Chapter
Two
TRUTHS
SELF EVIDENT
Jimmy and Warden got along quite well. In addition to all their other similarities, they had both grown up in poverty (Jimmy’s urban and Warden’s rural), and now found themselves in the midst of obscene wealth and didn’t quite know how to adapt.
Jimmy’s foster father was a man he called “Uncle Lex” and Warden got the impression that this Uncle Lex was a very important man, as well as being a friend of Archie Goodwin, the man who had taken Warden in. It was Archie Goodwin who had also brought Jimmy and Warden together. Warden suspected it was because Archie didn’t know how to act around a little boy and, by finding Warden a friend, he hoped it would take some of the pressure off him to be engaging.
Archie was a strange man. He always tried to be funny and cracked wise all the time. Nevertheless, Warden could tell this act was little more than a pose now and a poor one at that—a vestigial echo of a mischievous spirit since withered away. Early on, Archie had told Warden that he’d lost two people who were terribly important to him, and Mentalon could feel the twin holes their absence had left deep inside Archie. As with Jimmy, there was a bleak kinship here.
Still, living with Archie was odd at times. Despite his deceptively jovial tone, Archie obviously didn’t know the first thing about children and also seemed much more interested in the psi talents of Mentalon than Warden the little boy. Archie didn’t have any of the gifts that Mentalon had, yet he seemed to understand how they worked better than anyone Mentalon had ever meet before. Someone had even taught Archie a rudimentary way to hide his thoughts from people like Mentalon. This was the first real mind shield Mentalon had ever encountered. Archie encouraged him to try to get around it. All Mentalon had to do was push just a *little* bit.... It was easy, and no one was happier at Mentalon’s success than Archie.
There were many tests and exercises like this and they all took place in the immense mansion in the hills of Los Angeles where Warden now lived. Archie’s home had formerly belonged to his late friend and mentor, Jonathan Carlos Winchester. In the library, filled with all the pretty books that Archie didn’t know Warden couldn’t read, hung an ornate oil painting. Lit by a single spotlight, it was a portrait of three people standing happily in front of the glass case that held the Red Knight armor. Archie was one of the people in the painting, as was “The Old Man” as Archie called him. Indeed, for some reason it was this man’s face that always drew Warden’s gaze whenever he looked up at it. He reminded Warden of some of the old preachers he’d known back in Kentucky: Silver hair, stern expression, deceptively frail build, and piercing dark eyes that seemed to follow you. Even to Warden, the old man’s presence in the house was tangible.
But Mentalon saw much more in that mansion.
To him, it was a house of ghosts. Gentle ghosts, pleasant ghosts; echoes of emotions and tender moments long since past. The impressions left behind here were stronger than in any other place Mentalon had ever been before. Archie’s friends must have been somewhat like Mentalon to touch a place so deeply. Mentalon could often smell the strong scent of fresh pipe tobacco while sitting in the study, or hear a deep, booming laugh while eating in the dinning room. He once even glimpsed the old man from the oil painting standing in the library and staring at the empty glass case against the wall that had once held the Red Knight armor.
The echoes of the other person, however, were even stronger.
If he only stopped to listen, Mentalon could hear a soft, lilting, female voice whispering her end of long forgotten conversations in almost every room of the house. He saw her for the first time, from behind, in one of the mansion’s long hallways as she strolled sprightly toward the dinning room with a pronounced spring in her step. As Mentalon watched, she suddenly started walking faster, apparently deciding to impulsively race the person walking beside her, whom Mentalon could only just make out as a very faded image of Archie. She, on the other hand, looked as solid, as real, as anyone Mentalon had ever seen; it was almost like he could reach out and touch her.
Before she could cross the threshold to the dinning room, the faint afterimage of Archie tried to pick her up in his arms. She would have none of that. She floated up off the ground and out of his reach. Turning in the air to face him, she drifted serenely through the doorway ahead of him. She had long, black hair and wise eyes that sparkled and danced. Her smile was utter joy and Mentalon couldn’t help but smile back when he saw it. Her laugh was musical.
She was the most beautiful woman Mentalon had ever seen. She was in the painting, too, but it just didn’t do her justice.
He knew her name was Annette: It was the name that never drifted far from the center of Archie Goodwin’s being, as close to him now as it had been when the portrait in the library had been painted years ago.
Sometimes, late at night, Warden would sneak down into the library and find Archie still awake, standing in the library looking up at the portrait of himself and the two most important people in his life.
Warden wondered how they had been taken from him and what the significance was of the image Mentalon had glimpsed at the base of Archie’s mind shield, the focus for both Archie’s concentration and a rage so ragged and brutal that it made any probing mind instinctively recoil as if it touching white-hot steel: A tall, lanky man in a suit of many different colors with a plain, white plastic face that somehow both smiled and frowned. The feelings for those whom Archie loved and this thing which Archie hated were far too primal and overwhelming not to be inextricably connected.
It was a question Warden knew he would have to ask soon.
Chapter Three: “Church And State”
No one met at Justice League Headquarters anymore.