King of the Chapterplays, by Nora Vorion and AMB

 

 Adapted from the gripping limited series now streaming on CIRCUS™

It was in the summer of ‘46 that the Hollywood-That-Was began to sink into the ravenous bog upon which it had been built.

The first house to slope away into the swamp was Universal. That hallowed, golden palace, which had served as Frankenstein’s tomb and Dracula’s castle alike, found its frightful figures of fear no longer welcome in the world of wartime horror. Shock rippled across the whole of its halls, shaking loose skeletons and spider-webs, but there was no point in resisting the truth—the terror unleashed by the Axis had made tales of the undead unpalatable for the general public. Horror in the post-War world would hereafter be gilded or gelded by comedy, or else forced to retreat into the realm of thrillers, noir, and mysteries—and soon, even those came under threat.

This was demonstrated aptly when that dreary-hot summer saw Universal release a 13-chapter film serial, The Mysterious Mr. M. A pulse-pounding chiller of epic proportions, M’s plot featured master criminal Anthony Waldron’s return from his supposed death in Africa as the head of a conspiracy that sought control of a super-powered submarine. In order to keep up the illusion that he was dead, Waldron posed as a fictitious mastermind, Mr. M, when making his demands. However, this piqued the ire of a real crime-lord called Mr. M, who took control of Waldron’s operation by threatening to expose him. Thus was Waldron caught between the twin menaces of the harsh-whispering Mr. M and the forces of law and order, with the latter represented ably by serial monarch Dennis Moore and reliable he-man Richard Martin. Waldron had a secret weapon in the form of hypnotreme, a serum capable of erasing memories and creating perfect trances. He used this to control his elderly grandmother, under whose house he was hiding—and in the film’s most gut-wrenching scenes, he even managed to turn the heroes, who were all trusted friends, against each other, so irresistible was hypnotreme’s influence.

That dramatic, convention-twisting premise wasn’t what really mattered about M. No, the most vital part was the announcement that came with its release: Universal was leaving the serial picture business. After 32 long, glorious years of producing chapterplays, they were stepping down, leaving just two studios—Republic and Columbia—in the business of making such films. The three-decade tradition saw Universal make a whopping 137 serials. Even if they each averaged just 12 episodes a serial, that meant they’d created over 1,600 cliffhanger capers for Americans to enjoy all across the nation. Now it was all over. No dough in the horror game anymore, it was said, nor in the majority of its neighbors—and that stuff was always at the core of the serials, behind the gadgets and flashy action. Mystery villains, hands in the dark, sinister betrayals…

“All over…” muses the lonely man, pacing back and forth. “It can’t be—it can’t be all over…”

There was blowback against the decision, of course. The exhibs, the theater owners, they complained that serials were big sellers among children. A lot of kids didn’t come to the movies for the main feature, just for the serial chapter and B-movie they were showing. Universal refused to budge, citing changing attitudes among grown-up audiences, but in the wake of their lapse, both Sam Katzman at Columbia and Herb Yates at Republic made a solemn promise that they’d keep the serial-hungry public well-fed for years to come. And so they did, dutifully and loyally.

For a time, anyway.

“All promises inevitably fail…” he says. “All of them, dirty liars…”

The next castle fell in 1955, when Yates let down his mandate. In their heyday Republic and the chapterplays were synonymous—you could not speak of one without referring to the other. It seemed like their lean filmmaking machine would chug on into eternity. But in 1955, they released King of the Carnival, a high-tension Cold War adventure pitting carnival acrobats against Communist counterfeiters. Audiences—audiences that included Mr. Saxon King—chewed their nails down to the cuticles as the tough and manly Harry Lauter fended off the evil schemes of “the Clown” and his frightening roughneck roustabouts, Travis and Daley. It was a fantastic adventure, unsurpassed by anything Republic had previously turned out. But there was a reason why the studio poured their heart and soul into it: it was to be their last. Nine long years after Universal’s ill-received exit, Republic also resigned from the business of producing chapterplay motion pictures. The train screech-halted on the tracks, abandoned in the wilds to rust and rustication. The bombshell decision swiftly exposed what had only been hinted at nine years prior: there was a snake in Hollywood’s Garden of Eden. And its corruptive whispers were being heard by more and more every day.

For years to come Republic would re-edit their old serial content to feature length—but these 100-minute cuts of their old glory day releases were intended largely for television broadcast.

The demon has many names. Goggle box. Boob tube. Idiot’s lantern. None of them captures fully how truly stupid it is, how distasteful.

“There are other demons…” the lonely man insists.

It could not be denied—the nascent medium of television was bringing changes to the world of the silver screen. Despite its barer budgets and chintzier production quality, TV was rapidly laying claim to the world of serial storytelling. Radio had always been the serials’ big brother, but it had been a purely auditory form of broadcast, never encroaching on film’s right to the world of the visual. The church of the motion pictures and the state of radio were often kept separate, save for moments of prosperous collaboration. Yet now that TV could bring miniature chapterplays to people’s living rooms, studios like Republic felt they had no business continuing to charge the public a piece of their ticket price to display what they could get at home. The old ways had to change.

For diehard fans of the serials—like Mr. Saxon King—this was completely and absolutely unacceptable.

Of course, King was no fool. He understood that Republic had had many killers—it wasn’t just TV. He knew that behind the scenes, old Uncle Herb’s affair with a certain Ms. Vera Ralston had also contributed to the company’s ongoing financial woes. “Never shtup your star, and never try to make a star out of someone you’re shtupping,” that was King’s motto. He’d stayed true to it, and it had kept him in business all these years. Beyond that, though, the real Brutus had struck years before Yates had started any shtupping. A certain little hood outfit called the U.S. Supreme Court had thrown in the wrench back in 1948, via a case called United States v. Paramount. That shoddily-crafted ruling had ended the studios’ long-held system of block booking, whereby the studios forced exhibs to buy large blocks of minor films alongside their desirable A-star pictures. This was one of the main ways by which the big studios sold off their B-material, whether it be straight B-movies or serials. The exhibs had always lamented block booking because it ladled them with pictures that they claimed cost them more than they made, but people like King knew better. Block booking was good for them. Sure, A-movies were the steak, but the bonus features were the soup. The broth of the thing. All the vitamins boil off into the broth. It was in the serials, King knew, that the real art lay. You just had to have brains enough to see it.

The Mysterious Mr. M never saw it coming—not TV, and not the end of block booking. But it was still a canary in the mine. And now that Republic was down alongside Universal, the fumes were all around them. Only Columbia was able to rise above the poison.

TV was circling its head like a famished buzzard.

“I call thee by Air, by Water, by Shade and Sun…” King whispers. “I call you by Lucifuge, by Ozmodeus, by the Great God Pan…”

Something stirs. Something from the far side. Something from the shifting sands and fallen towers of distant, slumbering Ongonat…

King wasn’t the kind to bury his head in the sand—no sir. As soon as Republic fell he insinuated himself into the graces of Columbia’s Sam Katzman. The two had actually gone to school together, or so King claimed, and a reminder of that fact had actually stood for something in Katzman’s mind, to King’s great surprise. It was in this manner that King learned, to his tremendous horror, that the final house was about to fall—for Columbia’s own serial production was scheduled to finish out by the end of the year. This wasn’t without reason: Katzman’s most recent serial, The Adventures of Captain Africa, had ended up an unmitigated disaster. It had begun as a sequel to their earlier adaptation of that mystery-man comic strip The Phantom, which King considered to be one of their best flicks. Unfortunately, the studio had lost the rights to the strip, and King Features, in their boneheaded disregard for the cultural significance of serial film, refused to lower their asking price on a renewal fee, requiring a revamp of the main character halfway through filming. These extensive rewrites and reshoots caused the finished production to go severely over-budget, during a time when Columbia’s execs were already keen on cutting funding to their serials. This conjunction of calamities caused the studio to order Katzman to shut down the serial unit entirely. When King asked why Katzman was still making serials, the old B-picture huckster had cited exhib demand. A few major theaters still demanded these sorts of movies, but only a few. He was going to make two more serials—Perils of the Wilderness and Blazing the Overland Trail—but then, that would be it for chapterplays in Hollywood.

“This mustn’t be!” King had exclaimed, stroking his mustache excitedly. “Don’t you understand? Boys and girls all across America don’t want to sit at home watching television! They want to come into the city and watch their chapter adventures on a big screen—why, I tell you, Sam, if there’s a way God intended kids to be entertained, it’s sitting in a dark room watching big, strong men save the world!”

“That may be,” Katzman said, puffing on his cigar. (The whole office smelled of stale smoke.) “But all the same, they can get that at home, just by turnin’ the living room lamp off when the TV’s goin’.”

“It’s not the same,” King murmured. “Since the Great Depression, the Saturday matinee has been a staple of our society—just as much as the flag, or apple pie, or Superman. You go to the movies, and you get the A-movie, you get the B-movie, you get the cartoon, the newsreel, the comedy short—and you get the serial chapter, Sam! I tell you, I can take the TV getting the news and even the cartoons. But if we lose the comedy short and the B-movie—and above them all, the serial—the movies won’t be the same anymore. And I tell you, Sam, I’ll—I’ll quit making pictures when that happens.”

Katzman scoffed.

“I got my orders, kiddo—besides, I can’t lose money just because you’ve got a case of nostalgia. I didn’t live the same childhood as you, and thank goodness, in my opinion. You’re clingin’ to something that doesn’t have a sliver of a future. But if you believe in this dead horse so much—why quit? I haven’t seen any of your films, but they can’t be any worse than any of the shit I’ve made. If no one else is making serials, then maybe it’s on your shoulders. You could be that Atlas.”

In that moment, King beamed, and he straightened the lapels of his brown suit.

“Maybe you’re right, sir…” he said, nodding. “Maybe you’re right…”

“I call upon the spirits of the Totem of the Final Abrogation,” he chants. “As I am of the blood of Bridger, I call on the spirits of Marr and Devlin—Day and Night, Good and Evil. So may they come to me, bidden and commanded. So may the specters of Ongonat grant my prayer…”

The spirits of the fallen desert world of Ongonat are alive, distinct, but unshaped. They become what they are invoked to become. The curse placed upon them by their child-hating ancestors denies them agency on all levels of existence. When people call them across the Infinidad to other worlds, they are reshaped into new figures, new characters, new facets of existence. And yet they are still always, on some level, themselves…

The pair called Marr and Devlin were un-created before, unshaped. They had existed previously, within the great aether that joins the ghosts of Ongonat together. They had lives together; they were in love. But by King’s bidding they are renewed, redefined, reshuffled—

The pain they suffer now is beyond imagining.

When at last Blazing the Overland Trail came out, Saxon King refused to miss a single chapter—it was the most affecting moment of his entire life. Not only was it was to be the final serial of Hollywood history, it was in the truest sense made for him. By King’s urging Sam had requested some changes to George Plympton’s screenplay, vital changes; thus did it come to pass that the protagonist of Trail had been resculpted into a historical figure of great import. The hero of this final serial was Tom Bridger—an Army Scout of the 1860s who had been King’s great ancestor. King’s birth name had been Saxon Bridger before he changed it to King in honor of the great King family who haunted serial history. (These included Eddie King from King of the Circus, Dave King from King of the Royal Mounted, Tom King from King of the Texas Rangers, Steve King from King of the Forest Rangers, Jeff King from King of the Rocket Men, and Bert King from King of the Carnival.) Sam had appreciated King’s support and company, and wanted to honor his great love of chapterplays by referencing his bloodline in the very last of them. For King it was one of the few times in his existence where he felt true gratitude to another human being.

Blazing the Overland Trail turned out to be the finest serial ever produced. Its extraordinary tale concerned Tom Bridger joining forces with Pony Express rider Ed Marr to combat the “Black Raiders” gang, who, under the direction of the vile and sadistic Rance Devlin, sought to exploit the chaos of the War Between the States to establish an independent “Empire of Crime” in North America. Across 15 chapters, Bridger and Marr battled not only the Raiders but also the wild Indians they stirred up. It was a nonstop blur of gunfights, cavalry charges, kidnappings, and escapes. If Louis Feuillade, French inventor of the cliffhanger serial, could see this effort, Saxon King was sure he would weep tears of blissful joy.

When the curtain came down on the fifteenth chapter, King refused to believe it was all over. In his mind, it was only just beginning. Maybe he was the only one in this theater, in this whole world, who believed that the serials weren’t dead—but didn’t all great dreams start with one determined, rugged individual imposing their will on everyone else?

He could keep this Golden Age of Serials going. It didn’t have to be the end. He could do it.

With a little black magic, he could do it.

Something like black magic, anyway. Something sticky and treacly, something that probed deep into the places where reality was wounded. Something born of shadow and blood, and the knowledge of the beings who walked this world before man.

The leprous books of the Elder Things were written long before the birth of humanity, but nonetheless they survived into the present day. From their unholy pages, King could find knowledge of worlds like hidden Ongonat, home of the Ongonati spirit-walkers. His delight upon discovering the malleability of the spirit-walkers was indescribable. It was as though whatever power had blighted and cursed that distant planet had wanted to breed a race of perfect actors. If he was reading the Elder Things’ words correctly—and there was no guarantee that he was—these entities could be endowed with any number of personal attributes. They could become—anyone.

If he was Bridger, then he needed a Marr and a Devlin to complete his dynamic.

“Arise, pawns of the desert!” he cries, dancing through incense smoke and jangling beads. “Arise! Arise!”

The ritual has lasted hours. Long ago he ceased to sweat, and instead his pores drip blood. Yet he dances on, whirling and twirling on feet that burn like they’re shod with red-hot shoes. The intensity builds, escalates, percolates, resonates—

And they break through, through chronal membranes and spatial cell walls, spilling alive and naked into the mortal world.

“M-Marr? Wh-what’s happened—?”

Devlin—her name is Devlin now—had known her by another name before, but now—that name is lost. Sanded away from her memory by something coarse and cruel.

They grimace against the pain, whose coming they’ve dreaded all their lives. They brace against it, and at the same time let it course through them. Even as it fades, they feel the strings begin to grip them: puppet-strings. They are falling into the role, into the compact.

And then, all at once, it is done. The transition is complete. Out with the old, in with the new—there’s nothing to do but accept it.

Marr sighs contemptuously, and snaps her fingers. At once the two of them are clad in basic tunics and pants. King thought nothing of their nudity—all his affections and related impulses are withheld entirely for the serials.

Marr turns her cat-green eyes on him, and stand up from her prone position on the ground. She takes a moment to feel her own mortality, running a hand across her nearly shaved scalp. And then she asks him:

“What the hell do you want with us?”

“Fascinating,” King tuts. “A pretty one and an ugly one. You, short-hair, are the ugly one.”

“Hey—!” both women exclaim, but he raises a silencing hand.

“I’ll tell you what you’re here for: you are to be my actress-servants. My Ariel and my Caliban. That was the thought I imposed on the ritual. You cannot resist me.”

It’s true—much as they both desire in this moment to beat the hell out of him, they cannot. They are Ongonati, and so they are bound by the terms of the invisible compact. That was the fate their mad sires chose for them, and for all they know it is how things shall always be for their people.

The strain is, in some ways, more painful than the summoning.

“I have no untoward intentions towards you,” the lonely man insists. “I just need two ladies to help me make my movie. You know what a movie is, don’t you?” He laughs. “Ohh, ‘course y’do. I put that in the compact as well. You know everything you need to know about Hollywood. And I think you’ll be perfect. Devlin, I love the red hair, you look like a little Irish flame. And Marr—we’ll make you work. I can swing it, I’m sure! It’s gonna be a blast, ladies. You ready?”

Their faces say it all—but their arms and legs won’t obey their minds, not yet anyway. No Ongonati wants to be torn away from home, but this seems to be a uniquely disappointing fate: to be trapped in the web of some insane human. It’s true, he’s shown them all they’d need to see when he wove the compact. And while they fear nothing bodily from him—they’ve glimpsed something in him that has the potential to become the worst master a slave could end up with. For even though he himself fails to see it, Saxon King is one of those souls who ignores their own plainness, and seeks to bring the whole universe under their dominion.

* * *

In a dark, unseen world occupying the intersecting borders of reality, another figure had called forth beings from beyond. But not from the dust of Ongonat—from someplace far stranger. In one of the many alternate variants of Earth’s 21^st Century, nearly seventy years on from the current point in time, the Congress of Earth’s United States made or would make a supernatural pact of their own, bargaining with anomalous powers to cause an event known as the Junpi. Under a swollen sun turned green by the Junpi’s baleful energies, the Earth stood ravaged by chaos and turmoil as all the laws of nature were dissolved, mutilated, and desecrated. Monsters walked openly and all the civilizations of the world stood in ruin, with most survivors mutated beyond recognition, either physically or spiritually.

In spite of everything, a handful of new cities emerged from this hellish, untamed landscape, rising from the rubble of the old, lost urban sprawls—none of these were bigger or brighter than Golden Splendoropolis, where crime was the law of the land. Here, the great Crime Barons, who were as obsessed with Hollywood’s early days as Saxon King was, carried out bizarre felonies that were half-crime, half-performance art. Occasionally, a duo or trio of similarly-camp costumed “heroes” would combat them and their deadly cliffhanger traps, but most of the time the populace of Splendoropolis stood powerless before their antisocial tendencies.

Time and space were fluid within the Junpi, and so for one who came from far beyond its seething disorder, it was child’s play to pull the minds of these warlords backwards in time, to an era from before the destruction of their world. For the time-traveler known as the Leader, or otherwise the Boss, the Captain, or any number of other appropriate synonyms, to even call it child’s play was a laughable notion.

The Leader, who was dressed head to toe in all-obscuring black cloth, was a devious one. By playing upon the quasi-real fabric of film, he was able to “spin” a variety of host bodies for these visiting spirits. Part flesh, part cinema, they would be his Evil Council—through whom he would deal a deadly blow to some old enemies of his.

Each of the Crime Barons had fresh identities in their newly-fashioned 20^th Century bodies. The cruel master of logical conundrums, the One-Eyed Garlic Vendor, took on the form of “Dandy Darnell.” The loathsome avian-obsessed kingpin, the Cassowary, was reborn as “Pegleg.” As for Offensively Stereotyped Dissociative Identity Disorder Man, he found new flesh as “Mr. M.” But all of them were as nothing besides the Leader’s crown jewel: the Chucklin’ Mummer, now reshaped into “Carter the Communist Clown.”

The crime-artists were each caught off-guard by their materialization, to varying degrees, and the Leader had taken advantage of the disarray to proclaim his intentions for them. All of them proved to be surprisingly eager listeners, understanding at once that anyone who could pull their minds back through time could lead them to great riches and power. But there was one among them who was unconvinced. From the first, Carter the Clown feigned humility during the Leader’s monologue, and only thinly at that. As soon as the masked archfiend finished his explanations, he tried to do unto his host what he did best: turn him into a joke.

“So you’ve brought us into the past as serial villains, have you, Leader, old boy?” Carter giggled. “Well, I happen to know a little about antique entertainment myself—I’m something of a vaudevillian back in good ol’ G.S.! For me, the serials are nothing but vaudeville’s burlesque on nitrate—which makes them part of my kingdom! So I happen to know that behind that mask there’s nothing more than Otis Green, a mild, chubby shopkeeper with Napoleonic delusions of grandeur.”

At this, the Leader laughed triumphantly, and lifted a gloved hand to his black hood. With a firm jerk he pulled it away, revealing a black-mustachioed face with piercing dark eyes. None of them recognized him (at least it seemed Carter didn’t recognize him), but he soon explained himself.

“I am not Otis Green. My name is Dr. Maubeuge, late of Germany,” he said. “You may have heard of me. By the early 1970s I will have occupied no fewer than eight different human bodies across five decades, counting the one I’m wearing now. At this point in my timeline, however, my crime empire in the 20^th Century is now far behind me—I have resumed my former journeys through chronality.”

“Dr. Maubeuge? I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Mr. M, aka Offensively Stereotyped DID Man. “You have inspired a veritable religion of crime! You’re a celebrity among the anarchy-emperors of the Junpi.”

“Ha! He doesn’t impress me much,” Carter chuckled. “‘Humans bodies?’ What is he saying, he’s some kinda space alien?”

“That’s not important. My proposal is what matters,” Maubeuge said. “Perhaps in the course of your respective reigns over Golden Splendoropolis, you’ve heard of the time- and space-traveler, Captain Video. An annoying do-gooder who maintains an army of loyal agents across time.”

“You don’t need to tell me about him!” Dandy Darnell cried. “When I’m riddlin’ up the place as the One-Eyed Garlic Vendor, I like to do it uninterrupted, capisce? That fucker’s kicked my ass three different times, and that’s three times too many!”

“You know he is a perennial nuisance, then. How would you like it if we were able to eliminate him once and for all?”

That got them thinking. All save for cunning Carter, whose broad grin contained no sincere amusement. He already had Maubeuge figured out. Maubeuge, for his part, observed the irritation in his guest’s eyes, letting it confirm what he already knew: Carter may have been completely insane, but he was the cleverest of them all. He could not be fooled.

“So what is it you’re sellin’, kiddo?” asked Pegleg, né the Cassowary.

“You may be aware that Captain Video is a servant of the Higher Powers, one of their key combatants in the ongoing conflict known as the Great Game,” Maubeuge said. “It is by their bidding that he maintains fronts in the 19^th, 20^th, and 22^nd Centuries. I come to you on behalf of his greatest enemy, Frank Blayden—the dimensional traveler who calls himself the Rattler. His life was fictionalized in one of the same film serials from which I’ve derived your new identities. Mr. Blayden is very knowledgeable about the nature of dimensional warfare, as well as metafictional combat. There is a reason, gentlemen, I have cast you as serial villains. We will be waging war on Captain Video through the very fabric that sustains him…”

“This is starting to sound like a bunch of hooey,” said Mr. M. “Metafictional combat? What do you mean by that?”

“Before the Junpi, people on your world had a term for a specific period of entertainment history: the Golden Age of Television. There is a ‘canon’ of early shows that shaped and reshaped the possibilities of TV as a form of storytelling. Playhouse 90, The Honeymooners, Gunsmoke—and the first major sci-fi program in history, Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Some call it an adaptation of the truth, crafted with intent; others call it a reflection of real events, an emergent property created by Video’s influence on this planet’s timestream. Its true nature doesn’t matter. What does matter is that there is that for all his adventures in time, Captain Video’s heart is in the 20^th Century. It is anchored there, to the early ‘50s, when he had the most eyes on him. The innovation his program represents is synonymous with him—from a certain point of view he is television.”

The villains looked at him curiously, as if not fully grasping the nature of his words. Carter the Clown, for his part, folded his arms defiantly and leaned back in his chair. He knew what the doctor was proposing.

Maubeuge went on: “I believe that within the current iteration of time there has emerged an individual who stands a chance of staking this heart I speak of. I believe that with the proper incubation and nudging this individual could be transformed into an agent who could benefit us greatly.”

“Wait, you’re tellin’ us you wanna do somethin’ to make some guy destroy TV—and that’ll kill Cap’n Video?” Dandy Darnell wasn’t as thick as he looked. “Like—you’re talkin’ about blowin’ up an idea here, ain’tcha? You’re gonna destroy the idea of TV?”

“If I get my way, yes, we will destroy the concept of TV,” Maubeuge affirmed. He grinned widely. “And why not? We’re all movie people, at the end of the day. My own escapades have been heavily fictionalized by human filmmakers. And don’t tell me you’re not getting a thrill to inhabiting bodies from the Golden Age of Hollywood? You are such big fans of the olden days, after all.”

Darnell, M, and Pegleg, for their part, were rather charmed by their host bodies. And they were charmed by the idea of destroying TV, too. They had no fondness for media that followed on from their beloved Old Hollywood—none of them knew that the camp they embodied and celebrated would emerge as a reactive movement on television in the decade following that Golden Age’s conclusion. Like all warlords, they had no need for true history, only biased versions of it that suited their selfish interests.

“If you can really pull this off, kiddo, you can count me in,” Pegleg said.

“Yeah, me too,” M threw in.

“An’ me three!” declared Darnell. “Of course, I expect you to bring some real fireworks…I wanna be wowed, see?”

“Rest assured, it will be a battle to remember,” Maubeuge said. “As your Leader, I promise you glory and victory over one of the prize bulldogs of the Higher Powers. To claim Video’s head would be a feather in any Crime Baron’s cap.”

“Despite the fact that your dumb bozo so-called ‘plan’ would dissolve Captain Video bodily, thus leaving no head to claim…I’m interested,” said the ever-grinning Carter. “I notice you didn’t wait for my say-so before counting your chickens. They haven’t hatched yet, ‘Beugie, old boy!”

“But I may assume that you give your consent?”

“Why not? I’m a cheap date.”

“Good. You don’t have to agree with me on any sort of ideological grounds, Mr. Mummer. I recognize that a man of your prestige is accustomed to certain treatment, and rest assured that I will do my best to accommodate you.”

“Ohh, you will? Well, in that case, I’m going to need a million dollars—Canadian, of course—a boat, a nice boat, one I can name after my mama—and fifty bottles of glue. Crazy glue, naturally.”

“I—will do my best to grant that request.” Maubeuge adjusted his black robes and cleared his throat. “You will find that I have arranged quarters for each of you. We currently occupy an extrauniversal pocket in spacetime that I believe could be agitated to grant us unique influence over the Earth. Indeed, this seems to be the right sort of place dimensionally for us to telepathically modulate the collective unconscious of humanity.”

“That easy, huh?” Carter inquired, but Maubeuge ignored him.

“It will involve the use of certain resonance devices I’ve placed aboard this…fortress. I will instruct you in their use in time. For now, I suggest that you all get comfortable. Head to your quarters, enjoy a meal from the food-manufacturer—it’s not one of the cheap models, gentlemen, you can be certain of that—and we’ll all talk later.”

Darnell, M, and Pegleg were most amenable to the suggestion, and stood up from their seats to leave the room. As they departed, one by one, Darnell looked back and observed that Carter was still seated. Furthermore, he was staring unblinkingly straight at Maubeuge—and now he’d put a little teeth into his smile.

“That guy gives me the creeps,” Darnell muttered; then he stalked out into the hall.

That left Maubeuge and Carter alone together.

“So,” Carter said. “I bet you think you’re hot shit, huh?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Don’t get funny with me—that’s my arena. Higher Powers, my left foot. I know what this ‘fortress’ is, and how it wormed its way into such a thing as an ‘extrauniversal pocket in spacetime.’ It’s like you were saying about host bodies—you’ve got yourself a human crust, that’s for sure, but with a creamy ascended being filling!” The Clown crossed his legs and took out a fat cigar. He snapped his fingers, which ignited an invisible powder he kept on his gloves, and with the discharge he lit the small tobacco-blimp. “If you’re going to put me on your little chessboard, you gotta pay me at least double what you’re paying those chumps. You’re right when you said I’m used to a certain kind of treatment. I’m a goddamn celebrity, dear boy! A modern American hero, in what’s left of my America. Sure, I may be nouveau riche, a self-made man, and a stinkin’ human at that (well, mostly so)—but I’ve still got rights…”

“Don’t worry—I’ll ensure that you’re far more than just a pawn.”

“Can I be the Queen? Not your Queen, of course, that’s very ew. But the idea of all that power—why, it makes me positively giddy inside!”

Maubeuge smirked. “You’ll be a fine weapon indeed, of that I’m sure. To help build your confidence in me, I’ll confirm what you must be suspecting: I’m rebelling against my people. I’ve had it out for them ever since they quelled my revolts on the home planet, to say nothing of everything they did to me after. I figure that slaying Captain Video will tilt the Great Game against them. At the very least, Blayden and his dynasty will give them trouble for a few centuries.” A quiet, whispered hiss escaped from between his teeth. “Crimes and Games are both domains of War,” he explained. “That was once an aspect I embodied, before I was…broken. Now I must occupy the sub-components.”

“Ah, but that’s not the end of the story, cove,” said Carter, now suddenly serious. “I think you’re a double agent, maybe even a double-double agent. I think that you don’t want Video dead at all—I think this whole destroying-TV thing is intended to backfire. I think—IthinkIthinkIthinkthereforeIam—you don’t want your people to lose your little timespace tiff. After all, who’dja rule over if they were all dead?”

For a moment it looked like Maubeuge was unnerved. The light in his proud, dark eyes faded briefly.

But only briefly. A smile broke out across his face, and it was mirrored on Carter’s own visage.

“We’ll discuss errant potentialities some other time. For now, it is satisfactory that I can count on your support.”

Carter stood from his seat and bowed graciously—and then let out an ear-piercing laugh. A laugh that echoed all through the halls of Maubeuge’s space-fortress. A laugh that went on ringing as he departed the chamber.

The Clown knew there wasn’t room for two double agents in this enterprise. After all, the Chucklin’ Mummer was the man of the hour, every hour. And so as long as there was a throne for the taking, he was going to get his chips in the Game.

* * *

Excerpt from the archives of the Arizona Sun Tribune:

APR. 13, 1864 – THE last remaining members of the Black Raiders gang, who terrorized the American West the previous year as part of crime-lord Rance Devlin’s efforts to subvert the federal government of the United States, were arrested Tuesday by Capt. Thomas S. Bridger, an Army Scout-turned-lawman active in these parts. The two surviving Raiders, “King” Rogers and “Wildcat” Kelly, gave accounts to journalists that attempted to slander the good character of Capt. Bridger, by saying that a third man, Peter “Ptomaine Pete” Tweedle, had been arrested along with them, only for Bridger to cruelly torture and kill him on their trek back to civilization. According to Kelly, Bridger “kept makin’ [them] stop every few miles or so, whereupon he’d take out ‘is big Bowie knife and cut off little pieces of Pete—just parts of his skin here an’ there. And he’d pop ‘em little pieces right into his maw, like vittles.” When reporters asked why Capt. Bridger was putting these strips of flesh in his mouth, Kelly answered most emphatically: “To ett.”

Rogers affirmed Kelly’s strange story that the former Scout was seized by cannibalistic urges, insisting that as time went on, Bridger’s apparent appetite for flesh grew and grew, until at last he was cutting out some of Pete’s organs and eating them raw and bloody on the trail. After a point, the badly-wounded Pete was unable to continue, and Rogers explained: “He took ‘im behind a tall rock in the desert, some hunnerd yards from the trail we were treadin’. From behind that rock I heard a scream—a scream that I hope I never hear the likes of again. The Captain came out and his lips were bloody—we didn’t see what he did to Pete, and we didn’t ask. I pray no one ever tells me, if’n they happen to find out.”

While these unusual complaints are likely to be nothing more than the result of the fevered imaginations of two half-mad brigands of ill repute, there is still some interest on behalf of local authorities to investigate this matter—though for many settlers in the area, the character of Capt. Bridger remains spotless and unassailable.

They call it GAME for a reason: the thrill of the chase. Thrill of the hunt. And yes, perhaps even the cleaning, too. The preparation of the trophy, alongside the eatin’-parts. All excitin’-like. All FUN.

The hunter likes to be well-fed on his hunt. A woodsman eats of his own GAME, of the pheasant and of the venison of the buck, sampling his fare below the canopy of what was once their home. The humble, rustic mushroom is the companion of his kill, a staple of his stew.

But a cowboy likes a little beefheart. Eat some now, cook the rest up with a mess of beans. That’s country food, right there. The “special” beefheart. The prize of the GAME.

Sometimes you even cook yerself up a Video Ranger or two. A Western Agent, pawn o’ the other side. Little gritty, but no worse’n rats. (That’s a GAME joke, that one.)

Some of them get real young, those Rangers—child soldiers, Video Veal—

* * *

It was 1957—a whole year had come and gone since the summoning ritual, and despite his best efforts, Saxon King had failed to secure funding for his proposed serial. He had procured an office and a production lot by cashing out his life savings, but he needed real money if he was going to be able to buy film. Editing, camera work, scripting—those were easy, he’d take of those himself. But without film he was like a bird without wings.

He chose to keep calm and take things one investment meeting at a time.

Marr and Devlin still couldn’t fight against him physically, and he could stop them from speaking with a command—but nothing stopped them from speaking derisively of him, and to their surprise he allowed them to more often than not. After a few months it became clear that he was insecure enough to push around in small little ways without much consequence. And so when King started lamenting the death of yet another dead piece of Old Hollywood to cope with fucking up yet another investor conference, the two ladies bit back a bit.

“It’s just hard to believe, girls, that the days of the old oaters have died away,” he said, with a sigh. “The old-style B-Westerns. This meeting proves we can’t make our serial a cowboy picture like we wanted. Market just isn’t there. Why, there ain’t been a Western backing up an A-film since ‘54, when Wayne Morris’ series with Allied Artists wrapped up with Two Guns and a Badge. That was a damn fine movie—I’ll never forget that villain, Moore, and his rustling plot. Truly one of the most evil and vilely sadistic bad guys ever put on the screen.”

“Cattle rustling is the ultimate evil?” questioned Devlin.

“I don’t miss the B-Westerns,” said Marr. “I haven’t seen any save through your memories, King. But from what I glimpsed they all looked to same to me. That’s saying nothing of how they treat people who aren’t white. Comedy Mexicans, minstrelsy blacks, savage Indians…”

“You don’t understand! There’s nothing at all in all the history of man like a Western!” King was stroking his mustache, as he was fond of doing. He tried always to hide that it was fake, that he glued it on every morning. “It’s a uniquely American form of entertainment. Our frontier spirit is unlike any other culture’s. The conquest of the West is eternal proof of our natural superiority. It’s not racist to state facts about a people’s accomplishments.”

“Actually, the Western genre as we know it was created by Germans,” Marr said. “Have you ever read the Old Shatterhand stories?”

“The what? I don’t care about that. I care about the Westerns on film. And I mourn the art form that went out with Wayne Morris. ‘John’ Wayne Morris, I called him privately.” He huffed and leaned back in his office chair. “There was one wannabe pilgrim a couple years back who sought to revive the oater tradition. Johnny Carpenter, his name was. He managed to get investors, even though his Westerns were terrible. Half of them were scripted by this idiot of an unknown, Edward Wood, Jr. I met Wood and Carpenter on one of their shooting locations, and at once I knew that neither of them belonged anywhere near film. Wood couldn’t write if his life depended on it, but Carpenter was on a whole ‘nother level—he spends all of the money he makes from his movies running a ranch for crippled and half-wit children. Can you believe that? All that money going to waste, when it could be used to make more B-Westerns. If he really cares for tradition, why doesn’t he fight for it?”

“I’ve heard of this Carpenter guy—I read about him in the…newspapers, I think they’re called?” Devlin crossed her legs, which were still dressed in the plain pants Marr had conjured. “I remember he said that he had been in an accident that had almost crippled him, and when he recovered he promised your people’s God that he’d help disabled children as thanks for healing him.”

“Yeah, he sounds like a good guy,” said Marr. “And if we were probing into some dubious metafictionality, there’s some symbolism in his name. I mean, charitable man of God…initials J.C.…a carpenter…”

Devlin made a sign of disapproval, and Marr chafed at that somewhat. They couldn’t discuss their feelings openly, and so facial expressions and telepathic murmurs were their means of communication. Devlin tried to tell her partner: Treating real people like characters is stooping to his level. And Marr wanted to reply: If we are barred from playing with reality, aren’t we just trapped by another compact?

Creative disagreements—those were the last thing this trio expected to encounter. Marr and Devlin wanted their old life back, the life that seemed like something out of a dream, when they were unified and unstoppable and free. The more they became enmeshed in this world the more it corrupted them, eroded them, turned them against each other. As for King, he’d expected total obedience, without difference of opinion. Not because he was a force of authority, but because he couldn’t understand how anyone could fail to see the correctness of his vision.

But later that night, when King was asleep, the two lovers held each other, and whispered apologies for being ensnared. They understood at once they needed no forgiveness, because it was not their fault that this human had gained an advantage over them.

It was a momentary advantage, one which could be broken.

The past was the present was the future for them, when sleep touched their minds. At nights, in the shadows, they loved and schemed.

It was around this time that Saxon caught word from Sam at Columbia that Jules White was shutting down the studio’s comedy shorts unit. Just as they’d been the last to make serials, Columbia was the last to make comedy shorts. Already Andy Clyde and Vernon & Quillan had seen their stars driven to Earth, but now the coffin was being lowered into the Earth once and for all. The matinee theater bill would forever after be limited exclusively to a main attraction and a B-movie. Everything else had gone over to the black-and-white signals of the living room devil-demon.

At once Saxon grasped the significance of White’s rash decision: for it could not have been made unless he had fired the Three Stooges. Indeed, after 24 years of delighting audiences, through the Great Depression and World War II and Korea and beyond, Moe and Larry, along with their excellent impromptu Stooge Joe Besser, were now entirely jobless. Worse, they had been physically barred from returning to the Columbia lot to say goodbye to their old coworkers. It was a sign of how this television plague was eroding the crust of old Hollywood—it seemed inevitable that the movies as an institution would soon come crumbling down. Why, if they could take Besser out—who could say who was next?

Saxon would soon get his answer. He had been closely watching Universal’s handling of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of B-pictures, as well as Allied Artist’s Bowery Boys films. These were the last trickles of what had once been a vital, thriving river of B-movie franchises. Philo Vance, Bulldog Drummond, Boston Blackie, the Lone Wolf, Charlie Chan—these characters and dozens of others, drawn from pulps and comic strips and plain old imagination, had spawned countless series of hour-long delights that well complemented the serials that Saxon so deeply loved. Some of them went on for quite some time, too: Blondie, for instance, received 28 movies, while Charlie Chan ran on for over 40. The Bowery Boys were somethin’ else, though. If one counted the time they spent as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids, the Little Tough Guys, and the Persnickety Wee Bastards, they had made nearly 100 films with various configurations of membership. But there was no such thing as invincibility in Tinseltown. Universal had started the collapse with Mysterious Mr. M, and now they were bringing down that same hammer again with Ma and Pa Kettle on Old McDonald’s Farm. Percy Kilbride had already retired as Pa Kettle, the dirty coward, being replaced with the greatly inferior Parker Fennelly, but now Marjorie Main, who played Ma—sweet Marjorie, an unforgettable pillar of cinema—was announcing that she was retiring as well. Universal could’ve recast Ma Kettle as they had Pa, but they had decided instead to axe the whole series. Which meant…

“We have to do whatever we can to keep the Bowery Boys alive.”

“How do you propose we do that?” Marr asked. She and Devlin were used to King making these sorts of statements apropos of nothing, as he had done here.

“Well, there’s a Bowery Boys movie in theaters even as we speak: Up in Smoke. I’ve seen it already, it’s about Sach selling his soul to the Devil. Very, very funny,” Saxon said.

“Who’s Sach?”

“The main character of the Bowery Boys! He’s played by Huntz Hall, the world’s greatest living comedian—besides Joe Besser, of course. He’s the perfect idiot, everyone loves him.”

“I have a feeling I know what you’re going to suggest,” Devlin said.

“If we see that movie repeatedly—if we attend every Saturday matinee it plays on for the next month—we’ll drive the box office take sky-high! Allied’ll have no choice but to yield to the public’s demands and continue putting the Bowery Boys on our screens.”

“Let’s see,” Marr said, “three people buying three tickets a day at 30 cents a ticket. Each Saturday we bring in $2.70. So by the end of the month, Allied Artists will have made $10.80 off of us.”

“You’re right, that’s not enough,” Saxon agreed. He massaged his chin thoughtfully for a moment. “The multiplex downtown seats 80 for their matinee double-features. We’ll have to buy out the whole theater. 80 seats three times a day at 30 cents a pop, for four weeks. That’s…”

“…$288,” Marr concluded, rolling her eyes. “Not exactly record-breaking receipts.”

“Fine! I’ll book every theater in the state! There are nearly 80 screens in total that’ll be showing Up in Smoke on Saturdays…I’ll buy them all out!”

“You’re going to spend $23,040 just to make sure that Up in Smoke plays to empty seats?” asked Devlin. “Let’s just use that money to make our movie.”

“No! The Bowery Boys must live! I must persuade the powers that be to keep the B-movie tradition afloat.” He sighed. “You see, ladies, this is a culture war we’re fighting. A war for the sake of history itself. It’s no game, despite what some will tell you. We must keep the culture receptive to our forthcoming endeavor. We’ve gotta keep people’s minds locked on the old ways of Hollywood—the one true faith of movies! The full matinee program, darlings—serial and all! I tell you, girls, we will fight for its survival with every scrap of vim we’ve got!”

The next day, Devlin brought in a newspaper and set it delicately on Saxon’s desk. “What’s this?” the filmmaker asked.

“You can read, yes?” was her retort.

Saxon picked it up and scanned it.

“‘Film producer Allied Artists announced today that they will be…’” —at this point his voice broke into an angry, deafening scream— “‘…CONCLUDING THEIR LONG-RUNNING BOWERY BOYS SERIES EARLY NEXT YEAR WITH THEIR 99TH ENTRY, IN THE MONEY?!?!?’”

He started hyperventilating, and letting out a low whimpering sound that could be transcribed vaguely as, “Hffhehhhehhhmmmnnn. Mmmnn, mnnnn, mmm, mm.”

Slowly, his eyes turned towards the artificial potted plant that decorated the corner of his office. His shoulders heaved up and down as hard breaths surged through him.

He screamed again and hurled himself onto the plants, seizing its leaves at random and ripping them clean off. He scattered these haphazardly across the floor before gripping the central trunk and twisting it around itself.

“I am going to fuck this thing…”

“Maybe instead of doing that,” Marr said hurriedly, “you could turn your mind towards making the—”

The movie. The movie would set her and Devlin free. Once they made it they’d fulfill their contract and be free to roam the world in their new identities—or dissolve and return to Ongonat, if they liked. They just had to make the damn movie…

She never finished her sentence. Instead, Saxon bolted out of the office and ran pell-mell down the street, shrieking at the top of his lungs. After a moment of shocked hesitation the two Ongonati gave chase, with Devlin shouting after him, “Stop! Stop!”

But he could not be stopped. A maniac’s speed possessed him, and soon he sprinted out of sight.

Marr sighed, throwing up her hands in the air. A dozen or more strangers had their eyebrows cocked, having glimpsed the strange scene.

“Now what?”

As it happened, Marr and Devlin would not see Saxon King for another three weeks. It was a troubling time, but they spent it as best they could. Without him around, there was no one commanding them, and so they could do whatever they wanted. They found where he kept his money and used it to buy enough food to keep themselves alive for months. They also got themselves something better than the basic clothes they’d conjured upon their manifestation. In fact quite a bit of King’s money went into buying clothes. The director, nutty as he was, had a good nest egg, and after a time the Ongonati found a taste for luxury. It soon became that women would stop them on the street to admire their dresses, their hats, their purses and fine jewelry, and they relished the excitement of not just fitting in among an alien culture, but excelling within it.

One night the two were coming back from a night on the town. It was a dark and stormy night, and they were traipsing through some of the high houses that stood in the heart of Hollywood—the houses of the stars. They didn’t know it, but their journey was taking them past the home of Huntz Hall…alias Sach of the Bowery Boys.

“Hold on,” Devlin said, pointing, “is that—is that him?”

A windswept, bedraggled man with piercing eyes and thick stubble was pressing his greasy body against the front door of Hall’s house. He was pushing the doorbell urgently, over and over again. The lights of the house had been on a moment ago, but as soon as the man started pressing the button they had turned off, one by one. Once the last light was off, the man—it was indeed King—changed strategies. The doorbell was no longer enough. Instead, he grabbed the doorknob and started tugging, gently at first, but growing more and more violent as the door refused to yield.

“No-oo-oo-oo—!” King howled, against the rain of the lonely Hollywood night. “Noo-o-o, please—! I-I-I-I…I-I-I-I beg of you!”

“Should we do something?” Marr asked.

“I don’t know,” Devlin said. “Let’s just keeping watching for now.”

“You can’t leave us, Sach!” he cried. “I won’t let you! I won’t let you leave us!”

They could almost feel the aged oak doorway rattle as he pulled insistently at the knob. The lock refused to give, paying no heed to his panicked cries. He clutched the doorknob with both hands and put one foot up on the wall, and pulled that way, tears streaming down his cheeks. Soon it seemed like the whole house was shaking. For a moment the Ongonati grabbed each other’s hands, wondering if he was going to succeed in pulling the door off its hinges.

That was when the police sirens started. The distant squeals immediately evidenced that Mr. Huntz Hall had called the cops.

“Damn! We have to move now. The police on this planet are bloodthirsty. They seek out every opportunity they can to kill citizens,” Marr said. “I mean, King is white, but he’s also crazy, so it’s admittedly a bit of a coin-toss…”

“That’s an easy way out for us, isn’t it?” replied Devlin. “Him dying, I mean?”

“No, if he dies, the contract will be never-ending. We’d be bound to the will of a dead man. Some humans become ghosts, but only if their will is strong and their hearts are in the right place—two conditions which hardly describe our captor.”

“We’d be trapped in silence and stillness,” Devlin said, her shoulders slumping. “Alright. We save him. This time.”

“I would have given you a Bowery Boys empire, Hall! An empire! Teeming states of millions swarming at your feet…”

There was no time to waste. They bolted down into the yard through the streaming rain, and retrieved him from his own madness.

“The Roman Empire need never have fallen!” he roared. “It could have stood forever if those who believed in it had just tried hard enough!”

“Quiet, you,” Marr said angrily, and passed her hand over his face. In his weakened state it was easy to make him fall asleep.

* * *

Months dragged on, and eventually King was able to find a few investors who were willing to give him a try. Unfortunately, they made no profit off these funds, instead only being able to break even on the women’s shopping spree. Devlin and Marr, choosing liberty over luxury, made a point of selling or returning the more ostentatious parts of their wardrobe, which at last put them in the green. (They kept their favorite pieces, of course, as they fully deserved to.) Despite this windfall, they still needed a big push to start production at last.

All this time, King had avoided going to his old pal Sam Katzman. He was still furious with Columbia for canceling the Stooges, and deep down he viewed his former associate as a traitor to the old regime, even though Sam had had no hand in killing the comedy shorts. But as source after source dried up, the Ongonati started trying to persuade him to give Sam a try. “It can’t hurt to try, could it?” Devlin urged.

“It’s Hollywood,” he replied, in a temporary moment of near-wisdom. “It always hurts to try.”

To the women’s delight, he caved eventually, booking an appointment with Sam’s secretary as early as he could manage. When the secretary asked why he wanted to meet, he lied and said that it was about a feature film, an A-picture in the old parlance. He knew he had to spring the serial part on Sam once he was already inside the office—he probably wouldn’t let him back in otherwise. The secretary took the bait, and put the appointment down on the calendar.

Soon King was back in Sam’s office, surrounded again by the embrace of omnipresent cigar smoke. There was a tension in the office of a kind he’d never felt before.

A hint of irritation came into Sam’s voice as he asked: “What can I do for ya, King?”

“Sam, I want to make a pitch to you.”

“For a feature film, yeah, I heard. I’m listening. But only ‘cause you’re an old friend, mind.”

“Well, it’s—it’s not a feature film exactly. It’s something else.”

Sam’s face wrinkled a little bit, and King knew he had to shoot his shot.

“Sam, there’s nothing more important in this life than continuity. For anything to continue, and therefore thrive, it must be deliberately carried on, consciously, by human agents. Even a momentary lapse in the preservation of a tradition can mean disaster. The span of a human generation is a mere 25 years, a third or a quarter of a lifetime, and information that is not transferred between generations becomes dead information. Dead information is as grave and as horrible a thing as a dead person, or a dead culture. Think of it—we are defined by our traditions. Our history is etched in them, and history is our life. If we do not fight for our history by fighting for our traditions we will all die. Now, I like to believe that progress and tradition can be fused, melded. I believe the past can be recycled endlessly, in new forms, to amuse the new generations. But we must maintain it. We must always strive to resist death. Death of continuity, death of culture, death of ourselves. Or we will have no children.

“I come to you to make a serial, Sam. It will be one of the greats. Not a Western, but one of those newfangled science-fiction dealies. Like Commando Cody, the Purple Monster—Captain Video. It will be a space adventure of the sort the kids can’t get enough of. And it will do more than entertain them, Sam—it will inspire them to look up at the stars. Not only at the stars above their heads, but at the stars that make their entertainment happen. Real stars, Hollywood stars, not the phonies they prop up on TV. We will be better than TV, Sam, we—we will crush it. We will destroy TV. That’s how good our chapterplay will be. It will move forward the arrow of history—it will make sure that this nascent decade doesn’t go without serials. It will ensure the preservation of that sacred, all-powerful continuity.

“So hear my plea, Sam. Come on this cinematic adventure with me.

“Just one more, Sam. Just one more.”

“No.”

Saxon was taken aback. He hadn’t expected that frank an answer.

He tried to stop his heart from racing. It took a few deep breaths, but he gathered himself and continued.

“Sam, I, uh, heh. I don’t understand. I thought that—”

“I hated making serials, King. I hated it. They were a waste of money, and they never turned out good. Ever since the whole Captain Africa thing, I tell you, I fuckin’ hated those goddamn serial chapterplays. I’m glad we’re done makin’ ‘em.” He coughed, and took another drag off his cigar. “Besides, this ain’t Columbia no more. I work for Fox now. Fox never made serials and they ain’t about to start.”

“But—”

“Just cut your losses and get into TV, King. It’s not a dirty business, I promise. The serials are dead. Dee, ee, ay, dee. Dead. Get it?”

“You can’t let the arrow of time stop in 1956! It’s too late for a serial in ‘57 and ‘58, but 1959 isn’t too late! There’s—there’s still continuity. Maybe the ‘60s will be the dawn of a Silver Age of Serials…”

“King, no.”

“Yes!”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“No!”

King grabbed Sam by his lapels and started shaking him. His voice came out in a tearful roar. “Yes, yes, yes! Yes, yes!”

“Get off me, you freak bastard!”

“Produce it!”

“No!”

“Produce my serial!”

“Get out! I’m callin’ the police!”

King fled before Sam could do that, knowing their friendship was over. He thought fondly about all the times the two of them had shared. He had tried many times to touch Sam’s hand, to break the touch barrier and bring them closer together. But the producer had always kept him at a distance—he realized that now. He had always distrusted him. He had always been his enemy.

He tried the next day to get back into Sam’s office, but the old goat was right: this wasn’t Columbia, it was Fox. Those gate guards beat him worse than Moe beat Larry and Curly. He had tried to fight them off with a stick, crying the whole time that Sam wanted to see him, but they didn’t believe him. If he didn’t run away again they may well have shot him.

He didn’t associate any further with Sam Katzman, except on one occasion. No one could ever prove he did it, but during the production of Sam’s second feature with Fox, The Pirates of Tortuga, King broke onto the set and distributed gay porn magazines that had headshots of the film’s star, Ken Scott, pasted onto the faces of all the men. He credited this deed to Katzman’s release from his Fox contract later that year, little knowing that the only person to see his modified mags was the set janitor. Said janitor had taken one look at them, shrugged, discarded the ones he didn’t like, and slipped the rest into his pocket, for his home collection.

* * *

King stifled his tears when 1960 passed him by. The whole year, a total waste—nothing to celebrate at twelvemonth’s end. It took all his strength to keep going, and when 1961 passed him by as well it was almost too much. The only thing he achieved in 1962 was holding onto his office and his lot, which his landlords were always trying to kick him out of. Time was cruel to him; his once-black hair was turning white, and he had to buy a salt-and-pepper mustache to keep up appearances.

By this point Marr and Devlin had adapted to life on Earth, as their imprisonment had turned out to mostly consist of sitting around waiting for King to do things. Devlin had found a job at a candy shop, and through a series of convoluted circumstances, Marr became the owner of a local Italian restaurant, Culo di Paganini. It was their income that ultimately supported the office and the studio, as King did nothing all day except watch serials and occasionally call leads on investors.

Devlin almost always got off work before Marr did, and she would come sit in the kitchen of Culo and talk to her wife. They considered themselves wives now that they knew what the word meant. King would sometimes lambast them, telling them women couldn’t marry women, but they ignored him—clearly Earth was stuck at a backwards-facing point in its history. In any case, it happened that one cold January night, Devlin ran late for her scheduled rendezvous with Marr. She didn’t come in at the end of the shift, nor did she appear during closing. Marr was deeply worried as she exited the restaurant, at least until she saw her spouse trudging mightily through the snow. The snow was deep, so deep that many of the cars that were parked on the streets would be trapped there until the morning. That was why it had taken so long for Devlin to get to Culo. Marr’s face lit up with a smile, and that smile was returned—but then Devlin saw something strange. Marr’s expression dropped from a grin to a look of pure horror. She heard the crunch of snow behind her as her wife yelled:

“Look out!”

She turned just in time to see a figure dressed in a fedora and heavy coat charging towards her. Though a pang of fear seized her, so too did instinct. She reached out and took hold of the running man’s arm, and with a strong jerk she pulled him off his feet—then, with a quick flick of her wrist, she flipped him over her arm and slammed him down hard into the snow bank. The figure let out a groan of pain, before proclaiming, “Devlin…it’s me.”

She didn’t say it, but she would have flipped him even if she’d known it was him. It was King, his puffy red face barely visible below the brim of his hat.

“Oh God…help me up.”

Devlin did nothing. In the early days she would have been compelled to help him. But now, after years of mindful living, she could resist minor commands.

And King knew that. He helped himself to his feet, understanding he couldn’t force the women to assist him.

Devlin was smiling again when his eyes met hers. She half-expected him to become angry at this mockery, but instead he grinned back. “I’ve done it.”

“Done what?” she asked.

“Yeah, what are you up to, King?” Marr asked, approaching the pair.

“I’ve got the funding. You’ll never believe it. My great-great-etcetera-grandfather, Thomas Bridger, had an illegitimate child, Befsztyk ‘Steak-Soup’ Bigos, by a Polish prostitute named Gerta. Good ol’ Steak-Soup was a prospectin’ cowboy who uncovered a hundred-lifetimes fortune in silver. Turns out the old man managed to survive until just last week, when he dropped dead at the age of 101. He wanted to leave his fortune to family. Given that I’m the only surviving Bridger—I’ve been very careful about ensuring that—I became his heir. I’m rich—rich—rich! And we’re gonna make our movie!”

“Oh! That’s—great,” said Devlin, casting a look at Marr. Neither of them knew how to react. They had been waiting all this time to make the serial, so that they might escape the compact. But they knew it would hardly be a walk in the park to actually produce the damn thing. No matter what, King wasn’t letting them off easy.

“How much money did this uncle of yours leave you?” Marr asked. “More than I bring in slinging pizzas, I hope.”

“Oh, yes, my friends, much more than pizza-money. I-I shouldn’t be saying this on the naked streets, but—” He gestured for the two actresses to huddle in close to him. “We’ve got $47,000.”

There was a long pause, after which Marr nodded slowly. “That’s—that’s not bad,” she said.

“Not bad?! It’s fantastic! We could make a million serials on that!”

“Yeah, but they’d all be really bad,” Devlin said quietly. King didn’t hear her. He was too lost in his reverie; he hadn’t felt the cold at all on his sprint from the office.

King crossed his arms proudly, and cocked an eyebrow with smugness in his reddened face. “We’ll show ‘em!” he exclaimed. “We’ll show ‘em this serial business ain’t dead! Phone up all the greats, darlin’s! Kirk Alyn! Clayton Moore! Buster Crabbe! Kane Richmond! Phyllis Coates! Dick Purcell! Roy Barcroft! We’ll throw ‘em all into one big 15-chapter beast—and we’ll rip those eyeballs off those idiot boxes and get them back on the silver screen where they belong!”

He went on raving, fantasizing about the future—it was impossible to avoid doing so in the moment. He rambled about the far-off year of 2002, when Roy Barcroft would be 100 years old. He knew that by his hand, his labor, the children of 2002 and all the years between then and now would get to see this serial tradition go on—that Mr. Barcroft’s masterfully-portrayed heavies would provoke hisses from theater-going audiences the world over until he was in his grave. It wouldn’t die in 1956. He would shift that arrow of time forward until he got what he wanted.

And it would be good clean fun too. Not like that trash on TV…

“That pornographic garbage,” he found himself muttering. “Filthy, coarse game-shows like The Price is Right…they’re so blatantly rigged.”

“I can believe that,” Marr said. “A bunch of shows like that did turn out to be rigged a few years back. But what’s pornographic about them?”

“Their cash prizes are a farce. In reality, the winners of those shows receive unlimited access to the producers’ private collection of whores!”

Devlin raised a finger in protest. “I—”

“Television is nothing more than a bordello for women willing to debase themselves and frolic in anti-Americanism.”

“That part probably is not true,” said Marr, but as he was prone to doing, King raised his hand to interrupt her.

“That doesn’t matter now. The only thing that does matter is that we’re filthy, stinkin’ rich! Whoopeee!”

He flopped down into the nearest snowbank, giggling like a child; he started making a snow-angel. The bank he’d chosen was right next to the road, so the snow was brown and smelled of diesel, but he didn’t care.

Marr looked down the street, and saw twin lights approaching. “King!” she cried, but it was too late.

King’s legs were sticking out into the road, and so when the Ford pickup went by, its wheels shattered both his tibiae. His screams echoed through the city, full of agony and rage.

Production wouldn’t start till ‘64, then. Nevertheless, in the moment, the two women couldn’t stop themselves from snickering.

* * *

Rather than retread the mistakes of the past by trying to wring drama out of an in-depth description of a movie production,¹ there shall instead follow a string of bullet points briefly synopsizing the making of the 1964 film serial that was ultimately entitled Xarr Bower – Space Conqueror (also released as Saxon King’s Xarr Bower – Space Conqueror):

• The plot saw Xarr Bower, a human raised from birth by alien Saturnians, defend the Earth from the evil invader Empress Wyla, in what Marr called “a brazen ripoff of 1953’s The Lost Planet.” Xarr Bower was played by Dionisio Morelli, “the Italian Dennis Moore,” while Marr played Wyla and Devlin played Bower’s Earthling girlfriend Darletta McQueen. All other roles were played by Saxon King wearing masks of varying degrees of quality.

• The cast also functioned as the crew in all aspects, including post-production. The entire serial had to be reshot entirely from scratch when King accidentally overexposed all of the film during the editing process, despite the fact that by that point they had already exhausted 90% of their budget.

• The only exceptions to this “in-house approach” were the credits and title cards, which were created for the film by an independent company, E. Council Incorporated. King chose to employ ECI after receiving a friendly letter written in human blood recommending their services. “I’m sure absolutely nothing will go wrong,” he wrote in Space Conqueror’s production journal for that day.

• The production was credited as “Glory Days Films,” which Devlin suggested over King’s original proposal, “Break Your Goddamn TV Studios.”

• The serial was originally scheduled to run for 15 episodes, but just as they were completing filming on episode 13, a local man, Hector MacGruber, died of alcohol poisoning right outside the front door of King’s studio. He had $200 in his wallet, which enabled them to extend the story for five additional chapters.

• King had to spend six weeks in prison for robbing the North Hollywood Stock Footage Warehouse, whose price per reel the studio was unable to meet. During this time he wrote to Devlin and Marr, instructing them to complete 2^nd unit work until his release. They were compelled to obey, but when he was let go King found nothing waiting for him but a 27-hour-long static shot of a boulder.

• Further criminal charges were leveled against King when an elderly woman lost control of her bladder upon glimpsing the puppet for Wyla’s Lobster-Man Executioner, not because she was frightened by it, but because it inspired uncontrollable laughter.

• Mr. Morelli died from eating porridge before they had completed photography on the last three chapters, leaving King, in a wig, to take over the Bower role. Morelli’s family (allegedly) congratulated King on the accuracy of his recreation.

• In the last few weeks of production, King became convinced that his premise was being copied by a group of Mexican filmmakers, led by a nonexistent director named “Sajón Rey,” whom he claimed were hoping to beat King’s production to theaters. He attempted on multiple occasions to enlist local police in his search for the filming location of Jarr Emparrado – Conquistador Espacial.

* * *

One night in the editing room, King fell asleep, and dreamed of the wild night he’d spent in 1948 with a member of the American royalty: Babe Ruth. As a true, loyal, red-blooded American, King adored baseball. He kept framed photos of Ty Cobb and Wilbur “Pete” Henry in his office, alongside more conventional American heroes like Andrew Jackson and Charles Guiteau. When Ruth was wheeled into the lobby of the LA Palace Theater, he’d said to him, “I can’t believe I’m meeting the first player to play the game with two bats.” Babe had groaned approvingly at the remark, and Saxon knew he would treasure that bit of banter for the rest of his life.

The doctors at the Memorial Hospital in New York, quacks all, had given the Babe a negative prognosis. They said he had some kind of malignant tumor in his neck that had spread to a number of his vital issues and organs—but Saxon knew this wasn’t true. Ruth was only 53, in the prime of his life—and he was an American legend. Legends, especially American ones, never died, of that Saxon was certain. That was the central thesis of the movie Ruth had been flown out here to see: The Babe Ruth Story. It was to be an amber encapsulation of the myth behind the man, hagiographic in its presentation, just like the Sultan of Swat deserved. It was to be an American classic.

True, the Babe was a little emaciated when they wheeled him in, but that was surely a consequence of months of hospital food, not any imaginary tumor. Nevertheless, it was understood that Ruth was withered enough where he would have difficulty supporting his head during the screening. To accommodate this, the theater had ordered a special mechanical rig that would be attached to Mr. Ruth’s scalp, which, when controlled correctly via joystick by a dedicated operator, could be used to reposition the Babe’s head should he slump away from the screen. Saxon had used his contacts in the industry to petition for the role of operating this machine, and, having won the bid, he was now seated next to the Babe in the front row—the best seats in the house.

Ruth was unable to speak much, and so he could only protest through faint moans as the theaters attendants strapped him into the rig. He swatted at them feebly as they connected the skullcap that clasped his head to the movable arm Saxon would be controlling. After only a few minutes of labor everything was properly hooked up, and the machine controlling the arm was switched on. Saxon took up the controller and made a quick test—Ruth’s head had twisted back and to the left, and so he rotated the arm to bring him forward to the right. This motion made him slump forward, but by pulling the arm back King was able to bring him into a normal seating position.

Once the staff were content that Mr. Ruth could watch his film, they started up the projector.

“Isn’t this great, Babe?” Saxon whispered. “This is all for you.”

“Rrrrrrghhhh,” Ruth replied, as drool slipped messily from his lips. He would make noises for the next fifty minutes or so, starting quietly but steadily increasing in volume.

Halfway through the movie, Ruth had begun to arch backwards in his seat. “Let me get that for you,” Saxon said, and he used the arm to bend Ruth’s head forward. His shoulders stayed slumped back, so his neck was bent at something of a harsh angle. The baseball player began thrashing about, and he let out a heavy groan.

“RRRRRRGGGGHHHH!”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Babe,” Saxon said. “Hey, it’s fine. It’s fine.”

Ruth tried to squeeze his eyes shut, but Saxon reached over and pried his eyelids open. He watched as the Babe’s pupils darted around frantically, the grayscale image of the film reflected in the mirror of his corneas.

“Just watch,” Saxon whispered. “This is your movie, Babe. Yours. We’re never gonna forget you, Babe…”

Babe Ruth, in his own wordless way, begged quietly for death.

“Never, ever gonna forget you…”

He kissed the star on the cheek. He had to. How often do you get to kiss a star?

* * *

In time the dreams and nightmares passed away into something that could be touched, and tasted—and viewed.

“Sing,” Saxon commanded, speaking to the children he’d brought in off the street to sign the Hallelujah Chorus. “Sing, goddamnit!”

Marr and Devlin were sickened to the last, but in some ways the music that emerged from the captured children was appropriate. Heavy weights vanished from their shoulders; their burden was dissolved.

They had fulfilled the compact. And now it was just a matter of getting the beast into theaters.

* * *

“What do you mean?” Saxon asked.

“It’s like I just said,” Devlin groaned, scornfully. “Your people at ECI forgot to include the proper copyright notices.”

“I don’t understand what it is you’re telling me,” Saxon said, as if Devlin were an idiot. She sighed and rolled her eyes.

“You didn’t include a copyright notice in the credits!” Marr exclaimed. “Not on one measly episode! It’s the law in the United States that films need to include a copyright notice featuring a proper date, the name of the owner, and the word ‘copyright’ or an appropriate abbreviation. This, plus a registration with the U.S. Copyright Office, is required on the release of a piece of media to prevent it from becoming public domain.”

Saxon scratched his mustache and crossed his legs as he leaned back in his desk chair. “I don’t get it. I own Xarr Bower – Space Conqueror. I owned it as a concept and I owned it upon release as a motion picture.”

“No, that’s the thing,” Devlin said. “You messed up. Without that notice, you no longer own the serial. The public does. It’s an automatic process—there’s nothing you can do to take it back.”

“What do you mean, that people are going to try to make their own Xarr Bower merchandise? That’s absurd. If they do so without my say-so I’ll sue their pants off.”

“You can’t,” Marr insisted. “Your film is public domain, and your character with it. People can do whatever they want with it—and with him.”

“No—th-that’s not true. It can’t be. You two are aliens! You don’t know anything about the law—!”

“Unlike you, we did research,” Devlin said. “And that research shows that you are not the owner of Xarr Bower. You can exploit him financially, as you intended, but you’d be just one of many taking advantage of a public domain property.”

At that, Saxon sprang from his chair and seized the edge of his desk. The two Ongonati stepped back, anticipating the worst—a prophecy fulfilled when Saxon violently flipped the desk over, sending his phone and papers and heavy typewriter crashing to the floor.

“Noooo!!!” he screamed. “You’re lying! You stupid bitches. You’ve chafed at working for me since the beginning! Even though I’ve taken care of you—borderline pampered you! You try to tell me these lies about this so-called ‘public domain’—ha! Campfire stories! Old wives’ tales! I’m not afraid of shadows. I’ll go and prove that I’m the owner—the master!—of Xarr Bower! The greatest Space Conqueror to ever live!”

“What, is this the part where you say you’re gonna fuck the potted plant?” Devlin said. The compact was over now—she could say or do whatever she wanted to him, without any repercussions. For eight years she and her wife had been his prisoners, his slaves. She was only beginning to imagine dreadful fates for him.

Perhaps the worst fate of all would be to leave him to his own devices.

For the millionth time, he went into a temper tantrum, stomping his feet, moaning and groaning, frothing at the mouth. He stood up and bolted away from his desk, fleeing the office complex again for the wild chaos of the streets. Marr and Devlin pursued him, wanting to see his reaction to what the public had done to his film.

Xarr Bower was something of a financial failure, but it had appealed to kids. King had had faith in the children and they’d come through for him—at least, they’d come through enough for him to break even. But now, thanks to those same kids, the market was now seeing a vibrant demand for all kinds of products based on the Space Conqueror. King stepped into a landscape of newsstands, billboards, toyshops, and food carts. And each of them carried their own brand of Xarr Bower merchandise.

Xarr Bower comic books. Xarr Bower TV shows. Xarr Bower hot dogs. They were everywhere.

“No…” King cried. “No!”

Xarr Bower novels. Xarr Bower radio shows. Xarr Bower cereal with Xarr Bower decoder rings. Xarr Bower telephones. There was no end to it.

“Stop it! Stop exploiting him!”

King clutched the sides of his head and resisted sinking to his knees.

At his feet was a small boy playing with a doll that looked like Xarr Bower, but with the wrong color scheme. He snatched it out of his hands.

“No, no, no!” he roared. “What—what the fuck is this?!”

“That’s a Space Conqueror,” the boy said plainly.

“That’s not Xarr Bower! They did the colors all wrong!”

“No, no, that’s his brother, from the comics—that’s Klarr Bower!”

“What?!” King spat on the pavement. “Xarr Bower doesn’t have a brother! He’s an only child, like every real American!”

He saw that the toy twisted at the waist, and so he grabbed its legs and torso and began to wind. He kept winding until the joint inside the waist bent around itself and snapped. He hurled the bisected figure down on the ground and stomped on it until it was crushed to fragments.

“Evil! Evil!” he cried. “Sweet gods of Heaven and Earth—these dirty pimps have prostituted my son!!”

A man who was operating one of the newsstands overheard that, and briefly stepped away from his stall to meet with King.

“It’s true, Mr. King,” said the man. “We’ve done a lot to your brainchild. Half my stock now is composed of Xarr Bower comics. Marvel, Charlton, Gold Key, they’ve all started making their own takes on the guy. I myself have an independently printed fanzine that I sell at the kiosk that reimagines the character in a new genre every issue.”

“No, no—you fiend—”

“Hurts, don’t it? But them’s the breaks with the public domain. It’s a wild beast, you can’t control it.”

“I—I—” His power was leaving him. For a second he thought of starting over, calling fresh spirits from Ongonat. But he caught a glimpse of Marr and Devlin glaring at him, and he knew they wouldn’t allow that.

The magazine seller leaned in then, and said very quietly, “What happened to the tradition, huh? What happened to the arrow of time? Suddenly now it’s all about you?”

He was right—King knew he was right. The serials were alive and well. He had brought them back from the brink after a brutal eight-year absence. He had done it.

But now that all this money wasn’t coming his way, it suddenly didn’t seem worth it.

He regretted most that he couldn’t destroy TV as he’d intended. Even as he thought that, however, he felt disgusted with himself. Somehow, hate had eclipsed love. His hate for TV was greater now than his love for the serials…

With that final realization, Saxon King broke. And again he broke into a run, refusing to stop until he’d made it back to his private apartment. He would never see his office or his film lot again—he abandoned the leases, giving them back to the landlords at last.

“I think we just witnessed a man’s total destruction,” Marr said.

“I agree,” Devlin said. “Let’s laugh at him, shall we?”

And they did laugh. Their laughter was rich and long, and it mingled with the laughter of the stand owner. But there were two types of laughter on that street. The women were laughing from joy, the joy of freedom, but the man was laughing because he was thinking about all the money he’d make off of his indie Space Conqueror zines. Privately, the man remarked that the Evil Council had been right—showing that dumbass how stupid he was had been entertaining.

But the newsman’s laughter began to waver as a figure strode towards him from out of the crowd. Dr. Maubeuge was wearing all black—his Leader costume, minus the hood. In spite of the people walking all around them, he grabbed the bootlegger by the neck, and dragged him into the nearest alley. The sounds of the packed street faded away as they passed into the darkness.

“Who—who are you? What do you want?” the newsstand man whimpered.

“I want to show you something,” Maubeuge said, ignoring the first question. He retrieved a device from the inside of his robes, a toy crafted by his people—a time-viewer. He switched it on, and showed the man a glimpse of the 21^st Century.

Based on the horror that spread across the man’s face, one might assume that Maubeuge showed him the Junpi, and all the devastation thereof. But no—instead, he revealed a more mundane evil. The screen displayed the image of a young man seated at a device that looked like a television with a keyboard attached to it. Somehow, without the nature of the time-viewer being explained to him, the news seller understood that such a device could only exist in the future. This future man was using the strange machine to take pieces of art created by others and put them into an “app” that created new images cobbled out of the old ones. The photographers, painters, and illustrators who made the original images had spent hours creating them, and decades learning how to create them, but now the man at the—the “computer,” it was called—he was doing what they were doing in seconds, with virtually no knowledge of art history. Only his products looked much shittier than what the original artists had made.

The future man used his machine to connect to a global community of fellow users, so that he could share his “art,” but the majority of these users were “apps” as well—apps who had trawled billions of hours of human conversation in order to create a faulty veneer of human interactivity. There were few images made in the old ways still to be found on this aetheric content web, as they had been buried by the teeming flocks of machine-made paintings, drawings, photos, and films.

The image melted away into a view of the vast oceans of the world, which were turning to sticky gray slop under the relentless churn of the “computer”’s power centers. The machines that ground up old art and made inferior mosaics out of it needed an inordinate amount of water in order to avoid overheating. 300 quintillion gallons down, just 70 quintillion more to go…

The newsstand operator screamed and screamed, like the Devil had shown his face to him in all its horror and hideousness.

* * *

Marr and Devlin walked away arm in arm, unaware of the suffering of the man in the alley. In their world there was no suffering—the future was brighter than it had ever been. They could do whatever they wanted, go anywhere, be anything. They were free.

It was at that moment that a woman stepped out in front of them—a black woman, dressed in beautiful silks. She stared at the passing Ongonati, and something in her gaze made them hesitate for a moment. She smiled as she approached them.

“You know, I loved the two of you in that serial,” she said, as if she already knew them. “Excellent work—you especially, Marr. Maybe some would say it’s bad to have colored girls like us play villainesses, but I’ve never seen a black woman play an outer-space Empress before.”

“Th-thank you, you’re very kind,” Marr said. “And you are…?”

“Baby, don’t you recognize her?” said Devlin. “That’s Eve Guan, the director.”

“Wait…yes, I know you. I’ve seen your picture in magazines! You make all of those radical underground films that they play at the drive-ins!”

“Ohh, I saw her movie Dark Mountain with Hannah from work,” Devlin said, admiringly. “A weird psychological…neo-noir, almost, about a man stalked by the authorities, where the protagonist turns out to be a nonhuman. It—it was beautiful, in a strange way, it talked about the value of unusual perspectives…”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. But alas, I’m afraid you’re not my target audience. My hope is to engender empathy in humans.”

Marr stared at the director, realizing at once she, too, came from beyond the Earth.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been following you,” Eve Guan said. “I knew that you were soon to be released from Saxon King’s employment, and I wanted to snap you up before any other studio got to move in.”

“You—you want to hire us as actresses?”

“Why not? You did a damn good job with your debut.”

The two looked at each other.

“Just as long as I can keep my restaurant,” Marr told her. “I’ve developed quite a passion for Italian food over the years—and my customers need me.”

“I’m different—I’ve been looking for a road out of hocking candy,” Devlin said.

“We believe in freedom at my studio, it’s not at all like ‘Glory Days Films.’ All of our artists and contributors are free to come and go and act and not act as they please. It’s not perfect by any means, but we call it home.”

“That—sounds almost too good to be true,” said Marr, with a cough.

“I leave the ultimate decision to you. The choice is yours.” That wasn’t phrasing the Ongonati were used to hearing.

She handed them a business card. “Call this number when you’re ready. You can talk to my daughter Elysia.”

“Thank you,” they both said—and then she turned and walked away, her shoes clacking on the pavement.

The two wives clutched each other’s hands. “That was so—so cool, as the kids say,” Devlin said.

“It was,” Marr agreed, laughing. “I guess we’ve got something to think over.”

“I guess we do.”

They both sighed, and they embraced—they didn’t care if this planet wasn’t ready for two women doing so yet. It felt in that instant like all they saw and touched was infected by their freedom, like freedom was so contagious that evil stood no chance against it.

For a moment, their minds lingered on the question of evil. And they wondered what would become of Mr. Saxon King.

But then those ugly thoughts their minds for good. They knew all would be well. The universe, for some reason or another, had a tendency to lean slightly in favor of the side of justice. Even if it was still a dreadful thing when the scales tipped away from it.

* * *

In a suburban home in Washington, D.C., a man slept uneasily. He was a journalist, and a very busy one, with a great many difficult responsibilities on his shoulders. His sleep was shallow, and so it was hardly a surprise when he opened his eyes instinctively to the sensation of being watched. Once he was awake his breath caught in his throat: he was being watched. A tall, dark figure was standing over his bed, eyes aglow in the gloom. He was holding a silver-glinting pistol in his hand.

“Mr. Jack Marlyn?”

“Y-yes? Wh-what do you want?”

“You’re friends with FCC chief Newman Guppy, aren’t you?”

“Y-y-yes, I am. Pl-please, can we talk without you brandishing that gun?”

“I’ve heard Mr. Guppy isn’t too fond of how the television business is run. That correct?”

“It’s true, N-Newman is no fan of modern television. In fact, he’s p-planning a speech about it at—”

“—at the big NAB convention they’re holding on the 9^th, I know. Look, I want you to make some suggestions to Mr. Guppy’s speech—to make it more effective, you understand. You see, Mr. Guppy and I see eye to eye on these matters of TV’s bad direction. I want to help this country, as it’s become very sick under modern TV. You know that, don’t you, Mr. Marlyn?”

“I-I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another. Please—the gun—”

“All the same, I want you to suggest a phrase to Mr. Guppy, without telling him it was actually me that made it up. I want you to tell him that TV is a vast wasteland.”

“A-a vast wasteland?”

“Yes, Mr. Marlyn. Do that for me, make that little suggestion to Mr. Guppy—and I assure you that everything will go well for you and yours.”

“Me and—say! You—you leave my family out of this, you creep!”

“Oh, I will, Mr. Marlyn—so long as you do as I bid.”

At the moment, the shadowy figure—and, more importantly, the gun he wielded—fell back into the darkness. Jack Marlyn waited a long moment to make sure the intruder was truly gone, before letting out a sigh of relief.

Fearing the stranger’s threats, Marlyn went to his friend Guppy the very next day and managed to work the phrase the intruder had requested into their conversation. Guppy nodded enthusiastically at the words, feeling it encapsulated the whole of his message: “Can I use that?”

When Guppy took to the podium and gave his speech, Jack Marlyn nearly cheered. Not only had the phrase “vast wasteland” entered into Guppy’s speech—it was what the speech became known as. The “vast wasteland” speech. Marlyn was certain this would satisfy his mysterious nocturnal visitor.

He was not wrong—Saxon King was satisfied. So satisfied, in fact, that he allowed Marlyn’s family to continue to believe that nothing had changed in their lives. No one would ever have any idea that King had returned to Marlyn’s home and taken him away into the night, subsequently replacing him with a homeless man whom he had paid handsomely to adopt Marlyn’s appearance and mannerisms. No one would ever know that there was a correlation between the occasional memory lapses Jack Marlyn experienced thereafter and a heavily-gnawed, partially-eaten corpse that was fished out of the Potomac River in late May.

* * *

Every so often King did watch TV. Sometimes even he ran out of books to read or films to go see. The radio wasn’t as good as it once was, it dulled his senses after a while. A little bit of light channel-surfing before bed sometimes helped him fall asleep.

But that didn’t mean he approved of what he was seeing. Ridiculous sitcoms, disgusting displays of vulgar sexuality, empty-headed outer space adventures (nothing at all like Xarr Bower), and worst of all—crass commercialism. Every time he turned on the TV there was always the promise that a brand new hamburger joint would be opening up in his very neighborhood—one that was part of a fairly new up-and-coming brand of such establishments. He had no craving for such fatty swill. Not unless their clown mascot was going to star in his own newly-produced film serial.

He hated that clown, that peddler of cheap sandwiches. His red-and-yellow striped shirt, his paper-cup nose, his hamburger tray hat concealing an ugly mop of spaghetti-strand curls—he was an abomination. He appeared on King’s TV set so often that he started to haunt his dreams.

Even now, as he was drifting off to sleep in his living room armchair, one of those advertisements was playing. The jingle touched the periphery of his mind as his eyelids lowered, becoming a blurred smudge of song at the edge of his consciousness…

It’s R*n*ld McD*n*ld,

the Hamburger-Happy Clown.

A McD*n*ld’s drive-in restaurant

is his favorite place in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

in town.

“Aaah!!”

He opened his eyes and saw that the clown was standing over him. Yes, the very same clown, with the paper-cup nose and the serving tray hat.

“Hiya, Kingy! How’s it goin’?”

“You—you—you—how did you become real?!”

“Oh, it was easy as pie, Kingy—I’ve been around long before the burger joint hired me. I just took on old R*n*ld’s appearance to suit my new role. You remember me, don’t you?”

“N-no—no! I’ve never seen you before in my life!”

“Oh, I’ve been lurking at the edges of your life, Kingy—along with the rest of the Council. Sabotaging your efforts. Weakening you. Driving you mad!”

“What Council? What the hell are you talking about?”

“You’ve always known we’ve existed! We’ve always set you back! Every failure in your life has been our fashioning! We brought the Age of Serials to an end. We convinced Universal and Republic and Columbia to stop the production of chapterplays. We caused the Supreme Court to end block booking. We even became the first commercial manufacturers of TVs! All to fuck with you! With you! You!!” The clown laughed mockingly. “God, I wish that Honkledonk hadn’t been made non-canon. If she was here with me now, we’d rock your ass back to the Stone Age, if you know what I mean…”

“What—who—”

“Don’t mind it, kiddo, just a bit of clown humor! HEHEHEHEHEHHOOOHOHOHAHAHAHA!!!”

King cringed back into his armchair, trying to escape his new guest. He tried to remind himself this was just a nightmare. But right as he was thinking so, “R*n*ld” climbed onto his lap, straddling him between his surprisingly strong legs. Then he grabbed King by the hair and pulled his head close to his face—whereupon he stuck out his tongue and licked up and down the full length of his cheek. His tongue had suckers on it, like the arm of an octopus.

King screamed—this was no nightmare. There actually was a man dressed as a clown in his apartment, sitting on him and licking his face.

“You sure you don’t remember me, Kingy?” “R*n*ld” whispered.

“Y-y-you—”

The lunatic got up off of King’s lap, to his great relief. King’s whole body trembled as he looked his attacker over.

“You—you’re Carter, from King of the Carnival!”

“Yes—Carter the Commie Clown, at your service!” “R*n*ld” bowed. “Of course, like I said, I’ve since eschewed that name for my current moniker. I am always shifting, always changing with the times. But you don’t know anything about that, do you? Mr. Nostalgia? Mr. Rose-Colored Glasses?”

“What do you want—?”

“I’ve already gotten what I want, you fragile little bitch. I told you that we rigged the world to ruin your life. And it’s not over yet. You’re not seeing a dime from your precious little film, are you? Probably because we excised that vital copyright notice—us. Your fairy godfathers. Now you’re three months behind on your rent and the only thing keeping you from going crazy over that fact is the bottle. Soon you won’t even be able to afford that. You’re a failure. You’re always gonna be a failure! The Golden Age of Hollywood is dead, and you couldn’t save it!”

“I-I’ll stop you. I’ll find a way…”

“It’s already too late. It’s all too late. In a few years we’ve have you. You’ll be ours.”

“No! No—never—never—”

His eyes were closing once again, only this time it was against his will. He fought defiantly to keep the lids open, but he was dragged down into the darkness of sleep.

He tried to scream, but his lips would not part. So instead his scream echoed out across the landscape of his nightmares, where five shadowy figures stood encircling him, pointing and laughing.

* * *

First he went to the homeless shelters, and he wore out his welcome there. Then he went to the hospitals, and he wore out his welcome with them. Next he tried living in abandoned buildings, but the cops always found him. Eventually he took to the shadows of bridges and awnings and archways. The cops got him there, too. And so in time there was no room above ground for him. The only place he was truly safe was the sewers—and even then, the cops came down there, sometimes, and if they found him they would beat him, as they did on all other occasions.

The cops, however, were far from the biggest issue in the sewers. No, the worst part was the rats. Spontaneous generation as the origin of life had long since been disproven, but King was certain that the sewers created rats from pure aether. Every day he saw hundreds of them, and every day hundreds of them would die hundreds of empty, meaningless deaths. But there were always more—always more. It seemed to him that their population grew exponentially in the long years here he lived there, until every inch of every wall and ceiling was crawling with their squirming, chubby bodies. King had dreamed of going back to work—of finding a job somewhere, anywhere. But three weeks after he moved into the sewers, he awoke one morning to find that the rats had eaten all but three of his fingers, leaving two on one hand, one on the other. That was it for him. He would never work again.

He did not let his newfound disability weaken his resolve—though the focus of his resolve became different than anything he had known before. Day and night, night and day, he dedicated himself to the singular purpose of slaying and eating rats. Previously, before they took his fingers, he could scuttle onto the surface and find scraps of refuse to eat, but now he could not even grasp the ladders to carry himself up out of the manholes. So killing the rats was a very logical means of survival at the end of the day: it satisfied his need for vengeance, which was hot and burning and all-devouring, and it also kept him fed.

But man cannot live on rats for a long time without growing sick of them. There were too many gasses in the sewers to risk a fire, so King ate them raw. It was difficult on day one to choke them down, and by day 150, he was completely out of his mind from eating them in such great quantity. He had written “I AM SO FUCKING SICK OF EATING THESE GODDAMN FUCKING RATS” on the walls in rat blood so many times that the words no longer held any meaning for him. He knew that he could swallow them more easily if he could get himself a drop or two of liquor, but without being able to reach the surface it was hopeless.

Hopeless—until “Zorn” arrived. “Zorn” was not his real name, but King nicknamed him after the Soviet counterfeiter from King of the Carnival, and after refusing the appellation dozens of times the man eventually adopted it, begrudgingly. Zorn was a fellow sewer-dweller who represented a mysterious cabal of supervillains—probably the same Evil Council that had ruined King’s life, and were still ruining it. They certainly seemed like characters out of the serials, anyway—for their master conspiracy was to freely distribute heroin to as many people around the world as possible, for the sole purpose of spreading the illness of addiction. “Zorn” claimed his employers were all absurdly wealthy men who had lived all that life had to offer, and had therefore since soured on mortal existence. They wanted to compromise as much of society as they could, not to evoke or resurrect any long-lost sense of excitement, or to leave a legacy after their deaths, or even to drag the world down with them, but rather because they believed that oblivion was the natural state of existence, and that life on Earth deserved to be destroyed because it was ultimately pointless. They were hedonist-nihilists, more like a doomsday cult than a crime outfit (so actually they were probably not the Evil Council). It gave them no pleasure to kill people with heroin, but it was their solemn duty.

“We make progress every day, mein freund,” said Zorn, who had served many evil regimes in his life. “Mein employers, they have even made deal with Belgian distributors to get the new super-morphine drug. They call it fentanyl, will be popular very soon.”

“Stronger…than morphine?” groaned King. He was already badly hooked at that point, shooting up every day. “I—can’t hardly believe in something like that. It sounds too miserable to be true…”

“And yet it would give you much relief from your unholy diet!”

Zorn spoke the truth. The heroin was very useful for helping King to continue sustaining himself on the rats. His initial routine was to trap the rats, shoot up, and then eat them once the high kicked in. But sometimes, that was too inefficient, and in time King found it was much easier to instead inject the heroin directly into the rats, and then eat them that way. The taste of heroin-impregnated rats was

IN TOWN.

IN TOWN.

no more pleasant than the unadulterated ones, but the rats’ bodies seemed to process the heroin preemptively in a way that made the drug all the more potent.

After fifteen years in the sewers (wherein Zorn was eventually eaten by rats), a group of construction workers came down into the tunnel where King lived to do some long-overdue maintenance work. The foreman gasped upon discovering King’s disheveled form. “My God!” he exclaimed. “A formerly middle-class white man! We have to get him out of here and put some fresh money in his pocket at once!”

They called the city government, who sent down a team of rescuers; these rescuers came equipped with a deed for a nice house and a check for $65,000 (late ‘70s money!). As they took him back up on the surface, they assured him that they would be able to get him a managerial position within the week.

At last, it seemed Saxon King’s luck was looking up. The late ‘70s were a different time—much had changed since his exile. Soon, within a few short years, the America that had abandoned him and his ilk to the sewer would be nothing but a bitter memory.

* * *

Dear Misses Guan,

I am a 1^st grader at Mayport Elementry School and I am writeing to you to say that I love all of your movies!! I have posters for all of them in my room thanks to my Mom and Dad buying them for me at Mayport books (thats the bookstore downtown). I really like Dark Mountain but my favorite is The Man Who Was Not There. So spooky and weird to think about! I know you might not write back but I want to ask do you really think some people get pushed outside of the world like that? Do we REALLY become ghosts while were still alive, in the margins? I asked my teacher and she said thats too big a question for a girl my age and I laughed at her hahaha. But I stay up late thinking and I want to know. When my teacher gave me this homework to write to a famous person we admier I thought of you write right away! I want to be an actress one day and be in one of your movies but I know that will take a long time so for now I will settel for a letter back. Thank you for your time.

Your Number one Fan,

- Verity Ojo

* * *

“Mr. Bridger?”

“Yes, Ms. March?”

“Your 2 PM appointment is here.”

“Send them in, Ms. March. Thank you.”

Saxon Bridger—formerly King—was always proud of his big, fancy office. It wasn’t at all like that broken-down joint he’d managed back in the ‘60s, not one bit. It was shiny. It had abstract sculptures in it, and an antique mahogany desk, and a fish tank. It was every inch a sign of the wealthy TV producer he’d become.

The double doors of his colossal office opened, and two beautiful women stepped in. They were the actresses he’d invited to audition: Dani Ransom and Marla Edwards. Up until now he knew them by reputation only, having never seen their films or even the posters for such. And so when they caught his first glimpse of them, his jaw dropped.

He swiftly picked his jaw back up, and cleared his throat, with a hint of embarrassment. “Ah, ladies—g-good to finally meet you at last. I have enjoyed watching your many films with Eve Guan’s little indie outfit, and…”

“Cut the crap, King, you know it’s us,” Marla Edwards said.

“And that means you probably know what we’re here to do,” added Dani Ransom.

Bridger pretended to be shocked, clamping his hand over his mouth. “Oh my God…girls? Is that you? I hardly recognized you! Marr, you look…great…with long hair…”

Both of the women were wearing long, fashionable coats—they embodied female professionalism. They both reached inside their coats, and at once Bridger started panicking.

“Hey, hey, hey, I know there’s some hard feelings between us, ladies, but there’s no need for violence!” He swore he could see the glimmer of pistols. “Let’s just talk, shall we? Just…talk.”

“We heard enough of your talking when we were your captives, King,” said Marla, properly Marr.

“Yeah. I think it’s time that we do some serious business instead,” added Devlin, alias Dani.

But to their surprise, Bridger only smiled. He pressed his fingertips, seven of them artificial, down on his desk, and rose slowly to his feet.

“I agree,” he said. “I think it’s a great time for us to do a little business. I’d love to loop you two in on all the great business I’ve been doing these last few years. Because the ‘80s aren’t a thing at all like the ‘50s and ‘60s. They’re a better time. Sure, we’ve made some concessions here and there to the pseudo-Communist causes of the liberals—but after the mistakes of the last decade the playing field is starting to level out. Men like me are finally getting a chance again.”

“You never lost your chance, King, just misused it,” Marr said. “Men like you have always had chances.”

“That’s not true, Marr—I had my chance, but people like you took it away from me. But no more! The U.S. and the UK both have woken up from their slumber. We’ve appointed leaders willing to face the powerful national enemies, within and without, that threaten our great democracies. Not a single day more shall pass where we yield to the threats of Communism and its allies. We all have a role to play, and mine is here, as the head of this station. RRGN is the TV of the future, and we will bring about that future by resurrecting the past.”

“You hated TV. You wanted to destroy it,” said Devlin.

“Ah, but that was before. This is now. Never let it be said I can’t change, ladies. Real men change with the times. They embrace new things, new technology especially. The march towards the 21^st Century is predicated on technology, and that’s very manly, I think. It’s that same technology I use to make people pine for the ‘50s. That’s what we do here at RRGN—all our programs in their own little ways give the ‘50s a fresh coat of paint.” He sighed. “Oh, they weren’t that great a decade, were they? Lead paint, asbestos, all those cigarettes…and worse, for you people. Devlin, if you were human, you’d be chained to the oven night and day, only let off to go to the bedroom for baby-making. And Marr, well—you couldn’t even sit down on a bus if a white person wanted your seat. Of course, there were some who didn’t view any of that as being a problem. Yeah—there were some of us who didn’t mind it at all.

“I have gained new understanding in this fresh decade. I understand now that the issues of inequity are fundamentally not my problem. Oppression is the fault of the oppressed, for they failed to fight off the yoke before it was placed upon them. The true American sees the yoke wherever he goes, and fights it at all hours of the day. In this way he keeps himself above the woman and the Negro, who are frail and have accepted the yoke in their meekness.

“We were strong back then, thirty years ago, and in this brave new decade I will create a new generation devoted wholesale to that strength. All I have to do is sand down the edges somewhat. Plaster them over with Norman Rockwell paintings, smiling women with steaming apple pies. Happy, round-faced children knelt in prayer. Slick cars, chocolate malts, and beach party movies. Heck, it’s even okay for white people to like jazz now—and of course you can’t forget Elvis. With the President leading the way, people finally understand that there’s just right and wrong, black and white, A is A, and nothing else—and in this way, they understand that if there’s good on the surface there’s good all throughout. The old evils fade away in that view, they’re exorcised, like in that funky movie with the little girl. And so people see in the ‘50s a purity that was stripped away by Vietnam and protests and Manson…

“It started even while I was down in the sewer. Good ol’ George Lucas, his American Graffiti, it made people nostalgic, and nostalgia is a powerful weapon for those who control it. That film whetted the appetites of those who were young in those gentler days. But George didn’t stop there—he remembered me! Through him—without even knowing it—I got to bring the serials back! Again! Oh yes, I may have been in exile, down in those sewers, when the first one came out, but look at Star Wars—it’s Xarr Bower, risen from the grave! Except now it’s got a fresh business model behind it. There’s hundreds of toys to sell—and good ol’ George, he didn’t fuck up like I did, he didn’t lose his copyright, so all that money’s going to him. A real American entrepreneur, I gotta hand it to him. Franchising—that’s the way forward. I hope the 21^st Century, above all else, is full of franchising. If it is…I know it will be because of the serials. And so in some ways, in some small ways, it will be because of me.”

His eyes glimmered and he sucked in a sharp breath. “Yes—through the serials, capitalism will innovate the fuck out of this country. In many capacities, I am the serials. I am nostalgia—I am the ‘50s and the ‘80s, and thirty years hence, with nostalgia and television as my swords, I will make people long for a decade that sees the government abandon millions of queers to their deaths, that sees the President finance death squads, that sees monstrous things done to children in Jesus’ name.”

A long, horrible pause lingered in the air, as the two Ongonati digested his words.

Then they made their move.

“Page one,” said Devlin, retrieving her hand from her coat.

“Page two,” said Marr, doing the same.

They weren’t holding guns, just pieces of paper. They set them down on King’s desk, and gestured for him to read.

“George Lucas didn’t make Star Wars because of Xarr Bower,” Marr said. “Our boss, Eve, she’s worked with Lucas on a few projects, and he’s never heard of your little serial.”

“Our little serial,” King said.

“Yours!” she spat back. “It wasn’t Xarr Bower at all that made Star Wars. Lucas was influenced by Flash Gordon, The Fighting Devil Dogs, and the films of Akira Kurosawa.”

“That Japanese punk! No, that’s not true! The Japanese are our technological competitors, their movies mean nothing!”

“Read the pages,” Devlin said, kicking his desk. “That’s why we came here.”

“Okay, okay, geez.” He looked down at the documents they’d given him, throwing on his slim reading glasses. “Let’s see…blah, blah, blah, somethingsomethingsomething…‘and through this contract of purchase, so shall the ownership of the network RRGN and its associated frequencies and accessories (hereafter “the network”) be transferred forthwith, etcetera, etcetera, to the…’” He froze. “‘…to the incorporated entity of Guan-Burke Enterprises, E. Guan, M. Edwards, and D. Ransom, proprietors?’”

“We bought you out. Rather, we bought your board of directors out,” Marr explained. “They don’t hold loyalty to any one political affiliation—only to money. We’ve made enough money in our movies over the last few decades that the sale practically made itself.”

“We own RRGN now. And we’re going to bring your conservative propaganda to an end,” said Devlin.

Bridger fell back into his seat; again, his jaw fell open. He shook his head back and forth weakly, as if trying to work out a kink in his neck. His eyes were as slack as his mouth.

“This—this can’t be,” he said, for the billionth time in his life. “This is a forgery! I’ll call Ms. March, and she’ll call Peterson, and we’ll dismiss all this foolishness once and for all…” He picked his phone, growling to himself, “I’ll die before my hard work ends up in the hands of three lesbo feminazis…”

“Die you will, Mr. King. We all do, someday.”

A new voice sounded into the room, and King jumped. He recognized it at once. “Ms. March?”

“Marsh.” It was the executive’s secretary who had spoken. She was standing in the doorway to the office. “My name is Marsh. You’ve been saying it wrong for years.”

“H-have I? Well, get me Peterson on the horn, Ms., uh, Marsh. I need to discuss something urgent with him.”

“There’s nothing more urgent than what’s currently happening to your anatomy, Mr. King.” The secretary, whose face was lined with years of Sisyphean labor, smiled grimly.

“Why are you calling me that, Ms. Marsh—Phyllis? My name is Mr. Bridger, you’ve always known that.”

“Wrong. I’ve always known the truth about you. You see, this is a hostile takeover, King. I’ve been working for these two since the beginning.”

He turned to look at the two actresses. “But that’s impossible—you couldn’t work for them! I screened you myself!”

“You never knew very much about screenings,” Devlin said.

“What have you done to me? That woman’s administered my heart medication every day for the last six months!”

“We know,” said Marr. “Except that hasn’t been heart medicine. It’s a compound brewed by an apothecary in Phyllis’ hometown.”

“Y-you talked about that town sometimes, Phyllis, I-I remember now.” King gulped; his skin was starting to feel kind of clammy. “Some place up in Massachusetts, right…?”

“That’s correct,” Phyllis Marsh said.

The three women watched as King’s skin took on a greenish hue. He started squirming as painful tremors wracked his muscles. His mustache, still fake after all these years, fell off his face as long, probing tentacles erupted from the skin around his mouth. Each of his limbs themselves degenerated into long ropey tendrils, which terminated at the ends with vaguely shovel-like flippers.

“C’mon, let’s get him into the tank,” Devlin said. The trio stepped over and lifted up the blobby green mass, which slopped messily out of its clothes. King’s new form was heavier than it looked. They opened up the top of the fish tank that took up much of the wall behind his desk, and with a hardy thrust of strength, they dumped their burden inside. At once, King found that he could both swim and breathe freely in the water.

“You wanted to be the future, King,” Marr said then. “This is the future that awaits you should humanity continue down your path. Nothing but a race of misshapen monsters, relics of the Elder Things.” Her voice dropped low as she said: “You would take us back to this planet’s most awful beginnings.”

There was nothing more to say to him; and he couldn’t talk back to them. He had no mouth, no means of expressing himself.

The three abandoned the office, and him with it. They switched off the lights as they left, leaving him, at long last, alone in the dark.

* * *

Some might call it cynical, but the truth of history is that the dreams of revolutionaries rarely come true—and when they do they do so imperfectly. To fight against evil systems and oppressive status quos requires a great exertion of energy; the defense of such generally requires far less. The fight for freedom is inherently a fight against entropy itself. To dream is to know the pain of being infinite within the confines of finite reality.

It is worth it to fight and dream anyway.

Devlin and Marr hoped that the election of Bill Clinton might mean a change in fortunes for their scrappy little TV station, but as time went on, it became clear that what was formerly RRGN was doomed to become a financial liability for Guan-Burke Enterprises. The Democratic Party of the ‘90s was a ghost of its former self. Clinton joined Blair and Chrétien on the path of the Third Way, and in doing so abandoned the passionate radicalism that had powered the Civil Rights Movement. This was one of the quieter legacies of Reagan’s America—gutless centrism. DOMA, expanded death penalties, three-strike laws—concessions to the cruelest and bloodthirstiest members of the American populace. 

They shuttered the TV station in 1997, moving back to working directly with Eve. The great metropolitan tower they’d tried to make into their refuge of hope and inspiration was left to stand helpless against the encroachment of dust. Though they wouldn’t speak a word of it aloud, Marr and Devlin wondered if time was about to turn back against them—they wondered if perhaps King’s prophecies might not have had a grain of validity to them. There was no way to know for certain.

One thing they did know for certain: they’d never stop fighting. Never ever.

After they took their final steps off the lot, the building sat empty for over two decades, as property of the city. For whatever reason, buyers who came to tour the place never ended up committing to their interest in it. Privately the city employees called it cursed—it became custom to always tell new employees that that site would never sell.

But one day, out of the blue, the curse abated.

The sale went down at the tower’s base—the man representing the city was a shifty-faced fellow, who looked something like a descendant of the royal Stuarts. The buyer, a tall man, kept his face hidden under a balaclava, which was hardly a concern to the seller. The shifty, regal-seeming chap had only smiles for the tall man as he shook his hand—he kept on smiling as he led him inside and closed the heavy front door behind him, with an honest wish that he enjoy his purchase.

Once the tall man was sure that the seller had departed, he dropped his balaclava to the ground, and began roaming the long-deserted halls. He located the cafeteria, the studio sets, the editing rooms, and found them all to be surprisingly well-preserved. Much of the equipment had been written off and left behind to rot—but with a little repair most of it would work again. The buyer was pleased.

Then, at the back of the building, he found the exec office. And his pleasure only deepened.

Slowly, the tall man crossed into the room that had once belong to Saxon King. Striding with purpose, he approached the fish tank at the far end of the room. Something inside that tank had stirred at the sound of the door opening. Through the darkness the buyer glimpsed the flash of a long, greenish tentacle. Once he was a breath’s distance from the glass he tapped on it—and the bearer of that tentacle shyly drifted into sight.

“Hello, Kingy, old boy,” Carter the Clown said. “Good to see you again.” King’s singular eye, which shone a bright yellow, widened in horror.

At once he swam into the back corner of the tank, hoping that the years of murk the water had accumulated would conceal him. But he could still feel the Clown’s gaze on him.

“I don’t mean you any harm, Kingy,” said the Clown, in a sing-song voice. “I’m just surveying my new office. I’m taking over here, y’see.” King’s limbs flailed around helplessly, but the Clown went on: “Oh, don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of kicking you out. You have a long history of tenancy and I intend to respect that. Just so long as you act like a sweet little pet I won’t turn you into sushi.” He grinned. “You and me do have a history of eating our fellowmen, though. Back in the Old West, when I was just plain ol’ Tom Bridger, I ate my fill of people—and I didn’t wait for them to turn into octopi-monsters neither.”

King wished in that moment more than anything than he could scream.

“I look forward to putting out good TV from this place again. You’ve missed a lot these last three decades, naturally enough. We don’t do the whole cable package thing anymore—we’ve taken instead to this new ridiculous ripoff that we call ‘streaming.’ I think it’s a load of crap, but people on this world love eating crap up, so I’ve launched my own service. I call it Circus. Cute, huh? And I think it’ll be a great successor to the old RRGN.” He glanced outside of the narrative for a brief moment. “If it was an old-school station I’d’ve called it TRMP. Too on the nose?”

The room was still dark—the whole building was dark. But suddenly there was a light inside the dingy old office. Carter was opening a gateway to another world, drawing on elder powers to do so. Soon the office was aglow with the emerald light of the Junpi.

It was 2023 on the “normal” Earth, the same year as it was inside the Junpi. The Junpi was its own dimension in space, and could technically be physically accessed through space travel, albeit with great difficulty. But now that the two timelines stood parallel, the use of minor magicks could easily open a window linking the two together. A little bit of leaning on the substance of reality and the walls shattered like glass.

Carter the Clown was now gazing upon the Chucklin’ Mummer—his own past self, who ruled over the Junpi’s Golden Splendoropolis.

“Hello, luv.”

Carter laughed as he watched his past self jump in surprise—then he laughed again as he felt the act become part of his own memories.

“Who the devil are you?” the Mummer cried. “Why are you peeking in on me like this? Pervert!”

“I’m you, silly!” snickered Carter. “Rather, I’m a future version of you—or I will be—or rather won’t be. Look, it’s complicated, but just take my word for it!”

“Yeah, I can sense it—we’re the same person, just in different bodies. Where are you? Maybe I’ll find you and kill you, for the fun of it.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, unlike some people, I have no tolerance for talking to myself. So let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“Over with? What do you mean?”

“I borrowed this little trick from the Leader…”

He raised his hand and shook it a little bit, and at once a silver cord flashed into existence, a cord that connected the two of them. It represented their shared timeline.

The Clown grabbed the cord and urged the Mummer to do the same. “Now, when I say pull, you pull, got it?”

The Mummer nodded.

“1…2…3…pull!”

They yanked hard, and after a long, fraught moment of exertion—the cable that joined them snapped.

Both of them were hit by what felt like a heavy headrush. The Mummer staggered backwards and said, “What—what in the name of Groucho was that?”

“We just split our timeline!” cried the Clown, roaring with mirth. “We’re different people now, you and I—but with a shared background. Shared character motivations. Shared depravities!”

“I think I begin to understand. You—you’re outside the Junpi right now, aren’t you? You crazy kook!”

“Oh, yes, I’m in the ‘normal’ timeline now. It’s so dull out here. I think it needs our brand of comedy, don’t you?”

“Are you proposing what I think you’re proposing?”

“We have the same brain, numbskull! Of course I’m proposing what you think I proposing! Why should we rule over one 21^st Century—when we could have two instead?”

The Mummer, hidden behind his carnival mask, let out a rippling peal of laughter. The Clown joined him in it.

Time pulsed. Time seethed. The redundant one, the failed experiment, writhed in his tank. And the throne that Maubeuge had placed within the reach of the thing that was once Thomas S. Bridger drew ever nearer.

THE END

~ ~ ~

King of the Chapterplays was originally printed by the authors in zine form and distributed anonymously throughout their home cities on July 4^th, 2026, the 250^th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The story has been modified and expanded for publication by PhantomEye Press. The following notes are reprinted from the original edition:

This story is a work of fiction. All characters and events are creations of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, parodically, and/or satirically. This publication was created entirely without the use of artificial intelligence.

The Elder Things and the Marsh family were created by H.P. Lovecraft and are in the public domain.

Dr. Maubeuge is loosely based on Dr. Mabuse from Norbert Jacques’ Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1921), which is in the public domain.

Captain Video, the Video Rangers, and the Western Agents are from the TV series Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-1955) and Spencer Gordon Bennet’s film serial Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere (1951), which are in the public domain. “Xarr Bower” is an anagram of “Rex Barrow,” the protagonist of Spencer Gordon Bennet’s The Lost Planet (1953), which began life as a sequel to Master of the Stratosphere; The Lost Planet is in the public domain.

Frank Blayden, alias the Rattler, is from Otto Brower’s film serial Mystery Mountain (1934), which is in the public domain.

“King” Rogers is based on the fictitious version of Roy Rogers that appeared in films from 1938 to 1951, many of which are in the public domain. “Wildcat” Kelly is based on the character played by Gabby Hayes in John English’s Roy Rogers film Don’t Fence Me In (1945), which is in the public domain. Peter “Ptomaine Pete” Tweedle is a conflation of two characters played by Jimmy Aubrey: Ptomaine Pete from Robert J. Horner’s The Phantom Cowboy (1935), and Tweedle from Sam Newfield’s Ghost of Hidden Valley (1946), both of which are in the public domain.

Eve Guan’s film Dark Mountain is intended to be a fantasy reimagining of William Berke’s Dark Mountain (1944), which is in the public domain.

R*n*ld McD*n*ld is based on the original version of Ronald McDonald, who was created and played by Willard Scott for a series of television advertisements in 1963; these ads were released without copyright notices and therefore immediately entered the public domain upon publication. The authors have only used elements of the character that are without copyright. “Ronald McDonald” is a registered trademark of the McDonald’s Corporation, but the authors of this story frankly do not care about the rights of corporations, only those of individual artists.

Characters from Norman Deming and Sam Nelson’s Overland with Kit Carson (1938), James W. Horn’s White Eagle (1941), Lewis D. Collins’ The Mysterious Mr. M (1946), Spencer Gordon Bennet’s Gunfighters of the Northwest (1954), Franklin Adreon’s King of the Carnival (1955), and Spencer Gordon Bennet’s Blazing the Overland Trail (1956) are copyright their respective owners (see the notice above).

This story is published on the 250^th anniversary of the date commonly described as America’s foundation both as entertainment and as a reaction to the complacency that seemingly grips a disturbingly vast portion of the American public. It’s bad enough that our government is presently controlled freely by a racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and queerphobic fascist regime—but it is no less enraging that a great many of our privileged brethren in working and middle class life display a confounding and egregious blindness to so many different aspects of the systemic and individual choices that enabled said fascists to begin with.

In what likely amounts to little more than selfish, egomaniacal raging, we speak out against any action that oppresses and marginalizes human beings, deliberate or otherwise. In this fashion, and in the name of compassion for the oppressed, we demand that cis men engage and grow comfortable with their emotions. We demand that cis men socialize with and demonstrate basic courtesy towards people of all genders, including people they have no sexual desire for. We demand that cis men do not treat their wives as servants. We demand that cis men raise their sons to understand that real-life cruelty is not entertaining. We demand that white people constantly examine and reexamine their behavior for unconscious biases and microaggressions. We demand that white people comprehend the implications and history of their use of slang, slogans, and shibboleths. We demand that white people stop holding people of color to impossible double standards. We demand that Christians leave be those who believe differently from them. We demand that thin people accept the diversity of body types that naturally occurs throughout the human species. We demand that people who consented to become parents treat their children with kindness and without deference to negative generational stereotypes. We demand that people do not demean those who perform services for them in good faith. We demand that people do not presume idiocy or incompetence from those who make less money than them. We demand that people do not value work over workers. We demand that people do not formulate their opinions, decisions, and evaluations with AI. We demand that people cease worshipping celebrities and the wealthy in general. We demand that people go to therapy before they form parasocial relationships with strangers. We demand that people cease using money and possessions as status symbols. We demand that people pursue whatever genuine curiosity they have in life. We demand that people stop paying for merchandise based on the books of the violent bigot J.K. Rowling. We demand that people do not make a world full of tragedy, mutilation, misunderstanding, and death worse than it already is. We demand that abled people put their carts in the fucking cart corral and not leave them at the end of the grocery belt. We demand that people do their best to avoid running over animals. We demand that we (the authors) abide by all these demands. We demand that people remember they are not the only person in the world. We demand that people remember they are not alone. We demand that people remember they are loved. We demand that people know we all need each other. And we demand that people know they matter.

Happy Independence Day.

1See The Bryan Gospels, Atom Mudman Bezecny, Odd Tales Productions, 2021, Chapter 12: “Night of the Creeper,” for an example of this past inadequacy.