In only a few strokes, he’d reached the dressing table, one hand clutching at the nearest hardwood corner in the way someone would grab the tiled end of a swimming pool in between laps. Levering himself up on his elbows, Brandon Chuff’s successor tugged with one hand at the fancy metal handle of the topmost drawer, and with minimal effort, slid it open. Bracing against disappointment, Worsley slithered a few inches closer to the table, and peered in.

  Oh His God. Was all of this a fricking dream? This surely could not be, and yet … no. No, this wasn’t happening. This was incredible, like a religious miracle, a rush of transcendental fire.

  Inside the drawer were comics, maybe twenty, twenty-five, sensibly bagged, not even what you’d dignify by calling a collection. Neither were there genuine antiquities, or at least relatively speaking – nothing from the forties or the fifties, no Exciting #1 or Manhunt #22. In fact, somewhat disloyally, considering that Chuff had worked predominantly for American, these were all books from Massive or Goliath, Massive’s predecessor. What had made the supine Porlock gasp, however, was that these were all the number ones and first appearances. This was the origin of Massive, the nativity, front covers made as archetypal and familiar as the three kings or the baby in the manger. OHG.

  Before Worsley’s dilating pupils were near-mint first issues of The Unrealistic Five, Freak Force and The Vindictives, all with covers and interiors by the legendary Joe Gold. During ‘Joltin’’ Joe Gold’s staggering conceptual eruption of the early 1960s, he’d created almost all of Massive’s vast franchise portfolio single-handed, aided only by the fluttering, trilling byline of Satanic Sammy Blatz. The Unrealistic Five’s iconic frontage was exactly as the new chief editor remembered from his eighth year, when he’d passed on the now priceless UF #1 in favour of a mediocre Felix Firestone tiff in Thunderman. There was the wobbly, anxious-looking logo lettering in an anaemic blue, the ten-cent bullet, giant Comics Code seal of approval, number, month and mystifying lack of a publisher’s imprint. There was Gold’s perfectly weighted, shadow-friendly Unrealistic Five advancing apprehensively along a cracked and blasted urban avenue, herds of distraught New Yorkers scattering in the skyscrapered backdrop, and, up in the foreground on the right, the brutal armoured glove of the first issue’s villain hanging into view. Surging towards the reader genie-like, his lower half a rumpling column of grey smoke, Fogmaster had a black-trimmed speech balloon proclaiming, ‘Holy Scott! The Creature Curator plans to overrun the city with his creations!’ His teammate, Dr Unrealistic, closer to the reader and transforming his right arm into a corkscrew, issued a responding bubble that read, ‘Then he’s reckoned without Dr Unrealistic and the Unrealistic Five!’ Elsewhere, the avuncular John Monster lifted a cement mixer to use as a projectile, Insubstantial Girl walked through an upturned bus, and team mascot Electrikid sputtered and sparked with adolescent indignation.

  Under that, Vindictives #1; the three brief issues of The Brute’s mistimed initial run; Alarming Adult Reverie #19, with the first glimpse of Robert Novak’s Beetle Boy; Tales of Astonishing #37 and the debut of Ormazda; #1 of The Alarming Beetle Boy; the Human Tank in Journey into Strange #73; Vindictives #9 where Joe Gold’s National Guard is back in action after dreaming in a nutrient bath since World War II … everything. Everything was there. Worsley had found his inner child, albeit face down in a dead man’s porno horde. When he failed to ascend to heaven on the spot, Porlock was then left in a state of paralysing indecision. What to do? Should he tell Dan? Yes. Morally, of course he should. Of course he should tell Dan. Dan was the one who Chuff had trusted with the keys. Although. Although, just playing devil’s advocate, was there a way that Porlock could … no. Best not even think about it. But, then, there were only, what, two dozen comics at the most? You’d think you could – he didn’t know – just stick them down your pants or hide them in your jacket, something like that, but that really wouldn’t work in Worsley’s less than ideal current circumstances. Why hadn’t he brought his shoulder bag? Why hadn’t he just broken in the night before, with flashlight, mask and this year’s price guide? Why hadn’t he bought that issue of The Unrealistic Five in 1961, when it was right there on the rack at Mr Salter’s? Why—

  Off in the distance, in another world, Dan Wheems was screaming.

  Porlock pushed the drawer shut with a guilty start. Flailing intuitively, he contrived to pivot, swivelling on his ball-bearing stomach until he was pointing at the bedroom door. Wheems was still shrieking, way off down the landing, sounding like a thing in danger of its very soul being extinguished. With three by-now-expert kicks, Worsley was through the door and striking back down the fuck-flooded passageway towards his caterwauling colleague, shifting to a butterfly stroke for expediency’s sake. Both arms were flung in front like windmill blades, their backswing churning up a spindrift spray of scopophilia to either side, the shredded double penetrations, money shots and reverse cowgirls hanging beaded in the air. Each forward stroke pushed Porlock’s face into the peppery must of wrinkled relaxation literature that he was swimming through, so that each time he broke the nipple-studded surface, he was forced to take great gulping breaths before the next submersion. Like a flying fish that bounced on the Pacific’s peaks, or horny salmon flapping upstream, Worsley’s progress down the landing had its own magnificence, and its own bow wave of mangled erotica in a big, spreading V behind him.

  Wheems, apparently screamed out, was sitting on the partly submerged sofa in Brandon’s front room with shoulders shaking and one hand up covering his face. When Worsley had dismounted from his flume of rut and pushed his rustling way into the parlour, Dan was in a place beyond words. The Vindictives scriptwriter could only point across the rippling surface of the lewd lagoon, gesturing at a bulging-open doorway that led off to an adjacent space. Bewildered and increasingly afraid, Porlock followed the ragged trench his weeping buddy had already dug, towards the murky opening and whatever lay beyond.

  It was a largish room, and Worsley speculated that it may have once been the apartment’s living room, though it had evidently been long since repurposed. Now it seemed to be some sort of storage area, containing only numerous cardboard boxes of a size approximate to an old, three-dimensional TV. They were all open-topped, each with a different year’s date written on the front in thick, black marker pen. The dates appeared to reach at least as far back as the early 1990s. Back in the front room, Dan Wheems was sobbing audibly as Worsley shuffled further in amongst the ominous beige cubes. The nearer cartons, seemingly all from the current century, were full of packaging material, marshmallow-white in the subdued light. What might be concealed beneath the pallid nuggets, Porlock wondered? Bestial inflatables, or body parts with evidence of cannibal activity? In cautious half steps, he inched closer, to see better. When he was right next to the containers, he revised his earlier opinion with regard to what they held. It wasn’t packaging material. For one thing, there were threads, and tags, and … what was it, exactly? Worsley leaned in, frowning.

  It was two or three hours later, when the summer sun was low, that David Moskowitz dropped by. The publisher, diminutive but looking taller in a long black coat, jabbed at the buzzer by the street door, then stared blankly at the sea life on the walls of Scuba-Do until an ashen Worsley Porlock lumbered down the narrow stairs to let him in.

  Porlock looked ill and was incapable of speech, even when in the presence of the ultimate upstairs man at American. (Subordinate to the corporate owners, obviously, but still.) When Moskowitz asked what was wrong, his new chief editor could only mutely shake his head and indicate that his superior should follow him to Chuff’s apartment, up the worn, complaining steps. In Brandon’s hallway, with his first appraisal of the pornographic inundation, the intensely nervous little man – Moskowitz seemed shorter every time his underlings encountered him – was dumbfounded. Even more unaccustomed to the monodextrous genre than Dan Wheems, the publisher could only blink through his designer spectacles and struggle for some utterance that was remotely adequate.

  ‘Oh my gosh. I guess this explains why Brandon stopped.’

  Moskowitz, largely unfamiliar with the adult world, supposed that this vast plethora of spicy entertainment, previously unimaginable, was the source of Worsley Porlock’s haunted manner, but, of course, it wasn’t. The new editor-in-chief, still silent, led Moskowitz through into a front room where Dan Wheems was curled into a whimpering foetal ball on the tit-littered sofa, which rose like an atoll from its lecherous Sargasso. As the chief executive absorbed this abject spectacle, too far out of his depth to comment, Porlock merely gestured to the anteroom’s wedged-open entrance. He then sat down on the couch by the withdrawn and twitching Wheems, not meeting Moskowitz’s eye and making it apparent that if the unsettled publisher wished to investigate the proffered cubbyhole, he’d have to do so unaccompanied. The writer and the editor were broken, Moskowitz concluded. This, whatever it was, was a job for management.

  The boxes stood in failing light and mausoleum silence. David didn’t like it, not one bit. All of those dirty magazines filling the front room and the hallway, spilling everywhere like psychic sewage from a ruptured main, they made him feel as if he’d never really known his former editor-in-chief. It wasn’t the erotic content of the publications that disturbed him – sex was just another genre that he had no interest in, like funny animals or cowboys – but their terrible condition. How could anybody sane, whatever their enthusiasm, live with their collection in a state like that?

  At least these enigmatic cardboard crates suggested an attempt at order, in amongst the carnal chaos. Cautiously, as one would expect from a comics publisher in those challenging times, Moskowitz approached the marker-dated cartons, peering into each one as he passed.

  Like Porlock, Moskowitz at first mistook the wadded balls of tissue for some kind of packaging material, then noticed that each crumpled paper clump had its own label tag, affixed with cotton thread and, possibly, a glue stick. What was that about? Pausing before a box with 2001 in black and hasty numerals on the front, he reached in and took one of the compacted plugs of Kleenex for a more thorough examination. Stiff and brittle like a dried white rose, on its appended label the date ‘August 12’ was inscribed in what David recognised as Chuff’s distinctive, spidery hand. Throwing it back, he chose another, this one reading ‘July 9’. The next had ‘Sunday, May 13’, and after that, a brief addendum that said ‘Mother’s Day’. Then March 18, November 2, February 14 – ‘a romantic evening in’, October 8, May 23 … by Moskowitz’s estimate, there looked to be three or four hundred tissue parcels in each of a good two dozen boxes. He continued to sort through the crispy pillows, utterly bewildered but determined he should understand. At last his trapped and darting eyes alighted on a lone anomaly, a small black label tethered to its rosette with black thread and written on in fine-point silver Sharpie. His manicured fingers trembling, he fished it out.

  ‘September 11 – today, a new Pearl Harbor.’

  David stared at this, and blinked some more, and thought about it.

  Worsley Porlock looked up, unsurprised, as Moskowitz’s miniature hobgoblin form came backwards at high speed out of the storage space, a movie character on rewind with his frantic dialogue squeaky and reversed. He suddenly stopped dead, turned in a semicircle and threw up on Brandon Chuff’s flat-screen TV, where it poked out from the front room’s licentious topsoil. Moskowitz’s violent heaving, hoarse and with a canine quality, caused even Wheems to open one despairing eye and contemplate the wretched vista for some fifteen seconds before closing it again, seeking escape in an attempt at self-inflicted catatonia. The day outside went on with its decline.

  Over an hour passed with the three men crouching there amongst the hills of dream and quaquaversal strumpet-cascades; crouching, staring, no one saying anything, nothing to say. Night had begun to filter into the apartment, falling in a sooty, fine precipitate. Away in the ongoing movie of New York, sirens were stitched across the distant dark in threads of shimmering blue.

  Eventually, Porlock broke the silence with a lame suggestion.

  ‘We could, you know, we could leave it all here, maybe. We could just, you know, go home.’

  Through the corrective lenses, David Moskowitz’s eyes were feverish and intense.

  ‘No. No, no, no. We can’t just leave it. There’ll be people coming here, the landlord, perhaps relatives. Did Brandon Chuff have relatives? He didn’t look the type who had a family, but you can never tell. We can’t take any chances. If there’s people coming here, all this could wind up in The National Enquirer. It might end up doing damage to the company, and that can’t happen.’

  This last point was no remote consideration. With the comics industry having for some years been in a condition of collapse, rumours of buyout were forever in the air, so any minor scandal had potential to screw up a deal and greatly inconvenience the parent company, which, in this instance, was the all-powerful Brothers Brothers corporation. No one wanted Brothers Brothers mad at them, particularly David Moskowitz.

  Dusk settled like obscuring ash, and electronic wristwatches continued with their fake, unnecessary tick so as not to confound the elderly. Wheems and the abyss carried out a mutual inspection. Flies buzzed listlessly, so, after a few minutes, Worsley tried again.

  ‘Couldn’t we, I don’t know, couldn’t we get it to the dump or somewhere?’

  Both of Worsley’s ideas were, of course, put forward in the hope they might allow some covert opportunity to salvage those first issues hidden in Chuff’s dressing table. As it was, Worsley would end the night screaming inside and feeling a bereavement he knew he must never share with any other living soul. Now, though, sitting in Brandon’s darkening jerk-silo, David Moskowitz’s adenoidal snarl was shot through with contempt.

  ‘Are you insane? That’s probably what Arvo Cake was planning, with his girlfriend. No. There has to be some way that we can fix this. Shut up, both of you, so I can think.’

  Wheems hadn’t said a word for several hours.

  After a simmering hush, the publisher appeared to reach, internally, some calm and windswept summit of decision. Lifting up his small, sharp-featured head, he gazed with action-hero gravity through the descending gloom at his unravelling associates. Outside, a passing car sent lazy orange rays across the ceiling of this room drowning in prurience.

  ‘I know,’ Moskowitz said, the highlights dancing in his spectacles. ‘I know what we can do.’

  6. (May, 2016)

  A lovely day on the periphery of Gary, Indiana, and up in the glassy azure was a single mashed-potato serving of white cloud, as clean as anything Charlie Morelli ever saw. It wasn’t just the white of folded laundry in a washing-powder ad, or of unbroken Alpine snow, or perfect teeth. A galleon carved from vapour, it was white as God, a pinnacle of pristine all those other whites could only dream about. It glowed with purity and hygiene to a point that almost made Morelli want to cry.

  He was a wiry little guy, this Charles Morelli. In his middle seventies, he still had a good crop of dust-grey hair and a great tan, although he guessed it made his face look kind of leathery. Blue pants, cream shirt, same every day. He’d sometimes get a little crazy with the socks, just for variety. He moved around the square green baize of his front garden, tending to his flowers with an unhurried gait suggestive of tremendous patience, sunlight golden on his weathered cheek.

  Ask him about himself, he’d give it to you straight: born Providence, Rhode Island, 1929, his parents Joseph and Irene Morelli. Flunking out of high school, he’d worked at his father’s bakery then moved to New York with the family in 1951, explaining where he’d got that accent. Married to Joan Summers, 1963, a pizza business in Connecticut that didn’t work, divorced in 1970, no children. Since then, managing a vacuum-cleaner dealership in Cleveland until his retirement in 2005, when Charlie had moved here to this place, just outside of Gary. Huge Sinatra fan, having a lifelong interest in horticulture. That was the whole story, every time, practically word for word.

  His house, the pastel pink and well-appointed property behind him as he pruned and weeded by the picket fence, was just about the only place out that way that had anybody living in it, which was good. Morelli looked up from his gloves and shears to cast a wary eye at the For Sale sign in next door’s front yard. He’d been here for, what, ten years now? The next-door house had been stood vacant all that time, and Charlie liked it that way. It would probably all come to nothing, he consoled himself, returning to his pruning. Who the hell would want to live here anyway, with nothing much outside a general store for miles? No, it was all OK. He was OK.

  He was attending to his roses. Roses were the ones that smelled nice, something like Turkish Delight, but better. In Charlie’s experience, you tended to get quite a lot of them on greetings cards. The ones that he was fussing with at present were a sort of violet colour, and were called something. Those bugs like fat and furry hornets drifted amiably from flower to flower as Morelli clipped and trimmed, and he’d admit, if pressed, that he felt pretty good. This was a good life. Charlie didn’t get as stressed or angry as he used to do, nor did he face all the same problems and anxieties.

  Unconsciously, he registered the faraway buzz of an engine, quieter to start with than the furry hornets but then rapidly becoming louder, nearer. Probably it wasn’t anything. You didn’t get a lot of vehicles out Charlie’s way, but six or seven times a week there’d be a car, a truck, a deafening biker, things like that. He’d long since stopped reacting every time he heard a motor, but he’d not stopped noticing them. This one was an SUV with tinted windows, roaring down the otherwise deserted road towards Morelli’s house. The old man’s scrutiny of his rose bushes seemed to become more intense and focussed, his face buried in the large and fragrant blooms. He licked his lips, which suddenly were dry, and thought how much he’d like a beer right now.