#and one time we had a man ranting and raving on a rooftop somewhere saying he had a bomb and was gonna blow the building up

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As a Scouser, I concur.

I become consumed with jealousy every time I look at mudlarking instagram pages.

[bookishmatt]

Cage Match 2013 Round 1: The Thing vs. The Invisible Man

(Originally posted on the since-retired Suvudu.com on March 4, 2013)

The Contestants

The Thing

Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell

Age: At least 20,000 years

Race: Shapeshifting, body-infiltrating extraterrestrial

Weapons / Artifacts: Transforms its appendages into any weapon of its choosing

Special Attack: Renders men insane with future dream vision

Advantages

Telepathic

Can completely become any living organic form that it enters

Scientific knowledge beyond human comprehension

Disadvantages

Won’t attack in the open for fear of outing itself

Self-preserving tissue can reveal true nature by reflexively recoiling from danger

Appears to be incapable of becoming any form from memory for more than an instant

Griffin, The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells

Age: Early 30s

Race: Human

Weapons / Artifacts: Whatever he can get a hold of

Special Attack: Flying knee to the chest

Advantages

Invisible

Exceptionally strong

Doesn’t fear being naked in public

Disadvantages

Extremely short-tempered to the point of recklessness

Probably (definitely) insane

Sneezes at inopportune times

Can’t make weapons invisible

Too trusting

But that’s just one account of the events leading up to the abrupt end of Griffin’s mad reign. Though it sounds madder yet to even put it to words, the account that the majority of us have accepted as truth is the most cogent way to explain that terrifying day.

Mind you, even with nearly the entire town of Port Burdock on the hunt for – and indeed, truly believing in the existence of – an invisible man gone mad with power, we discerning folk have our limits for what we’re willing to accept. Which is to say that not everyone remembers the downfall of The Invisible Man in precisely the same way. For the sake of full disclosure, I’ve included one extra chapter for you, dear discerning reader, and ask that you please maintain an open mind for what I am about to tell you, though I too have my doubts.

Dutifully, our townsfolk barricaded their doors, locked up their windows, and nervously awaited for starvation and nature to ravish our invisible would-be tyrant. Dutifully, everyone waited and trusted their good sense to attempt to defeat Griffin, too sensible to venture from their homes and risk a confrontation.

But then, Doctor Kemp had to do a desperate thing and dispatch his housekeeper to the authorities to relay the death promise note from Griffin. What follows next is a bit of my own conjecture based off of the ramblings of one lone housekeeper driven mad with what she is convinced she saw during her attempts to meet with Colonel Adye. But as this was an extraordinary day, I shall spare no extraordinary account.

Kemp’s servant knew she was being followed – a crunch of gravel here, a breathy swear in the air there – but could no better see her assailant than the rest of us. Looking out from windows, they say, she ran in a blind terror, shooting glances behind her shoulder and trying desperately to escape the unseen.

It is somewhere here during her terrified sprint that she first claims to have seen an albatross slowly circling overhead, as if contemplating descending on her or collapsing in death. An albatross! A seabird never seen in the North Atlantic outside of an encyclopedia. Nothing can convince her that this was a hallucination or another bird of some kind, perhaps an unidentified gull, and her depiction of its flagging flapping is always consistent.

It must have been shortly after that when the servant was assaulted by Griffin, the letter intended for Colonel Adye ripped from her quaking hands, but this almost pales in eerie comparison to the terrible account she gives of the bird; the alleged albatross seemed to twitch and contort violently, its extremities morphing into impossible shapes as it struggled to stay afloat. But the impossible bird seemed to have lost interest in her after witnessing her tangle momentarily with Griffin. It vanished for a time over the rooftops.

Doubly terror-stricken by the bizarreness of two impossible things, the servant dashed madly toward her safe place, back to Doctor Kemp’s house. Alone, the bird seemed to find her vulnerable again and appeared once more overhead, but still kept its distance.

And then an invisible force plowed through her with an angry grunt, cutting a path decidedly toward Kemp’s residence. She sat on the ground a moment, terrified of going back but wanting desperately to warn Kemp. After a moment of fighting with herself, she picked herself up and ran back toward the house.

She was then hailed by a voice, a blessedly non-eerie voice whose origin was visible. She whipped herself around and found Adye in front of her. She stammered her warning of the recent encounter with The Invisible Man, and together they dashed the rest of the way to Kemp’s house.

Adye attempted to enter through the front door, and as he was pleading with the paranoid Kemp on the other side, the servant heard a shuffling nearby. On such high alert, she would have jumped out of her skin at the passing of a cat in the shadows, but she knew full well that this unseen stirring was not feline in origin. She stammered once more that she had to find a place to hide and took off toward the neighboring alley to conceal herself between discarded wooden crates.

Soon, she saw windows being smashed to pieces on the second floor by rocks the size of her head hurling through the air. Though her vision was a bit obscured, she swears to have seen clearly the labored bird thing whoosh into one of the now open windows. Possessed by the mad desire to aid her employer and see her duty through to the end, she climbed atop the crates and tried desperately to position herself in alignment with the smashed window. Through it, she could see the bird perched on the dresser, and could clearly make out a festering wound on its breast, what appeared to be the work of a bullet.

For an instant, she made eye contact with the bird, and it seemed to stare into her soul. It fluttered out of sight suddenly, managing to pull the heavy curtains closed with its movements. Still, she could make out bits of its silhouette from the light of a lantern by the door. She could make out an uncanny and convulsing mass of shapes where the bird had been.

A vase shattered amid the shocks of its convulsions, and soon she could hear Kemp rushing up the stairs, shouting to the closed door of his upstairs bedroom. “Griffin, if you’re in there, I’m not alone! You’re outnumbered!” – an empty threat, as he still hadn’t gathered the wit and nerve necessary to risk opening the front door to allow Adye into the residence.

Kemp must have burst through the door then, given the sounds and confusing shadow play that followed. He must have had a moment of bravery with his poker in hand, ready to swing wildly. He must have felt for a moment that animalistic drive to do anything to survive and flail wildly at his unseen assailant. But then, he must have been felled too quickly by the transforming bird thing to even utter a sound, because the fight was over in a flash of impossible shadows.

And yet, as the servant tells it, a completely unexpected silhouette appeared through the curtains a moment later: the sure shape of Kemp himself. Later, no one found any trace of an albatross or of anything else having been in that room during that moment in time.

You know the rest of the story. The Invisible Man was taken down by the vigilante townspeople, rendered visible once more upon his death. You know that Doctor Kemp, despite staring death in its invisible face, survived this encounter.

But what you or I don’t know and, indeed, may never know, is if the rants and ravings of Kemp’s house servant – committed to the county ward on Kemp’s own request – insisting that her employer had become some kind of thing weren’t so mad after all. But there is one thing I know with certainty: Extraordinary things don’t have to be seen to be believed

Predicted Winner: The Thing

NOTE: THIS MATCH ENDS ON WEDNESDAY, March 6th, 2013, AT 5 PM, EST

Check out the 2013 Bracket

Check all previous Cage Match 2013 posts

The Thing is a character from Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell; The Invisible Man is a character from The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells.

The Thing image is from the original book art. The Invisible Man image courtesy of Lanzie/DeviantArt.

Cage Match fans: We are looking forward to hearing your responses! If possible, please abstain from including potential spoilers about the books in your comments (and if you need spoilers to make your case, start your comments with: “SPOILER ALERT!”

Thanks!