Legends: Chapter One

This isn't a new work, per se; over the past two years I wrote 145 Writer pages deep into this story (that would be about 320-340 standard novel pages). The result of that work was really a rough idea of a story that now needs to be rewritten; what you see below is Chapter One of that rewrite, after I've taken a good deal of time to set down and develop the setting, the nations involved, the history, and the magic system of the Six Powers and the corresponding Black power. (You'll get more info on that as the story progresses.) This is a fantasy story, and of course it borrows elements from great fantasy stories of the past, as they all do, but I have high hopes for this story, as I like the characters I've developed in my head and my many pages of notes and think that, after five or six rewrites, they'll come forward and create en enthralling tale.

Some people have read the first (rough) draft and told me it's borrowing heavily from some fantasy story or another that I actually haven't read. I've read almost nothing in the genre, to tell you the truth. What I'm setting down now is a world I've tinkered with in my mind since I was in junior high school and am only now making a serious effort at bringing to reality. If you read it and think, "He's ripping off _____," well, yeah, I probably am, but not intentionally. There are a lot of themes and plot elements that are common to the genre, I think, or even to literature in general, but to me, characters and storytelling make a story good. I'm confident I've got some great characters; the question is, can I tell a story?

So this is Chapter One of Draft Two of what, for now, I'm calling Legends. What you will eventually, long down the road, pick up off the shelf of your local bookstore will most likely bear little resemblance to what you'll read here, but at least you'll be able to tell your friends you got in early. ;)

Before you get started, a quick key of unfamiliar terms:

Time: An Arcoan year is comprised of 180 days, divided into four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) each 45 days long. An Arcoan day is 24 hours long, and a day is considered to begin at sunrise. Thus, all measurements in years are understood to be slightly more than double their earthly counterparts; a man who has seen 100 winters would be understood to be age 50 to our understanding (actually 49.3).

Age: The construct "seen X winters" is near-universal in Arcoa when telling a person's age, analogous to the American "is X years old". The average human lifespan in Arcoa is the same as Earth's roughly 70 Earth years/145 Arcoan years, though Healers are known to live quite a bit longer.

Measurement: The moyre is almost two feet, actually 22 inches; the mamoyre is 1000 moyres, about one-sixth of a mile (.17 miles, to be exact). Long distances are most often measured in day's journeys; a day's journey is roughly considered to be 150 mamoyres (about 25 miles).

Weight, for right now, is just given in pounds in the few instances in which I need to give specific weights. I'll probably devise an arbitrary weight system later.

Oh, and before you ask: Yes, there's a reason the Lubyan lords have distinctly English names, and it's not merely my laziness. Arcoa and Earth share a nebulous connection, as we'll begin to see shortly.

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Belmon Lacla was the name his father gave him, but decades had gone by since last anyone had called him so. He called himself the Drifter, and for thirty years he had traveled all over Arcoa, from one town to the next to the next. As far as he could remember, two years was the longest he had stayed in the same place since he left his hometown; on a few occasions he was nicely asked to leave, on a few others driven out with torches and pitchforks, but usually he left of his own accord before it came to that. Kids loved him, loved to listen to the stories he would tell, but the general consensus among the adults of the world was that the Drifter was a wandering troublemaker that come to a town to snatch away its children, if allowed to. Arcoa was running out of corners he could rest in for even a little while.

But did that matter anymore? Surely it did not. The Drifter chuckled to himself as he peaked another of the long, gentle hills that marked the boundaries of the Plains of Elzareth. He wouldn't be venturing into the Plains on this occasion, but the Drifter three times had crossed the plains alive, and that was a feat most men, even those of Tuaisosopo and the Four Kingdoms, would never be able to claim. But then, he'd always had a knack for staying alive. How many times had he eluded death's cold fingers?

For two months he had ridden west, every day west and southwest, and for a wonder he hadn't stopped for more than a single night in any town or village. He had a good horse under him that he had borrowed without permission from a nobleman's ranch in Randle El, near its border with the Highlands. No one had detected his presence in the slightest, and the heist had taken place in the middle of the day; as far as any of the poor stablehands, now condemned to punitive ditch digging for probably a year or more, knew, the horse was in its stall one moment and gone the next. A man with the Drifter's talents could have made a thief to be remembered for ages to come for his exploits, but the notion of taking up a life of thievery had never really crossed the Drifter's mind. The dark brown horse's name was Chalice, and the Drifter had taken him because he had needed him; no reason less, or more. He didn't make Chalice sprint, but the horse rode at a trot for hours on end, day after day, bringing the Drifter across the continent about as quickly as it could be done without killing a horse or three.

The Navanor Icon was a mythical relic that had been whispered about among scholars for millennia and utterly forgotten by most of Arcoa. Forged from a supernatural stone that was so white it seemed to glow, and so strong nothing any man could do to it, not even a blow from the sharpest axe swung by the strongest man, could so much as chip it, the Icon was created by Brozen the White himself, with the aid of two of his fellow High Mages, Randals the Red and Aprile the Blue, if you believed the few surviving legends from crumbling books thousands of years old.

Whether the Icon existed, or whether it was just a tall tale from the age of an ancient war that seemed full of them, was a question that sparked no small excitement in Arcoa's academia. And even among those who believed it did exist, sparking yet greater contention was the question of whether it served the purpose a few of the oldest legends claimed it did. Some murmured that the Icon was itself the very lock that secured the seal keeping Ryth the Black trapped in the void, the nether realm into which the High Mages had thrown him just as he stood on the precipice of unsurpassable power and unchallenged rule over all Arcoa. Not too many believed such an extreme tale, but some said the Icon was an object into which Brozen and the High Mages channeled great power, and if it were ever to be found, the one who found it would obtain for himself greater power than any magician in centuries, maybe millennia. The High Mages' successors still existed in the world, of course, though no White High Mage had been known in a thousand years, but it was thought that their powers were only a shadow of their predecessors'. It had become popular in many places to hold that the Icon existed, but had no powerful significance; it was simply a handsome piece of art.

Wars had been fought over less than a handsome piece of art, but 4,500 years ago one appalling catastrophe of a war had been fought over the Navanor Icon. Given the level of ruin that struck such a large part of the continent, it was little surprising that complete records of the period were hard to come by and accessible only to the elite. Those records said that Brozen the White left the Icon in the trust of the queen of Chiara-Valhomana, the most magnificent of the ancient nations, an empire that far predated the Age of Darkness and fought Ryth the Black tooth and nail throughout the War, fought him until he brought her to the brink of utter destruction before Ryth was defeated in mankind's final desperate assault at the Battle of Sarcim. After the Victory of the Mages, as it was known, the queens of Chiara-Valhomana slowly, over hundreds of years, rebuilt the realm into her former glory. Chiara-Valhomana was universally acclaimed by the few surviving records as the crown jewel of the nations, and to this nation was charged the duty of keeping the Navanor Icon secret and safe.

To the Ever-enlightened, Pirslaea the daughter of Esatell the Queen, this day I lay to your charge the vanguard of free Arcoa, this Icon of Navanor, created with the agony toil of our own arms and minds, the High Mages. May the just kingdom of Chiara-Valhomana stand strong and tall, light to all living for as long as our world shall shine her light in the heavens, and may the Icon rest its long rest until the day of our reckoning come. These were the words of Brozen the White on the day he gave the Icon to the old Queen.

Brozen did not get his wish. For five hundred years the queens of Chiara-Valhomana, who assumed the title of the Guardian of Navanor and took it very seriously, kept it hidden deep in an underground chamber that only the queen and the captain of her honor guard knew. When destruction came, many thought it was the very day of reckoning of which Brozen had spoken; many terrified souls believed Ryth had broken loose from his imprisonment.

It wasn't Ryth that destroyed Chiara-Valhomana and burned every speck of her capital city of Nusbel Chiara to ashes. That was done by the armies of the Highlands, sworn to the Empress Derona and under the command of the Overlord Shikaa Linfazal, who was unparalleled in his brilliance on the battlefield and went into legend for the endlessness of his viciousness. Linfazal left no stone upon another on his path as he drove the Highland Forces across the river and south into Chiara-Valhomana. When he took a town, he took every last woman and child and forced the captured men to watch as his captains slaughtered their wives and children, one by one. When a town resisted him with particular stubbornness, he made sure to make them scream well before they died.

Linfazal laid siege to Nusbel Chiara for nearly four years, and did so with even more than his customary ruthlessness. Anyone that so much approached the city was killed without pause, dismembered, his or her entrails thrown over the walls of the city. The Valhomanan army in those days was large and strong, and they held their city for as long as they could, until starvation finally weakened them too much. When the Highland Forces broke through—the legends claim Shikaa Linfazal himself was the first man to step into the city, and joined combat with dozens of waiting Volhomanan soldiers—what followed was the greatest mass slaughter Arcoa had ever seen, unsurpassed even by Ryth the Black's many atrocities.

And then Linfazal left. He came to one of the world's most flourishing cities and left behind mamoyres of gore and not one breathing thing. If any reason for the annihilation of most of the queendom existed, it was lost to history. For hundreds of years piles of bones lay piled and scattered over a charred, barren field where Nusbel Chaira once stood, only very slowly being scattered abroad by rains, winds and animals. The area was called Tanuto'om, the Land Where Agony Reigns. The Navanor Icon vanished, to become the subject of countless prophecies, myths, tales and rumors, but never to be seen again. It was assumed by the few who wrote histories of the era that the Icon was the entire reason for the Highlanders' invasion, but if Linfazal left Tantuto'om with the Icon, the secret of its location died with him and Empress Derona.

For 4,500 years the Navanor Icon lay hidden, unknown to all the world, and faded into history, and then myth. The Drifter found it not only a very long way from civilization, but in a place no normal man would have thought to look, for the Icon or anything else. At a certain spot, a seventy degree bend in the Apar River two hundred mamoyres into its swath through the Sledge Mountains, where the river ran some twenty moyres deep, there lay a tunnel, hardly large enough to a man to squeeze through and fifty moyres long, submerged that led to a cave. No known man passed within thirty mamoyres of this spot until the Drifter, who went directly to the cave and retrieved the Navanor Icon from the very pedestal upon which it had been left four millennia ago.

The Drifter left his horse two hills short of the perimeter of the small and extremely well hidden camp, where clearly some very experienced soldiers, thieves or fugitives were about to go to sleep for the night. Soldiers, in point of fact they were, old soldiers, and very skilled soldiers; the thought, not his own, entered the Drifter's head as he pondered who he was approaching. The man in black keeping watch was serious trouble; in all, this was not only a group of men even trained searchers would be frustrated finding, but a group only a fool would want to find. Dangerous, dangerous, was the word that kept repeating itself in the Drifter's brain. Not that he had anything to fear; many years had gone by since last he really feared anything.

He followed a thin line, almost invisible, along the bottom of the hill and through trees that you recognized only on the third or fourth look as standing arranged in a straight line. He would need to meet the assassin straight on; surprise him and he might plant a knife in your head first and check on who you are second. He made sure the assassin saw him coming a good way off, and indeed a short sword had materialized in the assassin's left hand and a throwing knife in his right by the time the Drifter got close enough to see his hands. Had he not known precisely where he was, he would never seen the assassin until long after it was too late, and it wasn't even night yet; twilight had just begun to fall over the forests of Gerson.

The Drifter raised his hands, palms toward the assassin so he could see he held no weapon. “I carry a sword that I am not holding,” he said in a voice just loud enough to be made out by a man with excellent hearing, which the assassin was. “Besides, I hold no weapon.”

“Be on your way,” said the assassin, standing tall and straight, a viper poised to strike at the slightest provocation.

“My way brings me to you,” said the Drifter. “I need to speak with Lords Wilson and Williams.”

“Lie down.”

“I will not.”

The assassin had his short sword pressed to the Drifter's throat faster than he could blink. “Get down,” he said in a more menacing tone.

“No,” the Drifter responded just as firmly. “And you will not search me.”

For a long moment the assassin remained frozen. Finally he pulled back his sword. “Wait right on this spot,” he said, and vanished.

The assassin didn't return; two minutes later, Wilson and Williams themselves appeared. They both were men of about a hundred years, with full heads of similarly dark brown hair, though Williams' was mostly gray where Wilson's was not; the Drifter knew at a glance which was which. Williams was a man of normal size with a hawk's sharp, penetrating eyes and an almost dangerous intelligence that he exuded just from the way he stood. His companion, Wilson, was the biggest man the Drifter had ever seen: Nearly four moyres tall, and not just tall, but breathtakingly built, his tight shirt doing little to hide arms like cedar logs. He had to be more than two moyres from shoulder to shoulder. He towered a full moyre over Williams and the Drifter, and where Williams' face was stern and creased with hard lines, the giant's was a less severe visage, with a look as though he was chuckling to himself over some private joke that came through even his present suspicious attitude.

Wilson looked him over. “What's a Highlander doing by himself in the Four Kingdoms?” he said in a voice that managed to seem loud even though Wilson was keeping it toned down.

“Are we three by our lonesome here?” the Drifter asked.

“Makes no difference to you, friend,” said the giant. “I've not laid eyes on you in my life that I can recall... Lord Williams?”

“We've never seen him before.” Williams' eyes were bolted to the Drifter's in an almost unnatural gaze.

“And you ask for us by name,” Wilson continued. “I was just getting ready to go to sleep, but I'm staying up to chat with you because I'm anticipating a very good story. Please, don't disappoint me. Now, you appear to know our names. What's yours?”

“I have no name,” he said, breaking his eyes away from Williams'. “Call me the Drifter. That's the name I go by.”

Williams frowned, and then he and Wilson looked at each other for a moment.

“That is a most unusual name to answer to,” said Williams. “How did you find this camp?”

“I don't know, my lord,” the Drifter said. “I just know things. I have ridden west from the Sledge Mountains for two weeks, and as I entered the Four Kingdoms, I became aware of the need to seek you out. It's difficult to explain and inevitably results in my being taken for mad, but things come to me, things like who and where you are. I came to show you this. You are the first men besides myself to see it.” He opened his waist pouch and removed a heavy round object a little smaller than a man's head, rather the size of a large melon.

Williams took it and held it a little above his head, peering intently at it. He frowned. “Wilson,” he said, “would you get your battle ax?”

Wilson stole a glance at the Drifter as he turned away. “Be right back.” He went off into the darkness and returned a minute later with the biggest battle ax the Drifter had ever seen, a convex blade the size of a man's entire torso mounted on the end of a two and a half moyre staff, with half-moyre spikes adorning both ends of the staff. He looked at the Drifter again and then addressed Williams. “This for him?”

Williams shook his head. He walked about ten paces away and set the round object on a tree stump. “Destroy it,” he said to Wilson. “If you can.”

Wilson gave Williams a bewildered glance and then complied. The Drifter smirked, knowing what was coming, as Wilson hoisted his battle ax far up in the air and then brought it down on the globe with awesome force. The moyre-broad blade struck the globe with a dull thud and Wilson jumped into the air as if shocked by lightning.

“Ouch!!” the giant screamed. He instantly dropped the ax and shook his hands violently. “What the devil?”

Williams picked up the object, looked it over again, and then held it out toward Wilson. “Do you know what this is?”

Wilson finally got the tingling out of his hands enough to take it, and held it up with his fingers, palm up, despite its considerable weight. “Yeah,” he said at length. “I want to throw up, but I know what this is. It's the bloody Navanor Icon.” The Icon bore not a scratch from a blow that could have split a boulder in two.

Williams blinked away his astonishment and looked carefully over the Drifter. “The Drifter,” he said. “You must tell me, Drifter: What brought you to us?”
“I told you once all I know,” said the Drifter. “The knowledge came to me, from whence I know not, of the place where this Navanor Icon has been lying these millennia; and once I recovered it, the demand came to me to ride southwest, toward Sale Souel. This I did, and as I entered into the Forests of Gerson I found myself drawn to this very spot as a moth to a flame. Your names came to me, Lord Williams and Lord Wilson, the last lords of Lubyland, camping in a secret spot, with a very dangerous assassin standing watch. Hokela, his name is; that just came to me now, and I did not know it a moment ago.”

“Stark raving lunatic,” Wilson said. “Do the moons do this to him?”

“As soon as I found you, I knew I was to give the Icon to you, and I know you will give it back to me,” the Drifter finished.

“Give it back?” Wilson exclaimed. “So you can do what with it?” Williams remained silent, staring intently at the Drifter.

“Destroy it,” said the Drifter, “in the only way it can be destroyed. I will take it into the heart of the Black Mountains and cast it into the Pit of Shada, and thus will the seal be broken.”

Wilson, properly astonished at what blasphemy he was hearing, opened his mouth to speak once, closed it, opened it again, closed it again, and looked at Williams. Williams, still beholding the Drifter, glanced at him for only a brief moment, and then addressed the Drifter. “We will keep the Icon for now. Remain outside the camp for a time. Enter the camp and find us when it comes to you that you should find us.”

“Of course,” said the Drifter. “It's done, just as you say.”

Williams cocked his head to indicate Wilson to follow and vanished into the rapidly darkening night.

The exiled lords sat on the ground near where their small campfire was supposed to have been and leaned back against a small hill. Williams lit a lamp and set it on the ground, and set the fabled Navanor Icon, unseen by men's eyes for over four thousand years, beside it. “What's on your mind, Williams?” the giant asked.

“Too much,” said Williams. His hard face, creased with several deep wrinkles and the left cheek crossed with a scar healed long ago, betrayed the one hundred and two winters he had seen. His face looked its age, but he had an eagle's eyes, and his body was as fit as a man half his age. Now he stared through the Icon in his contemplations. “What are you minded to do with this situation?”

“Ryth, I can't make up from down right now,” Wilson said. “Whatever arm or leg of Fate sent this Drifter to us with this relic, I think we'd better make sure to put it someplace where it won't be found for another four thousand years, at the least.” He paused. “Do you think it sinks?”

“I'm troubled,” said Williams, “because he spoke so openly of his intent to... shatter the Icon. You know where you've heard about the shattering of the Icon.”

“Ryth, yes,” said the giant. “Is he a fool? He could walk into any village in Arcoa and say that and have his head taken off where he stood.”

Williams sat silently for a while yet, and Wilson said no more. Finally Williams said, “Wilson, it must be shattered. The time has come.”

Wilson sat in shock with his mouth open like a fish. “You didn't just say that. My friend since birth did not just say that.”

Williams stared at the ground. “The Creator forgive me for what I do,” he said, “but you know as well as I what's been handed down among us. Darkness must fall; evil must conquer. Wilson, we see it all around us. Everywhere we go we find greater greed, lust, hate. Lubyland is lost to us. At this rate the Omega will sweep over half the continent before we draw our last breaths.” He drew an especially heavy breath just then. “The shards of the Icon shatter the gate. The blood of the Ruuben marks Lubyland's fate,” he quoted.

“You aim to break the Icon to cause Ruuben to appear,” Wilson said.

“Do you interpret our prophecy in some other way?” Williams asked quietly. “In the Age of Darkness Lubyland plunged Arcoa to its doom. In the Age of the Ruuben she will lift Arcoa on her shoulders to triumph over the Black Ones. Is this not the very belief upon which we have staked our lives?”

“It's the greatest gamble the world has ever seen,” rumbled Wilson. “You want to bet all Arcoa's fate on double Whites and throw the dice?”

“It is out of our hands,” said Williams. “We are the dice.”

Wilson shrugged. “All right. You've always been the conservative one; I've always been the guy to break something first and worry about the consequences later. You want to do this? You want to be known as Riscarl Williams, the man who released the Six Evils and the Black power on Arcoa? Then Ryth, let's do it. There's nothing to lose but our souls and the eternal torment of everyone in the world.”

A man unfamiliar with Lord Wilson would have assumed he was being sarcastic, but not so. Williams, taking in his friend's words, leaned in to whisper for the giant's ear. “If what I suspect is so,” he whispered very quietly, “and the Drifter is indeed the same Drifter of the legends, he will appear before us three seconds after I stop whispering just now. Count to three now.” Wilson ticked off three seconds in his mind, and the Drifter approached from Williams' left. Wilson looked at Williams.

“I swear on my grave, I never saw him,” Williams said in answer to the unspoken question.

“It's settled, then,” the Drifter said rather than asked.

“Camp with us tonight,” said Wilson as he stood with a silent nod to his companion. “In the morning we will set out for the Black Mountains.”

The Sixth Street Sandman, Chapter 7

Within a couple days word found its way to Pond that Allie had also asked Alan Vorstad about him. It was remarkable that Pond ever heard anything, given how rarely anyone spoke to him, but he was good at overhearing things. Gutshall indeed completed the card for the following Friday's Fright Night, and he took out a quarter-page ad in the Record & Courier to advertise the best main event he'd had in months. Allie spent some time in her office that Monday morning, looking intently at the ad with a mysterious smile on her lips. Tickets for the event were $30 each—even more than Gutshall had speculated—and the ad claimed that they would sell out fast. The main event was a heavyweight bout pitting a good Buffalo fighter, “The Worldbeater” Shane Yance, 12-1-1 with 7 knockouts thus far in his career, against “The Sixth Street Sandman” Olin Pond, presently 17-0 with 17 knockouts. Fight Night began at 7:00 PM with the first of the three undercard bouts, followed at approximately 9:00 PM by the main event.

Just looking at Pond's record was proof enough even to Allie's limited understanding that he was too good for that level of competition. Vorstad had mentioned that Pond's 17 KO record was tremendously impressive given that most of the club fights were set for only five rounds, sometimes only three.

Allie knew people were whispering about her by now—she didn't expect Val to stay totally silent, friend or no—but she didn't care. She'd had plenty of time to dedicate to the best-looking guys around, and had her fill. It was basic to Allie Caldwell's personality that she was fascinated by the unusual, and it didn't get much more unusual than Olin Pond. Taking an opportunity to hang around his desk for a few minutes on Wednesday morning, two days before the fight, she brought the topic up. “So you're a fighter?”

Pond, who had very quickly taken care of her pretext for being there, looked back up from his screen. “Yes,” he said in a disinterested tone.

“What makes you want to fight?” she asked, as pleasantly as ever. She wasn't going away easily.

“I enjoy beating people up,” said Pond, demonstrating all the natural charm that had made him so popular around the office. There was no irony in his voice; there never was.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Allie. “A lot of them deserve it.”

Pond glared at her quietly for a moment. “You have no idea.”

“You must be making a good bit of money from fighting, at thirty bucks a ticket,” Allie said, changing course before he cut off the conversation.

“I fight for free,” said Pond.

At this Allie was stunned. Maybe Val was right; maybe he really was crazy. “You fight for free?”

“I already told you. I do it for the pleasure of making people bleed.”

Allie paused for a moment or two, leaning lightly on his desk. “You sure do act mean,” she said.

Pond didn't say anything.”

“But you're not,” she said, and walked away.

Shane Yance would probably have disagreed with that. Pond worked the full day on Friday and left the office at his usual time, about a quarter to five. Allie only worked the morning and left around lunchtime, without taking time to talk with anybody on her way out.

Pond arrived at the gym at 8:15. On fight nights, he had no interest in the previous fights or in taking any more time than absolutely necessary to get himself prepared for his own fight. At times he was known to arrive late enough to delay his fight a few minutes while he got ready. He took the back way into the downstairs dressing rooms, also as per his normal routine; he could hear the noise from the shouting spectators as one of the fights was going on. The last undercard fight was a six round lightweight boud that had probably jus gotten started. At three minutes per round and a minute in between rounds, it would be over at about 8:45, and the main event would commence at 9:00 as advertised.

Already, Pond had noted as he walked past with his head down, a small crowd was gathering at the main door to the gym. The biggest room in the gym, which Gutshall had three years past had constructed particularly for the Fight Nights, could comfortably hold about a thousand people in its bleachers, and at 8:15 maybe six hundred were present; on the plurality of Fight Nights that didn't feature a Pond fight, attendance was typically around five hundred. But tonight, hundreds more were willing to pay the $30 only to see the headline fight, and Gutshall expected that by the time it began he would have 1,200 people crammed into the gym, the maximum the fire code would allow. Between ticket sales and the few concession stands, Gutshall expected to take in about $40,000. The undercard fighters would be paid about $1,000 each. Pond spoke the truth; he didn't take a dime for his fights, and Yance was being paid an astonishing, for even a good club fighter, total of $7,500 plus expenses to come in from Buffalo and fight Broxton's star, plus Pond's personal promise of another $7,500 if Yance could beat him. Word about Pond had spread abroad through club boxing circles, and it took this much money to bring in a good opponent these days. Pond and Yance were both arguably good enough to go pro, and Yance, at least, was expected to do so in the near future. This would be one of the best club fights to be found anywhere in the country.

Pond went downstairs and changed into his trunks and boxing shoes, and then his corner man, a sixty-something boxing aficionado named Charlie Houser, began taping up his hands. Normally Cane Halama, who had been working for Gutshall for five years now and was the best trainer at Sixth Street, would work the corner of Pond's opponents, but Yance was bringing his own trainer with him. After finishing with the tape, Charlie then laced up Pond's gloves, told him he'd be waiting just outside, and left the room. This too was normal. After Charlie left, Pond sat tense on his stool, his head down and his eyes closed, for ten minutes. All the while, his body began to quake with increasing intensity as his muscles tensed to maximum strain, and the expression on his face turned from serene to agitated to determined to enraged to hateful and finally to venomous and almost evil. Finally he jumped up from the bench as though someone had shot him, stormed over into the corner where a dummy was set up, and with a scream that could be heard even in the noisy gym, hit the dummy with a right hook so hard that it almost toppled over. With another scream he slammed his left fist into it. Then he walked to the door and stood there, breathing very hard, perspiration trickling down his face.

There, behind the door, Pond stood for five minutes. Finally, Charlie opened it and nodded to him. “It's time.”

The gym exploded with noise as Pond emerged from the dressing room and began to walk down the narrow aisle—only about four feet across—between Gutshall's bleachers that led to the ring. It was only a walk of perhaps forty yards to the ring, but the entire gym was filled with people, all shouting as Olin Pond slowly marched to the ring. Pond seemed distracted, like a man whose mind was focused on something other than what was presently happening around him. Methodically he walked to the ring, where Trent Gutshall stood holding a microphone and, just behind him in the far corner, as though sizing Pond up from this safe distance, Shane Yance.

Pond entered the ring with nary a flinch or a flutter of the eyelids. He stood with his back only an inch away from the corner, his body still tense as a spring and quivering, rage burning in his eyes. Everyone who worked with him was used to his being surly, but none of them had ever seen the violence that burned beneath his eyes just now. It was enough to make most any man run for his life.

Allie Caldwell, from her seat in the third row up the bleachers very near the ring, saw it. With a light frown she watched Pond enter the ring and stand in his corner. She had asked Val to go with her to the fight, but Val would have nothing to do with it. She didn't especially want Alan Vorstad to know she was there, so she did her best to avoid notice.

With the fighters now in the ring, Gutshall held up the microphone. The gym fell dead silent as soon as he began speaking. “Ladies and gentlemen”—the crowd had to be 95 percent male, Allie had noticed—“we thank you again for coming out to Fight Night this evening at the Sixth Street Gym. This is the main event of the evening. This heavyweight bout is set for eight rounds!” Eight rounds was the maximum at the gym, very rarely seen, but Pond had insisted on it, or there would be no fight. For a five round fight Yance probably would have come for much less money.

Gutshall waited for the cheers to die down and then proceeded. “Introducing first, to my left, wearing black trunks, from Buffalo, New York, six feet, three inches tall, weighing two hundred and nine pounds, with a record of twelve wins, one loss, one draw, with seven knockouts. Ladies and gentlemen, the Worldbeater, Shane Yance!” The crowed cheered lustily as Gutshall gestured to Yance's corner and Yance raised his arms in self-recognition. He was, Allie had to admit, amazingly put together. He pumped his fists a few times, working out the tics as he waited the last few seconds before the fight would begin.

The crowd fell silent again. Gutshall continued. “And to my right, wearing blue trunks and gloves, from right here in Broxton, Ohio, six feet tall, weighing two hundred twenty-one pounds. Undefeated in seventeen career fights, all seventeen wins by knockout!” Gutshall paused, as the noise from the crowd was now growing. “The Sixth Street Sandman, Olin Pond!”

As the crowd erupted with a crescendo of cheers, Pond simply slowered his head an inch or two and looked round himself from side to side. Dark clouds passed through his eyes. He made no acknowledgment of the crowd. Seeing him for the first time without his immaculate suit, Pond was impressive, with massive, broad shoulders, thick through and through, and arms like oak trunks.

Gutshall, who also held a referee's license and officiated his own fights, gestured to the fighters, and they came out of their corners with their corner men behind. They stopped one foot from one another, with Gutshall just beside and between them. As the trainers inserted the fighters' mouthpieces, Gutshall loudly ran down the rules. “All right, gentlemen. Olin, you know the rules; Shane, they're the same as you're used to. Absolutely no low blows. No head butts. Watch the kidney punches. I'll warn you if there's no much grabbing, and I mean it. These folks didn't come here to watch you grab each other. If there's a knockdown, go straight to your corner and stay there until I say to come out. You understand?”

Pond, who was staring into Yance's eyes with a murderous countenance, dipped his head very slightly in affirmation. Yance nodded twice, forcing himself to stay focused on Pond's half-crazy eyes.

“All right, gentlemen, let's have a good clean fight,” said Gutshall. “Touch gloves and come out boxing.” And may God have mercy on your soul, he thought silently as he stepped back; the sentiment was aimed in Yance's general direction.

Pond raised his gloves to waist level for Yance to touch. Yance hit them with some force. Pond crashed his gloves down very hard through Yance's. “You're dead,” he said in a low, steely voice, and punctuated it by pounding his own gloves together with a grimace. With that he turned to stalk back to his corner. Yance, stretching his neck and shoulders, returned to his, acting as though nothing were amiss.

Pond paused just a step from his corner. Something to his right had caught his eye. He turned his head and looked straight at Allie for a second. He recognized her instantly, sitting at the end of the third row of bleachers, wearing jeans and a modest sweatshirt. She stared straight back at him with a blank face. The dark fire burning in his eyes seemed only to grow hotter. Etching a face of disgust, he punched the turnbuckle, hard, and turned to face his opponent.

The bell rang. Yance came out of his corner with vitality, hopping around, moving toward Pond. Pond walked slowly out of his. He didn't hop, didn't bounce, just walked, with his hands down, flagrantly violating the first rule of boxing: Protect yourself at all times.

Yance moved in and popped Pond with a jab, which Pond slipped with an almost casual twitch of his neck, and followed it with a quick right hook to the body, which Pond absorbed and stepped away to Yance's left. He stalked around as Yance jumped in and out, going after Pond's exposed body, several times. Yance was fighting Pond the way most of Pond's opponents tried to fight him: By trying to weave in and out, land punches, and win rounds, while trying to avoid getting too close to the crazy man.

This went on for about a minute before Yance finally went right after Pond, pouncing on him with Pond's back to the corner and unleashing a flurry of punches. Pond took that for a few seconds and then popped Yance with a solid right—the first real punch he'd thrown at him, a good 1:15 into the fight—and slipped away. He pulled his gloves up as he backed away from Yance, as though sizing him up. His jaw tightened.

Yance, seeing this, decided his best choice was to go back to trying to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, jumping in and out and peppering Pond with jabs while Pond did little in response. The crowd began to complain loudly for Pond to do something, go get the guy, hit him, hit him! Just short of the two-minute mark in the round, as Yance was coming in for another quick jab-hook combo, Pond suddenly fired a right hook into Yance's ribs. Yance felt that; he grunted in pain and barely avoided the left hook Pond aimed at his chin with deadly quickness. Pond advanced at his enemy now while Yance backed and circled, trying to hold him off with jabs in the face. He landed two, and Pond walked right through them and unloaded two hard, fast left jabs of his own. Yance then hit him with a very hard hook, right in the cheek, and Pond stumbled backward. Yance surged forward and hit him with a right cross; Pond lurched back against the ropes.

“Now!” Charlie Houser shouted from the corner. “Give it to him, Sandman!”

As Yance moved in and fired an uppercut to try to knock him down, Pond gritted his teeth and screamed through them. He cut off Yance's uppercut and aimed a straight right at Yance's body, and when Yance moved left, Pond swung a left cross to make him back up and then with frightening quickness backed him into the corner.

What followed was described by all who saw it as murderous. Yance couldn't get out of the corner; he tried twice to grab Pond and force a break to escape, but Pond was too strong. He threw Yance off himself and back into the corner and resumed the assault. Yance couldn't move fast enough to evade the cascade of missiles streaking in. Once, twice, three times he was crushed in the midsection by hands that felt like cement; once, twice a blurry, blue brick exploded in his face. He couldn't see anything. Twenty seconds before he was comfortably winning the first round, and now he was struggling like a cornered animal to escape, to survive, to somehow survive, to make it to the impossibly distant bell that waited 25 seconds in the distance. Yance staggered out of the corner, but Pond moved in perfect step with him, like a dancing partner, and hit him under the chin with a huge left uppercut. Yance rocked back into the ropes and fell on his face near his own corner. The crowd shrieked and hollered.

Amazingly, Yance recovered quickly enough to beat Gutshall's count, getting to his feet on eight. Gutshall was minded to stop the fight, but Yance correctly identified the three fingers he was holding up and insisted, to Gutshall's satisfaction, that he could continue. Gutshall let him continue, partly because the bell to end the first round rang before Pond could get to him again.

Yance sank onto the stool his trainer quickly set up in his corner. Pond had hopped around like a madman in his own corner while Yance was down, shrieking at him to get up. Now, again, he screamed at the top of his voice as he stomped back into his corner. He looked for all the world like he had totally lost his mind. Insane rage smoldered in his eyes, and he sat on his bench glaring at Yance with a contorted face and waiting for the buzzer that indicated ten seconds to the start of the second round.

There are many who cannot understand the mind of a fighter, who simply can't comprehend what would drive a man to get up and go back into the ring even when only disaster surely awaited; there are many who could never understand why Shane Yance would answer the bell for the second round. Many of those packed into the Sixth Street Gym that night had seen Olin Pond fight before, and knew Yance would be marching to his execution if he got up off the stool. Between her many fleeting thoughts as she watched Pond demolish this big, powerful fighter, the thought skittered across Allie's mind that Yance really shouldn't go in for the second, but she knew that he would. Yance himself probably knew that he'd be best advised to call it a night, but no fighter ever quites so long as he's able to stand, and Shane Yance was a fighter.

At the sound of the buzzer, Yance rose from the stool as steadily as he could muster. At the ring of the bell, he advanced toward the center of the ring on slightly wobbly legs, with his gloves up. Pond, gritting his teeth through his mouthpiece as he so often did, roared out after him in a fury. Yance, fighting for his life now, went right after Pond and began hitting him with quick combinations, one-two, one-two, one-two, to the face and body. Pond grunted—whether in pain or merely irritation, who could tell?—and drilled Yance with a right cross that sent him staggering backwards, and then Pond launched a hurricane of punches, forcing Yance back into the ropes. It was only ten seconds until Pond landed a demolishing right hook square on Yance's jaw, and Yance fell to the met like a dropped sack of potatoes.

Gutshall counted Yance out as he lay motionless; only on seven did he even begin to regain consciousness and move. The fight was over. The crowd erupted. Pond, who still seemed agitated about something even with his opponent vanquished, went back to his corner with his head down and leaned back against the turnbuckes. His shoulders rose and fell visibly as he breathed.

Gutshall had the microphone again, while the ring doctor was tending to the bloody mass that hopefully, with the proper medical attention, would soon once again be Shane Yance. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Gutshall shouted into the microphone, “scoring the win by knockout at fifty-one seconds of the second round, the winner, the Sixth Street Sandman, Olin Pond!” The crowd had gotten what it paid for. So, for that matter, had Pond.

When the newsroom workers of the Record & Courier arrived at work first thing Monday morning, Pond was at his desk as usual, acting as though nothing at all unordinary had taken place since Friday. Nobody from the Record & Courier except Vorstad and Allie had attended the fight, and only Parrella knew anything about its result, having gotten the scoop from Vorstad. Allie, who knew Pond had seen her there and didn't see any point in pretending she wasn't, arrived at the office early and went to Pond's desk.

“Do you pound everyone into unconsciousness inside of three rounds?” she asked when he finally looked up.

“Yes,” said Pond. “All but two guys that made it into the fourth.”

“I heard you fought down there at Sixth Street,” she ventured, “and I've always been intersted in boxing, so I figured I'd go to watch.”

“That's nice.”

A moment of silence ensured. “Yeah, you're right,” Allie said. “That's a sad explanation.”

Pond remained silent.

“Really,” she said, “what makes you so mad in there?”

He looked her in the eyes and held his gaze there for three seconds, a very hard gaze, and then left off. He didn't answer. She walked off and went to work.

The Sixth Street Sandman, Chapter 6

Two days later Allie came up with a passable excuse to go to Alan Vorstad's office. She had well-developed skills at subtly guiding a conversation the direction she wanted it to go—her all-smiles demeanor only made it easier, especially with men—and she didn't have to do much by way of passing herself off as mildly interested in boxing to get him talking wistfully about his favorite pastime. Along the way, she mentioned in passing that she heard one of the sports writers fought down at the Sixth Street Gym on occasion, which naturally led Vorstad to say no, that was actually Olin Pond, and he was as yet undefeated and really becoming something of a local sensation. It was only a while after she left that it occurred to Vorstad to wonder why she was so interested in hearing about Pond.

As soon as she got off work that evening, Wednesday, Allie went to the Sixth Street Gym. A beautiful woman with a charming smile is able to get just about anywhere and talk to just about anyone, and it was only a matter of minutes until she was shown into the office of the gym’s owner, Trent Gutshall. Gutshall was a surprisingly young man for a business owner. He looked to be in his late twenties, certainly no older than thirty. (In fact, he was thirty-four at that point.) He was big, thick, solidly built, but he had something of a disarming baby face, and he wore glasses. He looked more like a fit accountant than a bodybuilder or gym rat.

“Good evening,” said Gutshall, extending his hand to her as she entered. “You’re lucky; you caught me working late. I’m Trent Gutshall. What can I do for you?”

“I’m Allie Caldwell,” Allie said with a smile, shaking his hand and then sitting down across from his desk, her eyes quickly passing over the various posters, trophies, and randomly strewn papers in the office, which was surprisingly small for an owner of what was reputably a successful business. “I might not look it, but I happen to be fond of boxing. I’m from a ways out of town, but someone told me you have a little boxing league here?”

“Not a league,” said Gutshall. “But we train fighters and sponsor matches on a regular basis. It’s our calling card, and I daresay we’re the best boxing gym for quite some radius around here.” Allie knew all of that, but a little feigned ignorance went a long way.

“When do the fights usually happen?” Allie asked, although she already knew the answer to that too.

“Every other Friday, most of the time, we have Fight Night,” said Gutshall. “Typically admission is ten bucks, and there are between three and five fights on the card, from various weight classes. We also have a few small refreshment stands. We have a couple of bigger-ticket fighters, really good fighters, and when they fight admission can be a little bit more, twenty or twenty-five depending on the fight. We put ads in the local paper advertising our cards a week in advance.” He was giving a little sales pitch at this point. Something about this conversation seemed odd to him; something was strange about a knockout of a young woman coming to his very modest gym and asking about the Fight Nights.

“Speaking of which, is this the gym where a guy named Olin Pond fights?” said Allie, finally getting to her point.

“Yeah,” said Gutshall. He paused and frowned. “You a reporter?”

Allie smiled. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, at risk of sounding rude when I don’t mean to be,” said Gutshall, “I got a feeling, just call it a gut feeling, you’re here working for somebody. Is there anything you want? A tour, free tickets?”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Gutshall,” said Allie, “I can only assure you I’m not here on behalf of anyone but myself. I shouldn’t take much more of your time, but do you know when Pond is fighting next?”

Gutshall pushed his glasses up his nose, as he often did when perplexed. “He hasn’t fought much lately,” he said. “But I’m about seventy percent sure he’s going to fight next Friday. I have to finish the arrangements, but I think I have somebody to fight him.”

“Thank you very much for your help,” said Allie with another one of her cheerful smiles. “Do you put ads in the Record & Courier?”

“Yeah, I do,” said Gutshall. “If you get that paper, look for an ad on Monday or Tuesday about it. I publish the cards in the ads.”

Allie thanked Gutshall again and drove home, humming happily to herself.

What Allie had heard from Val and Alan Vorstad was very close to the truth as well as anyone knew it. Olin Pond’s story was short and utterly devoid of any information of substance. His past was completely unknown to everyone, and no one knew whether he had any relatives. He was never seen in the company of any particular friend, and in reference to the question Val never directly answered for Allie, no one ever saw him on a date with anyone, not even once. As is usually the case when someone who is unpopular is not married or frequently dating, speculation about his sexual orientation fluttered around from ear to ear.

Pond had appeared, as though out of the ether, in Broxton in 2008, at twenty-six years of age, and took over as John Parrella's personal secretary not long after. Everyone simply arrived at work one Monday morning to see a new desk in place and completely set up, directly in front of Parrella’s office, and Olin Pond sitting there as though he were born there.

Olin Pond also appeared at the Sixth Street Gym at the same time he arrived at the Record & Courier. Not a soul on earth knew this, but the reason Pond moved to Broxton was because he had known Trent Gutshall since childhood, and Gutshall had agreed to rent him a small room in the gym’s basement. Pond went to the gym almost nightly – four or five times a week on the average, it was estimated – dressed himself in shorts, an old T-shirt, and boxing gloves, and went downstairs to his little room. He had lined the walls with thick wrestling mats, propped up a dummy in the corner, and hanged three punching bags from the low ceiling. A while later he added to the punching bags five or six medicine balls, also hanged from the ceiling, a few high, a few low. Down there, in the dark, his muffled shouts, grunts, and furious screams could be heard in the adjacent rooms despite the padding in the room as he hit the bags, the dummy, the walls, furiously, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for three hours. Those few who heard it and the fewer who had seen it called it the most intense workouts they’d ever seen. And every morning, Pond returned to his desk, where every day he was utterly calm and cold as he went about his business. John Parrella told his few private friends Pond was the best secretary he’d ever heard of.

When Pond showed up at the Sixth Street Gym the next day after work, Gutshall was waiting for him at the dressing room, as he sometimes did. “Hey Olin,” he said at Pond passed by with a storm quietly raging in his eyes. “Talk to you a sec before you try to knock down my building?”

“Go for it,” said Pond quietly.

Gutshall talked while Pond changed from his business suit into his shorts and T-shirt. “A very odd thing happened yesterday. Someone came in here asking about when you fight.”

Pond stopped and turned to Gutshall. “A fighter?”

Gutshall shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. I suspect it was an out-of-town reporter. I think word about you is getting around.”

“You ‘suspect’?” Pond growled.

“Well, the thing is,” Gutshall said, “This was a girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and she was smoking hot. She might have been one of the five best-looking women I’ve ever personally laid eyes on. The only thing about her was…”

Pond had already ceased what he was doing and sat straight up on the bench, his body tensing. “Let me guess,” he interrupted. Gutshall stopped. “The only thing about her was, she was missing her left hand.”

Gutshall was flabbergasted. “How in the world did you know that?”

Pond sat still and rigid as a rock. “Call me psychic,” he said.

“Am I to believe you know this girl?”

Pond didn’t say anything for a moment or two, and all that could be heard was the sound of his thick breathing. “Allie Caldwell. She started working at the paper about a month ago.”

“So she is a reporter, then.”

“She wasn’t here for a story,” said Pond, suddenly rising.

“So what was she here for?”

Pond didn’t answer. He rose, leaving Gutshall sitting on the bench, and walked out of the room with a heavy step. A few seconds later, everyone downstairs could hear – some said they could feel – the force as he whaled on the walls and dummies in his closet-room.

The Sixth Street Sandman, Chapter 5

Allie settled straight into her job. When she arrived the following morning, several binders full of orientation information were stacked neatly on her desk along with a memo detailing her salary, hours requirement and job description. She was to report to Pat Walden, the Life editor, at 11 o'clock, leaving her two hours to go thoroughly—that was the word in Walden's memo—through the orientation materials.

Pat Walden wasn't an easy woman to get along with; she was an obsessive perfectionist. She was pleasant enough in conversation and was receptive to Allie as her new grunt worker—that's what any writer was to her editor in this business—but Allie quickly learned that to have to rewrite your piece seven, eight times over to suit what Walden had in mind was routine. Parrella was serious about his warning: The work was relentlessly dull and the hours were long. Allie grooved into a routine of leaving her home in Columbus at 6:30 in the morning, sometimes sooner, arriving at the office at around 8:00 if she was going there that day; as often as not she was running around Broxton doing minor interviews, often for another, more senior writer, or checking facts for stories or somesuch. She would arrive home at 7:30, 8:00 many evenings. It was only five weeks before she moved into a small apartment in Broxton, four blocks from the Record & Courier building. She would live there by herself, and it was a tearful farewell with Clara. The two had roomed together for more than two years, dating back into college, and Allie missed having a roommate. But this was her job, and she moved right into Broxton because she intended to stay for a long while, and because she wanted to announce to everyone around her that she was there to stay.

Allie had no difficulty settling into the office culture. She was a very big hit with her male colleagues, not quite so much with some of the females. Pat Walden dumped all the work on Allie she could; her style was to test the limits of a new worker right off the bat. Allie was, in Walden's words, “a bulldog”. She was all smiles for everyone that came across her path, no matter how badly her day might be spinning out of control. When she was overloaded with simply too much work—and Walden saw to it that she was—she did what she judged most important, explained her reasoning when challenged by her boss or colleagues, kept on smiling, and never yielded an inch. She was good at her job, and she knew it, and though she never spoke an unkind word to anybody about anybody, she knew what she was worth and backed down from no one.

Allie quickly made one close friend, Valerie Nierholt, a single 31-year-old mother of one working anonymously in graphics. She went out for drinks with various groups of coworkers on several occasions in those first few weeks and soon enough became an accepted fixture around the office, though everyone she went out with socially noticed she didn't drink; she pleasantly explained she simply didn't care for alcohol, though she didn't mind being around it. She got by with it.

It didn't take long to figure out that the taciturn and often surly Olin Pond was the resident office enigma. No one liked him, but he didn't mind. His manner of speaking—to everyone—was rough and sometimes downright rude, and he carried himself squarely and with his head up. He was not a man to be trifled with, and he had demonstrated so in several incidents that had, during the five-plus years he had been with the paper, passed into office legend.

Those who aggravated him were treated to a display of venomous rudeness that was spectacular in its very subdued nature, in the calm and detached attitude with which he delivered it. There was the time a reporter stood at Pond's desk and shouted at him to hurry with a particular report; Olin tiled his monitor so the gentleman could see it, allowed him to watch as he deleted the report in question from his schedule for that day and rescheduled it for the following day. The furious reporter demanded to see Parrella; Olin called him immediately, and the editor-in-chief told the reporter to learn from this helpful example of why it didn't pay to jump on the secretary's case. That got around the office in a hurry.

Another time, an overworked reporter, who left the paper immediately afterward, exploded in a violent, shouting, semicoherent tirade at Pond when Pond told him his request to Parrella would be handled precisely whenever he got around to it. The poor man ranted and raved for ten solid minutes while Pond continued with his daily duties as though he had no idea anything out of the ordinary was happening. Finally the reporter leaned over the counter and grabbed hold of Olin's keyboard, tore it away from the computer and hurled it across the newsroom. Olin sat back and kicked his feet up on his desk for another five minutes before the reporter stormed off, and then silently retrieved his keyboard. “I could hear it all from my office,” Parrella recalled, “but I learned quickly not to worry; Olin had everything under control. He always did.” There were some rumors that Pond had, once in a great while, been caught being kind to someone, but most everyone agreed he was best left at a safe distance, like fifty yards minimum.

No one knew where he'd come from; that was another subject of much water cooler speculation. He'd shown up not quite five and a half years ago, the veteran workers said, but no one had any idea from where. Those who asked him were told he was from a small town in Michigan, but he refused to identify which town, and rumors developed that he was a reformed criminal or in the witness protection program or such, rumors he found amusing and never took any steps to refute. More than one intrepid researcher had attempted to track him down using the powers of the internet, and had come up empty. Pond was almost never seen in any extra-office social setting, although he did attend company functions and apparently wasn't as unpleasant as expected to have at your table. He simply sat silent and pensive, and no one tried to strike up much conversation with him.

As she’d been everywhere she’d gone in her life, Allie was a tremendous hit among her single male colleagues, to the point that she figured that a fourth, maybe a third of the time she was in her cubicle, some guy was there chatting with her. She didn’t mind the attention and made herself a conversational pleasure. People finally, after a week or two, began to ask what happened to her hand, and she told them she’d lost it in a car accident when she was a child. Normally someone with such an obvious deformity was intimidating to the opposite sex, but Allie was so attractive it didn’t matter. Valerie reported that one man had inquired about Allie’s availability two days after she started, and it took only five before she was asked out by a fresh-out-of-college guy who worked in the print shop. She was impressed by the invitation – normally she would be out of the league of a guy working in printing – but wasn’t interested, and politely said so.

The subject came up in a conversation with Val a few weeks after Allie was hired. Two particular men were persistently hanging around, who didn’t like each other much and were now competing for her attention. One was Jeff Baker, one of the paper’s two primary sports columnists. Twenty-eight and having been a sports columnist since high school, he was a prototypically charming young man possessed of good looks, a 6’3” frame, and a muscular physique he painstakingly maintained. He was also possessed of all the smug cockiness that went with a guy who was used to having whatever, and whoever, he wanted, so Allie’s polite declines of his advances didn’t deter him.

The other guy involved was someone who had just been hired three months before as a staff local news reporter, Shawn Schwartz. He was bright and quick of wit, but, being from New Jersey, he was loud and boisterous, and still fond of the party-every-weekend lifestyle he had enjoyed so much in college. In crowds he was so, but he could be quite polite and charming in individual conversation, whether by nature or good acting skills, who knows.

“So how long did Jeff stay in your cubicle before he let you go home today?” Val asked Allie while they were jogging on a treadmill at the Summit Athletic Club.

“I cut him off after about ten minutes,” Allie said. “He was sure trying hard to be charming.”

“He’s kind of an airhead, but he’s cute,” said Val. “I’d at least go out with him once or twice, see if anything’s there.”

“I’m only a year removed from college, Val,” said Allie. “Guys like him are a dime a dozen. Not all guys just want to get in your pants, but his type gives the whole gender a bad name.”

Val laughed loudly at that. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s all of them, or at least almost all of them.”

Allie grinned. “Well, okay, but that’s not the only thing some of them care about.”

Val puffed for a moment as the treadmill’s speed increased a little. “But look at you, Allie!” she said at length. “You can have any guy in the world you could possibly want. What are you waiting around looking for?”

“That one guy in the world who’s interested in me for some reason other than my looks,” Allie said.

She paused.

“Is Olin Pond seeing anybody?”

Val was so stunned she stopped cold and fell off the back of the treadmill, just barely catching herself before she sprawled on the floor. She stood behind the treadmill and gaped at Allie as though she was completely insane. Who would even joke about that? There was an informal pool among some of the newsroom guys concerning when Olin Pond would finally be arrested for murdering two drifters somewhere in Kentucky eight years ago.

“What did you just say?”

Allie smiled bemusingly and stepped gracefully off her treadmill. “I asked if Olin Pond is seeing anybody,” she said as she dabbed her forehead with her towel and began walking toward the changing room.

Val laughed incredulously. “Olin Pond? You have to be kidding, Allie!” She was assuming Allie would now tell her she was kidding. Allie just smiled.

“Allie!” Val exclaimed. “I’ve been working for the paper for three years and I’ve seen that man smile all of never. He’s not even very cute!”

“I think he’s interesting…” said Allie with a twinkling eye. “What do you know about him?”

Val was walking out of the gym and heading downstairs to the changing room as Allie followed. “No one knows much of anything about him,” Val said. “He just showed up about five or six years ago, out of nowhere, and Mr. Parrella hired him as his personal secretary. Mr. Parrella says he doesn’t know anything about where he came from.”

“Yeah, that's the general consensus,” said Allie. “Mr. Parrella said all he knew about Olin was he was, quote, a damn good secretary.”

“Maybe for Mr. Parrella, but having to deal with him is like walking a bed of hot coals.”

“Oh come on,” said Allie. “He’s not that bad. He’s just aloof, that’s all. What’s so wrong with that?”

“You can’t have a conversation with him,” retorted Val. “At all. That’s what’s wrong.”

“Now, that just can’t be true,” said Allie, even though the several attempts she had already made at conversation had flatly failed. “There’s some way to get him talking. No one’s that cold. So you don’t know anything about him?”

“Well, he fights,” said Val.

“Fights?” Allie said.

“Boxing. The guys in Sports say he fights over at the Sixth Street Gym. You know that place?”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Allie in a somewhat detached voice, as though her mind was elsewhere. “I drove by it a couple of times. It looked kind of tacky.”

“Well, they have some pro boxing. They do fights every other Friday, I think, and it costs like ten or fifteen bucks to watch. I think Alan usually covers the fights.”

“Alan?” said Allie. “You mean Alan Vorstad?”

“Yeah.”

“Why does he cover local club boxing?” Alan Vorstad was the assistant sports editor, and had been with the Record & Courier for fifteen years. It seemed strange someone of his standing would do such a menial task.

“I think because he’s a big boxing fan. Oh! What a horrible sport!” Val shuddered. Who would pay actual money to watch two men try to kill each other with their bare bands? Okay, gloved hands. Not Val Nierholt.

“I used to watch it in school, actually,” said Allie. “Boxers are the best athletes in the world, they say. So Olin’s a boxer?”

“I guess,” said Val, who was now growing genuinely uncomfortable with her friend's bizarre fascinations. “I don’t know anything about it, really, that’s just what the Sports guys have said. It’s fitting for a mean, sulky guy like him.”

“I think there’s something underneath that meanness,” said Allie. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad or ugly, but I’m going to find out what it is.”

“Girl,” said Val, “If you can even so much as get half a smile out of him, I’ll be convinced you’re the most irresistibly charming female walking the planet.” She paused. “Seriously, what about Randy Topper?”