KnightMask had long read about Missouri’s legendary Wilson Ward, fearsome catch-as-catch-can submission artist, one of the last American wrestlers to rise to prominence from the carnival circuit. Wilson was infamous for turning away students, choosing instead to live in forested seclusion with his family. And yet, when he arrived in the state for his upcoming title challenge, something in KnightMask bade him to seek the legendary grappler out…



IN







The moonlight glinted off KnightMask's ruby quartz visor as he rolled for his father's legs at headlong speed, careening into them with the force of a wrecking ball. Upon the impact, which sent both men to the dirt, KnightMask entrapped one of his father's jean clad legs in a steel grip. KnightMask's arms wrapped about his father's heel, while his legs had closed upon his father's knee, holding it fast. Thrusting his hip and arching his back, the masked grappler began the grisly work of hyper-extending the leg.

From his hiding place, Marion gasped. It was so loud that for a moment he thought he'd be discovered, but he realized that the two men were far two embroiled in their own struggle to take notice of him.

"Yer gonna have to break it, KnightMask...! That's the only way you'll stop me...!" his father grunted. Then he plowed his free foot into KnightMask's butt and shoved hard, driving KnightMask's hips down past his knee and freeing up the joint. With a quick scramble, the farmer had made back to his feet. His huge ham-sized fist slammed into KnightMask's chin with a ferocity that made Marion wince.

Though he'd only known the masked man for a matter of days, in those days he'd come to respect and look up to him nearly as much as his own father. Wilson Ward didn't take on many students but when KnightMask had come upon him chopping at that tree stump that he hated so much, well, the masked man had set his duffel bag down and taken up the axe with no questions. And his father hadn't asked any questions of KnightMask.

A look had passed between them and that was it. KnightMask had added his strength to his father's and in a few hours, KnightMask was chomping on deer meat and bathing in the warmth of the flames of the fireplace, fed by the stump's chopped up remains. As he sat at the dinner table, Marion had felt that the family had found a new member.

Wilson's blow took KnightMask off his feet. But the masked man spun on the ground, whipping his feet up around Wilson's leg, tripping him to the ground and immediately tying him up in another leg submission. Marion strained his eyes to follow the action, as his dad seemed to spin around out of the submission, end up on top of KnightMask, choking him...then KnightMask flipped out and...and then it seemed as though both men turned into a blinding blur of whirling limbs.

Submissions were reversed, throws floated out of. The counters and re-counters came so fast that it almost seemed, for a moment, as if they weren't really fighting each other anymore. They were so adept at escaping and reversing the others' offense that it almost seemed as if they were deliberately presenting each other with opportunities for escape.

Then Wilson had noticed his son watching from the bushes, taking his attention away for the briefest of moments. KnightMask took full advantage, blasting Wilson in the face with all the speed and power his body could muster. Wilson had dropped heavily to the ground, unconscious.

"You sucker-punched him...! KnightMask...I hate you...!" Marion had declared, before running off, sobbing. Of course, he didn't run too far, because he had to follow KnightMask. As soon as he finished tying his dad's hands and feet together, the masked wrestler had set off into the forest. Marion knew where he was going...he was going to meet up with that man...the one that had made his mom sick.

What he didn't understand was why KnightMask didn't want his dad to come with him. I mean, together, wouldn't they pretty much be unstoppable...?






KnightMask slouched in a corner, listening to Wilson, who stood over him, silhouetted in the light of the single bulb that dangled from the basement’s ceiling. Sweat gathered in pools on the wrestling mats that covered nearly the entire floor. Marion had watched from the top of the stairs, in silent awe of the two powerful men and also amazed at reverential way that KnightMask took in his father’s every word.

"You don't have Steve Davids' size, strength or savagery. And you don't have the agility of Satellite…don’t get me wrong, you’re quick, you’re acrobatic…but Satellite…he can darn near fly. It’s like he’s got some kind of diplomatic immunity against the laws of gravity or something. Your is edge is going to be on the ground…take Davids and Satellite to the ground…the mat is your ocean…and you’re a shark…and Davids can’t even swim. And Satellite ain’t much better."

Wilson noticed KnightMask wince at the analogy. He chuckled, but in an affectionate way.

“Hey, sorry man…I don’t wanna compare you to a shark. That’s a little too brutal for yah, ain’t it…? Here’s a better way to put it…you getting them on the mat is like the Submariner getting the Hulk into the water…on land, he ain’t got a prayer…but under the water…the game changes. Alright, enough jawing, let’s get back to work…”





Marion had always loved the forest, but as he followed after KnightMask through the swaying trees and winding dirt pathways, he had the feeling of someone who’d been given a cold shoulder by an old friend. The branches that once practically invited him to swing on them seemed cruel and crooked, like the finger of an old witch. Bushes and brush, soaked in shadow, crouched menacingly, goblins of the nighttime, ready to spring upon him. Mist rolled everywhere, turning familiar objects into murky, obscure shapes.

The pathway KnightMask had bee following opened up into a clearing. The masked man stood at the foot of it, his muscles tensed to explode like steel springs. Though his back was to Marion, the boy knew that KnightMask’s eyes had settled on something in that clearing, something out of Marion’s line of vision. He knew also that he was staring at it, whatever it was. Staring at it the way his father used to stare across the ring at his opponents.




Marion clutched his arms tightly about the XWF tag champion’s bull neck. The sprint that KnightMask had begun with at the foot of the slope had turned to a slow, agonized bear crawl as they made it to the summit of the mountain, made no easier by the fact that, all the way up the masked grappler had carried the weight of the boy’s fifty pounds on his back. There, Wilson awaited them, standing near the edge of the cliff, his elbow resting on a knee. Behind him, the morning sun rose up between the peaks of distant cliffs.

“Eight hundred Hindu squats…hand-stand push-ups to failure…and then we wrestle.”

Though fires born of near total fatigue seared his muscles, KnightMask nodded and began the squats, Marion still hanging from his back.

“There’s your edge,” Wilson said quietly, as he watched KnightMask struggle through shaking, unsteady legs to bend at the knees until his buttocks nearly touched his heels, straighten back out to standing and again .

“Davids, he’s not torn like you are. He knows what he is and he likes it. There ain’t no lie in him…he’s crazy, brutal and proud of it. And Satellite, well, he didn’t have any problems with Sebastian Duke getting buried, possibly killed, did he…? You…you’ve got that hunger in you…that hunger to hold that strap around your waist…but you’ve also got an ideal you’re striving to live up to. You want to be the best so bad you can taste it…its burning you, I can see them flames, even now. You want it so bad that you get the urge to do things that’d be the equivalent of flushing your principles down the toilet. You’re at war with yourself, kid. You’re principles…your beliefs are wrestling around in there with your instincts and your desires.”

Wilson turned away from KnightMask, to gaze down the face of the cliff. He looked down at the whispering stream that ran below then looked over his shoulder at KnightMask, still embroiled in his Hindu squats.

“KnightMask…every good man is at war with himself. And that’s going to be your greatest edge in this match. Steve Davids…his soul and his instincts are at peace with each other. I think the same goes for Satellite…at least in so far as wrestling is concerned. And that’s your edge, because at some point during any tough match, the body starts rebelling against the soul. But when it comes to that war, you’re a grizzled veteran. You know all about bringing your lower instincts to heel, come hell or high water. I ain’t saying you always win that battle…but just the fact that you’ve got experience fighting it gives the advantage to you.”






They looked less like eyes than cavernous tunnels, lit by the unholy glow of smoldering red embers. Fangs lined the thing’s misshapen mouth like the stalagmites of an ancient, forgotten cave, of which his flicking, serpentine tongue was a monstrous, slithering occupant. And yet, his face, for all that, retained an aspect of humanity. There were remnants of shape to his decomposed nose. His cheeks, lips and brow, decomposed though they were, could still yield expression. He was outfitted in a fine suit, the sort you might wear to church…or to a funeral.

Marion had frozen like a deer before headlights when the thing had stepped out of the mist. KnightMask had simply shaken out his arms and legs, just as though he were about to begin a wrestling bout. There didn’t seem to be any hint of shock or surprise in his body, as if this was all familiar to him.

The creature walked forward, to the middle of the clearing. KnightMask had gone to meet him, and the two came together in a collar and elbow tie-up.

“Marion…you shouldn’t be here, boy.’

Marion wheeled to see his father standing over him, a bruise still forming around his eye where KnightMask had slugged him.

“This isn’t for you to see, son. Not now, not ever if you can avoid it. Fighting creatures like these, its part of KnightMask’s burden Marion. He was almost pulled into their shadowy world…and maybe as a price for his freedom, he’s got to spend the rest of his days battling against them. You know how doctors give you shots that make you just a little bit sick, so that things like measles and mumps can’t make you real sick…? They give you just a little bit of it, to get your body used to fighting it…? That’s what happened to KnightMask, Marion. Don’t hate him for sucker-punching me…he was trying to save me…and he was trying you from going through life without a dad.’

Marion didn’t fully understand what his father was saying, but he nodded anyhow. He hoped, desperately, that his father wasn’t going to tell him to go home. As horrible as that thing was, he felt spellbound by it. He had to watch it. He had to see KnightMask and his father battle against it, if that’s what they were going to do.

But even though that was the thing that had made his mom sick, Marion noticed that his dad and KnightMask didn’t seem angry. They seemed concerned, worried and very, very serious, but not angry.

“Go on, Marion, get on home. This is KnightMask’s war, but this battle is one that I need to finish with him. It’s my responsibility. Maybe someday, when you’re older, I’ll explain it to you, if you still wanna know. Hopefully, by then you’ve forgotten all this. Now get…! ”






“After my first son died, I never wanted to take on another student.”

Wilson stood at the bank of the river, looking off in the direction of the evergreens across the water from them, but really looking through the memories that were swimming before his eyes.. KnightMask was squatted down, his elbows upon his knees, listening intently to the older wrestler.

“I let the business harden me…but not in the right ways. I thought I had to make him hard too. And to me, part of making him hard was letting him go. I stopped cornering him…and when he’d taken on a string of losses, I turned him away when he looked to me for comfort. I was wrong, Tyrone…”

Wilson, in less than a week’s time, had become one of the few men left to call KnightMask by his given name. It was a sign of how close they’d become, teacher and student, the past of submission-wrestling and its future. The old wrestler put a grizzled, calloused hand upon KnightMask’s shoulder.

“I want you to learn from my mistake, Tyrone. Go after the championship, give it your best. But just remember…the one muscle you must never allow to harden is your heart. Gaining all the championships in the world means nothing if you lose your soul in the process. Wrestling is nothing if it stops being about people bringing the best out of each other…I just wish I had been able to show my son that before he…”




Wilson hadn’t yet known what KnightMask had long understood, ever since the bite that destroyed his vocal chords had also nearly claimed his soul. He hadn’t realized that the dead didn’t always stay beneath the Earth. It wasn’t long before he discovered that bitter truth, when he’d awoken to find twin puncture marks on his wife’s neck. She’d dreamed of their first son, she’d said.

The old wrestler watched from the edge of the clearing as KnightMask and the vampire exchanged hold after hold, in an eerie echo of their own contest, earlier that night. The vampire was stronger than the masked submission master, but KnightMask, owing in no small part to his brief but profound education at Wilson’s hands, was able to redirect the revenants power into the execution of his throws and trips, so that at no time was it able to make the tag-champion bear head-on with its supernatural might. And yet, for the vampire’s part, each throw KnightMask accomplished yielded little more than opportunity for the undead creature to showcase its lupine agility, as time and again it sailed through the air to land neatly on its feet, unharmed. As to submissions, it seemed a matter of two men continually looking to imprison one another in an endless succession of dungeons, only to find time and again that the other had immediate knowledge of hidden pathways of escape.

And then the shadows began to retreat, the mist parted away…and the sun began its ascent.

The vampire broke away from KnightMask then, retreating to the cover of trees. Within the fires that burned in the recesses of its craterous eyes, there was fear.

Wilson stepped forward then.

“Come on son. You can do this. You can finish this match.”

KnightMask beckoned him on, not in challenge, but in encouragementt. With the hesitation of a child being coaxed into a pool, the creature slowly stepped out of the shade….and back into the clearing.

“It…it burns…”

“You can take it boy! I believe in you…your father believes in you!” declared Wilson, his voice choked but strong.

KnightMask reached out a hand and then their fingers intertwined in that classic test of strength. Flesh charred and fell to the grass. Smoke rose up from the body, drifting skyward. Muscle wilted, bone began to crumble…and in those strange eyes, fear gave way to determination.

Finally, only ashes remained, and the sobs of a hardened veteran of the brutal world of wrestling...a father who had finally seen his son come home.



And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. 25 When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” 27 And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,[f] for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Genesis 3:24-3:28