Night Raven: The Cure, Part 2

How to read Night Raven

You can read Alan Moore's Night Raven stories by buying the print or digital collection here.

If you're less respecting of copyright or you just want to try it out before deciding to buy, you can follow along here.

The Cure, Part2

You can check out my read through of part 1 here. And for more background info on Night Raven, go here.

The story picks up where we left off in Part 1 with reporter Scoop Daley dealing with Night Raven having kidnapped his wife Sadie so that Scoop will deliver the cure to the poison Night Raven has in his system.

The first thing that jumps out is how Scoop's mind is terrorizing him, especially the fear of Night Raven cutting Sadie. "Because when the razor dips into flesh, flesh that offers no more resistance than ice cream, and it does that awful stuff, that stuff your mind can't swallow, and you know that whatever happens, nothing can ever make that crimson ruin look right again..."

As Scoop explains, "Your mind does bad things to you when you lose somebody that you love. Suddenly it isn't your best friend anymore."

What Moore does so well is set up the consequences and let's us stew in Scoop's fears, so by the time we get to the end, we feel like we're in his place. 

Then Moore recaps what happened in Part 1 for quite a while. Eventually Scoop goes to the wharf to meet Night Raven. Moore has always been able to capture the feeling of a setting and this wharf is no different.

"Wharves are like forgotten outposts in some terrible war of attrition between the sea and the land. The war still goes on, but it’s quieter here. Every year the algae creeps a little higher up the sodden, salt-encrusted wood of the support posts. Every two years fat, bad-tempered men who smoke Luckies come and paint it over with pitch and the sea has to start its assault all over again, slowly, steadily, an inch at a time.

"The sea creeps. You can hear it."

Night Raven shows up and confronts Scoop demanding the cure. Scoop's description of Night Raven is evocative:

"The trenchcoat was looking a lot dirtier than when I'd last seen it. The years hadn't been kind. It was frayed and grey and there were a couple of buttons missing. Over the years the posture of the body beneath it had changed, slowly knotting into the hunched crouch of an animal at bay, and the coat didn't hang properly any more. It was evolving the wrong kind of creases. The brim of the slouch hat hung defeated. It had lost its war with the rain. And beneath the hat brim was the mask. It was more or less the same as it had been when I last saw it, nearly ten years before. I still couldn’t put my finger on what it reminded me of even after all that time. Something like a bird, something like the skull of a steer bleaching in the Death Valley sunshine, and something else. Something I couldn’t quite get."

The way he describes this is the same way Moore has praised H.P. Lovecraft for his descriptions of his terrible monsters. He describes what it's sort of like but there is something missing that isn't able to be described that then gets filled in by the dark recesses of the mind of the reader.

Scoop explains to Night Raven why he can't give Night Raven the cure. It's because it's a counter disease that would spread everywhere Night Raven went, killing millions. He also can't give it to Night Raven because he already tossed it into the river, knowing he'd be too weak when confronted with his hostage wife.

Night Raven moves to kill Scoop with a scalpel but he approaches so slowly that Scoop was able to use the gun in his pocket to shoot the poisoned man. As he was shooting, the mask fell off. "I could see his face. His face. I don't want to talk about his face."

Before toppling into the water, Night Raven smiled and whispered "The Cure."

We end much later with Scoop looking at the bottle he lied about throwing into the river. And he's haunted by the thought, "What if that really is the cure in there? Just a cure. Nothing else." Could that have been Yi Yang's plan all along?

From this first story, Moore set himself up with a few threads he'd get to follow through his run and we get one of the great ones next time. See you next week.