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A new hero.
A hero that believes in the chivalrous codes that define what a hero should be.
A hero that has tasted the stench of evil’s darkness yet has also touched the good in men’s hearts.
A hero that rewards as well as punishes.
A hero that battles street crimes as well as that which crosses supernatural dimensions.
The hero is NIGHTLINGER and the shadows are his domain. And joining him is his sexy assisitant, Myke...who keeps Nightlinger embedded in humanity...
From one troubled person to the next the plain black business cards with the gold lettering are passed.
"I had a problem like yours once," the donor confesses. "This card got me out of it."
There is only an address on the card, to the Haunted Bookshop in Minneapolis, where a fat man named Stick sits behind the counter. This fat man will patiently listen to your tale of woe, may even ask you a question or two, but in the end all he will do is wish you well, leaving you nothing to do except to go home.
Sometimes nothing happens to rectify a problem; more often than not, the predicament is resolved. Permanently. In the latter case a letter appears in your mail requesting a small donation to support the Haunted Bookshop. Most folks are only too happy to comply.
For awhile after this you carry the cared around in your wallet or your purse. You might even forget it is in there. Until one day when someone tells you their tale of woe, and you instinctively reply, "I had a problem like yours once."
In the historical Hull neighborhood of Minneapolis stands Hillcrest, a renovated townhouse at 60 Cranbrook Avenue. Directly connected to Hillcrest is a seventy-five year-old parkade, closed for the last thirty years. Both are owned by Feril Nightlinger, one of the world’s most popular illusionist. Living in the townhouse, Feril stores his stage props and collection of antique automobiles in the parkade. There is also a man-lift inside the parkade: a vertical conveyor belt, popular in the 1930’s for transporting someone up to one floor of a building or down the other. Be careful if you ever ride this man-lift. It goes down a lot further then you think.
Underneath the streets and sewer-lines of Hull is buried the remains of Universal City, a township that thrived outside frontier Minneapolis over a century ago, most of its Victorian homes and shops destroyed in a range fire that swept across Minnesota in 1897. The enterprising people of Minneapolis saw the opportunity to expand their borders and annexed Universal City, building right over whatever survived the fire.
If you ride the parkades’ man-lift down far enough it will bring you to the grave of Universal City, where the sky is made up of rafters and concrete and steam pipes; where empty trolley cars occasionally roll by vacant structures; and where on some nights, lights burn inside the old Universal City library where Feril Nightlinger tinkers builds, studies and hides away when he wants or desperately needs to be alone.
It is down here, it should be mentioned, that those plain black business cards with the gold lettering are printed up.