Jimmy had nothing to his name but the name itself and the clothes on his back. The Multiverse at large no longer cared about him, for he was no part of its truth. He was non-canon. Without even realizing it he had crossed over the Canonical Demarcation Line, and as soon as he had done so everything about his life had passed away from his perception until he was left with only the gray-white mists of the Lost Stream, where all non-canon persons and events in existence end up. Those mists took away his possessions, his memories, and his sense of self, leaving him with only his life. If he could even be said to still have that.
He lived in a small cabin in the middle of the endless, eternal void, having inhabited it since discovering it a few months after his arrival in the Stream. Before finding it he had wandered half-freezing across flat infinity, with nothing around him but white emptiness. He had screamed and screamed for someone to come find him and tell him who and where he was, but no one heard him. Or if anyone did hear him, they didn’t care.
As he was still just a boy, Jimmy had few words to describe how he felt—but the image that lingered most in his head was that of a crow who had been separated from his flock. Occasionally he would be visited by flashes of memories, and he had a faint impression of having once been yelled at by one of his parents for wanting to help an abandoned crow he had found. His screams of distress had been little more than distant, meaningless squawks—mundane sounds, which ordinary folks on an ordinary day would simply ignore.
At least the cabin made up for the hardship of those early months. It was cozy, being possessed of both an upstairs and downstairs fireplace, as well as a pantry that restocked itself with both food and firewood. All the food was dried or canned, but he didn’t mind that much. In fact it made him feel rugged, like a pioneer on the trail…whatever that was.
Yes, the cabin kept him safe—for Jimmy felt deep down that there were many things to safeguard against. This dimension was too big for him to be alone in it. He didn’t like imagining what might step out of the mist someday and find him. He viewed the Stream as a prison, or a place otherwise forsaken, and he figured that it was home to monsters, hideous beings who no longer had a place in existence at large. Initially he had questioned if the cabin’s isolation would drive him crazy. But as time passed he grew as thankful for the solitude of his home as he was for the sturdiness of its walls.
He hoped with everything he had that this sense of safety would never leave him.
Then, one day, the scarecrows appeared.
Jimmy had observed before that new objects sometimes manifested in the cabin, which he imagined were things the cabin’s original owners had kept in the building before it became non-canon. Either these objects were made non-canon to the greater Multiverse at a later point in time than the cabin itself, or the cabin’s canonicity was fading out slowly, in waves, perhaps as the owners died off or forgot about it. Now he started to wonder if he’d been premature in calling it a cabin—when it might in fact be a farmhouse. These scarecrows could have once been part of the property the house belonged to.
“Just my luck,” he whispered to himself, as he gazed out the bay window. “I had to wind up with the two spookiest-looking scarecrows in all the universes.”
They were pretty dang scary. Their shirts and pants were torn and battered, and the cloth that formed their “faces” was nothing but wind-ravaged scraps whose eyes and mouths had been cut out without a hint of care. They looked angry and mournful at the same time, especially under the shadow of the wide brims of their hats. That they and the stakes that propped them up were just floating freely in the ceaseless whiteness made them all the more intimidating.
Still, they never moved, besides swaying lightly in the breeze that seemed to blow across the whole of the Stream. Even if they did start moving, Jimmy had faith in the strength of his doors and windows and locks. His cabin had kept him safe all this time, and it wouldn’t fail him in the face of a couple sets of straw-stuffed clothes.
Indeed, the scarecrows did nothing but linger on their posts for two or three weeks, at least insofar as Jimmy could reckon time. They became a mundane part of his world, so much so that he stopped watching them.
Almost nothing changed in this new world of his. That meant that when things did change, he took notice of them almost immediately.
And so he did a double-take and let out a little scream when one day he saw the scarecrows had gotten closer to the front door.
He wondered initially if maybe he was mistaken, but he wasn’t. The scarecrows and their posts had definitely moved a few feet closer to the house.
For the first time, Jimmy started pondering the question of making weapons. He had never had any need for them before, and deep down, he didn’t want to have to fight. Maybe it would be better to run away. But the wastes would hold nothing for him—even if there were other places to hide, he was too hurt by the memories of the long, cold months following his arrival to risk going out there again. Even with stores of food and wood to help him along.
No, he had to make weapons. Fortunately, the house provided a fair selection once he got to looking. There were a few metal fire-pokers available, the kitchen had knifes and a couple of mean-looking forks. If he wanted more he could sharpen a curtain-rod or two, and he could use frying pans or stove grates as clubs. Once he realized how many armaments he had at his disposal, he thought about making traps.
But once the scarecrows got to moving, they gained a sort of momentum. Less than a full day had passed when Jimmy saw that they had moved just a little closer.
He started to panic then. He had to sleep sometime, and there was no one besides him to watch over the house. It would take a long time to devise the traps and set them up, and by the time he did all that it might already be too late.
Could they get inside, though? Could straw and cloth smash a pane of glass, or force open a door?
If they could move, then maybe they were capable of anything.
He decided that the best answer was the simplest one. He would sleep in one of the inner rooms, with twine tripwires set up that would knock over heavy things if anyone got inside. He would be sleeping lightly anyway, so it wouldn’t take much to wake him up.
Even with this system in place the nights were still hard. When he would go to sleep he would wake up maybe three or four times during the night, and it would be hard to fall back. Every shadow on every wall suddenly looked like ragged fabric fingers reaching out towards him. Every creak of every floorboard made him shudder. The tripwires remained intact, but somehow that failed to relieve him of the sense that he was being watched.
Steadily, ominously, the scarecrows grew closer and closer. One day they were standing right outside the front door, and Jimmy knew they would be coming in that night. All his faith in the protection of the door had left him. He kept his weapons close as he slept inside his tripwire labyrinth.
As it happened, he didn’t need his tripwires. The second the supposedly-locked doorknob squeaked open he bolted upward, a fire-poker in his hands. He got out of his cozy bed and scampered off into the cold of the house. He wouldn’t have long to search.
In the time it took for him to get downstairs, the scarecrows had already seated themselves in the living room, and gotten a fire going. The reddish light shone frighteningly on their wrinkled faces—which turned as one to face him as he went down the stairs.
Jimmy couldn’t help himself—he screamed, as he had when he was trapped out in the wastes. At first he tried to run back up the stairs, then he turned back to fight the intruders, only to finally dash up the stairs once again. He tripped and fell heavily down the steps, until he was flat on the ground right in front of the living room entrance. If they’d wanted to, the scarecrows could’ve rushed in and destroyed him then and there.
But they didn’t. Instead, they only stared at him with their hollow black eyes.
“Wh-what do you want with me?” Jimmy demanded.
For a long time, they didn’t answer. And when one of them did at last, it spoke with a whispering voice that sounded like wind over dry hay.
“We want…your fire…”
Jimmy gulped. “My—fire?”
“Yes…very cold out there…surely you’ve noticed…”
“It—it is cold, yes. But…but don’t scarecrows hate fire?”
The two strawmen looked at each other.
“He’s thinking of that Baum book…” one said.
“No, no, the Scarecrow isn’t burned in the book…he’s burned in the movie,” the other replied.
“What are you talking about?”
They looked back at him.
“I suppose you’ve seen lots of movies about walking scarecrows…” hissed one.
“What are movies?”
“Ah, yes…you don’t remember. Your history is gone. You’re a tabula rasa…”
The boy had stood back up at this point; his small hands still clutched his fire-poker tightly. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t remember who I was before I came to this place, though sometimes I know words or faces or places from my past.”
“Such is the life of one non-canonical.” The scarecrow cleared his throat, or what passed for one. “We were once central to the canon of our universe. Us scarecrows, I mean. We didn’t just guard fields against simple birds—we guarded the universe itself from all varieties of pests. Crows were among them, namely the dread corvid berserkers known as the Ravera’an. They and their evil empire were our principal enemies, at least up until the devastating Scarecrow-Mummy Wars, which lasted a thousand generations. I remember well my grandfather’s tales of the tasting gauze wrapping and crow-feather alike on the field of combat. I yearned to follow in his footsteps, even though I was made years after the Ravera’an were confined to their corner of space in the Ghastly Zones…”
“How the mighty have fallen since then, eh, brother?” cackled his partner.
While the scarecrow had been talking, Jimmy had sat down on the floor cross-legged, suddenly enraptured by the stories of his strange guests. His fear was swiftly melting away, though it was still strange to see things of cloth and straw move about by themselves in the eerie fire-light.
“What do you mean, fallen?” he asked. “What happened to you guys? Are you still the protectors of the universe?”
“We wouldn’t be getting turned non-canon if we were,” said one of them. “Bit by bit, our old role in the order of things is being swept away. It all started with the rise of these pretentious upstarts known as the Jeunes-Vieillards. From their glittering palace on their galactic ChronoThrone they proclaimed themselves masters of chronality itself, and as such the true protectors of Time. In the days of the Beast Wars they fought to eliminate and marginalize their competition—including us. They found a way to make our kind into their puppets, claiming that we had actually been some sort of machine-form of their invention the whole time. Some of us submitted to this role, choosing the life of mere automata. Others fell from grace, becoming crude, even wicked.”
“You mean…evil?”
The scarecrow nodded slowly.
“Some still invoked our totem for good—Captain Clegg, for instance. Other infused with our mythos became cryptids, dangerous in demeanor but rare in number. These are and were the kunekune, the hodmedods, the wicker men. Some of us seem to have mixed natures, like the fellow at Scatterbrook Farm. Us two, we…”
“Are you evil?” Jimmy asked. His face seemed half-afraid, half-enthralled.
Again, the pair looked at each other, before turning back to the child.
“Our memories, too, are somewhat damaged,” claimed one, the one who had been silent just now. “But I remember that the last thing I did before I became non-canon was threaten a 20th Century costumed adventurer called the Eagle.”
“Curious,” said his fellow. “given that my last memories are of fighting a 19th Century costumed adventurer called the Red Mask. He was actually a lawman named Tim Holt, one of Captain Video’s Western Agents.”
“Costumed adventurers…like superheroes?” Somehow, Jimmy now recalled what superheroes were—they were from something called “comic books.” “You fought good guys? I guess that does make you evil.”
“Yes—yes, I guess it does.”
Jimmy stared at the scarecrows for a long while, and they stared back at him.
“If you were going to kill me you’d have done it by now,” the boy said. “Am I right?”
“Yes,” they replied. “We are not brutal in our evil. We prefer cunning. The domain of the mind…”
“I know the domain of the mind. I’ve spent a lot of time here alone with my thoughts. Trying not to be scared of what’s outside.” He shuddered. “Or, I guess, what’s not outside.”
“You don’t need to be afraid of the Lost Stream, Jimmy. Why, with us helping you, maybe someday you could become its master…”
He looked up when they said that.
“Its master, huh?”
“Yes…think about it. If you were in charge of the Lost Stream…you’d never have any reason to be scared again…”
“Maybe you could even get your canonicity back…or build a new backstory for yourself…”
“And there are many things out there to see and do, Jimmy…”
The boy was starting to feel strange things within his heart. Alien feelings. He liked them.
“You could stroll through the ruins of Ruin’dia, archetype of decay. You could ride the tolbolwleol-mounts of forgotten Pendirr. You could sail on the skies with your pick of the ghosts of failed flying-machines…there are no limits to what has been clipped and cut and shamed out of our infinite Multiverse.”
Jimmy looked out the window at the horrible void that surrounded his home. Suddenly the thought of the unknown no longer scared him, but delighted him. He no longer wished to be a crow without a flock, stranded and ignored. If it would banish his fear, he wanted to conquer the unknown.
“Let’s talk some more, gentlemen,” he said then. “I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship…”
The scarecrows began to laugh. The laughter rose slowly in their straw throats, just a tickle of a sound. But it swelled in volume, louder and louder, until it rang deafeningly off of the wooden walls of the cabin.
Jimmy was just a boy then, an evil boy—but under the tutelage of his new teachers, he would soon became an evil man. Oh, yes—a very Evil Man indeed!
TO BE CONTINUED!
~ ~ ~
Happy Halloween! We here at PhantomEye wish you a lovely spooky season, with many pumpkins on your family’s dinner table.
This story not only serves as a prelude to a new series set in the Lost Stream, but it also meshes with elements of my Star Wars Halloween fanfic “The Ravers of Raveron and the Rains of Rainboh”, which also came out today, and can be read here. The Ravera’an (originally called Raverons) come from the hoaxes of notorious Star Wars scam artist Mickey “SuperShadow” Suttle, specifically his “leaked” plot summaries for a supposed second Star Wars sequel trilogy (i.e. Episodes X-XII). Almost nothing about the Raverons was revealed in Suttle’s “leaks,” besides the fact that they were “the ultimate evil,” and so nearly all of the lore about them featured in my stories is my invention.
Captain Clegg, aka Dr. Syn and the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, is from Russell Thorndike’s Dr. Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh (1915), which is in the public domain.
The Eagle was created by Louis Cazeneuve and first appeared in Fox Features’ Science Comics #1 (Feb. 1940); his enemy the Scarecrow was created by an unknown writer and first appeared in The Eagle #4 (Jan. 1942). Both are in the public domain.
The origin of the Red Mask, alias Tim Holt, is complicated—Tim Holt was a real-life B-Western film actor who, like many cowboy stars of the ‘30s and ‘40s, played a character sharing his name in a series of films, starting with Frank McDonald’s Gun Runners (1948). The fictional Holt spun off into his own comic book, Tim Holt, starting in July 1948, and in Gardner Fox’s “Red Mask of the Rio Grande” in issue #20 (Nov. 1950), he became the costumed vigilante Red Mask, an identity he would keep up through the magazine changing its name to Red Mask with issue #42. The copyrights on the Tim Holt and Red Mask magazines have expired, making their version of Tim Holt/Red Mask free to use. Red Mask’s enemy, the Scarecrow (initially called the Strawman), was created by Frank Bolle in Tim Holt #27 (Dec. 1951-Jan. 1952)—he is similarly in the public domain.
Captain Video and his Western Agents are in the public domain.
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