Only one week remained until the dawning of yet another All Hallows’ Eve. Many of the time knew All Hallows’ Eve as a night to rejoice, to shed the skin of day-to-day life in favor of a provocative mask or perhaps an alluring physical reconfiguration. Others knew it as the night when the veil of spirits was most porous, a night when the line between the living and the dead barely seemed to matter.
It was unseasonably warm that October night in the bayou, but then again, Louisiana always had plenty of surprises up her sleeve. Some said if you squinted, through the fog and past the nondescript tombstones reaching up from the dirt like desperate hands in need, you could make out the shape of the masked man first.
The masked man had made his way across the southern United States with surprising precision and swift brutality, and people in coastal towns had begun to take notice. A force such as he could not be prepared for, or at least that seemed to be the general wisdom of the time that balmy October night. After all, how can a man vanquish a monster he has never seen vanquished? The equation had never been solved, thus the solution remained maddeningly out of reach.
That is why when the masked man emerged to feed seven days shy of All Hallows’ Eve, there did not appear to be a governing tenet of the universe that would allow him to be stopped. And yet there he was. His gnarled mask stretched across his face only to obscure his features, not to hide them. His bulbous shoulders pushed thinner the cloak that contained them, and everywhere he went he carried a twisted vessel of golden parts collected throughout his travels. From under their beds, the Louisiana townsfolk heard the masked man’s battle cry. And from under their beds, the Louisiana townsfolk turned to silent prayer.
It must have seemed like a miracle when Jack moved through the fog, no sign of fear in his normally warm eyes, and made his way toward the masked man. Jack did not hesitate, his long, dark hair cascading behind him as he leapt atop the masked man and took the behemoth off his feet. The townsfolk sensed something was amiss, and many began to peek over their windowsills, hoping against all odds that Jack would bring salvation to the south.
Jack knew he had only knocked the masked man down thanks to the element of surprise. It certainly wasn’t every day that a wily would-be hero physically confronted the mythical monster. Jack struck while the iron was hot, reaching around in the fog for a weapon to use and clubbing the masked man over the head with the first object his fingertips touched. As his line of vision became clearer, Jack realized he had wrapped a steel chair around the larger man’s head, and that the mask that had instilled so much fear in Louisiana had fallen to the ground.
“Bang bang!” Jack exclaimed, climbing back to his feet. Jack’s knees were not as good as they used to be, and he was short an ear from an ill-advised trip to Germany, but he would be damned if this big bastard would be the end of him. The larger – but no longer masked – man rose seconds later, driving Jack into a slab of wood. The monster hulked over Jack and smiled. “It was I who took your ear in Europe,” it cackled through bloody teeth.
“It’s…it’s you?” Jack gasped from the ground, still reeling from his opponent’s quick rebuttal. “But, but I thought you had returned to the grand arenas of Japan. Some claimed you were left for dead…” Jack couldn’t make sense of any of it.
“It’s. Vader. Time!” the monster screamed as he bludgeoned Jack with the same steel chair that had once been his own undoing. He then dropped his considerable weight down upon Jack, only to pull from his pocket a ViperTek VTS taser and shove it against Jack’s leg.
“You will not stand again tonight, ‘Cactus’ Jack. It is I who shall be the last man standing!” Squeezing the surprisingly difficult to find button on the ViperTek VTS, our villain sent volts of pain into the leg of ol’ Cactus Jack, ending New Orleans’ hopes of a new champion for good at Halloween Havoc 1993.
“And still your WCW World Heavyweight champion, Vader!” -WCW ring announcer David Penzer
