by Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.
Becca admired herself in her new full-length mirror. It was possibly her simplest costume yet: a yellow one-piece thong with a plunging neckline, a waist-length green cape and green wraparound sunglasses. The only part of it she'd had to sew had been the cape. Yet it looked terrific.
She was going to enjoy portraying Phantom Lady, one of the all-time classic sexy superheroines. A toy gun with an old floodlight bulb glued into the muzzle served as Phantom Lady's Black Light gun. The photos were going to be spectacular.
Becca took aim with the gun, leveled it on her reflection, and pulled the trigger. She nearly dropped the thing when a cone of absolute darkness shot from it, blotting out the mirror. The cone vanished when she released the trigger, but the mirror's face remained perfectly dark, not the slightest gleam disturbing its depthless emptiness.
Becca stepped forward, reaching out to touch the lightless face of the mirror. She recoiled a moment later, cursing herself for doing something as foolish as touching a supernatural mirror, but it was too late: her fingers sank into the darkness, and she was dragged inside.
There was an instant of darkness and intense cold.
Becca blinked. The room she now stood in was dim, but seemed dazzling compared with the darkness she had endured for that timeless instant of travel.
The room's walls were dressed stone, damp and slimy. Light came from a couple of flyspecked low-powered bulbs crudely wired along heavy wooden roofbeams. It looked like a basement. Or a dungeon.
A bald, bullet-headed man in a gray uniform turned away from some kind of workbench, a gleaming scalpel in his hand. His eyes widened in shock, then he lunged forward, brandishing the blade while groping for a holstered pistol.
"Phantom Lady," he snarled as Becca backed away from him. "We meet again."
Becca kept backing up, slowly raising her hands in a conciliatory gesture.
"Look, my name's Rebecca --"
"I care nothing for your real name, woman. It was as Phantom Lady that you foiled my last brilliant plan to end this war, and the one before that, and the one before that. So, it is as Phantom Lady that you will help me fulfill my latest. Then the war will be over and I will be able to pursue my normal, peacetime research. And if you live through my wonderful plan to bring peace to the world, you can help me with that, too!"
Becca finally remembered the Black Light gun in her hand. She raised it, slippery now with sweat, and took shaky aim at the madman, took another step backwards and tripped over a wooden crate.
When she regained consciousness, Becca was tied -- no, manacled -- to a metal slab, at a 45 degree angle. She now saw that the "workbench" she had seen before was another such table, which held a pretty redhaired woman in a nurse's uniform. The bald man was bent over her now, the scalpel back in his hand. Becca was about to turn away in horror when he pushed up her skirt, lifted one of the straps of her garter belt and cut through it.
"You could have just unsnapped it, creep," the nurse said petulantly as he drew her stocking down her leg. "You know how hard it is to get elastic, with a war on?"
The man just chuckled, his apish shoulders shaking, and continued his wasteful undressing.
Becca squirmed helplessly in her bonds. Whatever this Nazi beast had in mind for the two of them, it was sure to involve a lot more than just mistreating their underwear. And, as she was now uncomfortably aware, Becca herself wasn't wearing any.
If only I really were Phantom Lady, she thought. I'll bet for her these cuffs would be no harder to escape from than a panty girdle!
Then it struck her: if the toy gun had somehow worked as a real Black Light gun, then maybe, in this strange world, Becca in a Phantom Lady costume could be a real Phantom Lady.
I am Phantom Lady, she told herself, willing athletic strength into her limbs, needed skills into her mind. I am Phantom Lady.
She was so busy concentrating on the mental image of herself slipping the manacles, she almost failed to notice that she already had. Springing from the table, she landed on the madman, knocking him to the floor. He threw her off, drawing his gun, but she kicked it from his hand. He seized her foot and twisted, and Becca fell across a metal bench.
An image of herself flashed through her mind: face nearly on the floor, her thong-clad bottom sticking up vulnerably. She felt her Phantom Lady skill and confidence fading, then she set her teeth and tucked into an elegant somersault, landing on her feet and snatching up her Black Light gun from a shelf.
The bald man cursed in German as he floundered within the cone of darkness. Becca saw his groping hand emerge from the beam and come down on the captive nurse's mouth. He shrieked when she bit him, falling backwards and hitting his head on the table to which, but moments ago, Becca herself had been bound.
That gave Becca an idea, and while he was still dazed, she hauled her erstwhile captor onto the table and snapped the manacles onto his own wrists.
"I suppose I'll have to help you find your way back to Allied territory now," Becca said to the nurse as she unlocked her manacles with one of the nurse's own bobby pins.
"Allied what? You must have hit your head harder than I thought. We're in the basement of Baum's Department Store in Jersey City. That boob must have escaped from the POW camp at Fort Dix."
"Oh, right, never mind.
"Listen, can you call the police about this guy? I have to take care of, um, some other business."
"Oh, sure, I know you mystery-mask types like to fade fast once you've trounced the bad guys."
Becca thanked her and tried to retrace her steps in the basement room. She had emerged into this otherworld right about . . . there.
An oval of perfect darkness floated within an ormolu frame, among various pieces of what looked like display-window dressing. That would be the portal on this side. Swallowing hard, Becca stepped towards it and reached out to touch the terrifying vacancy . . . .
Becca looked around her. She was back in her own home, alive and well, her costume only a little smudged and mussed from her harrowing adventure. The Black Light gun was still in her hand, but the darkness was gone from her mirror.
The costume went into the wash. The gun went into a shoebox in her bedroom closet until she could decide what to do with it. Becca looked long and hard at the sketches she'd been making for her next costume. She wondered if she really wanted to dress up as Vampirella.