“Whoa, Carson, hang on. How… how did you know about Butterball?”
“‘Cause Long-Lost told me.”
“And who’s Long-Lost?”
He reached into his knapsack and pulled out a comic book, then rifled through the pages until he came to a dog-eared page. “ This is him.” He handed over the comic.
The whole thing-front and back covers included-was drawn in black and white. The paper stock was cheap (some of the ink rubbed off on my fingertips) and it was hand-bound with plastic spirals. A homemade comic if ever there was one.
It was open to a full-page drawing of a creature that was so incredible I was momentarily taken back in time to my first encounter with Bruce Banner’s alter ego, The Incredible Hulk. “Wow. That’s pretty cool.”
And it was. This creature named Long-Lost stood in the middle of a futuristic-looking city where it towered over every building around it. It had the head of rat with a unicorn’s spiraling horn rising from the center of its forehead; the snout of a pig, the body and wings of a bat; the legs of a spider; a horse’s tail; and two semi-human arms jutting from its chest, one hand gripping a pencil, the other a sketch pad. The more I looked at it, the more details registered; its body was composed of fish scales, its wings were a mosaic of hundreds of different varieties of feathers, its underbelly looked slick as a dolphin’s skin, and its spider’s legs ended in paws that were a combination of dog and cat.
It was both grotesque and remarkable, the work of an underground artist who was obviously gifted in a way only the truly and happily demented can be; despite all of its disparate parts, Long-Lost as a whole seemed at once organic and correct, as if it should look no other way than this.
“So this is who told you about Butterball?”
“Uh-huh. He’s the Monarch of Modoc.”
“What’s Modoc?”
Carson shook his head and made a tsk -ing noise. “Boy, you sure are goofy sometimes.” He took the comic from my hand and closed it, turning the cover toward me.
And there it was: Modoc: Land of the Abandoned Beast.
“Modoc is Long-Lost’s kingdom?” I asked.
“It ain’t a kingdom like with knights and stuff, y’know? It’s like in the future, only it’s not, really. It’s like a… a hidden world. There’s people and everything and they all love Long-Lost and he protects them.”
I nodded my head and asked him if I could see the comic again. He reluctantly handed it over. I flipped through the pages, stopping here and there to read the dialogue in the various balloons… except there wasn’t any. In each frame where a character was speaking, its speech-bubble was blank. It was only through the badly printed narration in the squares that I was able to discover that Long-Lost was preparing Modoc for something Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know. (That’s how the phrase was written every time it appeared: Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.) I handed it back to Carson.
“How could Long-Lost tell you about Butterball when there are no words?”
“There’s words there. I can see ’em but you can’t, yet.”
“Yet?”
Carson nodded. “It’s a secret.”
“Okay.” But it still didn’t explain how he’d known about the cat. Or how he’d come up with the phrase hidden world. I wondered if he even knew what that meant.
“Carson?”
“We gonna go to the Sparta again tomorrow? They make good cheeseburgers.”
“The best known to mankind, yes-but I was about to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Is this a joke you’re playing on me? Did you sneak out last night and get Butterball and take him back to the group home?”
“Nuh-uh. Butterball went to live at the Magic Zoo.”
“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
“Yeah… but not about this. I lie about Christmas presents-like telling you I don’t got one for you. I lie like that. But not this. This Very Terribly Important, Don’t You Know.”
I decided to let it rest for a while. If this was a joke of some kind, Carson would tell me eventually; if it wasn’t, at least he wasn’t upset. I only hoped that Butterball was all right. I really liked having that cat around.
Later, after dinner, Carson pulled out a whole stack of Modoc comics and sat next to me on the couch, showing me each page of every issue, in order, so I could follow what was going on.
Long-Lost ruled Modoc, a place where human beings and animals lived together in perfect accord. Long-Lost kept everyone in Modoc happy and entertained by drawing their wishes and then making those wishes come to life. It was a good-enough place. But there was an evil hexer, Tumeni Notes, who was trying to cast a spell so that the animals would revolt against Long-Lost and force him to show Tumeni where the Great Scrim was located. The Great Scrim separated Modoc’s world from our own… On and on it went, becoming dumbfoundingly complicated as it threw in everything from simultaneous-universe theories to Darwinism and a dash or two of modern DNA research. I found it difficult to believe that Carson-though categorized as a “high-functional” Down’s and capable of reading at a fifth-grade level-could understand all of this, let alone keep it straight.
He came to the most recent issue and opened it to the first page, then let out a little gasp and immediately closed it.
“What’s wrong?”
“Can’t read this one yet.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause I’m not supposed to.”
“I don’t understand.”
Tsk -ing again. “You’re goofy. I can’t read it ’cause Long-Lost won’t let me see the words yet.”
“But there aren’t any words in the first place.”
“Are too.”
I grabbed up three issues at random and opened them to various pages. “Look at this-Carson, come on! Look! Nowhere, see? Nowhere in any of these comics does any of the characters say anything. See? Just empty space.” I was shocked at how angry I suddenly felt.
“I told you already, there’re words in them, you just can’t see ’em.”
“Yet,” I added, all at once too frustrated to care.
“Uh-huh. Long-Lost does it to me, too. When I get a new Modoc, the words aren’t always there ’cause he don’t feel like talking to me yet. I gotta wait.”
“Like I have to wait?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do I have to wait? Why can’t Long-Lost just let me read the same words he says to you?”
“‘Cause he won’t say the same thing to you. He told me that, just like he told me about Butterball. He says different things to different people… but only if he likes them.”
Time for aspirin and sleep.
The next morning Carson woke me at seven-thirty and told me that we had to go to the truck stop for breakfast.
“Carson, my head hurts and I’ve had about four hours’ sleep. Can’t it wait?”
“No!” He sounded both excited and slightly scared. “We gotta go now.”
“Why?”
He showed me the latest issue of Modoc -the one he couldn’t read to me the night before-and opened it to the first page.
I was looking at a black-and-white drawing of the I-70 truck stop near Buckeye Lake. There was a car driving into its parking lot. My car. With Carson and me inside. And something that looked like the ghost of a bear floating behind us.
I took the comic from my nephew’s hands and turned to the next page. It was blank.
Okay; if Carson wanted to continue stringing me along with his little joke, I’d go with it for a while. It was kind of nice to see him putting this much effort into pulling the wool over my eyes.
All the way to the truck stop, I found myself glancing in the rearview mirror, half-expecting to see some diaphanous form pursuing us; Ursa Major, P.I.
We took our usual booth and ordered. While we waited for the food to arrive, Carson opened the Modoc issue and turned to the second page and showed me the “new” panels. They displayed, in order, our arriving at the truck stop, eating, paying our bill, and driving away. There were six panels per page, and in each frame we were joined in ever-developing degrees by ghostly creatures of myth; the centaur, the manticora, the chimera, and a griffin.