by Dan Swanson
Monday, October 29, 1984:
It was bright and sunny at midday outside a small house in Rowayton, Connecticut. A red and blue For Sale sign was displayed in the front yard, with a big Sold sticker plastered on either side.
“That’s the last damn box I’m doing today! I need to put together a costume for the party tonight.” As Valerie Coppersmith tried to get up from her squatting position, her back muscles clenched in savage protest. The spasm hurt so badly that she released a loud string of curses that would have made her Romani ancestors proud. “It sure sucks getting old. That wouldn’t have happened ten years ago, before I turned forty!”
A series of bangs, like a dozen gunshots nearby, startled her out of her soliloquy. She was already ducking for the floor when she stopped abruptly and swore again. “Freepin’ fireworks! I wish those bastage cops would do something about them!” She straightened up and looked around at the seemingly endless piles of boxes. “I’m glad dear Nelson included me in his will, but I would rather have kept the house and let his dutiful darling daughter Doreen have the cash instead, so I wouldn’t have to move! Give her the whole pile — what do I care? — but she don’t need another narky house! I got my own money.”
She stopped talking for a minute to stretch her back. “That sure felt good. And I guess it was kinda fun house hunting — almost as much fun as shopping for jewelry… not!” She turned to survey the boxes piled everywhere in the undersized second bedroom of her very own new home. “Well, a little mine, and mostly the bank’s right now. But that will change!” she reassured her new house. As she turned back, she twisted the wrong way and was brutally attacked by another excruciating spasm, and once again the air turned blue with loud Romani curses.
“Stupid freakin’ box!” she yelled at the empty moving box in front of her (though perhaps she was just a little more emphatic than that). Just to prove she was serious, she savagely kicked it across the room, revealing more boxes piled behind it — boxes and something else.
“I don’t remember ever seeing that before,” she marveled at the big steamer trunk that was holding up the next pile. It was finished in shiny black shellac covered with red, silver, and gold arcane mystical symbols. The brass reinforcements on the edges and corners gleamed as if they had been polished yesterday. She looked more closely. “Never saw it, but somehow it’s got my name on it,” she whispered a little raggedly when she read the brass plaque inset below the latch.
She knelt down, and as she got closer, she could sense a faint mystical aura enveloping the enigmatic chest. The magical emanations didn’t feel dangerous, so she reached out and eagerly touched the latch. A few seconds later, just before she turned off the light and closed the door, she noticed that there was a beautiful shiny black steamer trunk under the pile of tomorrow’s boxes.
“I don’t remember ever seeing that before,” she said, and then stopped dead in her tracks. “I just said that!” she barked in astonishment.
As if a balloon had burst, memories of reaching out and touching that latch not more than a few seconds ago flashed into her mind. “There’s some kind of forget spell on the damn thing!” she informed the piles of boxes, both wonder and a little frustration in her tone.
She strained her modest magical senses to the utmost, studying that aggravating forget spell. She could discern that it was frazzled and tattered, barely potent enough to trick an unwary victim, but certainly no match for one who was aware and determined to resist its insidious mental infiltration. By now, her curiosity about the contents of this trunk was like an insatiable itch. She pulled on her work gloves, moved the other boxes, and then sat on the floor next to the mysterious, impertinent trunk. Concentrating fiercely on resisting the trunk’s magical emanations, she tried to open the latch. So deep was her concentration that she ignored the almost constant spasms that kept clenching her back.
“Damn, it’s locked!” she swore without heat, unsurprised. Trunks that had locks usually got locked when they were placed in storage. “Well, I’ve jiggered tougher locks than this before.” She pulled a hairpin from her long, straight, still-black locks. Squinting with one eye, her tongue sticking out of the side of her closed mouth, she began probing the mechanism behind the big keyhole.
This time, she was just barely on her feet when she noticed the chest again. “Well, pooters! Paid so much attention to picking the frippin’ lock I forgot about the damn spell.” She gritted her teeth and went back to her cautious probing of the lock. Splitting her concentration made her task more difficult, but the latch fell open in about two minutes. And, as she had hoped, when she popped the latch, the remains of the forget spell popped as well.
The trunk was packed; everything inside was carefully wrapped in newspaper. Val picked up what was clearly a picture and carefully unwrapped it. She was stunned at the photograph she uncovered.
It was a group portrait, and the group in it was nothing short of incredible. The plaque at the bottom said The Super Squad — 1965. There were more than ten gaudily-clad figures pictured standing in front of the League of United Nations building in New York, and somehow, Val instantly knew that the Super Squad had been the premier super-team in the ’60s, even though she also knew she had never heard of them before. (*) All the heroes had autographed the picture; Val read the autographs with wonder.
[(*) Editor’s note: See Super Squad: Times Past, 1961: Origin of the Super Squad.]
In the back row were Shiva and Kali, both powerful beings nearly seven feet tall, with four arms each, the male Shiva with blue skin and three eyes, and the female Kali with skin as black as coal and flame flashing from her eyes. They looked like demons, yet somehow Val knew that they were the greatest super-heroes of their time. Master Man might have disputed that, even though next to Shiva he looked as small as a boy, with wavy butterscotch hair, wearing red tights and a long-sleeved light blue shirt with a lace-up front. Tom Atomic, who boasted of being the third strongest man in the world (or fourth strongest being, counting Kali), flamboyantly dressed in red and blue, swarthy, handsome, and exotic with his black mustache and goatee and bronze skin. Her heart fluttered a little — had she and this hero she’d never seen before been involved, somehow?
In the middle row were Red Rocket and Lady Victory, who had later married; his union suit and cowl were mostly red, while hers was a blue bodysuit with some white stars, blue hot pants that left her legs bare, and a big V on her chest that highlighted her ample bust, accompanied by a round shield. Elastique, who could look like anyone she wanted to, wore a light blue skin-tight leotard, also with bare legs. In a yellow costume that was splattered with paint drops of all the colors of the rainbow, was the tall, slender blonde Palette, and next to her — Majique. Val gasped in stunned amazement when she realized that Majique was a younger Valerie Coppersmith.
“That’s impossible!” she declared loudly. “How could I be in that picture and not remember it?” Then she recalled the forget spell on the trunk. “Or maybe it’s not so impossible, after all?” she asked the air around her.
When she was younger, people had often told Val that she resembled a shorter, more voluptuous version of Cher. She’d never thought so then, but now, years removed and with no memory of this photograph, she could see the facial similarities. In the photo, she was dressed emphatically as a Gypsy, almost as a caricature. She had deliberately dressed this way at the time to enhance her image as a fortune teller with her rich clients. They expected me to dress that way, she thought. That image helped me make a lot of money!
In the photograph she wore a full, ground-length multicolored skirt, fluffed out by petticoats underneath, several scarves around her waist, a low-cut peasant top with ruffled, off-the-shoulder sleeves, gold chains around her neck, big, dangly hoop earrings, and a bandana. Her fingers were covered with gaudy rings, her hair was studded with geejaws, and there was a small blue cloth bag, covered with mystical symbols, hanging from her belt.
Finally, in the front row, were five smaller people, four men and a woman. She knew the barely five-foot-tall, red, white and blue-clad woman was Crescendo, and that she had a personality big enough for the whole back row put together. She towered over the four tiny men like a skyscraper. They were virtually identical, from their flaming red hair to their Donegal-style beards to their traditional green leprechaun garb to their miniature shillelaghs. These four were called chauns, and could merge into a single person, Quadrechaun.
As she read each name, she touched that person in the photo, trying to regain her memory of them — and suddenly it struck her: “Wait a minute!” she whispered hoarsely. “I must have been more than just a fortune teller, to hang around with a band of such great heroes! I must have been a hero, too!”
She eagerly unwrapped the next item and discovered…
“My wishing bag!” she exclaimed in excitement; this was the blue leather bag hanging from her belt in the photo. Her memories of the bag were still vague, but she could barely recall that if she made a wish, sometimes she could reach into that bag and draw out something useful. Looming alongside that vague memory was an equally vague feeling of foreboding, as if there was something very important about the bag that she needed to remember. But she couldn’t pin it down, so she ignored it. “I’m going to try it out right now! Bag, I want a costume for the party tonight. I want to be someone really unusual, someone who won’t brood over the recent death of her husband, someone nobody would ever guess was me!”
Concentrating fiercely on her wish, she thrust her arm up to the elbow into the wishing bag, though the bag itself was no more than six inches long on the outside. She was alarmed — where was her arm going? As she was about to yank back her arm, she felt something like cloth being pressed against her hand. She closed her fist on whatever it was and easily pulled it out of that seemingly bottomless bag.
“Well, if I wanted to prove this bag really is magical, I just did!” she announced triumphantly to the world at large, then turned her attention to the object in her hand.
It was a gray cowl attached to a cape of the same color.
The cowl was hideous. It was designed to look like a skull with the lower jaw missing, the teeth of the upper jaw strung across the face just below the nose. It had ears, much like the ears of a cat. The eye holes were covered with red lenses that seemed to glow. The cape was long and ribbed, and the bottom edge was ragged and tattered. The top edge wrapped around both sides of the neck and was joined in the front a few inches below the nape of the neck by a cunning quick-release clasp, shaped like a skull and crossbones. The color of everything but the teeth, the eyes, and the clasp was pallid gray. Like the face of a two-day-old corpse! Val shuddered at the morbid thought. She couldn’t remember ever seeing a two-day-old corpse, so how would she know what color it would be? But somewhere inside, remember it she did.
The material of the cowl was stretchy. “It will definitely fit,” she observed. “But I could never wear anything that hideous!”
For some reason, though, the costume tugged at her. She looked at the disgusting cowl again. “I did ask for a costume that would make me totally unrecognizable…” she rationalized. “For sure, if I wear this, nobody will guess who I am. And it is Halloween, after all. I could wear that old gray one-piece jumpsuit, and it would give me a chance to show off my long black leather opera gloves, and the black leather thigh boots Nelson wouldn’t let me wear.” Just the chance to finally wear those boots in public was very tempting. “I guess there’s no harm trying everything on, just to see how it would look.”
She carried the cape and cowl into her own bedroom, where she’d earlier finished installing a full-length mirror on the back of the door. She donned her blacks and grays, but as she pulled the cowl over her head, she felt a chill, which raised goosebumps and caused her to shiver. “Damned drafty house!” she snarled, as she shrugged into the cape and snapped the clasp shut.