May Dan understand I was never disappointed, only sad when he seemed to compromise.
May he know how proud…
The car finally jumps and clears the mud. He cheers, briefly confused about why. Now where was I? Oh.
May he be sad when I’m gone.
My father’s story appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! number twenty-five. I held the small digest-sized comic in my hand as I walked toward the door of the store.
Beyond all imagining, buggering all odds, the sisters each rolled ones.
Drunk and doomed and somehow dear, I rolled four.
The rest was simple math. Whether the game was new or ancient, the die polymer or pumice or bone, I won the day by the margin of a single digit. It might not be much, but it meant the world to me.
Holding the book like I had my father’s hand, I approached the door of the comic book shop and looked back one last time. I saw the Vampire tapestry being sucked inward, swept aside like a theater curtain at a premier. It allowed a clear view of the glowing table and the galaxy it held beyond. In that moment, playing the role of Orpheus, of Lot’s wife, I saw the wave motion table, like a Tesla coil without boundaries, expand beyond the framework built to keep its stars inside. The black hole at the center of those lost suns began sucking in all the light I’d seen, every part and particle of a store that couldn’t exist, all the images I couldn’t unsee.
Sister, sister, mother, father, tiny tinsel tree…
Everything swept its way into the nothing at the center of that impossible game.
Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?
I held onto my comic and ran. I ran for the front door, I ran for the alley outside, for the street, Angell street where I’d found the store in the first place. I ran for the car, back toward the post office, the place where I’d begun the evening. I ran for my father and the memory he would never keep, the one final piece of him I could hold onto. I ran and ran and felt like a woman running before the storm, toward her child, running to keep him alive. I ran like a man who couldn’t remember his father, not for real, who knew one thing, just one. I ran like a man who wanted to keep any, single, solitary memory, glad or sad, of his father alive. I ran like a son who would give anything—any universe, Saturn, Titan, all the stars aflame between— anything to have his father back.
I survived of course. This isn’t American Beauty or Our Town or that song by Gordon Lightfoot. I’m not a ghost. I finally mounted a successful if dull production of Hamlet, one my Dean could live with. It wasn’t what I wanted — no female lead, no go-go boots, no guns — but it helped fill the coffers of the capital campaign. And after that night things did change. I moved, for one. New town. New job. New directing gig. I keep that issue of Believe It or Not!in a shadow box on the wall of my new office. This school may not have the Rose, but the politics smell sweeter. They let me do more innovative stuff, spread my wings like I couldn’t before, like my dad couldn’t. I think he’d be happy for me. He’s still in the facility, still losing ground, still doomed to walk the earth. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t remember anything anymore.
I shall not look upon his like again.
So, no, things aren’t perfect. They never are. This isn’t a comic book. No mythic figures in t-shirts or capes. And no, despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never been able to find Angell again, though I did find a hero.
Malygris Never Died JOHN R. FULTZ
“What know ye of Malygris?”
— Clark Ashton Smith
Sages of the ancient world transcribed many legends regarding the infamous Malygris of Poseidonis. In the golden age before the final remnant of Atlantis sank beneath the waves, the glory of Malygris spread far and wide. According to various written accounts mostly lost to history now, the wizard inhabited an onyx tower that cast its shadow over the bright domes and temple-gardens of the Atlantean capitol. Slaves from the royal courts delivered monthly tributes of gold, ivory, and precious rarities to the sanctum of Malygris, overlord of kings and sorcerers.
Malygris held mastery over the spirits of the upper air and the lower earth, commanded solar and lunar demons, and established his dominance over the living and the dead. No magician of the ancient world could rival him at the peak of his powers. Yet legends say that he grew miserable in his wickedness, set apart from humanity by his exalted conjury. Eventually the demon of Loneliness overpowered even his ravenous lust for knowledge. All human beings shunned him and feared to walk in the shadow of his tower. So Malygris stayed locked in his lofty sanctuary for decades, his only company that of summoned imps, wraiths, and the occasional conjured daemon.
After centuries of supernatural existence, old Malygris finally died sitting in his great chair of ebony and crystal. Yet his sorcery lived on after his death in the form of the unearthly spirits that guarded his tower-tomb against thieves and looters. There was no relief for the longsuffering Lords of Poseidonis when they heard tale of the wizard’s demise, for even in death the terror of Malygris persisted in their hearts. The Tower of Malygris rose above the city like a titan gravestone. No embalmer came to apply the treatments of death to the withered corpse of Malygris. It sat rotting in its high seat for many years. Eventually the ocean swallowed the last fragments of Atlantis. Tidal waves rushed in to drown the streets and gardens of Poseidonis, and the cursed tower crumbled with the rest of the capitol. Malygris, like his legendary kingdom, was finally gone from the earth.
Or so the stories tell.
Yet stories are written by the hands of men, and men are fallible, inconstant, and often oblivious to truth. It is the quest for truth that drives sages and wizards. I have pursued it beyond the written words of unreliable men. I found it in the spirits who roam the lost and remote places. I pursued it into realms beyond our own, where immortal devils laugh at humanity’s folly. Thus I learned the great secret that haunts me to this day. I have it from the lips of seven infernal spirits and a host of nameless ghosts. Here is the substance of that terrible truth:
Malygris never died.
The Terror of Old Atlantis, the sorcerer whose dried bones never gave up his throne, the greatest wizard of the ancient world, lives on. Like a parasite invading a host, the spirit of Malygris infects and corrupts the living world. The whole of the wide earth suffers for it. Yes, Malygris lives, and his eternal bitterness, his festering malevolence, taints space and time like a poison.
In order to explain I must return again to Malygris’ deep and abiding loneliness. His attempt to conjure the spirit of Nylissa, long-dead sweetheart of his youth, left him defeated and disheartened. Upon conversing with the shade of his dead lover, Malygris realized that he could no longer see the depth of her beauty or feel the passion that had inflamed his youth. It came to him from the lips of a demonic servant that he could never recapture such lost love by conjuring Nylissa’s spirit because the wizard himself had changed over the years and grown old. The passion of youth no longer inhabited his frame, for he was truly not the same man as when he had loved her. So her ghost failed to excite him or alleviate his loneliness.
The experiment in necromantic romance was a failure, so the wizard’s loneliness persisted until it grew into a raging lust. No living concubine could satisfy him, not even those sent by decree from the Lords of Poseidonis. He could not love a slave, nor would any slave love such a terrifying master. Old and wretched, consumed by carnal guilt, Malygris spurned the living and turned once more to harassing the dead. He searched the underworld for roaming spirits of wisdom and doom. His third eye searched the stars for cosmic entities to snare and bottle in a web of spells. In his laboratory among the delicate contraptions of glass and bone, he managed to capture a disembodied intelligence drifting through the currents of time.