1948.

When other boys issued the schoolyard challenge, “My dad could beat up your dad,” Eddie had to bite his tongue. No one else could know what he, the family mechanic Chubby Chumley, and their housekeeper Miss Glenda knew — that his father, William Finn, was the Crimson Wraith.

They could keep their comic books with Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy, or Blackhawk. None of those were real, not like the Crimson Wraith. He had saved Eddie from the Blue Banshee and now tucked him into bed each night before going out to fight crime.

Eddie often asked, “Who are you fighting tonight, Father?” 

Usually, he would just be keeping watch over Titan City streets to thwart the regular kinds of criminals — robbers, burglars, and other hoodlums. But now and then, Will might share a special, strange, and scary story about someone like the Shadowmaster, overlord of the Little Tokyo underworld, or Mr. Echo, who made a game of his crimes by announcing them ahead of time in coded radio messages.

Sometimes his father would allow Eddie to join him in the Crypt, the secret underground lair of the Crimson Wraith. It reminded Eddie of the sort of cave where a pirate might hide his treasure, and when he told his father that, William smiled. “That is actually very close to why your great-great-grandfather built it.” 

At the center of the Crypt sat an ornate wooden desk with a leather-bound ledger his father kept written accounts of his adventures — preserving names, dates, and locations, details that might become critical clues in future. The costume of the Crimson Wraith stood in one corner, and the rack beside it held his various tools and weapons which had been crafted by Chubby at a nearby workbench. There was even a small laboratory just off the main room for performing chemical analysis on crime scene evidence. It also served as a darkroom for developing photographs.

When they emerged from the Crypt after Eddie’s first visit, Miss Glenda said, “Now, Mister Finn, surely Master Eddie is too young for such things.”

But his father brushed her concerns aside. “A son should know his father’s business. It may just be his someday.”

That hint of a future where Eddie would also go out in the dark to defend the defenseless made his young heart soar. 

He drew pictures in crayon of the two of them together, his father in his skull mask and red cloak, himself in more conventional comic book hero attire — yellow tunic and tights, a purple cape and domino mask over his eyes, the kind of mask he saw worn by the Lone Ranger and Zorro. 

“I’m the Wily Wisp,” he told his father, pointing to his drawing.

“The Wily Wisp?”

“Yeah, like in this.” Eddie pulled out a picture book of ghost stories and folklore. “It’s about a man. His name was Will.” 

“Just like me.”

“Just like you! Except when he died, he was too wicked to go to Heaven and too nice to go to Hell. ”

“So, what happened to him?”

“He got trapped in between. And he became a ghost who walks the world with a lantern to light his way. If you are good, his lantern will lead you from the dark and into safety.”

“And if you are not good?”

Eddie shook his little head with that gravity that children sometimes have when declaring just how the world is and must always be.

“I see. And as the Wisp, you’d be like this too? Good to the good and bad to the bad?”

“I would! And while you moved through the shadows, I would wave around a light to distract the bad guys until you got up close to sock ‘em!”

His father smiled, “Very smart. That sounds like a very good plan indeed.”

When Eddie asked how soon he could go out fighting crime, his father always turned the conversation to training. Every day, they spent some period of time running the grounds, swimming laps, or lifting weights. They would practice each of the several hand-to-hand fighting styles his father had mastered, throwing each other laughing to the mats laid out on the floor of the Finn Manor gymnasium. 

Eddie knew he needed to be strong to fight crime. “But your greatest strength,” his father would ask, over and over again, “is what?”

“My mind,” answered Eddie.

“Correct.”

And so to train his mind, Eddie read. He liked adventure stories best and poured through tales like Robin Hood and Ivanhoe to learn what it meant to be a hero. From Sherlock Holmes and the novels of Agatha Christie — whose newest mystery he always got on the day of its release — Eddie began to learn deductive reasoning.

Those fictional detectives also showed him there was no limit to all the other things he needed to know — chemistry, physics, geography, zoology, botany, languages, and the practices of foreign cultures could all prove vital in solving crime.

After their work-outs, Eddie would recover by working his way through multi-volume encyclopedias. It seemed too much for any one person to know, and he sometimes despaired over ever being allowed to don his own mask and fight alongside his father.

When it came time for him to enter Ellsworth Academy, Eddie proved well-prepared to undertake the scholastic challenges. But what surprised him was how much he enjoyed being away from home. It felt exciting to be, night and day, in the company of his peers. They had grown into something beyond schoolyard games, and played instead at being men — independent, capable, and daring. 

On the school wrestling team, Eddie found his physical prowess prized. However, although he enjoyed winning medals at competitions, what Eddie loved most was all the locker room laughter before and after. 

He discovered, as well, an interest in poetry, although he could imagine no relation between it and the crime-fighting future for which he longed. When his English instructor commented that poetry has a way of expressing those quiet longings a man keeps secret, sometimes even from himself, that resonated with Eddie. After all, the son of the Crimson Wraith had many secrets to keep. 

He felt things stir within him as he read John Donne, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelly; but when he discovered Walt Whitman, it was as if Eddie read his own heart poured out on the page. So many times after that, as he stepped onto the wrestling mat, he would hear in his head, “I sing the body electric…” and feel that electricity shiver through his limbs. Smiling as he would take or be taken by his opponent, Whitman’s words would continue: 

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, 

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, 

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

He felt the same joy he imagined for the Wily Wisp, grinning at every villain whose swings he would dance around until finally landing his own.

Then came Eddie’s high school graduation. At age sixteen, he had finished his education, and there was to be a big to-do for all the recent graduates from both Ellsworth Academy and the Fletcher School for Girls. It was to be held off-campus at the Dionysian — the swankiest hotel in Titan City, where movie stars and foreign dignitaries stayed. All of the young elite would be there, celebrating freedom from the drudgery of academia and coming into their wealth now they were of age.

Eddie would soon have access to Finn Industry stock and the bank accounts where his dividends had been accumulating. None of these really mattered to him, though. The only inheritance Eddie cared about was the mask and cloak that continued to elude him.

Some families dictated that the graduates would not come into their wealth until their marriage, particularly among the Fletcher girls. The anticipation of potential engagements added extra intensity to their party at the Dionysian. How soon would there be wedding bells ringing? And for whom? That question appeared again and again in the eyes of boys looking at girls and girls looking at boys. 

What relief Eddie felt that his own inheritance held no such requirements. None of the girls held much interest for him. Marriage did not fit into Eddie’s fantasies of his future.

So, he sat out one song after another that night, declining more than a few invitations to dance. But it was a fine evening regardless. His friends looked so handsome in their tuxedos, each one a young Cary Grant or Clark Gable, and he enjoyed many a laugh with them between their dances.

Sometime after midnight, the party began to calm. Half of the graduates had departed for home or found some cozy corner for canoodling, and Eddie noticed the glasses of the comrades at his table needed replenishing. However, all the bottles around them had been emptied and none replaced. It seemed the wait staff had fallen off their game. 

Eddie assured those around him, “Never fear, chaps. I shall remedy this grave circumstance forthwith,” and he rose to find the hotel kitchen.

The service door led to an unadorned hallway, where Eddie wandered past a cart of cleaning supplies, stacks of chairs, and bins full of linens, until he came to a swinging door by a sign that read, “Kitchen.” 

Pushing it open, he called out, cordially, “Pardon me, gentlemen It seems our table has run tragically dry…”

Then he saw three waiters wearing costume-party goat masks, and in their hands — not bottles, not spatulas, not even cooking knives — but pistols. They pointed these toward a small cluster of Eddie’s classmates who had their wrists bound with butcher’s twine and pillowcases over their heads.

The waiters looked to Eddie, then to each other, and then back at Eddie, turning their guns his way. Eddie put up his hands. 

One of them wordlessly waved him closer. Another lowered his gun to pick up the roll of twine. Eddie quietly consented to be bound while fighting a grin as Whitman’s words once more came to mind.

None of the goat waiters spoke until they had Eddie gagged, hooded, and bound, and then it seemed they would never stop. 

The first voice he heard sounded high and shrill, almost child-like. Eddie imagined that he must be the Baby Goat. “I told you we oughta block the door!” 

The second voice, who Eddie decided was the Biggest Goat, had a gravelly, grating quality and sounded as if he was speaking out of the side of his mouth. “And raise suspicions? Don’t be ridiculous.” 

The third voice, the Middle Goat, came pinched and nasal. “Besides, now we got another millionaire brat to ransom off to his parents.”

“I don’t like it,” said the Baby Goat. “What if this fancypants here told his friends he’d be right back?”

“Good thing no one cares what you like,” said the Biggest Goat. “I’m the brains around here, and don’t you forget it!”

“You ain’t the only one with brains!”

“If you got a problem with how I’m running this job, you see the door right there,” said the Biggest Goat. Eddie heard a pistol cock. “Only you’ll be leaving a few quarts lighter.”

“All right!” The Baby Goat whined. “I was just saying…”

The Middle Goat cut him off, “How about you stop saying?”

The Biggest Goat asked. “You got the ransom note?” 

“Sure do!” The Middle Goat read it out loud. “If ever you want to see your sons alive, bring a hundred thousand each to Pier 38 at midnight. No funny business. Signed, the Three Billy Goats Gang.”

“That’ll put the fear into ‘em!” said the Biggest Goat.

There was the squeak of laundry cart wheels. “Time for you filthy rich kids to come clean,” the Baby Goat chirped. Then Eddie heard one muffled grunt after another until he felt himself being shoved into the laundry cart with the other Ellsworth Academy boys. 

The Middle Goat said, “Better keep yourself tucked in, if you know what’s good for ya.” Blankets were thrown over them, and they were pushed out of the kitchen, down a hallway.

After a minute, he heard the Biggest Goat whisper, “Masks off, boys. We’ve got company.” He growled softly to their captives, “Not one peep or we’ll toss you snots into the Brennert like a sack of kittens.”

“Aw, that’s sad,” said the Baby Goat. “Little baby kittens being tossed into the river.”

The Middle Goat snapped, “Someone should have tossed you in the river.”

“Why I oughta…”

The Biggest Goat cut them off. “Can it, you two!” Then he suddenly spoke with an affectation of refined deference to someone else in the hallway. “Evening to you, good sir. And a pleasant one it is, I hope?”

There came a reply from one of the stuffy maitre d’ types who would bring Eddie’s father the restaurant’s finest bottle for their meal. “What on earth are you doing with that cart? The hotel laundry is the other way!”

“Oh, begging your pardon. I do apologize for having gotten ourselves lost. We’re new, you see.”

“That’s no excuse! Turn that thing around this instant.”

“It would be my greatest joy. Only there is just one problem.”

“And what is that?”

“I don’t quite care for your tone of voice.” 

A thud. A grunt. The sound of a body falling to the floor.

“Enjoy your nap, you sap,” said the Middle Goat.

The Baby Goat laughed. “A sap nap!”

“Let’s get going,” said the Biggest Goat, “He should wake up just in time to bring our ransom note to the police. Then everyone will know the Three Billy Goats Gang ain’t nothin’ to laugh at.”