It’s familiar.
It makes sense only in a vague, comfortable way. I should know what this means, but its meaning is just out of reach.
I look at the letters, the familiar half cursive, half print. The steady hand of an artist, the swirls of each s, the half-crossed t’s, the offset dots over each lowercase i. This is his handwriting, the ink patterns I’ve known since I was old enough to read.
If it didn’t have my name on it, it would trouble me less. But he wrote this to me. The book was sent to me. By a man murdered three years ago.
Thomas takes it from me and holds the pages close to his face. My mother peers over his shoulder and reads the inscription aloud.
“What does that even mean?” she asks.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“He’s a loon,” she says. “He always was. What kind of sick joke is this?”
“Mom, stop.”
“I will not stop, Alice. He’s been dead for three years, and somehow he’s arranged to have this sent to you from the grave?”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
But she didn’t hear me. “What a sick, sick man,” she said. “Good riddance, is what I say. You should take that book and—”
“It’s from our stories.” Thomas says this as he continues to stare at the words on the page.
My mother snaps her head to him.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He looks up at me, and I see life in his eyes, a liveliness most often buried deep inside him.
“Remember, Alice, when we were kids? The stories he used to tell us? Chancellor’s Kingdom?”
Chancellor’s Kingdom.
“Yes,” I say, finally making the connection. “I remember.”
As children, Thomas and I shared a bedroom, and each night at bedtime, my father would tell us a story. He never read us books; the stories we heard were the ones he made up on the spot, the most epic of which was about Chancellor’s Kingdom, a faraway world throughout which little Alice and her younger brother Thomas journeyed on the back of an impossibly gigantic penguin. Every night was a new adventure, and as much excitement as Alice and Thomas had in discovering this world, all they really wanted to do was come home to their parents.
But there was always an obstacle, a challenge to overcome, an enemy to defeat. The story took months to tell, all revealed in fifteen-minute chunks every night. Shortly after the story ended, after the fictitious Alice and Thomas found their way safely home again, the real Alice and Thomas moved with their parents to a new house, one a few streets away, next to Gladstone Park. That house was bigger than the previous one. Thomas and I got our own rooms. We never heard of Chancellor’s Kingdom again.
“The penguin,” Thomas says. “What was his name?”
“Ferdinand,” I reply, the ridiculous name immediately coming to my lips after years of dormancy. “The penguin’s name was Ferdinand. And he was twelve feet high and was all white, with only wisps of black at the ends of his wings. And he could fly.”
Alice and Thomas rode on Ferdinand’s back high into the skies above London, just as Wendy, John, and Michael had soared after Peter Pan. But the similarities between Neverland and Chancellor’s Kingdom had ended there, and although the former had plenty of scenes of action and suspense, it was nothing compared to the darkness my father could command. Chancellor’s Kingdom contained entire cities of ruin, graveyards with the bodies of heroes only mostly buried—heads rising above the dirt—and a vast amusement park full of flesh-eating zombies. My father’s stories always enthralled and frightened me, and I sometimes wonder how life would have turned out had he just been content penning a trite and toothless Sunday comic strip.
Then another jolt of a memory. Mister Tender was born in Chancellor’s Kingdom. He lived as a character in my bedtime stories before making the leap into the world of graphic novels, evolving from the stories meant to put me to sleep.
“Alice, dear, you look ill,” my mother says. She gives my arm a little squeeze, more of a pinch, just below the elbow. “Let me get you some tea.”
She leaves the room, and Thomas says, “Do you understand what he wrote? What did the penguin always tell you?”
I do remember now. I can hear him saying the words, and my father always used an almost-American accent when speaking as Ferdinand. Several times, in situations when Alice and Thomas were about to face a rather tense situation in Chancellor’s Kingdom (which was almost every night, because Dad knew how to pace a story), Ferdinand would look down at them with a very serious face and say, Now then, if you get the sudden urge to start trusting someone, be smart and do away with it.
Ferdinand never wanted us to trust anyone. One time, the Alice of the story asked Ferdinand why, if that was his advice, should they indeed be trusting him, to which Ferdinand simply replied, Perhaps you shouldn’t be.
I go back to the beginning of the book, turning each page with care. There’s the title page with my father’s inscription. A blank page follows. Then another title page, this one with a more demanding font, with the words LAST CALL stretching side to side. No publisher information, no copyright date. But at the bottom of the title page, in a font so miniscule, I have to bring the book close to my face, there’s a website address.
www.mistertender.com
Beneath the address is a single word: gladstone.
Nothing else.
The scent of the book hits me. It’s so familiar. It makes me think of my father’s office, of those times he’d receive boxes of his advance copies. He’d open them up, and the room would fill with the incense of fresh ink and binding glue. The heady scent of glossy art.
I now realize I’ve already forgotten about getting fingerprints on the volume; we have all now handled the book. My second realization has a more visceral impact, because I flip through to the next few pages and see they are completely blank. Is there some kind of hidden ink I need to detect, or is this just an extension of a cruel joke? Why bother setting a hundred blank pages into a bound volume?
But the following page isn’t blank. I recognize the characteristics of my father’s art: bold, straight strokes; angular, shaded faces. White eyes, no pupils. The first panel is a double panel, stretching from one side of the page to the other. There are a little boy and a little girl, and they cling tightly to the back of a penguin, a miraculously large and airborne penguin, which descends into a heavenly plane of clouds holding gleaming white castles.
This is not the usual gritty setting in which Mister Tender dwells. This is Chancellor’s Kingdom. Thomas and I are those children, and that impossible penguin is Ferdinand. I read the perfectly straight lettering in the white dialogue box.
What is this place? the little version of myself says to Ferdinand.
This is Cloud City, he says. I remember now. Cloud City was the capital of Chancellor’s Kingdom.
Why are we here?
Because, young thing, there’s nowhere else to be at the moment.
I realize Thomas is now reading over my shoulder, and I turn my head just enough to see his face. He looks desperately tired, but I think there’s more than just fatigue in his eyes. The inception of tears.
The next panel shows Ferdinand landing on a cloud, and a rat in an immaculate yeoman warder uniform stands guard before an unwelcoming spiked steel gate.
“I remember the rat,” I say.
“Me too,” Thomas whispers.
The rat challenges Ferdinand with a riddle, which must be answered to gain entrance.
Step aside, Ferdinand says. I’ve no time for your puzzles. Can’t you see I’m carrying precious cargo?
The rat draws his sword.
Look out! little Thomas yells.
Then, with one swoop of his wing, Ferdinand smacks the rat, sending him sailing right off the edge of the cloud.
I turn the page. The three adventurers pass through the gates of Cloud City, and once again little Alice questions Ferdinand as to why they are there, and the penguin tells her they must find someone to help them get home. That’s the point of it all anyway, Ferdinand says. If you can’t get home, why bother exploring to begin with?
That page ends. The one adjacent to it is blank.
I flip past two, three, four more pages. They, too, are blank, and for a moment, I think my father’s brief, incomplete story is a tiny, solitary island surrounded by empty, white gloss sheets. But then I turn to the next page, and this one is not blank.
Not at all.
As I take in the first panel, I can already tell something’s a little off. It takes me a moment, but then I realize this is not my father’s work. It is impressively close, and probably to the casual observer, the differences would be indiscernible. But I know how my father would hold his pens, the angles from which he approached every blank canvas, the trajectory of every stroke, and while the artwork here is a beautiful imitation, it is an imitation nonetheless.
The first panel shows a woman, who, despite the exaggerations of the face, is most clearly me. She’s walking along the street at night, scarf snaked tightly around her neck, eyes down, her frame caught in the moment within a focused pool of street light. This light illuminates the thing in her hand, which, on closer inspection, is a movie ticket.
A wave of goose bumps peppers my arms.
The ticket displays the name of the movie.
I remember that movie. I saw it two weeks ago.