Me? I keptplaying it out in my head, imagining the Black Wraith going on a rampage. Oneof the things I always loved about the old stories was that they were lurid.They gave graphic descriptions of the way the Wraith hit people andthe sort of damage he did. In the stories he really was a ghost,but he had a body. They always made that clear. He was dead, but when the suncame up he could hide in plain sight and he did that by becoming DoctorSam Hanes. Sam Hanes. Samhain. Halloween. Get it? A silly and very likelytongue in cheek comment from the creator of the Black Wraith.
I read aninterview where he talked about the creation of the character and how he’dalmost called him the Halloween Man or Doctor Halloween. I never did find outwhy he changed his mind, but the motif stayed. In the early stories he wore ahomemade skull mask. Later he wore a black mask and the brass knuckles. Healways wore a tattered cape and a fedora. He originally used smoke bombs tomake his getaways and to fight the bad guys, but later he summoned a heavy fogand fought against people who could barely see their own faces through thehaze.
In theserials it was always dry ice.
When I gotback to the department I showed the pictures to Dom and watched carefullyfor his reaction. At first he frowned, and his brow got tight. “This a joke,Billy?”
“Not even alittle.”
“You tellanyone else about it?”
“Imentioned the movies, but no. No one else knows.”
Dom noddedand lowered his chin to his chest as he examined the pictures again. Ilooked at him as he did it. He studied the scene and I studied him. Dark, curlyhair, dark eyes, a chiseled jaw line. One of the first things I ever said tohim was he looked like Bruce Wayne. He laughed it off. He had a perfect laughand perfect teeth. He looked like a Hollywood leading man. He still does.
Turns outit runs in the family. Back in the day, as he told me one night over drinks,his great-grandfather had worked in Hollywood. Bit parts in about a dozenmovies, normally where he played the best friend or competition of the leadingman, but for a short time, he’d made a better name for himself playing a pulpage hero.
For thelength of time it took to make four serials and three actual movies, hisgreat-grandfather, the pulp writer that had created the Black Wraith, alsoplayed him on the silver screen. There was no budget for the stuff and AnthonyGalliano, also known as the pulp writer Walter Slade, took on the name BlakeHadley and became an actor. He made decent enough money. He made the same sortof scratch for his stories.
Dom nevertalked much about what happened, but there was some sort of Hollywood scandaland before the dust had settled he’d retired to Massachusetts and a differentlife entirely. Low-level politics, mostly.
Dom lovedthe fact that his family had a celebrity but, whatever the scandal was, it wasbad enough that he didn’t talk about it and he almost never spoke about hisgreat-grandfather.
There was atime he thought about going to Hollywood himself, but it never happened.
He turnedhis eyes toward me and studied me. I mean studied me like I was a perp. Helooked worried. Genuinely worried and I couldn’t understand why.
“What’s up,Dom?”
“I need youto come with me, partner, and I need to show you something.” He didn’t reallyask, but he rose from his desk seat and started for the exit we alwaysused.
I followedhim and frowned.
“Dom,seriously, what is going on?”
“I need toshow you. I need a witness, okay?”
A witness? I justnodded.
“Did yousee anything on the tapes, Dom?” I spoke as we walked from the building.
“I’ll showthem to you. What we got is nothing. I mean, I can see the guys getting beaten,but there isn’t a person doing it to them.”
“Comeagain?”
“No one isin the images, Bill. No one. Just some weird distortions.”
Three milesdown the road from the station was the house where Dom had lived his entirelife. His parents owned it before him (and they would have had it still if theyhadn’t decided to move to Florida and hang around Disneyworld) and before themhis grandparents and before them his great-grandparents. Four generations inthe same place. It was a damned nice house; I’d have stayed, too. Dom’s placewas an old Victorian with lots of gingerbread, a widow’s walk, and half an acreof land. He inherited the house but I knew he was paying someone to keep theplace looking good for him. Dom is a certified slob.
Not muchhad changed since the first time I’d been there. That was right after Domtold me about his great-grandfather’s books and movies and showed me thecollection he had.
The filmswere in decent shape. Parts of the old celluloid had buckled and crumbled butDom managed to get all of the stuff put onto DVDs and later onto Blu-Rays andhe’d settled us in the room set aside with a dozen theater seats where we’dwatched the first of the serials.
We wentright to the same room again, but instead of smiling as he entered, Domfrowned, his face set in a brooding expression I seldom saw on him. It addedyears.
“We gonnawatch a movie, Dom?”
“You seen‘em all already.”
“Yeah,that’s why I’m puzzled.”
“I evertell you what my great-granddad did with all of the props from the movies?”
“Nope. Ijust figured they were in the same place as all the movies.”
Aside fromwhat Dom had, most of the old copies of the Black Wraith films had beendestroyed a long time ago. Some had fallen apart, some just vanished, othersburned up in a studio fire back in the forties. These were the personalcopies of the family, handed down from generation to generation and basicallyignored until Dom took enough of an interest to save them.
“So, thereare films here. The rest of Black Wraith stuff? It’s here, too.”
“What? Likethe old costumes and such?”
“Exactly.”
I nodded.He was worried someone had maybe used the props from the movies, or had stolenthem. It took only a
