Ghost Owl

Hudson City

December 24th, 1998

The old man lay sprawled out on the white blanket like a morbid snow angel. It was, in some obscure way, almost serene. Darkly festive, even - maybe it was all that scarlet. And the guy was old - on that rugged, rawboned face, with its harsh planes and tapestry of wrinkles, you could read all the years, the decades, of hard living in a split second. But there was a quiet strength there too, a sense of dignity that not even death and a gaping bullet wound could steal away. Not an ordinary man, not by any means. But that didn't stop him dying a death that was all too ordinary - season's greetings, Hudson City style.

But he wasn't alone. A kid in a hoodie, couldn't have been any older than sixteen, was huddled up against a nearby wall, shivering, not from the cold - he didn't even feel the cold, not now - but from the shock and horror of what he'd just seen. From the anger of allowing it to happen. It was a Christmas he'd never forget. Chances are, you know how it goes: a good man dies, a bad man lives, a newborn vigilante, angry, screaming, is baptised in blood. Old tale, played out a thousand times over. But it has punch. It resonates. And you have to make allowances for the classics.

Nevertheless, this time around it seems somebody got bored with the same old script, demanded a last-minute twist thrown in. So a sharp-eyed observer - not that there any other witnesses that night, sharp-eyed or otherwise - would have noticed the kid was clutching something, staring down at it with the sort of wide eyed disbelief typically reserved for first-time alien encounters. It was a .45 revolver, and it had five bullets chambered. A spent shell casing, still warm, lay in the snow not three feet away. No prizes for guessing where the rest would be found.

The victim was later identified as Reverend Nathan Sutherland. But the kid would discover he'd been better known by another name: Ghost Owl.

History

Rare newspaper photograph of Ghost Owl c. 1962. A simpler costume for a simpler era.

NIGHT-SHIFT NEMESIS NABS NARCELLI - headline of Hudson City Times, dated April 23rd, 1962.

An anonymous vigilante made his big debut on the Hudson crimefighting scene in the spring of 1962 - and he knew how to make an entrance. The police who later raided the dockside warehouse found a metric tonne of cocaine, a small army of thugs with an entire medical encyclopedia's worth of injuries evenly distributed amongst them - inclduing one Marco Narcelli, notorious underboss of the Danovicci crime family. Narcelli had suffered the additional humiliation of being covered in feathers and hung upside down from the rafters. During an interview, he described his assailant as 'some psycho in an owl costume'. For the next few months, the papers, local news networks and street gossip were all abuzz with speculation, rumours and alleged sightings of the mysterious new crimefighter.

"...man reportedly dressed as an owl foiled a bank robbery..."

"...no hostages were harmed..."

"...the would-be victim Fred Highfield, 46, described his rescuer as 'a ghost'..."

"...We don't care what 'good' he thinks he's doing. This Owlman, he gets caught breaking the law and he goes down..."

"...don't he realise Halloween ain't for another four months..."

"...HCPD commissioner issued a warrant for the masked vigilante's arrest..."

"...just another crook with an entitlement complex..."

"...a real hero..."

"...another sighting of Hudson's very own Ghost Owl..."

"...Ghost Owl..."

Ghost Owl. It was the papers that saddled him with the name. Maybe it wasn't what he'd have chosen for himself but he never raised any objections. Not to the name or anything else - the see-sawing opinions of the press, the arrest warrants, the public denouncements and whispered praise; none of it mattered. He just continued his silent war and left everyone to draw their own conclusions.