Arlie liked
The Crimson Wizard
even more than
Ace Larson Space Explorer
because he had copies of
Crimson Wizard Comics
and he could read about the Crimson Wizard’s adventures whenever he wanted to.
Uncle Mort and Aunt Mary
got home from work and came to see him in his room. Uncle Mort brought him a comic book today, the new issue of
Crimson Wizard Comics
, and Arlie was so excited that he had one of his spells but it went away. Aunt Cora brought him dinner, a baked chicken drumstick and some beans, and he ate as much as he could.
He had to rest after dinner but then came the best part of the day. Uncle Mort picked
him up and put him in his chair. He turned on the lamp over the chair. It had a lampshade made of cloth that looked brown when the light was turned off but orange when it was turned on, and a fringe of little strings hanging all around.
Arlie’s room was kept dark all the time and he had to stay in bed except when Aunt Cora took him to the bathroom, but every day after he ate his dinner Uncle
Mort would put him in his chair and turn on the light for him. He was allowed to stay in the chair for an hour.
During the hour he had time to listen to two radio stories, and he always read during the stories. Aunt Mary used to be a schoolteacher before the war and she said it was a miracle that Arlie could read one story while he listened to another one and take them both in at the same time.
That was exactly the way she said it, that he took them both in at the same time.
That seemed strange to him. He listened to the radio and he read his comic books. The only thing that he took in was his food and the medicine he had to take every day, but Aunt Mary said he took in the stories.
There were different stories every night. It wasn’t like the radio programs he heard before dinner.
Programs like
Ace Larson Space Explorer
and
The Crimson Wizard
were on this same station every day, Monday through Friday, and the stories continued every day.
But the night-time stories were different.
Tonight they were
Tex Wilson, Sheriff
and
Crooks Beware!
Tex Wilson rode a famous Arabian stallion named Pharaoh who was as smart as most men. Tex always wore a ten-gallon hat trimmed with a
band of turquoise beads given to him by a friendly Indian tribe for saving them from a disaster caused by Snake Williams who wanted the oil that was under the Indians’ land. Snake Williams had miscalculated and used too much dynamite, trying to get the oil to the surface, and instead wakened a long-dormant volcano that sent rivers of red-hot lava pouring down its sides.
The hero on
Crooks Beware!
was Homicide Sergeant Jack Martin. Jack’s boss was Lieutenant Gibson, and his best friend and confidant was the lovely Marguerite Moran. Tonight Homicide Sergeant Jack Martin tackled the case of the terrible termagant. Arlie didn’t know what a termagant was but it made a scary noise that sounded something like a person’s voice but wasn’t, and it took all of Homicide Sergeant Jack Martin’s skill
and courage, plus the help of the lovely Marguerite Moran, to defeat the menace.
Then your announcer Larry Thorson signed off with those familiar words, “Don’t forget to tune in a week from tonight, same time same station, for another thrilling episode of
Crooks Beware!
Uncle Mort came back and picked Arlie up and took him to the bathroom, then tucked him in his bed again and turned off the light.
Arlie closed his eyes. He lay in bed, listening to Aunt Cora and Uncle Mort and Aunt Mary talking in the living room. He could hear their voices and make out a word now and then, sometimes a regular American word and sometimes a word in the Old Country language, but he couldn’t tell what they were saying, not really. Except that he heard his own name once in a while.
He tried to stay awake but
he was too tired and he fell asleep. He didn’t have any dreams. But then he woke up when he heard a train going past. He looked at the clock on his night table and it was really, really late at night. He couldn’t hear Aunt Cora or Uncle Mort or Aunt Mary, he could only hear the click of the train’s wheels getting louder, then the whistle sounding exciting in a kind of sad way, then the wheels getting
quieter again, and then the train was gone.
But Arlie was awake now.
He pushed himself upright, the pillow behind him. He pulled the comforter up because he felt cold. He looked in the corner of his room. There
was a radiator there, and sometimes when it got too cold in the apartment and there was no heat coming up Aunt Cora would get a hammer out of the kitchen drawer and bring it and bang
on the radiator.
“That will let the super know we need some heat,” she always explained to Arlie. He knew that “super” wasn’t short for Superman or Super Mouse or Super Rabbit, it was short for superintendent, the man in the basement of the apartment building who sent steam up through the radiators.
Next to the radiator was the darkest part of Arlie’s room. In the daytime, with even a little
light coming around the window shade, Arlie could see that there was just plain, dark, blank wall there.
At night the wall was even darker there, darker than any part of Arlie’s room. In fact he could see that there was an opening in the wall. It led to a tunnel. The tunnel was very dark, but there were lights far away inside the tunnel. Arlie could see the light places inside the tunnel. He
could see people in there and other things too.
He could see Tex Wilson and the great Arabian stallion Pharaoh. Tex was sitting on Pharaoh’s back. Arlie could see Tex’s lariat hanging from the pommel of Pharaoh’s saddle, and Tex’s glittering silver six-shooter in Tex’s holster.
Tex was waving to Arlie and saying something that Arlie couldn’t make out no matter how hard he tried. He leaned forward
in his bed, trying to hear what Tex was saying but it was no use.
Finally he saw Tex turn Pharaoh away and they galloped off across the great open plains in search of adventure. Arlie slid down in his bed, pulled the comforter up to his chin, and fell asleep.
The next morning Arlie was still asleep when Aunt Cora came to check on him before breakfast. He found himself with her arms around him,
his face pressed against her house dress. When he said, “Ouch, you’re squeezing me too hard,” Aunt Cora laughed and squeezed him even harder before she let him go.
She took him to the bathroom, brought him back to bed, gave him his sponge bath, and dressed him in fresh pajamas. Today’s pajamas had little baseball players all over them.
He took his medicine and ate some breakfast, part of a pancake
and a slice of bacon. Then Dr. Goldsmith arrived and examined Arlie the way he did every day. He didn’t smile exactly the way he did most days.
He did say, “Keep it up and you’ll be playing halfback one of these days,” but when he left Arlie’s room with Aunt Cora he wasn’t even humming “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
Dr. Goldsmith and Aunt Cora talked for a long time, mostly in Old Country language,
before Dr. Goldsmith left. Aunt Cora opened the door of Arlie’s room partway and looked in at him. He lifted his hand and waved to her. She didn’t say anything, she just closed the door. Arlie thought that was odd.
Even with light coming from outside around the window shade, it seemed that the dark place on Arlie’s wall near the radiator was especially dark today. Arlie looked into the dark place
as hard as he could. He wasn’t sure if he could see the tunnel. He knew there were no lights inside. Still, this was the first time he’d even thought he might see the tunnel in the daytime.
He reached over and turned on the radio but he fell asleep before he could hear the news.
When Arlie woke up Aunt Cora was sitting on a wooden chair next to his bed watching him. He could tell it was afternoon
by the way the light came around the window shade. He asked Aunt Cora if it was lunch time and she said that it was, yes, and what would he like for lunch?
He said a cheeseburger on a roll and French fries and Aunt Cora said she would make that for him and he heard her for a while in the kitchen. He could smell the food cooking and while Aunt Cora made his lunch Arlie tried to see the dark place
again and see if he could make out anything inside the tunnel but there was too much light in the room.
A train went by, though, and he was able to make believe it was taking him to the Black Forest where he would ride in his father’s tank and blow up Nazis. Then Aunt Cora brought his lunch and he ate part of it. He asked his Aunt Cora what she was having for lunch and she said the same thing
he was, he didn’t eat so much and there was enough left for her.
In the afternoon he made believe that he was in a Crimson Wizard story with the Crimson Wizard. The Crimson Wizard wore a big hat with a point on top and a wide brim that hid his face from his enemies so they wouldn’t learn his secret identity and attack him when he wasn’t in his Crimson Wizard identity. Nobody ever saw the Crimson
Wizard’s face because he could never tell when an enemy might be lurking nearby, even when he was at home or in his secret lair working on a new and more potent potion or spell.
Arlie imagined that the Crimson Wizard needed an assistant and that he asked Arlie to be his assistant. They might even change the name of the comic book from
Crimson Wizard Comics
to
The Crimson Wizard and Arlie
, and
Arlie would get to share the Crimson Wizard’s adventures in the comics and on the radio, too.
He had his nap and when he woke up he could tell that it was getting dark outside. He turned on the radio and listened to
Ace Larson Space Explorer
and to
The Crimson Wizard
.
Ace Larson managed to unlock the emergency equipment kit on board the
Isis
and get out oxygen masks for himself and for Betty
Blanton. Once they had their oxygen masks in place Ace Larson Space Explorer was able to land the
Isis
safely on the surface of the Poison Planetoid.
But that was just the beginning of Ace Larson and Betty Blanton’s latest and most exciting adventure. Ace Larson asked Betty Blanton to look outside and see what kind of place the
Isis
had come down in. Ace Larson meant that Betty should look outside
through one of the
Isis’s
portholes but Betty didn’t understand and she opened the hatch. A dozen scaly monsters rushed through the doorway, ray-rifles blazing, just as the day’s episode came to an end.
The Crimson Wizard was facing his arch foe the fiendish Dr. Mephisto. Not only was Dr. Mephisto a powerful master of the dark arts, he knew the secret that it took to summon up all the Demon Horde
of Hades. It wasn’t easy for him, he could only do it when the stars of the Pleiades were in perfect alignment and the forces of good were at a low ebb. But as the Crimson Wizard himself was all too aware, the forces of good were busily engaged in defeating the Axis powers in Europe and Asia, so they were not available to aid the Crimson Wizard in holding off Dr. Mephisto and the Horde of Hades.
Arlie knew that the Horde of Hades were shown in one of the stories in his newest Crimson Wizard comic book. The radio dial gave off a little light and Arlie turned the pages, looking for the Horde of Hades. He found the story and lay in bed studying the drawings while he listened to the radio. He knew how the story came out in the comic book but it might be different on the radio. He liked the
Crimson Wizard’s voice on the radio. Whenever the Crimson Wizard spoke there was an echo in his voice. It sounded like the Crimson Wizard was far away and up close at the same time.
When the story ended on the radio Arlie lay in bed trying to see into the tunnel in the corner but all he could see was a black place.
Soon he heard a key in the doorway of the apartment. He remembered when he was
stronger and could go out of the apartment. He played stickball with some other kids in the cement courtyard outside the building, the same courtyard where you could see the trains when they went past.
He used to walk to school, too. He walked with his best friend. His best friend was named Buddy Bill McIlhenny.
The McIlhennys lived upstairs in another apartment. Buddy Bill lived there with
his mom and dad and two sisters. Arlie wished he could live with his own mom and dad and sisters instead of his Aunt Cora and his Uncle Mort and Aunt Mary but he knew that could never be. He didn’t have any brothers or sisters and his mom was dead so he knew he would never have any but at least he knew his dad was in the Black Forest fighting Nazis and when he came back from the war Arlie would live
with him.
When Arlie first got sick and couldn’t go to school or play in the courtyard Buddy Bill visited him almost every day. They traded comic books and talked about school and the war and Buddy Bill’s sisters and their other friends. But Arlie got sicker and Buddy Bill didn’t visit him as often as he did at first and then he stopped visiting him.
It was wintertime now. Last winter Arlie
and Buddy Bill had made a snowman in the courtyard but this winter Arlie had not been able to go outside at all. He couldn’t even get to the window and look down into the courtyard to see if Buddy Bill had made a snowman without him.
He knew what the hallway looked like and he remembered the smell in the hallway and on the stairs. Some apartment houses had elevators in them but Arlie’s house
didn’t have an elevator so you had to walk up and down flights of stairs when you went out or got home. But Arlie hadn’t been out of the apartment in a long time.
He heard the door open and he knew that Uncle Mort and Aunt Mary were home. He heard their voices and Aunt Cora’s talking in the Old Country language.
The door of his own room opened and Uncle Mort and Aunt Mary came in together. Aunt
Mary knelt next to Arlie’s bed and put her hand on his forehead and her cheek against his cheek. Her hand and her face felt cool and smooth and her cheek was soft.
He could see her dark lips even in his room. The radio was still turned on and the light from the dial made Aunt Mary’s face show up clearly.