| COHERENT COMICS UNINC. PRESENTS an ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES Tale.... __\|/_______________________________________________________________________ /|\ BEACON by Dave Van Domelen, copyright 2001 | #1 - "Sunrise In The Trenches" ============================================================================ [cover shows a battered soldier in muddy WWI United States Army uniform lying partially in a shellhole. The image is in sepiatone, except for a golden sunbeam shining through a hole in the clouds to bathe the soldier in light.] ============================================================================ [April, 1918 - Somewhere in France] I remember feeling two things when I woke up. Mud and pain. Both of these were in plentiful supply on the rain-soaked, shell-blasted plains of France. Assuming we were still in France. We could have been across the old border already, there were no landmarks left unshelled by which we could really tell. We could also have been in Hell. No one could have really told the difference, except that in Hell you knew that your torment was for a reason. In Hell, you were punished for the evil you had done. In the stinking mud of France, we were punished for the good we had wanted to do. Whip the Kaiser and bring peace back to the Continent, then back home for the parades. The only parades I'd seen so far were of men marching off to die. I opened my eyes again. The sky was grey, the ground was brown, all real color had long since fled this damned land. And what hadn't been covered in mud we'd painted olive and brown and grey, so it wouldn't stand out and be shelled into oblivion. Shells. I was in a shell hole, a pretty deep one. I remembered being on a truck, a big-wheeled clanking affair that gamely tried to traverse the muck that had once been farmland. We'd...hit one of these shell holes. I remembered flying, briefly and wryly wondering if maybe I should have signed up for the air arm if I was going to be spending the war in the air. Then.... Then nothing until I woke up in the hole, my body stunned and battered and in pain. It took me several minutes to even open my eyes the first time. My ears still rang, but I could finally hear murmuring around me. I couldn't move. I could see medics, walking away with a man slung in a tarpaulin. They had left me for dead! Panic seized me, and I was quite unmanned...I'm told it took five men to restrain my flailing arms, which I suddenly discovered I could still move. A pity I couldn't move anything below that. * * * * [October, 1921 - University of Chicago] "...and I expect you to read Einstein's 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect and be prepared to discuss both it and the arguments mounted against it for tomorrow's discussion." I closed my portable writing desk and stowed it behind the back of my wheelchair. The lecture had ended, and now I was forced to leave the freedom I found in the worlds of the mind and return to the prison of my body. "Mr. Parker, do you need any...?" the professor asked. "No thank you, Professor Rubenstein, I can manage." If I'd wanted a nurse to follow me around, I certainly could have had one, given my father's money. In fact, I had to practically beg my father for the chance to be indepedent. Getting around campus was certainly not easy, of course. Only a few buildings had mechanical elevators installed, and they had not yet invented a wheelchair that could climb stairs. Fortunately for me, the need to bring demonstration apparatus into a physics lecture hall meant ramps, although entering and leaving via the loading dock was somewhat embarrassing. Better, though, that small wound to my pride than the larger one that would have arisen had I needed someone to carry me like a baby into the lecture hall. After some small struggling, thanks to a Tesla-style coil left in the middle of an aisle, I made it outside into the chilly autumn air. A few weeks of freedom left before the necessities of Chicago's snowy winters forced me to rely on an assistant to get around the grey campus. "Harry, I knew I'd find you out here," came a voice from behind me. "Hello, Jason," I sighed. Jason was one of those new patriots, very impressed at how the United States had helped win the war, and feeling a little guilty that he hadn't gone to Fight The Good Fight. I'd told him again and again that only a madman would have WANTED to be where I'd been, but I don't think it had ever made a difference. "Given any more thought to that thing I asked about?" Jason chirped, carefully avoiding any appearance of trying to push my wheelchair. I'd made my position on THAT quite clear when we first met. "No, Jason. I don't need to give it any more thought. I'm sure you'll find someone else to be your speaker. Someone who got their red badge of courage in a manner more romantic than a flipped tractor. I'll attend, I simply do not want to be held up as the focus of the event." "Harry, Harry...there's plenty of veterans in Chicago, yes. It's a big city. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even some colored veterans here. But you're the only University of Chicago man who was actually close enough to see the shelling. We want the student body to really get a feel for the importance of this day. Why, in Washington they'll be consecrating a memorial to the victims of the Great War next month, and I hear the Tommies and the Frogs are doing the same. Three years ago, we finally ended war for all time, can't you just play some small part in the ceremony here?" I wish I'd shared his idealism, his optimism. But we hadn't ended war. The adventurism of the United States in the former nation of Russia in 1919 through 1920 was proof enough of that. "Jason, I'll be there. I just don't want to be the center of attention. I'm tired of being the center of attention." "Oh, all right, have it your way Harry. I'll be seeing you!" Idealism. The thought preoccupied me as I rolled across campus. Idealism drove me to enlist in the expeditionary force that ended up in the mud of France. And I suppose I still had a spark of that idealism, the belief that I could make the world a better place. I just planned to do so through science, rather than through fighting. I left the fighting to the flamboyant heroes of the pulps I read to "rest my brain" between physical science treatises. Although... my thoughts did occasionally turn to the idea of a modern Sherlock Holmes, who beat back the darkness with his mind, rather than with his fists. A man trapped in a wheelchair could still hope to emulate the great detective.... * * * * [July, 1924 - Chicago, Illinois] As I waited for the elevator, I leafed through the press clippings I'd started collecting a few weeks ago. "Midnight Killer Strikes Again!" read the latest, still fresh enough to smell the ink. There was rampant speculation about exactly how many had died at the hands of this new menace, mainly because there was no certainty about who had been the first victim. The first few killings had seemed to be simple robberies gone sour or gangland killings when the victims were not completely on the proper side of the law. But patterns started to emerge. Every victim was a person of some local importance. Aldermen, industrialists, the mayor's aide, a bank president, a major bootlegger, and so forth. And as far as anyone could tell, all had died at or very near the stroke of midnight...hence the colorful nickname of this killer. But where the early murders had been fairly simple, they had grown in complexity over time, as if "Midnight" had grown bored with mere slaughter. And now last night's slaying. A locked-room murder. Not just a locked room, but a locked and barred thirtieth-story apartment with armed guards outside in the hall. Mr. Hearst, a local party boss (no relationship of the publisher), had feared the worst...and gotten it. The elevator arrived somewhat jerkily. The usual attendant had been replaced by a police officer while he was questioned, apparently. I counted my small blessings...had Midnight preyed upon the poor, I would have had no elevator available to take me to the crime scene. "I'm Professor Parker, from the University?" I ventured. The officer looked at me suspiciously. Not because I was in a wheelchair, he'd been told to expect that, no doubt. Rather, he was probably taken aback by my youth. Most people have this image of professors as being balding, grey-bearded old men, and forget that we have to start somewhere. Heavens, we're not born grey and grizzled. Although I was the youngest tenured professor of physical science ever at the University of Chicago, so I'd gotten used to such disbelieving looks. He helped me into the elevator, for which I was grateful...the three inch step up into the inexpertly stopped car would have been rather difficult to navigate on my own. He caused the problem, he could damn well help me overcome it. It was a fairly quiet ride to the thirtieth floor, as the policeman faced fixedly ahead and tried ever so hard not to gawk at me out of the corner of his eye. Once at the top, he showed a little more care in stopping the car, and I was able to leave without assistance. I rolled down the hall to the door flanked by more policemen. "Ah, Professor," a trenchcoated man greeted me as he stepped out of the apartment. "No trouble getting here?" "None, thank you Detective Rich," I nodded. "And thank you for letting me see the crime scene so soon after." It had taken me a few weeks to get permission to investigate the previous murder scenes, and there had been nothing left to find. Detective Rich had finally decided having a willing scientist on the case might be a good idea, though. "Another goddamn locked room murder...pardon my language, Professor." I waved a hand dismissively. "I hear worse from my students during exams, although they don't realize the acoustics of a lecture hall work both directions, so they think I can't hear. What do you know about this one?" Rich pulled out a notebook. "His security guards say he was worried about the Midnight Killer, so he hired people to come in and make sure there were no hidden ways into his rooms. No leftover service doors, no ducts large enough for a person to fit through. He had locks added to all the windows, even though you'd need to be a spider to get up the walls. The windows weren't broken...in fact, nothing was disturbed. As far as we can tell, Mr. Hearst had fallen asleep in his chair next to the air cooling vent...he had air cooling added once he started locking the windows. But we checked, the workmen who installed that didn't leave any secret way in. Anyway, he was strangled by a cord of some kind as he slept. As far as we can tell, unless the security guards killed him and lied about it, this is really a locked room murder." "And that's where I come in," I nodded. "A number of individuals have demonstrated strange abilities not explained by current science, possibly resulting from the new physics being discovered in Germany. I'd like to examine the room tonight. Alone, if possible." "Why do it at night?" "Because whatever method the killer used may have depended on lack of daylight. The fact that he strikes only at midnight may be mere affectation or madness, but it could also be tied into the method by which he gains entry. I'll have my equipment sent up, so I can be ready to start after dinner. And before you ask, the more people in the room, the more interference that will obscure any signal I might detect, so please instruct the officers to remain outside during my investigations." "Well, you're the scientist," Rich scratched his head. "Go ahead and use the phone here to make arrangements, we've already checked it for physical evidence." I nodded and went to work. * * * * [August, 1924 - Chicago, Illinois] The heat was damnably oppressive. While Mr. Hearst had been considerate enough to lay on air cooling, the victim whose house I examined tonight had not done so. A transplant from New Orleans, he'd often boasted to friends that Chicagoans couldn't handle a little heat. Of course, he usually made sure to be away on business in the winter...because Louisianans can't handle a little cold. On the other hand, Mr. Tolliver's minimal use of electrical equipment in his home meant less interference, and I'd started to get a glimmering of the method used by the Midnight Killer. He was entering via the windows... without opening them! Somehow, he had managed to convert his own body into a form that could pass through any transparent substance. All of the "locked room" murders had taken place in locations with generous windows. I'd already told Detective Rich this suspicion, and he promised to get it to the papers so that potential victims could at least hide in windowless rooms until the killer was caught. An unpleasant prospect, but less unpleasant than being murdered. I put down my ultraviolet lamp and noted the results of my test. The windowpane fluoresced under ultraviolet light, in an irregular pattern that could easily have been made by a humanoid figure passing through the glass. Normal glass is opaque to ultraviolet light, of course, so it wasn't as if the Midnight Killer was transforming himself into such waves. But his passing had left residual excitations that could be coaxed out with the aid of a powerful UV lamp. Excitedly, I started theorizing aloud. "Perhaps that's the key? Ultraviolet light, abundant in sunlight but not in most artificial light, might interfere with the killer's means of entry, by exciting the glass as he passed through it. So he chooses a time when ambient ultraviolet is likely to be at a minimum...." "Incorrect. It is because the goddess rules the night, not the day." I whirled around as quickly as I could, to see a slender man dressed in black and holding what appeared to be an obsidian blade. No...he wasn't dressed in black...he WAS blackness! He was a walking shadow! And then he was upon me.... ============================================================================ Next Issue: In #2, "I Shall Shed My Light Over Dark Evil," Harry Parker faces the murderous Midnight at the stroke of 12! ============================================================================ Author's Notes: This series will try to cover some of the things that happened in the ASH Universe during the First Heroic Age and a while before it. Harry Parker will eventually become the hero known as Beacon (hence the title of this series), and become involved in the "pulp" era of ASH. Why Beacon? Well, he has some ties to the current ASH continuity, as the origins of Doublecross arise from Beacon's work. Plus, as a scientific hero, I could write him in several different ways, from detective to adventurer to superhero. This four issue miniseries will follow that development. Now for a few notes on things in the story. One of the less publicized aspects of WWI was that U.S. forces stayed behind in Russia to try and prevent the Bolsheviks from coming to power. There was some particularly vicious fighting, especially in Vladivostok, as local commanders decided they had to stand against communism. Regular glass is opaque to most ultraviolet light. You may ask, "What about UV lamps?" But they use quartz crystal so that the UV can get through.