SHADOW OF THE RAPTOR

We were watching Samson and Delilah. 1949 film with Hedy Lamarr and Victor Mature. Hedy had always impressed me—she'd actually co-invented a torpedo radio guidance system during World War II. Hardly the kind of thing you'd expect a movie star—especially a female movie star—to come up with. But folks can surprise you. Who knew that the philosopher, Frederic Nietszche also composed music?

But today, I wasn't looking at Hedy (looker and inspiration though she was). I was looking at Victor Mature. More to the point, I was looking at Samson, the role he was playing.

“You seem to be absorbed in that old movie, Nancy. I thought we were going to discuss our situation.”

“Yes. We will. We need to.”

“And this is the perfect time, with all the others out. Joanna's off, doing Joanna things. Lady Angelique's taking care of her own affairs. She's given me the night off—and frankly, without my work to occupy me, I feel a little bit lost, so I'm glad we have this little opportunity.”

“You really identify with being Angelique's bodyguard, don't you?”

“I'm not cut out for anything else. We've served the Grissom family concerns for generations.”

“Yes, and to be quite honest, when Lady Angelique introduced you as her bodyguard I had my doubts...”

“Yes. My small size is rather misleading. Opponents have landed on the floor before their brains even realized how they'd gotten there.”

“Yes—that drunk guy trying to put moves on Angelique. He looked like he weighed...”

“One-hundred thirty-six kilograms—or twenty-one and a half stone. You and I should review our discoveries so far. My memory is photographic, but I think you have an ability to recognize patterns, which I lack. That is why Mr. Carçis employed you, I think.”

“Daegne Carçis. I admit he leaves me at a loss sometimes. He's like a Grand Master, ten moves—or fifty—ahead of the game. I don't know why he needs me around sometimes.”

“My employer's great-grandfather was Augustus Grissom. Before the outbreak of World War I, he founded Grissom's Omniversal Gadgets—G.O.G., for short.”

“An outfit for which there is no historical reference, but I believe you.”

“Herr Grissom was in Russia, in 1908. He was there the day the sky split apart—June 30th. It's what he found there that was significant...”

“I'm hearing this for the first time.”

“Whatever it was that came to Earth from out there left a calling card. Living material—metal, that was alive. Grissom gathered it. He found a way to make living creatures out of it—to multiply the material. Get it to reproduce. He made creatures in the shape of men, men that could be trained to fight—and to kill.”

“Of course! The so-called gadgets. Artificial life—my fact checking showed they were the inspiration for Karl Čapek's play, Rossum's Universal Robots. But we have no idea where and how he came across the information.”

“This is why Lady Angelique came to see your Mister Carçis. For one hundred and seven years we have not known why our plan failed. We knew something destroyed many of the Gogs—our factories were wrecked. We had nothing we could offer the Central Powers—nor the Allied Powers. Not any more.”

“Wait—you were selling to both sides in the war?”

“The longer we kept the war running, the more money pours into our coffers.”

Paul must have seen the expression of disgust on my face. “There's nothing to be afraid of. It's called Realpolitik. Just business. Nothing more. We skate in very rarefied circles. You would serve your own best interests by jettisoning your pet naivety. I find your attachment to it both puzzling and even slightly annoying.”

I was getting increasingly uncomfortable. What kind of people had I gotten myself involved with?

“Nancy—Carcis has virtually identified what we have been dealing with for more than a century. I had not thought our quests were connected—but they are.”

“What! Paul—we've been trying to track down and prove an urban legend.”

“Yes. The so-called 'Homeless Superman.'”

“Yes, he's just like Superman in the movies and comic books—except that he also happens to be real. We've been able to piece together information from all over the place. No one sees this guy. He never leaves a trace, but he's done all this good in the world—always in secret. Nobody knows his name. What he looks like. But we've been able to find factually verifiable traces of his existence.”

“Your Joanna believes he might even be her father.”

“Yes. Her mother was attacked while freight hopping thirty years ago. Whoever he was—whatever he was, he saved her. He yanked the train doors open and threw her attacker down to the Kentucky River, nearly three hundred feet below. Her mom said she was terrified he was going to get her too, but whoever he was, he knelt down by her and told her, 'No one will ever hurt you again.' Those were the exact words her mother told her he said.”

“That is valuable information. We absolutely need to find him. Do you have any earlier reports?”

“They go back pretty far—unbelievably far. Listen, in 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two boys from Cleveland, Ohio, created the Superman character. We don't think he came out of their heads—we found traces of a circus that passed through that area in 1934. Its sideshow featured a man so strong he could lift a DeSoto sedan over his head. Dressed like a circus strongman, he gave them the idea for what became their character, a man stronger than steel!

“But it stretches back even further! There were works of fiction that, when we traced them back to their origins always turned out to be based on something that had really happened—something that was buried and hidden, to keep the public from panicking.

“1931—a writer named Owen Francis publishes a story in Scribner's Magazine, about a man who was born in a Bessemer furnace—he was literally made of steel. They called him Joe Magarac. He was a kind of Paul Bunyan of the steel mills. But we found very disturbing evidence that there was something real behind those stories—something gave rise to those stories.

“1930—Philip Wylie, author of Generation of Vipers, writes Gladiator. A novel about a man whose father bequeathed him superhuman powers. Where'd he get that idea? None of his other books comes close to anything like that. Everything leads us to believe that Wylie had had an encounter with our homeless superman—that they all had. Wylie, Francis, Siegel and Shuster, and who knows who else? Whoever he is, he's still out there, and still doing good.”

“Nancy—he's no longer doing good. He's slaughtered a few thousand people. Lady Angelique and I joined your outfit shortly after those things started happening. Something has changed him. Whatever good he may have done in the past—it's gone now. I suppose it was only a matter of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“His story goes back much further than 1930. I can tell you why he's done good all this time, and why he's suddenly stopped. Perhaps you've heard the story of Judah Ben Loew, a rabbi in seventeenth century Prague, Czechoslovakia?”

“Yes, I have. He was supposed to have created a golem of clay and by Kabbalistic magick brought it to life to defend his people, the Jews of Prague.”

“Yes. He inscribed the word, emeth, or truth, on its forehead. If the initial letter was erased, turning emeth into meth, or death, the golem would return to lifelessness. But that is a myth.

“The story actually originates four hundred years earlier. It was the Rabbi, Jakov Ben Kasher—but his golem was not made of clay, but iron, and he did not make it—it came to him. He trapped it, inscribing the word Tzaddiq (or rightousness) on its forehead. If the initial letter was removed from that, the word Tzaddiq, became Duwq, (or crumbling). He would crumble and fall apart. So the magick compels him to do only that which was righteous.”

“Four hundred years! That's...incredible!”

“It becomes even more unbelievable the further back you go. We have unearthed records going back thousands of years, not just hundreds.

“About seventeen thousand years ago, fifteen thousand B.C., the Commorian records tell of King Cromragge. He encountered a monstrous being made of living iron. He was able to wound it in the eye and it fled his kingdom.”

“People who've caught a glimpse of him—that patch over his eye...” I could not believe what I was hearing. Where did this all stop?

“The records give the name Raptor to this being—whatever it really is. They say that after its encounter with the king, it began to do good, even eventually being befriended by the king and guarding his kingdom.

“And I think I know why. Why did an inhuman monster suddenly change its nature like that? The answer to that goes back to the very beginning of this creature's foray into our universe.”

I'd been paying strict attention up to now but that last thing really brought me up suddenly.

“Did you say...universe? Oh, of course you did.” I admit I was reeling at this.

“Nancy, all our investigations point to the fact that there are more universes than one. In each universe, a single element predominates as the core building block of life. In our universe, that element is carbon. Together with other elements, like hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, life is formed. Carbon is the sixth element on the Periodic Table. But there are other universes where other elements form the basic building block of life.

“We're the Sixth Universe. The universe of Carbon. What we call the Raptor came from the Twenty-sixth Universe—the universe of iron.

“Think of it—living iron. Iron atoms in organic bonds with titanium, vanadium, cobalt and nickel, tungsten, iridium and mercury. It entered our universe through a rip in the two realities and it smashed into the Earth—hard. It changed the very shape of the incipient continents. The skies were covered with dust and ash. The great dragons could not survive...”

Compared with this revelation, my previous astonishment was nothing.

“Are you saying..”

“The coming of the Raptor put an end to the Age of the Dinosaurs. It has existed on the Earth for sixty-five million years.

“Think of it—it was a life form completely alien to our carbon form of life. How would the Raptor have regarded the life that remained? He was something completely new. A virtually immortal being he would have strode the world as a colossus. And to him, a century would have been like an hour.”

“Wait a second...I know that phrase. 'Like a colossus, a century like an hour...' C'mon, Paul—I'll wrestle my eiditic photographic memory against your eiditic photographic memory. That's it. Robert E. Howard. The Devil in Iron. Conan story. Weird Tales. 1934. Conan fights a demon who's manufactured a body from iron and made it live. Oh, my gosh—are you saying, that king you were talking about...”

“Cromragge.”

“...was the source that inspired that Conan story? So Superman, and Hugo Danner and Khosatral Khel, Joe Magarac, the Golem—stories all inspired by this reality, this thing that's not even from our universe—this Raptor?”

“Yes. When King Cromragge put out the Raptor's eye, for the first time in millions of years, it understood that all these carbon-based creatures—they were sentient, too. And from that time he started getting more interested in them. He strove to comprehend what, to him, were utterly alien forms of life.

“And what Ben Kasher did was cement that change of heart. It guaranteed the Raptor would continue to do good. But after eight hundred years that magick is beginning to wear off. And that's why he's starting to kill people.”

Something didn't quite ring right about that.

"From what you're saying, the Raptor was already doing good...thousands of years before that rabbi got a hold of him. No, it's got to be something else. I mean, what you're telling me is incredible stuff. The stories I know of our homeless superman, they're pretty consistent. I don't believe it could be him that's doing these things. I think I know him too well.”

“You can't know him. Despite the façade of good, he is completely alien, with totally alien motivations.”

“It has to be someone else.”

“Who? There are no records of there being any others. He is the only one—and he's gone bad. Don't let you affection for the myth...of this creature, blind you to the realities. Remember what I said about naivety.”

“Let me honest with you, Mister Paul Scatterley, I've been keeping track of all the places where our superman has supposedly gone rogue. They are all places where all of has haven't been too far distant from.”

“Are you thinking that perhaps it's one of us that's doing this? Do you think Johanna? She's a bit crazy, but not malicious.

“Your employer, Mister Carçis? Or how about my Lady Angelique?”

“Or how about you?”

“I know you're not really serious, Nancy. Our superman, the Raptor—do I look like I could tear apart steel girders with my bare hands? That's a lot harder to do taking down a three hundred pound asshole.”

“Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I'm just really wound up about this. And, no matter what the facts seem to be pointing toward, I can't really believe our superman is morally capable of doing this...this total evil. I need to sit down. Get my mind off this.”

“Besides everything else, suppose you're right, and the Raptor isn't the one doing these things. Suppose it's someone else? Why? What would be the motive? What would they hope to gain?”

“I don't know. But it's almost as if they're going out of their way to make it look as terrible as possible. Maybe this hypothetical other monster really does just delight in slaughter for its own sake.

“But what...if, for some reason, it was trying to pin these things on the Raptor. They wanted to make the Raptor, our homeless superman, look bad. I can't figure it out. It's too much for me.”

“Sit down and watch the film. Say this 'other' monster is trying to frame the Raptor. You still have to identify the reason why.”

I sat down on the couch. Paul was slowly pacing back and forth on the floor behind me. I got back into the flick.

And as I was watching Victor Mature as Samson, a thought was beginning to form in my brain. Vague. Shadowy. Tentative. But there was something. I looked at the screen.

“I pray thee, O God, strengthen me only this once.” And Samson starts to push at the temple column. He stresses and strains and the pillar begins to scrape free of its housing.

“My eyes have seen thy glory, O God. Now let me die with my enemies.”

There was something there. Something about that scene. It was trying to tell me something. But what?

Samson stresses and strains. Looks just like...a strong man. The kind you'd see in a circus sideshow. And you look at them, you admire their strength. You couldn't lift the weights they lift.

And here's Samson. He's moving weights no human being could move. But...it would take far more than just muscular strength to do that. You'd have to have muscles bigger than cannonballs!

Every time they show Samson in paintings, engravings, book illustrations, sculpture—and this film, he's always got the muscles of a weight lifter.

But big muscles weren't how Samson got his power—not in the Bible, at least. No. His strength came...because...he had this special relationship with God. And the sign of that strength was the long hair he had because he was a Nazirite. Muscles couldn't have done the feats of strength that Samson accomplished—but the power that God gave him, that could do it!

And that meant...oh...my...God. We'd been trying to find out who was doing all these killings. We were looking for someone who looked like Superman, someone whom we could believe was that strong, because he looked that strong.

But Samson's power depended on God. When he spilled the secret of his strength, Delilah arranged to have his hair cut and he had no more strength than an ordinary man. It was God's strength in Samson—he could have looked like the proverbial 98 pound weakling and he still would have been a killing machine.

We'd been looking in all the wrong places. The Raptor didn't have to look like Superman. He wasn't guilty of all those murders. But someone else was—someone who didn't have to look like Victor Mature, or Herculles. Someone who'd been around all the places where the slaughters had occurred. Someone who wanted to bring the Raptor out of hiding.

Because it was the Raptor who destroyed Grissom's gadgets, and prevented him making a killing—literally—in the war.

It was the Raptor, who'd come from a universe of living metal—to destroy the Gogs, robots of living metal who came from the same Iron Universe as the Raptor, in the Tunguska Event of 1908—but had never learned compassion for the native life.

But not all the Gogs had been destroyed. Some of them escaped...and they wanted revenge.

There was only one person whom it could be.

I whipped around in the dark room. Paul's eyes were glowing coldly.

The temple of Dagon crashed into ruin.