring to find them.
He turned it to the next bear trap, silent as well. Mordor was an expanse before him, and his eye searched with unfaltering focus.
One Ring to bring them in,
He pointed it to the third, and he heard the frantic mental stream of an unseen figure deciding whether to creep forwards or stay put.
and in the darkness bind them.
Setting down the Thought-Enunciator and grabbing his revolver in his left hand, Logan raised the gun and fired straight through the window at the third bear trap. The glass exploded outwards and his ears rang in protest, but Logan was already on his feet. He bolted to the generator behind the shack and reached for the cord, but a voice in his mind, perhaps the ring's, protested. Don't pull that, he thought. That will help them see you, but won't help you see them. He nodded, agreeing with himself. He instead crept back into the cabin, keeping low to the ground. As he did so, the wood near his head exploded with the impact of a rifle round, sending woodchips flying. He dove into the shack and covered his head. He had a dilemma, he now realized. His right arm was just about useless. He could squeeze the Protectionizer in his good left hand, and have effectively no means to work his weapon, or he could place the Protectionizer in his wounded right, and at least be able to fire his gun. He decided on the latter, his right hand squeezing the protective device faintly.
He hoisted the gun above his head and fired blindly out the window once. He'd reloaded the gun hours ago, meaning he'd started with six shots tonight. He was now down to four.
* * *
Horace remained sprawled prone on the ground, a position he'd dropped to after the window exploded outwards from the first gunshot. He had his rifle trained forwards in a position that reminded him of a sniper's, waiting for movement. The first bullet fired had missed him, miraculously, but some shards of glass hadn't been so inclined… Horace felt the white-hot sting of broken skin at several dots along his face, neck, and a particularly sharp point somewhere near his right rib. When he'd dropped, he felt a tearing at the gunshot wound he'd stitched not even a full hour ago… he wondered if it was open and bleeding again. No time for a medical examination, he thought. In the murky dark, he thought he saw the boy dart from the shack's rear back into its front door, and he fired at that retreating form. A miss, he noted as it struck the wooden side of the shack. Who'd have thought being hard to see makes it hard to see, he mused. The air above him ripped with the passing of a bullet fired blindly from cover, not posing any particular risk of hitting Horace. From here on the ground, his face mere inches from the strange ring of metal, Horace could now identify the bear trap he'd nearly stepped on… he shuttered at the thought.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
He needed to advance, but he didn't want the boy knowing precisely where he was running. And so, Horace fired his rifle at the shack, levered the bolt, and fired again, the thunderous crackles hiding his footsteps as he scurried up to the shack's edge. He pressed his rifle against the thin wooden wall and listened.
* * *
Within the shack, Logan again set down his revolver and picked up the Thought-Enunciator. He knew the blindfire had been to hide Horace's movements, and so it was time to figure out where the rat had scurried to. He began a wide, circular sweep from the center of the room, moving the device slowly as he rotated. As he turned to the south wall of the cabin, a foreign voice entered his mind: the old man's. Was that click his weapon being set down? the voice asked, tense and determined in equal measure. Logan imagined a laser beam shooting from his device. He twisted slightly to the left, and slightly to the right, listening for precisely where the voice dropped out. Judging by the angle he could turn before losing the man's thoughts—wider than he had anticipated—he could judge the old man to be close. Very close indeed.
His left hand was a poor shot and he knew it. So, Logan set the device silently in his pocket and began to creep towards the wall, wanting to line up his shot as closely as possible. As he stepped, his foot struck a battery that laid dull and unglowing on the floor. It skittered as it rolled, clanking into the leg of one of the shack's chairs.
A monstrous bang! immediately filled the space as the wall seemed to burst into a spray of wood debris and heat. Logan felt as though a train had struck him in the face. He was propelled away from the wall and spilled over onto his back, world spinning and lurching as he toppled. I am alive, Logan thought numbly, mentally checking his body for wounds. It seemed as though neither bullet nor sharpnel had punctured him at all. His awareness prodded at his hand and discovered yes, it somehow still clutched the Protectionizer. And then, in what seemed like a mere heartbeat, the pressing weight of an invisible foe was on top of him, pinning his arms down against the ground.
A rifle materialized on the ground to Logan's left; It seemed the old man had let it go, ending its invisibility. While Logan's left arm was pinned against the ground, he angled his wrist to point the gun at Horace's weapon. He then fired his revolver into the rifle, erupting in a small burst of metal shrapnel and wood. Horace yelped as the fragments of hot metal and wood bit at his unseen flesh, but even these only glanced off of Logan as he still gripped the Protectionizer.
Seizing the momentum, Logan jerked his weight to the right and rolled over on top of the invisible foe, the two still locked in a tight grapple. Horace's arm was clasped tight around Logan's left arm, and unexpectedly, the man was alarmingly strong, but Logan struggled with every ounce of strength he could muster. He tilted his left wrist lower and lower, aligning the gun slowly but inexorably towards where the man's head might be. He was winning, and they both knew it. He saw only empty air beneath him, and so he spat, noting where the dribble of saliva plopped to the wood, and where it struck seemingly nothing at all. There you are, Logan thought.
The gun crept inwards degree by miserable degree, the old man's strength beginning to wane. Finally, it arrived to range, and Logan squeezed the trigger, the short range blast momentarily blinding and deafening both of them. As the flash cleared, Logan saw the sheared off flesh of the man's ear, and the trickle of blood from an insivible spigot… he'd fired too soon.
Two left in the chamber, Logan thought. As he continued to press the hand inwards, he felt the man's other hand prying at the Protectionizer in Logan's weakened right. Just… a little… more… Logan thought, body shaking with exertion. He twisted his left desparately and squeezed as tightly as his right could manage. The gun rotated past the trickle of phantom blood, and even another degree beyond that point still. It would surely now be aimed at the man's head.
Logan squeezed the trigger, and again, both were blinded by that deafening boom and blinding flash… but as the bullet raced towards Horace's invisible skull, it struck against the man's Protectionizer-protected face and exploded into shrapnel, hot shards of metal blasting back into Logan. And this time, they found purchase in Logan's exposed flesh. He'd lost the struggle for control of Wade's device.
One small shard found Logan's right eye, moving through it with the resistance of a hot knife plunged into a tub of butter. Logan screamed as he recoiled, wanting to claw at his face, but both arms were still gripped tightly. And as his mind raced and he screamed and wailed and shook in wrath, he felt the tide of their struggle again begin to turn.
* * *
Horace pried the gun from the screaming youth's grip and managed to again roll him to underneath as the two grappled. He then withdrew his hand from the boy's clearly-wounded right arm and pressed his forearm against Logan's throat, squeezing the device as he pressed the air from Logan's neck. The boy's right hand scratched and clawed ineffectually at Horace, who now felt the strange protection cover his body completely. The boy's struggles weakened rapidly, and soon Horace managed to wrench the gun from his left hand. The boy's arms fell limply to his side.
Horace pressed down harder on the boy's throat and trained the weapon at his head, before loosening the press against his neck. Logan gasped a narrow breath like a swimmer who had been trapped deep underwater.
"All the devices," Horace said. "No games, or I shoot. Give them to me."
He watched as the boy bit back the urge to scream, one eye wild with animal fear and the other squeezed shut, bleeding. Horace saw the gun he held pointed at this boy's head and thought how can this be God's will? How can killing someone like this do an ounce of good in the end? Horace shuddered and bit back the sense that maybe this vengeance being right was as much him lying to himself as much as it was Jim's lie. This was cruel; this was vindictive. This boy deserved prison, but not death. Or, if he did deserve death, it wasn't Horace's call to make… only the Lord's. And now that the boy was disarmed, the system could serve the justice he deserved. He resolved himself then to not kill the boy… but he would bring him back to town, and turn him in to the policewoman Nora Campbell. And then, he would take these devices and throw them straight into the ocean, making certain that such temptations never fell into vulnerable hands again.
With the gun pressed to his temple, Logan compliantly slipped off the ring from his finger, which spun as it clattered to the floor. Next came the Thought-Enunciator, set next to the ring. Finally, with great reluctance, he removed the Empathizer from his pocket and set it to the side, a few batteries rolling on the ground with it. Keeping the gun pointed to Logan's head, Horace used his other hand to scoop up the three items and placed them in his inner jacket pocket. Horace then stood and toggled the Invisibility Plug, materializing from the dark.
"Stand," Horace commanded. Logan stood slowly and swallowed. "Out the door," Horace instructed, and Logan walked out the shack. As Horace left, he grabbed the lone flashlight and shone it at Logan's back. Horace had light, and Logan didn't. If he ran, he was as good as found.
Horace instructed him forwards, staying behind the boy with the gun trained on his back. When Logan had arrived near to the tree where Horace had stashed his case, he instructed the boy to stay still for a moment. Horace retrieved the case, opened it, and placed the strange artifacts gingerly inside. As he snapped it shut, Logan began to sprint away desperately, bolting with all the skittish energy of a wild animal trapped in a situation it couldn't comprehend. He fled, blinded by the light, stumbling into trees and scraping against shrubs as his feet carried himself forwards. Horace jogged and was easily able to keep pace, keeping the light trained on the boy's back. "Stop running," he called, but the boy stumbled onwards. "I'm growing tired of this," Horace called, but still he ran.
Logan's feet carried him forwards into the dark. His shadow danced left and right in front of him, hiding trees and bushes that he smashed into repeatedly as he ran, and yet he couldn't stop. It was all unraveled. His Empathizer… gone. He felt the swelling of the tides, and he knew that he was crumbling under their motion… his mind stood on the brink of snapping for good. He had one hope left, a desperate hope beyond hope that could still win him the day… the body in the woods. What if it has a weapon? Or, better: what if there were more than six devices? What if there had been a seventh one, and we simply hadn't noticed? There had to be, it wouldn't make sense unless there was one… there had to be one. Just had to be. On and on his desperate mind raved, clinging for some sliver of hope. In truth, the only thread that kept Logan's mind from crumbling irrevocably was the certainty that there was such a device, a blind faith in spite of a total lack of evidence. He couldn't rationalize failure, because failure would mean spending the rest of his life with this surging tide of burning hot emotions, a feeling tantamount to someone holding his mouth open and pouring boiling water down his throat day in and day out. Those unfair colored chains would stack up in every waking moment around his neck until their suffocating weight drove him mad. It's just ahead now, he thought. Just ahead.
As the boy scrambled ahead, bleeding, Horace came to recognize exactly where Logan was heading. He'd memorized all the maps in Duncan's letters, and this landmark they headed to was the site of what would've been Horace's contingency plan. Near the peak of the ridge Logan now stumbled up was the spot where they'd found the corpse with the devices. If too much had gone wrong, but Horace survived, he was to go back in time to July 1st, 1981, and steal the devices before the boys could find them… paradoxes or not. It was the backup chute, the last straw. It had been just east of Cliff Rock… and now Logan stumbled past that dark tower of stone, honing in on the clearing.
Horace felt a deep, resonant pity for the boy, driven by desperation back to where it had all begun. Perhaps he was searching for another device? A desperate way to deny his fate and escape from consequences?
Horace tucked the boy's gun in the rear of his waistband and walked after him, shaking his head in sorrow. I am sorry, Lord, for torturing this boy so. I will repent… Oh, Lord, how I will repent.
He crested the hill just behind Logan and watched as the boy dropped to his knees in a clearing. The sour, acrid stink of death blew in the gentle breeze to Horace's nostrils, and he had to fight the urge to vomit there and then. Logan didn't seem to mind. He crept over a dark, rotting thing, a body that had had a month to decay in the sweltering summer heat. Horace was grateful that the shadows hid much of the details… he wouldn't have wanted to see anything that gave off the scent that now assailed his senses.
Logan leaned over the slumping, bloating thing, hands desperately pawing at his clothes for pockets. The clothing was wet, cold, soggy, and sticky, and Logan felt squirming motion where his hand dipped into empty pockets. He tried to slide a hand under the thing's back, but quickly found that it had rotted to the floor… it seemed body and ground made a nearly watertight seal he couldn't easily slip beneath.
"Are you finished yet?" Horace asked, walking near to the corpse on the ground and the desperate scavenger above it. He kept a safe distance out of arm's reach, waiting for the boy to tire of picking through the corpse. "I'm sorry, son," he said. "It's over."
To see such misery broke Horace's heart, and the smell of death shook his whole mind. He longed for the buzz of a smoke, and hoped literally any new smell might drown out that horrible smell. He pulled a cigar, still wrapped, from his jacket pocket and turned his back to the wind to light it, holding his lighter in one hand and the cigar and briefcase in the other.
Logan pressed his hand to the small of the corpse's back and felt it enter a wet, lukewarm stew that set his skin crawling. He retched dryly, but he still pushed his hand forwards, prodding for some final secret the corpse guarded. And then, when all seemed finally over, his hands found the comforting weight of cold metal. A seventh device—hidden beneath the corpse all along.
He yanked it out, looking at the deep-red-stained sticky thing he held in his hands. His spirits soared as he identified it as a weapon—somehow, so very similar to Dad's. It was as if fate wanted him to have it, as if fate had given him a chance to take it all back… it was time to make good on the treasures the world offered.
He aimed the revolver at the stooping back of the man lighting his cigar. He squeezed the trigger and the gore-covered hammer clicked to the round in the chamber, and its flash was the most beautiful light Logan had ever beheld. The bullet ran through Horace's spine and punched into the briefcase he held before him… and then he was gone in a brilliant flash of white light and a crackle that seemed to issue from the pounding of God's own hammer against the anvil of the world.
Logan sat, stupefied, as he crept forwards to the spot on the grass where Horace had just been. A fine layer of black soot drifted lazily in the air, sprinkling down softly across the grass and trees and indeed even Logan's skin. It only took a moment for the truth to set in: they were gone.
There was a weighty moment of stillness marked only by the boy's ragged breathing in the forest that echoed with the receding crack of the jump through time. Logan was perhaps too stunned to feel anything at all, but then he felt the first trickle of black-tinged regret. It wasn't yet an emotional construct, but rather one fashioned out of cold, logic-based self interest. His plans had unraveled; his goals were now unattainable, and consequences would be coming. For those reasons, and those alone, Logan began to wish that he hadn't done any of it—that he'd borrowed the damn things, or that he'd stolen them in the night, or that he and the boys never opened the case at all.
The regret pooled within him as he felt a new trickle of purple-tinged despair, and Logan realized something disquieting: the emotional dam that had held it all back in his mind was already cracking away… then came the spray of guilt, and then came the flow of shame, and then came the flood of hatred and the deluge of terror and the surging column of rage and the tidal wave of dread, an emotional breach that he knew would surely break him.
He screamed a primal, enraged shriek that tore at his throat and threatened to be the last noise his throat ever made… but soon the scream was choked out by the sobs, and how the sobs came in wave after violent wave. He pressed the bloody barrel to his own temple and squeezed his eyes shut tight, telling himself this was long overdue. He squeezed the trigger and awaited relief, but the empty chamber only clicked in its wordless defiance…. Dad's son after all.
* * *
It was July 1st, 1981.
Horace materialized in the clearing with a flash of light, looking down at the briefcase that now sported a bullet hole in its front panel. I had the only gun, he thought, feeling something immediately very wrong. His own weight seem to increase more and more by the second—or was gravity becoming stronger? He tried to step backwards, towards the unexpected gunshot, and even managed two stumbling steps, but his left leg seemed to be entirely boneless, made of Jell-o. He toppled to the floor, falling onto his back, clutching at the briefcase as gravity seemed to press down harder and harder. I can feel it coming, Lord, he thought, knowing that death hovered just beyond. Please, forgive me for my misdeeds. And then his eyes widened. The final details slotted into place: Horace had succeeded, but so, too, had he failed—the problem's solution was also its cause. The Lord's plan, as ever, proved an unchangeable thing.
Logan's gun, still with one round in its cylinder, pressed to Horace's back as a point of icy cold in the spreading warmth of blood against the grass. Six items in his case, and a seventh beneath his back. As he rattled his final, parting breaths, and Horace closed his eyes, at long last ready to meet his creator, a boy of twelve watched with eyes full of terror and fascination. A traveler had appeared and then had crumpled to the ground. He flashed back to the comic books he had read and his child's mind was already racing for its explanation… was that an alien in the woods?