The Imp Of The Perverse - Part The First

Billy Bowford was a man with a secret. By day, he was a mild-mannered accountant with the firm of Freely, Hardiman and Wilson, immersed in a world of budgets, actuals and forecasts. He was an unremarkable bespectacled man, average almost to the point of being functionally invisible. His work was good (if unexceptional), he was liked by his co-workers (but certainly not loved; more “acquaintance” than “friend”), he was punctual and he made as little impact as was humanly possible to make upon the world.

Come the night and a whole other story would unfold. When darkness fell, the trappings of Billy Bowford were cast off. As twilight made its way across Capitalville, that mild-mannered accountant was nowhere to be found. In his place stood the imposing and impressive figure of Major Crisis, superhero! No mere mortal he but a virtual god. Nigh-invulnerable! The power of flight! Dominance over the weak of will! An unstoppable force for good against the dastardly minions of evil.

No secret was ever perfect, of course, and there were a select few who knew the truth about Billy Bowford and Major Crisis. For one thing, his fiancee Lily Langden was in on the act. Sure, in the early days, she’d been pretty clueless. He’d done whatever it took to pull the wool over her eyes - using his mind powers to convince her she was imagining things, having the Malleable Man shapeshift to pose as Major Crisis so that Billy Bowford could be seen with him; all the usual stuff, really. As time went on and their relationship progressed, however, Billy began to question the lengths he was going to protect to his secret identity. In fact, he began to feel pretty lousy about constantly lying to her. In a way, it felt like a form of cheating. So he’d confessed to her one night and that had been the start of a pretty rocky patch; Lily had also felt that lying about who you fundamentally were was not the best foundation for a relationship. Still, they had weathered this particular storm  (and some actual storms plus hurricanes, tidal waves and a few erupting volcanoes) and come out the other side even stronger, their love blossoming to the point of proposal.

His colleagues in the Super Defence Force were also in on the whole identity thing (as he was on theirs). Trust is an important factor when you’re fighting a thirty foot tall space squid determined to enslave the population of the earth and use them as breeding chambers for its foul brood. Trust and the contact details for a good dry cleaner. The stink of space squid does not wash out easily.

So while his identity was, on the whole, a secret, it was a secret that was shared with a discrete number of people. What nobody knew, however, was that Billy had another secret, one that he barely even dared to admit to himself. For some time now and at times when it was most inappropriate, Billy really, really wanted to hurt someone.

It was an urge, an impulse and it rang through his mind so loud and so clear that he often had to check that he hadn’t just acted upon it. He’d done some research; discretely, naturally. He’d found somewhere (he couldn’t remember exactly where) a description for this feeling which seemed to perfectly encapsulate it. The imp of the perverse, it was called. That little devil that sat on your shoulder and said in a quiet but insistent voice, “Push, jump, poke, snatch, smack” - all the things you knew deep down that you shouldn’t do. Billy had never acted upon it, of course. No, he was a hero and that was precisely the thing that heroes did not do. There was a certain type of person who acted upon that sort of impulse and they were the certain type of person who repeatedly got themselves punched in the face by people like Billy.

This horrible, almost physical need to do something utterly unpardonable had first come over him around eight months previously. There was nothing particularly different or special about the day*. Billy had just completed a routine piece of everyday superheroing; in this case, talking a suicidal teen out of throwing himself off the top of the Captialville bridge.

He was just flying the depressive youth back to the appreciative crowd of gawkers and onlookers (plus emergency services) when the thought popped into his head fully formed. It was so clear that it almost as if a separate voice was suddenly calling out in his head. The only difference was that the voice was his own.

“Hey,” the his-not-his voice seemed to say, “why don’t you just let go?”

“Yeah,” Billy found himself thinking back at him-not-himself, “why don’t I?”


* Words like “special and “different” came with a vastly altered set of criteria for someone like Billy; when you spent your day stopping an evil clone of yourself from unleashing a nightmarish interdimensional god upon all of reality, your definition of “everyday” tended to diverge somewhat from societal norms.


To Be Continued