I waited near the boxy white lighthouse horn, out of the wind. I expected the damned thing to go off and blow me over the edge and down the rocks to the beach below. It had felt warmer back by the light tower. Two National Guard privates waited with me, all of us deployed to watch the vortex. 

      It swirled, an oval of blue and purple light and smoke above the edge of the bluff, just shy of the decline to the beach. It was as if some cosmic force had decided the tip of Long Island was the perfect place to hang new artwork.

      A long gray trailer was parked twenty yards away on the snow-covered lighthouse lawn. It had been there a week, since the swirl first appeared above the bluff. I would have been inside but the eggheads were there, and ten minutes of 'differential energy' this and 'subspace particle' that and whatever the hell 'omniquantum state muon neutrinos' were hurt worse than the winter wind off the Atlantic. The privates were more my speed. 

Almost.

      "I don't want to be a bother," the one labeled REILLY said, which meant he was going to be anyway, "but my kid's a huge fan. Keeps his fan club newsletters in a binder. He saved up and bought four of the pins so he could have one on every jacket he owns—"

      "Signed photo?"

      "Well, he has a birthday coming up and—"

      "Signed... photo?"

      "Do you ever do kids parties?"

      "Maybe in my retirement. If I don't get killed first."

      They exchanged nervous glances. O'GRADY chimed in. "You can die?"

      "Why does everyone ask me that?"

      REILLY saw the brass ring floating off towards the ocean. "I promise it'd be a small party. Maybe twenty kids. I wouldn't tell anybody in advance you're coming—"

      "Do I need to spell the words 'signed' and 'photo' with flags or something?"

      He was about to either pitch or bitch. I'll never know how the wave would have broken because one of the eggheads—not a pejorative, because this guy could have been Vincent Price ripped straight out of his BATMAN episode—popped out of the cozy-but-crazy warmth of the van to shout above the wind. "Something's coming through!"

      I resisted the urge to shout EGGCELLENT! "Through from where?"

      "Wherever it comes from." With the diamond-hard focus of a hungry scientist. 

      "Super helpful. Any idea what's coming?"

      The scowl said it all. It's easy to wish you'd stayed in the trailer and gotten smart later. "No! Why do you think we called you?"

      "Just in case?" It happened more often than you might think. In the month preceding, the Army had twice put me on standby in case something went 'bonk' with the armored vehicles they were testing. They should probably spend less time hounding me to babysit science projects and more vetting the contractors building their radar and targeting systems.Your tax dollars at play.

      The swirling intensified. Red light jetted into the mix. I took a half-dozen preemptive steps towards the vortex. Braced myself. I suppose part of me hoped whatever was coming through would do so on the opposite side, a quick ocean view and a plummet down the hill to its death on the rocks below. Let the eggheads celebrate a late Christmas with a new gift to dissect. 

      It's always coal in the stocking.

      There was a rumble and a screech. A hand emerged from the center of the vortex. The rest of the typical person-parts followed. The surprise came when I saw they were all my parts: my build, features, eyes, hair. Even the suit was mine, though the colors were wrong, darker, skewed. The logo on the chest was more industrial, as if it had been weaponized by some third-year brutalist-school architecture major. A small disc hung from his belt, swirled with the same colors as the vortex, some sort of link or control device.  

      I stood and stared at my evil twin from some adjacent, alternate universe.

      Of course he had a beard.  

      For a split-second I was beguiled by it. I'd never had much success in life growing a beard. It inevitably came in patchy if it poked out at all; and what did emerge from my follicles was more like a calico cat: a little blonde, a little brunette, an unfathomable patch of red bristle suggesting I was possibly the milkman's kid. Even my mustache did this. Sometime after college I decided facial hair was for losers and criminal masterminds and gave up.

      And maybe I was right. Evil Iron Vanguard's beard was stately. First, it was jet black. I suspected dye was involved, but if the multiverse is layer upon layer of soft cross-duplications, it was possible he came by its color and body naturally, the bastard. Second, he wore it in a neat goatee. Clean, even lines surrounded his mouth and flowed to his chin. I wonder sometimes if, in this series of postulated multiversal layers, there's some sort of handbook written by a supremely evil demon barber delving into the grooming techniques and tools required for such a beard. Are there trimmers with elements beyond numerical settings and clunky, imprecise plastic sliders? Stuff with lasers to ensure perfect hair height and contour with both neighboring whiskers and the topography of the face? Is there some wax still undiscovered in our universe producing the shape and sheen such a precise organization of facial hair required? And if all this is so somewhere out there, how is it men like Evil Iron Vanguard have the time to engage in this sort of manscaping? Basic grooming takes a hell of a lot of time and effort. Isn't he busy holding on to his power, putting down challengers, striding across the multiverse to interject himself into peaceful societies in an effort to dominate them? Who has time to enslave a planet and develop the uniform luster of that beard?

      Third, and I suppose this was what bothered me the most about that magnificent goatee framing his angry scowl and shielding his chin, is how such a simple thing tied the whole package together. It made him handsome, certainly more handsome than I considered myself. It thinned his face. It made him simultaneously appear more intimidating and more intelligent. Would it have the same effect on a hero as it did on an evil twin? Or did you need the villainous swagger to pull it off?

      Seeing it at work on what was ostensibly my face, I began to understand the archetypes, even the cliches in popular culture. The Theorist—wherever he was holed up for the winter—might have had something to add. Maybe about the beard choices of the Mongol hoards or the Vikings, shorthand for strength, cunning, ruthlessness, and how such things had seeped into the bedrock of popular culture. Maybe how the dichotomous depictions of Native Americans—almost never glimpsed in any representation as having facial hair—were done with intent to retroactively make them seem weaker than the Anglos who slaughtered them. Frankly, given equal strength weapons—like in that one STAR TREK episode with the Mugatu and the actress I always mistake for Julie Newmar when I first see her—I don't think most of the people who shot a Cherokee in the back could have taken the same Cherokee hand-to-hand with matched axes.

      In the other fragment of that split-second, I really, really resented having to spend a Tuesday afternoon freezing my nuts overlooking the Atlantic with a couple of pushy and/or naive National Guardsmen and a trailer full of eggheads who were letting me do all the heavy lifting against a knockoff version of myself with sumptuous facial hair from some unspecified alternate dimension.

      Evil Iron Vanguard got his second foot on the ground and opened his mouth to speak. A quick right hand and I'd ripped the lower half of his beard from his chin. The tearing sound was delightful. While he writhed in shock from that, I yanked what I presumed was the vortex control disc from his belt and punched the center button. I unceremoniously kicked him back into the collapsing tear in space, returning him from whence he'd come. He blinked from our universe with an incomplete shout as the portal collapsed to nothing behind him.

      I scattered the handful of rich, black whiskers and watched the ocean wind spirit them away. Won't lie. I hope it wound up in a hundred Oystercatcher nests.

      I turned around. The egghead-echo of Vincent Price stood, staring, mouth agape. He was trying to stammer something out, probably about how he wanted to ask Evil Iron Vanguard questions, learn about his universe, see how alike we were genetically—the usual mad scientist stuff. Funny how they all come with facial hair, too. 

      "Happy Presidents Day!" I shouted over the wind and tossed the vortex manipulator to him. He dropped it in the snow. 

      REILLY and O'GRADY turned from the now-empty precipice to the egghead to me. "So that's—that's it? Just like that?" O'GRADY asked.

      "Just like that." We walked from the horn building back to the lighthouse, where they'd parked their truck beside my Jeep. I glanced at REILLY. “You know, maybe I was a little hard on you earlier. Do you have a card, a number where I can reach you?"

      "Huh?" REILLY still seemed dazed by the speed with which things had resolved.

      "Your kid's party. He's a fan club member. I'm always hearing from the guy who runs it about how I should do more outreach. Just keep it under thirty kids. And mum. Last thing you want is a media circus tearing up your front lawn. Your insurance will never cover it, and damned if I will."

      He didn't have a card, so I took down his number. He seemed more relieved by the offer than my evil twin's sudden departure. 

      I mean, fans are the bread and butter of doing the job.

      Also, they're kids. They almost never ask why you don't have a fancy beard.

The Iron Vanguard is an ongoing diversion I write to amuse myself. I didn’t plan on him; I caught him at the end of his career in a story for an anthology about heroes in their twilight years (“Dial ‘C’ For Consultant”); and then he started telling me his life story, re-emerging for a micro print run chapbook with four additional stories (FROM THE FILES OF THE IRON VANGUARD, a recently rediscovered copy of which may be available soon in the website store), a previously Story Stash appearance (“The Ardor of Giant Mecha”) and, more recently, as a backup story in the HUNDRED ACRE chapbook (“Triplicate Threat”). 

His latest exploit rose from a stew of pop culture elements. The villain came from the Iron Vanguard’s nemesis list (also in the chapbook). It originally set up a classic good/evil showdown that left the IV wondering which one he actually was, but it was talky and dull, and IV finally told me how he’d actually solved his problem. But that didn’t work until he waxed philosophic about the beard. It’s a one-punch bit, but like I said: I keep him around to amuse myself. If he also amused you? Good news: there’s more in the pipeline.