Crossover of the Week

Winter 1940; Summer 2011

A PLAGUE ON THE LAND

Moran’s Pub, owned by Seamus Moran, is frequented by vigilantes. Seamus pours the owner of a fire opal another large Bushmill’s, and thinks of his cousin Paddy and his bar uptown. Seamus thinks most of the vigilantes are killers, with two exceptions: “the green one was a man of peace, the pink one killed when she had to but mostly avoided it.” Seamus, a leprechaun, asks the Nightmare to deal with trouble in his homeland, Eire, the spiritual plane of Ireland. In the 21st century, Detective Sergeant Bianca Jones of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide division talks to Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, at Paddy’s. Bianca thinks the Nightmare is “a character, like the Spider or the Pink Reaper,” but Nemesis says he was real, and persuades Bianca to go back into the past to help the hero in Eire.

Short story by John L. French in Apocalypse 13, Diane Raetz, ed., Padwolf Publishing, 2012. The vigilante with the fire opal is the shadowy hero of the pulps. Paddy Moran and Nemesis are from Patrick Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series. “The green one” is the Green Lama, while “the pink one” is the Pink Reaper, another character from the Murphy’s Lore series. The Nightmare is a pulp-era vigilante created by French. The Nightmare became romantically involved with Nemesis in Thomas and French’s book From the Shadows. Bianca Jones appears in her own series of stories by French. Bianca is wrong about the Nightmare and the Pink Reaper being fictional, and she is also wrong about the Spider’s nonexistence.