Rob MacGregor - The Phantom

[kooshmeister]

It's 1533. The merchant ship Miranda has been blown off course by tropical winds and ended up on the isle of Bangalla. The captain is a fearless, proud man who claims to be descended from the captain of one of Christopher Columbus' ships during the Italian's voyage to the New World. He has several sons, the oldest of whom, Kit, is with him on the voyage serving as cabin boy. Prior to losing their way in the storm, they'd been en route to deliver some supplies of tools, clothes and large stores of wool to some settlers.

Along with his son and some of his crew, the captain goes ashore to trade for food and fresh water with a friendly tribe of Bangallans, the natives of the island. Kit likes the Bangallans. They're a hearty, friendly people, and some of them are said to have mystical powers including astral projection or "spirit navigating" as they call it.

A white man named Sam lives amongst them. He's been there ever since he was shipwrecked and has no desire to leave. He warns the Miranda's crew of the Sengh Brotherhood, a particularly vicious band of pirates notorious for murdering the passengers and crews of the ships they attack... before setting fire to the ships themselves and sinking them, apparently just for the hell of it. Kit's father has heard of them and isn't too concerned, even though Sam claims that they hire unscurpulous Bangallans to "spirit navigate" them to their prey.

On their way home, Kit asks his father if what Sam said was true, and the captain simply laughs it off.

But later that day, Kit sights a pirate ship flying a flag with a spider web symbol. The Sengh Brotherhood! Whether they can astrally project themselves or not the fact is they're just off the bow and preparing to attack. Kit's father orders him below decks to hide. The boy obeys despite wanting to stay and help fend off the pirates.

A vicious, bloody battle follows. Kit, peeking out from his hiding place, is seen by a pirate, who grabs him, only to be killed by Kit's father who orders him below decks again. Kit scampers away to hide, while his father is slain. True to their reputation, the Brotherhood leave no one aboard alive. At least, not intentionally. Only one pirate saw Kit, and he's dead, and so none of them are aware of the captain's son.

Kit hides inside a bundle of wool, which ends up being among the cargo the pirates decide to pillage to sell. He tries to squirm free... only to see his father's ghost standing there, warning him not to, to remain in hiding until the right time. Confused as hell, Kit nevertheless obeys.

Thus it is that he survives the burning and sinking of the Miranda. Rather than end up accompanying the Brotherhood back to their hideout as a stowaway, which they won't like in the least, Kit jumps overboard that night, bag of wool and all, and after almost drowning because he can't free himself from the bag in time, he washes ashore on nearby Bangalla. He sits on the beach and mourns for his father as he watches the Miranda still burning in the distance.

This is how he is found by the Touganda, a secretive but friendly tribe of Bangallans. Some of their warriors came down to the beach in response to the commotion of the battle and the ship-burning, and they bring Kit to their shaman, Buli, a holy man and sorcerer. Apparently for lack of anything better to do with the kid, Buli adopts the boy as his own son and takes him on as an apprentice. It turns out that the Bangallans can indeed spirit navigate as is rumored, and he teaches Kit to do it as well. Kit leaves his body and explores the island in spirit form. And then there's the whole communing with the dead thing, which is how he was able to be warned by his father's spirit back aboard the Miranda.

During one such spiritual journey, he sees, in his vision, a body washed up on the beach. Returning to his body (or simply waking up, whichever you prefer), Kit runs down to the beach. The body is in his father's clothes, but it isn't his father, it's one of the Sengh pirates. He's just wearing the dead man's clothes. After burying the man, Kit elects not to tell Buli of this, and swears and oath to no one in particular - he'll fight evil and injustice in all of its forms from now one, and become...

...the Phantom!

[kooshmeister]

Hundreds of years later, in 1938, a particularly surly ex-con named Quill is leading an expedition deep into the Bangalla Jungle. He's a nominally a member of the Sengh Brotherhood, with the identifying spider web tattoo on his forearm, but it hasn't brought him much in the way of prosperity. A few years prior, he was connected in some way to the Zephro crime familty in New York, and took the rap for killing a cop. Following a prison riot turned breakout, he fled to the farthest corner of he Earth he could think of, which turns out is Bangalla.

He hates it and wants to get out. During a recent return to New York, he tried to find work with Ray Zephro and his younger brother Charlie, but was instead directed to a businessman named Xander Drax, whose interest was piqued after he learned Quill was a member of the Brotherhood and knew his way around Bangalla. So it was that he hired Quill, provided him with an ancient map and dispatched him back to the island in search of something very special.

In the port town of Zavia, he hires three other scruffy ne'er-do-wells named Styles, Morgan and Breen. Styles in particular is World War I veteran and a former altar boy (!) who in his youth murdered a shop owner before evading the law. The four men attempt to enlist the aide of a local Bangallan man to act as their guide. As well as Quill knows the jungles of the island, he doesn't know how to reach the area indicated on Drax's map. The man refuses to help them, and so they kidnap his son Zak, intending to threaten the boy's life in return for the man's cooperation. As it happens, though, Zak knows the area relatively well, and understands, but doesn't speak, English, and so a new deal is struck: Zak's father will be kept prisoner aboard Quill's ship, and he'll be released after the boy assists his captors in finding their destination.

So it is that the four men and the more or less captive boy find themselves in an old rented truck driving through the deepest, darkest parts of the Bangalla jungle. Morgan, who is married to a Bangallan woman, speaks the local dialect and interprets for Quill and has something of a rapport with the kid. Anything Quill suggests which might endanger Zak is met with resistance from him. Particularly when they need to cross a rickety old bridge over a ravine. Quill, concerned the truck won't make it across with all of them aboard, suggests the four adults walk across on foot, and the lighter Zak drive the vehicle across himself. Morgan protests, but Quill ignores him. Despite a few close calls, the plan comes off without a hitch, and soon the truck has reached the other side, and everyone piles back in and they drive on (Quill behind the wheel again, of course).

Behind them, though, the strain of the truck's weight has left the bridge in no shape for a second such crossing...

Eventually the men stop and park the truck. They've gone as far as the map can take them and it's up to Zak now. But the boy refuses to assist his captors any further. As far as he's concerned, he's taken them as far as is possible. When they demand to know why, he insists this part of the jungle is protected by "a ghost." "A Ghost Who Walks," Morgan translates uncertainly. Quill, pausing to feel a skull tattoo on his cheek, tells his friends not to worry about this "ghost." Zak persists, and Styles suggests just shooting the kid and finding what they're looking for themselves. Before this suggestion can draw the inevitable protest from Morgan, Quill reaches a compromise - they'll find what they're looking for without Zak's assistance, but, to keep Morgan happy, they'll just tie the kid up and leave him in the truck.

So doing, they head on and find what they seek: a cave serving as an ancient burial site for the Touganda tribe. And what they've come for is inside. It's Styles who finds it. In addition to numerous pots of priceless jewels and other goodies, the former soldier finds a carefully wrapped skull made of pure silver. This, it seems, is what Drax wants so badly. Styles wants to know why, but all Quill can tell him is it's better not to know. Suddenly, the skeletal remains of none other than Tougandan shaman Buli springs to life at this violation and strangles Styles to death on the spot. His friends are horrified... but not enough to resist grabbing as much jewels as they can carry, which they're able to do unmolested because apparently the undead shaman's mojo was spent choking just the one guy.

Laden with ill-gotten gains, including the silver skull, the three immediately start back for the truck. Suddenly they hear drums. Morgan and Breen are spooked and so is Quill, but he hides it well. His friends ask him what the drums mean, and he tells them it doesn't mean anything... but warns them to hurry back just the same. It seems he's done this dance before.

Elsewhere, a muscular figure in a hooded purple bodysuit sits perched on a large throne decorated in skull imagery in a dark underground lair somewhere, his head bowed in silent contemplation. Hearing the drums and sensing that something his amiss, he reaches out with his spirit to sense the lay of things, and realizes at once what the trouble is. Rising from his throne and retrieving his silver handguns and rallying his pet wolf Devil and trusty stallion Hero, he heads off to intervene on behalf of the adopted tribe of his distant ancestor and try to stop the violation of their sacred burial ground.

The Phantom is needed again. And no one is more surprised than Quill when the mysterious man in the purple costume astride a white horse accompanied by a ferocious wolf comes charging out from the depths of the jungle with retribution in mind. But Quill isn't surprised because he's never seen such a thing before. He's surprised because he has... and he could've sworn to God that he'd put an end to Phantom's heroic shenanigans years ago! He even got the skull tattoo as a symbol of his victory!

Breen's effort to shoot the rider is thwarted when the Phantom unholsters his sidearms and fires dual-handed (on horseback!), shooting the machine gun out of the criminal's hand. At this, the villains' courage leaves them, and they run like crazy. The Phantom pursues them, quickly apprehending Breen and leaving him in the care of Devil ("If he moves, eat him," he tells the wolf). Then it's off to catch the other two, who manage to get back into the truck and drive off, with Zak still tied up in back, speeding wildly towards the bridge. The one that isn't going to stand a second attempt at crossing...

[kooshmeister]

In the truck, Morgan understandably wants to know what on God's green Earth is up with the masked man in the purple bodysuit, but Quill is cryptic. He simply replies it's someone he thought he already killed. Taking a shortcut on Hero because he knows the jungle better than the bad guys, the Phantom leaps onto the hood of the truck. Morgan fires through the windshield (not exactly the best decision), and he rolls off the hood. Morgan is all "I got him, I got him!" when the Phantom reappears hanging onto the side. He punches through the rolled up passenger window, smashing the glass ("Sorry about the window!" he quips), then opens the door and throws Morgan out, then climbs into try and get Quill.

After a brief tussle, Quill manages to stab him in the side. As the truck is hurtling towards the bridge, he grabs the bag containing the silver skull Styles found and jumps out (more quipping: "Keep the truck, it's yours!"). The Phantom is unable to stop the vehicle in time and it drives full speed out onto the bridge, which, predictably, starts giving way under its weight. The vehicle ends up stopping in the middle and teetering precariously over the gorge. The Phantom was unaware of Zak, and finds the boy while trying to escape the truck. Untying the boy, he tries to figure out out the hell they're going to escape. And thinking right now is hard because of the deep knife wound in his side. He's bleeding out rapidly. He may be known locally as the Ghost Who Walks, but he's neither immortal nor incapable of being hurt. To keep up his image, as well as keep the understandably panicky boy calm, he dismisses the bleeding wound as being a prick from a bramble bush.

Zak, a wide-eyed admirer of the Ghost Who Walks, asks why he doesn't just fly away. The Phantom wonders where in the heck the increasingly outlandish stories of what he's capable of doing ever even come from! Brushing it off, he has the kid get on his back and climbs out of the dangling truck. Trying to think quickly through the haze of agony from the knife wound and the ever encroaching dizziness of bloodless and keep hold of a small child, with the truck about to fall and take the entire bridge with it, he ultimately makes the desperate decision to get them out of there Tarzan style. Making sure Zak's got his arms around his neck, he grabs a vine one-handed, pulls a gun with the other, and shoots the vine, separating it from the bridge, swinging himself and Zak away from the bridge just as the entire thing, truck and all, snaps loose and falls down the gorge into the river.

They land on a rocky outcropping several feet below the top of the cliff. Although he's saved them from falling, the Phantom is unsure he can get them safely to the top. He hasn't stopped bleeding, and he's feeling more and more tired. He's going to die from blood loss, he's certain of it. With Zak still on his back, he finds some convenient foot and hand holds and climbs through the searing pain to the top, where he collapses, all but ready to die, except for the silver skull ring passed down from father to son for generations. It possesses magic healing properties, but his father warned him it was only to be used if the only other outcome was certain death. And with the darkness closing in, well, he considers this a desperate enough time, and, making sure Zak doesn't see him do it, he touches the ring to the injury. It doesn't heal it exactly, but turns it from a life-threatening injury to merely a painful annoyance.

Meanwhile, Corporal Samuel Weeks of the Jungle Patrol and his men are out, well, patrolling the jungle. They appear to be some kind of colonial military or police force that keeps law and order on Bangalla. But Weeks knows they stay out of Zavia. That's the territory of the Sengh Brotherhood, along with half a dozen other pirate organizations and criminal syndicates. The Patrol isn't welcome there, so they stay as far away from that part of the island as possible. They've found Morgan and Breen, correctly taking them to have been stealing sacred tribal objects in the caves, and taken them back to headquarters. There's no sign of Quill.

Weeks turns the prisoners and their ill-gotten gains over to his superior, Captain Philip Horton. The two men try to warn the officers that "a weird purple man" on a horse beat them, but Horton dismisses their claims as the result of madness from jungle fever or ingesting psychedelic mushrooms and has them taken away. He orders the stolen treasure returned to the chieftains of the tribe(s), and seems to consider it case closed, but Weeks, who has long suspected that the Ghost Who Walks is real, presses the issue, wanting to know why Horton is keeping the Phantom's existence a secret. Horton simply replies that he should look up the word "phantom" in the dictionary and walks off.

The definition (according to whatever dictionary the Jungle Patrol has on hand, anyway) is "something that isn't really there." Weeks is unsure if this is Horton telling him the Phantom doesn't exist or if it's a sly admission about why the hero's existence should be secret: because if he really is an actual phantom (insofar as a mortal man can be) he can be more effective against evil.

[kooshmeister]

For lack of anything better to do with the kid, the Phantom brings Zak to his jungle cavern lair, the Skull Cave. Our purple-clad hero is in the Skull Cave's library looking up information on whatever it is Quill and his cronies stole. Since later we'll learn he maintains contact with the Jungle Patrol, I suppose he could always just, y'know, got and ask the currently locked up Morgan and Breen, but whatever. He's being tended to his elderly assistant Guran, the only person who knows the Phantom's true name: Kit Walker. Ordinarily the Phantom goes maskless but with the kid around he's got to keep up appearances, so he only has the costume off when he's in private. Luckily, though, the kid is tuckered out and fast asleep somewhere else in the lair.

The Phantom himself is feeling much better. Not only did his ring save him, but to heal the superficial wound which remains, Guran is applying a jungle remedy of some kind of mashed up goopy yellow stuff. Apparently it stings a little. The Phantom is a man about it, or at least he tries to be.

So anyway he's reading up on that silver skull, and in one of the ancient tomes kept in the library he finds it. It turns out it's one of three. The other two are made of gold and black jade, and they originally belonged to the Touganda tribe. Guran asks if they're valuable and that's why the thieves wanted them. The Phantom replies that they're very valuable... and very dangerous. Apparently, if brought together, they'll create some kind of awesomely destructive power or other, and in the wrong hands, like, say, the Sengh Brotherhood, they could cause untold damage.

Guran has never heard of the Tougandas. Apparently, the tribe no longer exists as such, having been wiped out centuries ago by the Brotherhood in their quest for the Skulls. The Phantom explains (apparently reading from the Big Book of Really Dangerous Ancient Artifacts) that when the Brotherhood came for the Skulls and destroyed the Tougandas' village, three of their holy men, including Buli, hid the Skulls someplace. Although the pirates capture the shamans, they refused to talk, and so the pirates killed them. But apparently somehow the silver one ended up with Buli's remains in the burial cave.

Guran leaves to go do whatever else he does, whereupon the spirit of the previous Phantom, our hero's father, appears and reminisces about how he too would consults the ancient chronicles of the Skull Cave's library when he was troubled. Exactly how the "ghost dad" thing works is a mystery even to the Phantom. Although basically his own personal Obi-Wan, he never comes when bidden and just sort of shows up when he feels like it. Dad's kind of a troll like that. So father and son converse regarding the day's events and Daddy is... less than pleased that his son let one of the Skulls of Touganda end up in the hands of a member of the Sengh Brotherhood (apparently the Phantom saw the spider web tattoo on Quill's arm). Excuses like "I was in a truck hanging off a bridge" don't gut with Dad, who sternly tells his errant son to get the Skull back by any means necessary, and pray the Brotherhood doesn't have the other two already.

Elswhere, Quill manages to make it back to Zavia by hitching a ride with an officer of the Jungle Patrol. Although the Phantom's father is concerned about the Skull ending up in the Brotherhood's hands and Zavia is a haven for their crews, he needn't be concerned, since, despite the fact Quill is nominally a member of the organization, he's been hired by Xander Drax and intends to turn the item over to the New York businessman and not any of his fellow pirates. He keeps the item in a leather satchel which he guards jealously.

Quill, we learn, thinks he's killed the Phantom again (although it was actually the previous one, but only we know that), so he prematurely gets a second skull tattoo on his other cheek to celebrate. Then he goes to a dive to meet with Sala, your typical femme fatale type and his direct line to Drax. She serves as his personal pilot. Getting a bit boozy, he tells her about his encounter with the jungle hero, and expresses his puzzlement that he had to kill the same person twice. Sala can't say she quite understands what he means, so he tells the story of how he slew the previous Phantom (which, remember, he thinks is the same as the one he "killed" earlier today).

The Phantom(s) have been a thorn in the side of the Brotherhood for years. The order came down: find his lair in the Bangalla jungle and kill him. A whole team of grunts, including Quill, set off to accomplish the task. To hear Quill tell it, he was the sole survivor of the assassination team, shooting and killing both the Phantom and his wolf. He cut off the Phantom's head and brought it to Kabai Sengh, the Brotherhood's leader and the descendant of its namesake, as well as the Phantom's arch-enemy.

In reality, although this particular attempt to kill one of the Phantoms did occur, and did end in that Phantom's death and decapitation and the presentation of his head to Kabai Sengh, this was before Quill's time, and he's basically co-opted the story to impress Sala. He did kill that Phantom's son, though it was much less impressive a feat. He was alone in the jungle looking for gold and not purple-clad superheroes when he was bitten by a diseased monkey and was found by the Phantom (ours' father) who took him blindfolded back to the Skull Cave where he nursed him back to health and in return Quill promised he'd take him to the Brotherhoods' secret stronghold... the lair of Kabai Sengh himself.

The Phantom agreed, and off they went, with Quill being led blindfolded from the Skull Cave so he couldn't find his way back. But what the Phantom didn't know is that not everyone who is a member of the Brotherhood knows where Sengh's lair is, and as soon as they're far enough away from the Skull Cave that the Phantom removed the blindfold, Quill betrayed him and literally stabbed him in the back. He took his belt, recognizable by the skull emblem on the gun holsters, as a trophy and he's worn it ever since. But this story doesn't play as well as "me and a hundred other guys shot him in the head and decapitated him," so he never tells that particular story...