Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(25)

“Who says I dig comics?”

Grey peepers sidled down. “The t-shirt, my boy. The t-shirt.” He pressed a finger into Spider-Man’s print-faded forehead. “I can tell you have a hankering for some place better than this nightmare in motion.”





#113


The ink-bled address scrawled on the flyer ended up being a ruse.

The place was an old, boarded-up milk bar that hadn’t seen custom in at least a couple of decades. Jacob had kicked the door with what — frustration? A sense of bitter reality? Of course it was a hoax. What’d he expected? Escape? There was no escape. The world was the world.

Jacob walked from beneath a sheltering doorway, back out into the deluge. His clothes were already soaked through, his skin itched. Precisely the moment a tiny woman approached, wrapped to the nines in torn plastic garbage bags.

“Heropa?” she inquired.

“You were scammed too?”

“No scam. It’s real. But you need to go some place else. First up, a question: How did Peter Parker become Spider-Man?”

“You’re kidding?”

“Fine. See you.” The little lady turned about.

“He was bitten by a radioactive spider. Any fool knows that.”

She chortled while coming back. “Not so many fools as you’d think. Go here.” The Bag Lady showed him a different address, and retracted it as he reached over. “No, you remember. Safer that way.”

“For who?”

“Everybody.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“You’ll find out when you get there.”

“That address?”

“No, silly. In Heropa.”





#114


The address the Bag Lady offered up led him to an empty lot. A man hidden in a waxy, plasti-board crate in the corner of the open space, secure from the downpour, asked a different question after Jacob politely knocked.

“What were the names of Batman’s parents?”

“Thomas and Martha Wayne.”

“Listen carefully,” the unseen Box Man’s voice said from within. “I’ll give you the next directions only once. I don’t care if the rain is making a racket and you can’t hear me properly.”

“I can hear you okay.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one?”

Third port-of-call was a three-storey, nineteenth-century redbrick warehouse down a flooded laneway. There were beaten-up old skips, fallen walls and rusted shopping trolleys littered about that together prevented access by any means other than foot. This was tricky enough, since it required a lot of climbing and much slippage.

The place had corrugated steel on some windows, but similar dressing on the others had obviously been torn away for salvage, and there was a helter-skelter of planks and plastic sheeting stuck on.

The warehouse, too, was a red herring.

The by-now-customary point-man — in this case a middle-aged punk with a misshapen umbrella and a leather jacket that was probably really vinyl and way past its use-by — intercepted Jacob and quizzed him with another teaser, this time pinched from an old cartoon (‘Who was Popeye’s girlfriend?’ — Answer, ‘Olive Oyl’).

The Punk passed on a street number in the same neighbourhood.

Wildish goose chase this may’ve increasingly resembled, but the fact was Jacob had little better to do with his time, and at least the wayward search killed his appetite. He wondered if these watch-people hovered there twenty-four hours a day, if they had rotating shifts, and whether or not they got paid.

At the fourth address the question was dead easy (‘What is Superman’s weakness?’ — Answer, ‘Kryptonite, magic or lead’) and at the fifth obscure (‘When was the first issue of The Fantastic Four published?’ ‘According to the cover, November, 1961’).

Outside address six Jacob stopped, waiting to be accosted, but nobody showed.

Before him was a dilapidated Victorian terrace house, street number 43, two floors of bluestone and perhaps an attic above that. There were a brother and sister joined at the hip on either side, in equally shoddy condition.

The gate was missing most of its pointed bars and let out an almighty creak when he shoved against it. After that he weaselled past an overgrown, very dead bush with zero foliage, and went up five steps to the verandah, where most of the floorboards were absent and the cast-iron ornaments long-since plundered.

Stepping carefully from remaining slat to remaining slat, Jacob reached the heavy-looking wooden door and pushed. Of course it was locked, or barred.

Above eye-level on the warped upper panel where a window probably used to be, there were three sketches of apparent female superheroes done in charcoal or pencil and rendered in a style that would’ve made Japanese kids’ book illustrator Ryōji Arai proud.