James Beech, Sandman ExCo Midterm
Territorial
Through the shadowy forest that cloaked the steep hills of the skerry, the Corinthian prowled. A ruddy light filtered down through the canopy, giving the forest floor the appearance of being splashed with blood. The thought made the Corinthian smile his threefold smile.
He was in his primal hunter's guise. Lines of ochre and sumac marked his lean body and his fine white hair was shaven to the scalp, save for a long braid bound with a leather thong. In one hand he carried a cruel knife, chipped from black glass. It was an old weapon, but then these were old hunting grounds.
As he loped through the woodland, swinging gracefully from the limbs of monkey-puzzle trees or slipping between the tangles of cycad, he heard the distant birdlike calls of the skerry's fauna. He paid them no heed. They were cold, lizard-blooded things, long dead to the world of the living sun. The Corinthian was after sweeter meet.
He paused at the summit of a low rise of broken stone, nostrils flared, snuffing the turgid jungle air. The quarry was young, but he was strong. His sleeping mind made ripples in the fabric of the Dreaming, even in a skerry as old as this. Time flowed strangely here, but the Corinthian had been tracking the boy long enough for the red sun to wax and wane three times, and now he was almost upon him. He could smell him, nearly taste him. The Corinthian's mouths began to water as he crept forward.
Then something stirred in the long ferns. Up it loomed, bigger than a man, bigger than a horse, for all that it had lain invisible. It was a hunting cat, all lean muscle and matted fur, barred tawny and sable. Its lambent eyes were green torches in the ruby twilight and its ivory fangs were half-bared in a rumbling snarl.
"Turn back, night stalker. The child is not for you."
The Corinthian smiled his threefold smile and laughed darkly. "Ooh, a tiger. Very frightening. Did he dream you up himself? I'm almost impressed now. But it won't help him. I am the dark mirror to Adam's flesh, and all his line are my lawful prey."
"I know only one law, night stalker," the cat said, "The law of the jungle. And I say you shall not touch the child."
"You cannot stop me," said the Corinthian, and quick as summer lighting he darted forward and slit the cat's throat with the glass knife.
The cat did not bleed, and though a fine white down was visible through the narrow wound, he did not quail. "My turn," he growled.
He pounced upon the Corinthian and the two rolled over and over on the wet earth and browning ferns. The Corinthian, knife lost, fought to find purchase on his foe, find a place where his grip, a vise of adamant, could choke and throttle. But the cat was a liquid thing, a river of burning oil, whose claws gouged hot wounds in the Corinthian's pale flesh. Then his jaws closed about the Corinthian's spine and splintered it. With a cuff of one mighty paw, the great beast sent the nightmare spinning away like a broken doll, coming to rest at the foot of the stone hill. There he sat, dark blood pooling about his lap, his eyeless gaze searching the unreadable features of the cat.
"What are you?" the Corinthian asked, his voice wet and ragged.
"The one who has stopped you," replied the cat, enigmatically.
"Why?" asked the Corinthian, "Why do you protect him?"
"Love," said the cat. "Love and fealty, because of the pact at Galleon's Lap."
"I do not understand," said the Corinthian, as darkness stole through him.
"No," said the cat. "You would not."
Author's Note: This piece is a crossover fan fiction, featuring characters and concepts from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics and Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. I took the Calvin and Hobbes ExCo at Oberlin the year before I took the Sandman one, so I guess that's where this comes from. The first volume of The Sandman collections is called "Preludes and Nocturnes" while the first of the Calvin and Hobbes anthologies begins with poem called "A Nauseous Nocturne" (in which Hobbes shields Calvin from a semi-imaginary monster, a plot I shameless stole for this piece). Nocturne is not word you hear every day, and seeing it in these two seemingly disparate places got me thinking about the other things that the two works have in common. For one thing, Calvin's vivid flights of fancy, populated by his playthings, remind me of Barbie's trials in "A Game of You" (hence my allusions to skerries in the piece above). For another, Hobbes actually reminds me a good deal of Dream himself: deliberately enigmatic, haughty, and self-possessed. As with the Endless-as they are described by Dream in "The Doll's House"-we can never be sure whether Hobbes is in charge (he certainly seems adept at manipulating Calvin) or whether he is in fact a (literal) doll, only animated human belief. Like Dream, Hobbes' nature depends on the observer. Where humans see Dream as a man, cats see him as one of their own. Where adults see Hobbes as a toy, Calvin sees him as a living creature. In both these comics, reality and fancy begin to run together into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.