Episode 2: Charlie Emerges

Charlie and the Black Crow

The concrete bricks fell from Charlie as he emerged from the weight that had held him down. He took a quick assessment of the things around him, and, for the most part, the park was clear. The children and their actual mothers had dispersed, and the immediate surroundings were flush with color. After the rapid-fire machine gun that had hit him right in his mind, Shadow Man saw comfort around him.

A black Crow stared him down and squawked, the noise resonating into the park and getting Charlie’s attention. He followed the Crow’s gaze where it took him and saw those zeppelin–like clouds crashing down. The rain began to pour on all sides of Shadow Man, the bricks that lay dead at his feet. He started toward the iron gate and the sleek black Crow beyond.

The children and mothers were far behind Charlie, literally, and in his mind.  He focused on the Crow before him. The Crow was plumper than most, undoubtedly feeding well off the urban scraps around him. He flew about 30 feet ahead of Charlie, find a perch on a lamp post, the corner of a skyscraper, or some other urban landmark, and squawk toward Charlie. In the torrential downpour, with the dark grey clouds blocking out any sunlight, the Crow served as a lantern, a guiding light that kept Charlie moving.

Deep Waters Have Charlie Moving

The water had been rising fast and had nearly reached Charlie’s knees. He was wading through a lukewarm river of milk chocolate. As the rain perpetually fell, waves lapped against the surrounding concrete, and small serpentine whirlpools formed here and there. The expansive flooding revealed the City’s dark secrets – trash bounced up and down the emerging rivers like buoys in the sea. Old bleach bottles, beer cans, plastic water bottles, and newspapers. Garbage was everywhere, floating on the surface as Charlie kept moving with the Crow.

In his periphery, he saw another skeleton in the City’s vast closet. Homeless people were being washed out of their encampments as the thunderstorm continued to punish the town. Like quail from a cubby, groups of the street people would emerge from their wooden or cardboard abodes and scatter in all directions; some holding a rickety umbrella or an old magazine for cover, their hand-me-down jackets and pants offering no protection and leaving them soaked through and through.

By now, the City was immersed in a blanket of near darkness, and Charlie’s vision was limited to roughly 40 feet. Seeing the crow would have been impossible without the illuminated skyscrapers that lined the streets. They were now the banks of the newly formed rivers and their tributaries. These massive concrete structures jutted into the sky, daring God himself to strike them with his terrible lightning fury. A memory hit Charlie, an awful fog in China that couldn’t be penetrated. He shivered and kept moving forward, and then he saw them – the whirlpools of water were now growing massive around him, and reptilian heads emerged from the murky depths.

Creatures Emerge

Crocodiles.

The beasts had come from the darkest depths of the City’s sewers, seizing on the moment and swimming towards the surface at street level. The dreaded beasts used their massive tails and enormous lengths of 10 – 15 feet to move quickly. They were swimming after the scampering hobos that had left the safety of their shelters.  Charlie didn’t have the strength to save them. The thought barely occurred to him as he pushed on toward his mission.

The desolate, the hungry. The ragged. The weak. All was in Shadow Man’s view, but he kept going. How could he not? He had to move forward toward the head of the monster while people were dropping all around him, submerged and never to seen again. Thick pools of crimson were rising on what were sidewalks. Still, he compelled himself to continue forward, undistracted by the collateral damage of it all.

 The City Bank

Shadow Man’s legs felt like they had battery acid coursing through them. Block after block of treading through water flowing against him had taken its toll on him. His energy diminished when the Crow did something he had not yet done. Rather than flying and perching Himself on one of His usual spots, the Crow landed on a massive doorknob of a building that stood right before Charlie. Charlie caught up to the Crow and stood a few feet from the building. He looked up to see what it was. City Bank had written its title in two words etched in the stone, two words that stood majestically. Shadow Man knew this was where he was meant to be.

With a reinvigorated step, Shadow Man ascended the massive steps that led to the City Bank. It stood before him like a colossus, blocking out the horizon behind it and, if not raining, casting a long shadow across the town. Its doors were gargantuan and made of fine oak, standing 12 feet tall and 6 feet wide. The handles were of polished ivory and gleamed even in this hellish storm. A flash of lightning behind Charlie brightened the doorway enough, and Charlie could see his reflection in the glass panes of the doors – he saw himself, coal black through and through.

A Cathedral in Hell

He stared at the Bank for some time. It was a cathedral serving a city that was hell. After some time, the Crow fluttered up to a gaslight adjacent to the door, clearing the way for Shadow Man. Thunder rumbled behind Charlie, and water lapped up to the stairway that had become a shore. Charlie’s hand reached for the creamy white handle and gripped it. He pulled it toward him, but the door did not budge an inch, tried again, pushing in the other direction, but still, the resistance was too much. Finally, he lowered his shoulder and tried a third time – nothing. The rain continued to patter down all around him, splashing up and keeping him soaked. He raised his leg and kicked the door, sending the barrier flying backward with an explosive shock.

Under the Dome

A foyer appeared before him, massive in its expanse. Like the Sistine Chapel, a gargantuan dome reached far overhead, complete with Renaissance art and windows that decorated it up to its peak, in the heavens above, where the machines were working. Shadow Man stood, small and finite by comparison.

Around him, the walls were inlaid with massive screens that stretched for miles, disappearing into the vast building beyond Shadow Man’s sight. The numbers flashed and ticked, electric pulses glowing all around him. Up.  Down. The numbers flashed and ticked and ticked and flashed, going on endlessly, presumably until the setting sun. For a moment, Charlie was mesmerized by the exhibition. All the world’s economies were collected and digested right here. A man could make some money with this information being vomited out. With the right expertise… a man (or woman) could make some money. Shadow Man had no such intention today.

Into the Woods

The sheer size of the place was astounding. Around the foyer were massive desks that climbed upward like redwood trees, wooden and intimidating but somehow majestic and enthralling. Rooted into the desks were the systems that irrigated the forest of finances – computers. Screens were atop all the desks and lit up like beacons to guide anyone lost in the tapestry of the woods. Information relentlessly crossed the screens – moving money around the world with the clicks of a button and keeping everyone who worked here mesmerized – busy!

And who was watching these screens? Who was perched in the trees, guiding us through the financial darkness? Was it Little Red Riding Hood or the Big Bad Wolf? A wolf planted himself behind each desk, but not like any Shadow Man had ever seen before. The canines stood on their hind legs and stood tall, some 7 feet in height. Their fur was shiny and sleek and stood out under the heavy lights of the dome. Clean. Combed. Perfect. But over the fur, the Wolves were dressed to the nines. The wolves donned shiny Brooks Brothers suits, looking over the computers, all tailored to perfection and topped off with Brooks and Hermes silk ties. They were all matching. Coordinated.

Big Bad Wolves

Behind the desks, more beasts were roaming about, but Shadow Man couldn’t get a good view of them. They were shrouded in darkness, mostly behind closed doors, predators expertly moving behind large screens of frosted glass and not presenting themselves to the public. Not yet. In front of the desks was something even more alarming.  Line after line of schoolboys and Red Riding Hoods await their chance to speak to the Big Bad Wolves. Shadow Man saw this scene repeated, row after row, as far as he could see. It ultimately faded into a shroud of darkness, the redwood desks going on and on.

Then something happened. A windowpane shattered into 1,000 pieces as a bolt of lightning shot through the dome’s top and struck Shadow Man. Glass sprayed down like sleet on the crowd and onto Shadow Man; it pelted the marble slab and rang out like fine jewels shattered. Rain poured through, and Shadow Man convulsed; he seized up. His back shot outward, and he collapsed, shaking all over. A memory descended over him, a cloud as dark as the ones outside, and that fog engulfed him. He was taken back, back to a place that was much like City Bank.

Charlie’s Memories Remain    

Charlie walked into the Bank and had his university acceptance letters in his hand, neatly arranged in folders to present to the bank manager. Pride accompanied him to this meeting instead of the parents, who had not. He was here to apply for a private student loan to attend the university of his dreams. His problem, in a unique way, was that his parents made too much money but would not fund his higher education. Therefore, he was barred from any federal loans in one case and from any money from his parents in the other. This left Charlie where he stood now, in front of one of the sprawling redwood desks and staring at a Wolf. And Charlie had a smile on his face.

 So did the Wolf. 

 It straightened its diagonally patterned tie and gripped the folders with enormous paws. Its suit was immaculate. A tailored black number from Brooks Brothers. The pocket square lent it an air of formality, in case the child hadn’t registered it yet. The Wolf combed through the folder with terrible paws, occasionally staring daggers into Charlie’s eyes and licking its fangs.

Charlie’s Chess Game

Big grins to show what big teeth it had.

 A chess game began, and the two went back and forth. Interest rates are this. You’ll pay it off here. You won’t get a deferment there. On and on. Eventually, the chess match was resolved. The Wolf slid over his offer with its insurmountable interest: a private loan with private responsibilities. Charlie, as dumb as ever, took a pen from the Wolf’s big black paw and signed away 30 years of his life. 

The Wolf licked its chops and began a howling laugh. The deed had been done. Behind Charlie and the Wolf, behind the papers, the Pack circled. Wolves in suits circled the two of them, howling at the moon in the windowed ceiling. The noise was deafening. Screens were behind the Pack, like the ones Charlie had seen in the City Bank. Stock markets were skyrocketing. The numbers climbed – up, up, and up! The Wolves saw this and were foaming at the mouth. Wild. Rabid. Some of their suits began to burst as they furiously celebrated the numbers. Charlie could see over the cape of the Wolves. Barely. The frosted glass behind the Pack started to crack. Charlie could almost see what was behind it. It blasted forward like a C-4 explosion and sprayed glass in every direction, hitting Charlie in the face, and he –

Awoke.

Lightning Strikes

Shadow Man lay on the floor in a state of shock. The cold marble gripped him all over, and his immediate thought was to get off this frigid, dead surface and stand up. He started to get up, albeit with a struggle. Everything that had surrounded him, the little girls in red, the schoolboys in blue, the Wolves, were wholly unaffected by his lightning strike. It was as if they did not even care. He propped himself up with his elbows. The fine glass made them bleed. Rain poured through the window, and he got to a point where he sat upright, with his legs folded.

That’s when the second blast of lightning came, hitting him like a bison and sending him back to the cold, hard ground. Yet it did the opposite of what was imagined. It fed him. The shockwaves moved all through him, and through his rapidly blinking eyes, he saw the Crow from the broken window high above him. He let nature run its course, soaking in the strength of the bolt, feeling it as it pressed into his fingertips and toes – a vise of power. It reminded him of the nuclear blast. The one who had started this all.

He lay there for a few moments before getting up, reinvigorated. Nuclear energy was reactivated, and he had bursts of energy all over. Dark emanations swelling up and pulsing through his body. He stretched out his hands.  Shadow Man put his toes onto the floor, and they bent the surface, creating a groove where his toes were beneath him, ever so slightly. He raised his head to take in the scene around him and saw something that would arrest and freeze the entire scene.

Bad News

CNN was on all the televisions. The announcer had cataclysmic news – the stock market had crashed. His suit matched the occasion, a somber black that matched his heart. The screen held up a hand of talking heads – Jokers and Aces rambling about the disastrous effects of what this all means. Tickers clicked across the bottom of the screens, relaying the extent of financial loss rippling through the world’s financial markets. In the split screen, each “expert” lamented how we got here and what would happen from here on out.

Panic was in the air. Indeed, people had lost their shirts. The Wolves had lost their minds.

With fangs bared, the Wolves began turning on the crowds of people. One Wolf leaped over a desk and mauled the first woman to stand in line.  He ripped her flesh as the money she had had in her hand was thrown into the air, crimson all over. Another Wolf in the Pack turned on one of the schoolboys as he began to flee, his money clutched tightly against his chest to avoid losing it. The money was more important to him than his life, after all.

He was making a break for the door when the Wolf made three large bounds, crossing that tile and gripping the boy by the coat with his teeth, stopping him in his tracks. The money went up into the air, and the boy grasped for it in desperation, his hands flying in all directions and his fingers only able to clasp the empty air. That was when the Wolf went for his throat.

The transaction was over.

Carnage at the City Bank

The scene of carnage was beginning to unfold more violently when the frozen shock that had been creeping through Shadow Man swept through his mind, fingertips, and his entire body, and shot out in all directions. A burst of radiation and waves shot glacial ice throughout the Bank, sending frigid ice in every direction. The blue ice burst forth and climbed every inch of the walls, launching up and covering everything in its path: the spiders, the cobwebs, the ancient portraits of the barons who had run the City Bank. Nothing was left uncovered.

In other directions, it flew across that once-cold tile floor. Now, it was beyond freezing. The barrage didn’t slide under the people and Wolves’ feet or paws so much as it hit them and rocked them with a force that froze them from head to tail. The Bank was now a tundra. Charlie recalled Lucy’s first fateful escapade into the wardrobe. Narnia’s scenic wonders and frozen features amazed Lucy. At first, in nothing but awe. Later, she saw the horror that lay in its depths. Eventually, she would conquer it all.

He was amid the horror stage, as time moved fast. Around him, the vicious beasts were captured in mid-flight over the desks, ready to pounce on and devour all the trusting boys and girls lined up for the bankers’ services. In other cases, Red Riding Hoods cowered in fear, perfectly blue and white statues with screams on their faces, stood in corners of the foyer, hoping to not be the next victim. Greenbacks were suspended in animation and spread throughout the air, like some horrific reminder of greed, standing out like giant snowflakes when put into the context of what

Charlie’s Moments of Clarity

Charlie was seeing.

Charlie stood in the middle of it all, a man in a frozen act of horror, surrounded by Wolves of prey and the meek, all of them shot through with ice and part of a symphonic and hellish scene trapped in stilled animation. The meek is where he saw himself. In their glacial profiles, he could see Charlie, who had been trapped and strapped down, and put through it all. Like a man looking into a refugee camp, he saw the faces of the downcast and downtrodden.

He could see a man who had died in 2020 but had hope of surviving after all the fallout. After all the hellscape, he could see hope. And he could see it through the stone-cold features and dead eyes that peered back at him through icy layers of gloom. He could see heat just beyond the dead stares. He saw a fire in the eyes where there were once just icicles.

Black Mambas

Shadow Man gathered his strength from the core of his body. The trauma that had created him, the painstaking blast that had created him, and the events that had once made him 2-D were channeled. His arms sprang out in all their coal–black brilliance, black mambas of fire in an otherwise cold scene, and he pushed himself forward with all his might and slapped the floor with the hands that were now steel with purpose. The same hands that had twisted that gate back at the park.

The contact sent shivers through him, going back through his spine. A spine! He now could feel what Herman Melville would call a man’s flagstaff. In all its glory, but he wouldn’t come to appreciate that now.  Instead, as he slapped the icy graveyard with two open palms, he felt a reverberating shock that went all the way down to his tailbone and caused him excruciating pain. Shadow Man looked up, expecting the glory of all he had done to before him, the place emancipated. Instead, he found cracks in the ice that spread like estuaries that should be rivers.

But how? The victory in the park had come so easily. He raised his head, painfully, oh so painfully, and glanced around. The scene was remarkably the same. Predators, violent predators, and terrible and pitiful prey locked in that dance that he had seen before. He hadn’t helped anyone. The energy wasn’t there. He raised his head to the dome, that chapel that rose into the heavens, and sought answers.

Places of Sanctuary

Dark clouds, those zeppelins of the gods, were still cruising around the heavens when he looked up. As Shadow Man stared into the Heavens, he remembered those ancient Catholic churches that had comforted him as a young man, as Charlie. They were places of sanctuary and peace in his mind. The chill through the broken window grasped his shoulders like the Ghost of Christmas Future. A whistling sound crept around the corners of those redwood desks, and Shadow Man looked around, almost in fear. The cold began to seep into him for the first time. His fingertips slapped that icy cascade beneath him. Then it crept down into his arms, and a venomous sting accompanied it. Or was it medicine? Charlie didn’t know. All he knew was that things were changing, and his heart was slowing down.

A peace absorbed him, as frigid as it was. Something told Charlie that he had been here before. He tried to remember, but a fog descended on his mind. Visions danced in the outlying consciousness – faint memories of a smiling family, a woman, and brothers. Clouded visions. It became dark.

He had a moment of perfect clarity.

Shadow Man raised his hand toward the heavens, clenched his fist, and shot it through the glacier below him. The estuaries became rivers as the cracks blew open in every direction.  Within seconds, Wolves were beginning to thaw, and, without the enormous burdens of ice, their prey was no longer immobile statues but beginning to tingle and feel life. Shadow Man saw the horrific consequences this might lead to and began to stomp the ice with his feet, creating a massive fissure in the surface and a vacuum.

Back to Reality

A hole was now in the foyer, and everything was subject to the force, dragging the entire scene down. Walls crumbled around them, and desks broke into a thousand steel, concrete, and tile pieces. Melting ice destroyed the computers, sparks shot across the room and sent an array of electricity into the air. Numbers flew into the air like butterflies broken out of their cocoons and ceased to be relevant.

Charlie lay flat on his back, the rubble all around him. Trickles of the defrosting ice oozed through the bricks, concrete, and technology that lay all around him. His black appendages were spread out in a horrific dead man’s chalk lineup.

But he had been here before.

The ice–cold water rejuvenated Charlie. He stared up, back into Nietzsche’s so-called abyss. Charlie looked into the abysmal scope of things and let the ice hit him. He now had hope and understanding about what he needed to move forward, unlike the fires that had consumed him, and different than the blast that had obliterated him into nothing but a 2D kite. The cool water dripped onto him from the remnants of the computers and the disaster that was the City Bank. He felt its frigidness in his fingers and bones.

He was at once Shadow Man and Charlie. It was time to move forward by finding his past.

Shadow Man’s, aka Charlie’s, Story will continue with Episode 3. 

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