The Scar

BY DR. AGONSON

He burst through the wall. Plaster dust filled the air. His sharp eyes scanned the dark interior: The faint silhouettes of manikins, their unsettling stillness and faceless stares, all he saw. They stood naked in the shadowed room.

“I’m glad you could join me,” a voice said from out the plastic array of limbs.

The hero’s eyes darted from false human form to false human form, searching each for any sign of movement or life.

The voice seemed to come from a new direction. “I have so longed to meet with you. There are many things you must be made to see.”

“Come on out, villain!” He was long past feeling awkward when shouting these inane cliches. After twenty years of flying around and punching through walls, he didn’t really feel he needed to embellish upon the trivialities of banter. If it works, don’t fix it, was his motto, though, come to think of it, it never had worked. Villains seldom came out at his call.

A movement in the shadows, and the hero’s eyes flashed with bright intensity. One of the dummies, its limbs exploding in all directions, the center of its torso dissolving to ash, was thrown into a wall.

“That’s not much of an incentive for me to show myself, now is it? Now how about I step out slowly, and you don’t kill me? Hmm?”

“Okay,” the hero agreed.

One of the manikins moved, coming away from the others, and it was all the hero could do, gripped by his fear, to keep his killing eyes from vaporizing this one too. With an easy step, the white figure sauntered into the center of the room. Its arm lifted, and it pointed toward the door.

“Why don’t you come in?” the dummy asked. The hero began stomping in the direction indicated. “And the door works fine. Don’t know how many walls this old building can lose.”

The hero kicked down the door. Stepping into the unlit hallway, he looked down one end of it and then down the other. A grey figure stood in tattered robes, a white bandage wrapped around his head and covering his eyes. The layers of the wrap sunk in around these, giving the impression of the skull underneath.

He spoke, “I have such sights to show you.”

The hero walked down the hallway, fighting against the thrill of fear clawing its way up his spine. As he came beside the ghostly stranger, he said, “What?”

“Follow me.”

The creature or man led him farther on into the darkness. He stopped before a room, turning to face it. It seemed that merely by the power of his mind, the latch undid itself, and the door swung open into the darkness.

“Enter,” he said. The hero went in, followed by this specter. “Sit down.” There was a chair, rather comfortable looking.

“I’d rather not,” objected the hero.

“Observe,” the other continued.

Suddenly the wall was bright white, and the hero noticed there on the stand beside him a carousel slide projector. Like the door, it wanted no hand to operate it. He heard its click, and the first picture came up. It was of him, a child, a dog, a stick. He remembered the day, a good day.

“You were born,” said the stranger as picture followed picture. He watched scenes of his childhood, watched himself grow. “You grew in strength.” The stills kept coming; he was a young man now, muscular and tall. “And then,” the regular clicking of the carousel stopped, and one image stood, “you became—”

“A hero,” the hero interjected.

“A hero,” the stranger repeated mockingly, “of a sort.” The clicking continued. He saw his exploits, his first foiling of a bank robbery, saving a woman falling from a building, starting the Association of Heroes. But the clicker kept clicking, and he saw also killing that man when he really didn’t have to, punching and breaking the jaw of his friend the Investigator, the affair and divorce. Through all of this, he also saw himself growing older, his hair turning grey and white. The carousel went on, on into imagined futures: Older and older, smaller, weaker. Dead.

“You were born,” the stranger repeated, “like any man, and like a man you grew. Like every man, you must also die.”

Here he lifted his hand, and the hero saw for the first time that it was fleshless bone, bleached white. One finger came up and gently touched the hero’s cheek.

“So that you remember you are mortal.” The fleshless digit slowly traced a line on the hero’s face. “So that you learn to count your days.”

The hero felt a warmth dripping down his chin. He lifted up his hand to his cheek, and drawing it away, saw his fingertips red with blood.

He woke screaming. Wandering to the bathroom, he studied his face in the mirror. There was the faded scar, right where that specter had traced it. He remembered how the experimental laser had grazed him, remembered the shock of pain—the surprise of pain. He had nearly forgotten pain.

“I will,” he promised himself. “I’ll count my days. I’ll count my days. I’ll count my days,” he repeated to the mirror until his words were mumbled and his voice tired and meaningless. “How many left? How long?” He touched the scar.

He heard a beeping. Wandering back toward his bed, he found his phone. Its face was flashing. Aliens attacking the city, again.

“I’m a hero,” he said to himself. “I’m a hero. I’m a hero,” he chanted as he quickly dressed. Leaping out his window, he flew into the dark of the predawn. “I’m a hero.” His eyes flashed like fire, and a flying saucer suddenly lost altitude, falling into the sea.

He felt tired as the sun rose, and throughout that long day he was haunted by strange movements, lost in the corner of his eye. He was sure it was that specter of his nightmare. And he would be seen, lifting a trembling hand to his scar, standing as if in a daze.

The aliens were beaten back, the day was saved, but the hero went home alone and waited alone in his empty room, touching his scar, longing and yet fearing that his phone would ring again. He did not sleep easy.

But the hero had no one to save him from death,
and had no way to measure the worth of his life.
And the specter would come to remind him again
that his carousel’s turning must stop