Krissy's Second Visit

Youthful footsteps echoed throughout the store's frozen section.

It is not often a challenge to determine one's age from footsteps. The slow, stumbling walk of an old man, and the tap of his walker or cane, gives him away immediately. A hop and a skip might reveal that one is a child. But in the ages between 12 and 60, there is a singular type of step, one which is not easily linked to age due to the variance in height and weight of the teenage and adult population. In the cold of the frozen section, this uniformity was slimmed even further, because nothing leeches strength from the heart and legs like cold. But in the footsteps of the confident young girl who wore a Sun Valley uniform, one could sense her youthfulness. The cold didn't touch her and she wasn't afraid of it or hateful of it. And so perhaps it was the youthfulness of her step that revealed to the mysterious figure known as the Blue Phantom who it was who came to visit him, in his hidden lair behind the coolers.

He smiled up seeing her, his sapphire-mask conforming to the angles of his face. Only his eyeholes provided any sort of look upon his true visage—his sparkling blue eyes, which looked almost like low-burning flames, stared out at her. Besides the mask, flanked by pitch-black hair, he wore dark coats to keep himself safe from the cold.

“Hello, Krissy.”

“Hi, Phantom,” Krissy said. “What's the plan for today?” she asked in that extreme self-confidence that some teenagers still had.

“How much time can you spare?”

“I'm not on for today. I'm breaking store rules. Shopping in uniform outside my shift.”

“Ordinarily I'd name that as yet another restriction of your freedoms, but I can't imagine a living soul who would want to wear such ugly, imposing garb unless they were forced to. And, unless—you are using such an outfit for subterfuge as you are today.”

“It'll help excuse me if customers catch me back here, but there's only a 50/50 chance it'll work on my boss. Some subterfuge! I bet you could teach me better.”

“I am a master of staying hidden, and that is all, you realize. If you seek the ability of hiding your face—well, it is beyond me to speak to anyone of faces.”

“Whatever you can teach me, I'll be glad to learn it.”

He gave her a strange look then with his shining blue eyes. “You don't wish to look beneath my mask. That's curious. Oftentimes when I raise the idea of disguised faces, they ask me to raise the mask...”

She cocked an eyebrow. “They?”

“Today you will learn of many things, my dear. You will hear that there have been other workers of this store who were also associates of mine. There are things lurking below which have left dark marks on the minds of those who have met them—would you care to see a few today?”

“Would I?! That's a yes, by the way.”

“That's the spirit. Come on.”

And he reached down to the floor then, his fingers probing at the smallest hint of a seam which Krissy just now see. Then he hauled up a heavy portion of the floor and set it aside. “After you.”

Not the nicest smell she'd ever run into. It was a sewer—she could see that in an instant. Strangely, though, there was something nostalgic to the blend of scents—the musty brick made her think of libraries at night, and the water, old swimming pools. Down below the water sparkled in languid green—a string of ripples bubbled past each other, moved by some unseen current. She could heard the sounds of machinery, pumps, far below.

“So these are just the store's sewers?”

“They are linked to the city sewers, but they don't cross paths with the main system the store uses.”

She had started her descent. He followed her even as he spoke. “The store has two systems, and you don't wonder why that is?”

“I haven't got a clue, that's what's going on,” Krissy replied. Then he tossed something down to her.

“Take these rubber gloves. They'll keep your hands clean. I apologize, I should have given them to you at the top. How much do you know about this town, Krissy?”

“Not much. It was a military base, or had one in it, once upon a time. And we grew up from there once we cleared the forests for farmland.”

“Back in the early 1960s, the powers-that-be saw fit to turn this town into a 'defense station' of sorts.”

“Defense against what?”

“...it's unclear.”

“How? I mean, how could people have forgotten why all this was built?”

The scale of the place was evident from the sound alone—that burbling noise she'd heard was now louder and more complicated now that she was at the ladder base. She took a few steps down the path, seeing the water dip off some distance ahead, into a large, vertical cylindrical tunnel. A few more steps revealed that this shaft was lined with branching walkways that led to dozens of stone mouths.

“All the records on the reason were erased,” the Blue Phantom said then.

“But people would—”

“—remember? Yes...they ought to, but there's a story there...a long one.”

Krissy was at a loss for words, but now the Phantom was leading her somewhere. “I will show you where I live, if you wish.”

“You promise me dark and terrible horrors, and now you're offering to show me where you live? That's not suspicious.”

“My home is my gallery. I keep trophies of my adventures there.”

“Like what? You keep vintage grocery items that aren't in stock anymore? I hate to say it, my friend, but they brought back Crystal Pepsi already.”

He laughed. “I know, and it was a miracle. But no, I have been to many parts of the world in my long life, as I hope I said before. Like Leroux's Erik, I am shaped by a life of long adventure.”

“What is your name, Phantom?”

“Erik.”

“...you're kidding.”

“I am. My name is Illiad Ziguwmar.”

“Ahem. You're kidding.”

Now he was in front of her, at the edge of the shaft. She wondered what was back down the other way of the sewer, but for now she watched him step down a staircase that led downward along the shaft walls.

“That one I'm not kidding on.”

“Where does it come from?”

“The Roma folk. One of my family lines is descended from the Romani crime lord Zigomar. I once was the leader of Z, his organization.” He swept his fingers through the air in the shape of the letter Z. “'Z is the life! Z is the death!' It was good fun, for a time—purposeful fun, in the end. Nowadays however, the organization exists to better the lives of Romani the world over.”

“That's a needed purpose.”

“Indeed.”

“My coworker, Eleanor del Rey, she's an immigrant. Her parents ended up in jail because they came here illegally—she herself doesn't know how she ended up escaping the same fate.”

“That doesn't make any sense, but Eleanor seems good at her work,” the Phantom said. “I will keep her safe, if you wish.”

“Just don't creep her out, I guess. Not everyone is as hard to rile as me.”

“What makes you so unflappable, my dear?”

Krissy did not reply.

The Phantom seemed to accept this, and he led her now to an iron door that sat below the arch of a stone bridge. There was light down there, as there was light all throughout the system. “I'm sure that these doors indicate the menace in question was the Zombie Plague of 1953. It crops up every ten years, when the Mesa of the Zombies returns to Earth, so we'll be getting one again soon if the locks fail...”

“What?”

“I am an adventurer.”

“You said that before, kinda. What does that mean?”

“We're almost there...I'll show you.”

“What, do you have King Kong down there?”

“No, he wouldn't fit. That's why I'm sure it was the Zombie Plague and not Ab-Horriblis. Ab-Horriblis, 2,000 tons that he was, couldn't squeeze through these passages—”

“Ab-Horriblis?”

Now he went quiet. They walked over a short bridge in a tight chamber, over running water. They passed into a strange area reminiscent of an office, with many locked rooms side by side along the stretch of a long hallway. “Is this it?”

The Phantom opened one of the doors. White light flooded out from the inside.

Krissy gasped. It was as clean and bright as a hospital. The white/pastel walls echoed that; the high-tech equipment substantiated it fully. This was like a superhero's lair. Only—

“Who cleans it for you?”

“My knowledge of chemistry has allowed me to create an aerosol that cleans the room for me. I still have to dust, though. I work alone, for now.”

Krissy admittedly didn't understand all the equipment she saw—unless it was a freezer unit, like the ones she worked on up above, or a microscope. “Where are these horrors you spoke of?”

“Patience, patience. It's through this door—the one surrounded by the blue curtains.”

She saw them hanging from the ceiling, pinned spread out so that they looked like theatre curtains. He opened the door for her once again (she hated when people did that) and crossed over into the next room. She could already tell it was significantly less hospitalish.

Here, now—it was like in old books. There were glass cases and museum stands of almost any size imaginable. The space was the size of two of her high school's gyms.

“This is...” She had no adjective. It was beyond amazing, para-incredible. “What is all this?”

“Some of them are replicas, admittedly. That's not a real Horriblis claw.” He gestured to a large, bony structure at least three times her size. “The real Iron Warrior was destroyed in a battle involving the scientist-spy Boris Orloff.” Now he pointed at a large robot, with a singular lamp for its eye—its head donned with a comically-oversized top hat.

“What's this turban?”

“It belonged to Swami Talpur, one of the agents of the Lord of Chaos. He was the successor to Swami Degar and Prince Saliano in that regard.”

“And this rapier?”

“Ah! The strange case of the Student of Prague. Not only was he doubled, poor man, but his life was doubled. The unusual circumstances of his haunted life were cloned in time, and nearly doubled again into the 1860s. Those events threatened to consume all of history.”

Dozens of names bombarded her, from the plaques at the base of the cages. “Kul'ul Flesh Artifact.” “Falcon Statue, Malta Origin.” “Remains of the Giant Rat of Sumatra.” “And this? It looks like this has a story to it.”

The Phantom could not hide his grin as she looked at the last case on the row. “Would you like to hear it?”