- For other uses of "Legion", see Legion.
Dodge, also known as the Lady in the Well, the Legion, and Lucas, is the main antagonist of the Locke & Key graphic novels.
History
A demon from the spawn known as the Children of Leng, Legion, as he referred to himself, was born in a hellish dimension accessible from Earth only through what would have become, after 1775, the Black Door, a dimensional opening located beneath the town of Lovecraft, Massachusetts. In his home dimension, Legion was one of several dozens of children of a she-devil, that devoured half of her clutch, only to be later devoured by her spouse in turn. As soon as he got of age (unlike many of his siblings who died before growing up), Legion devoured his father, establishing control over what remained of his family. He lived in this hellish dimension for an unspecified time (it’s unknown even if times existed, in this particular kind of Hell), until in 1988 someone opened the Black Door in Lovecraft: drawn to Earth like a moth to the flame, Legion went to the portal, and from the other side a young man did the same. The two met at the door, and Legion attached himself to the soul of Lucas Caravaggio, absorbing all his memories, controlling his body, becoming a permanent parasite that now had stolen the boy’s life, , absorbing all his memories, controlling his body, becoming a permanent parasite that now had stolen the boy’s life, appearance and identity. At first, Legion managed to disguise himself as Lucas, convincing the boy’s friends that he was always the same; that same night, as he came to Keyhouse to threaten and kill Rendell Locke, he was exposed by the other Tamers of the Tempest, and restrained. Legion, who had by then adopted the moniker of his host, Dodge, mocked them, as it was impossible to detach a demon from a human soul, but that wasn’t their intention: Rendell, instead, used the Head Key to remove all of Lucas’ memories, leaving the demon without a clue on what he really was, on the magic keys and on the Black Door he had come from. He lived this way for a while, until at school a girl mentioned he had been with Ellie Whedon, one of the Tamers, for all the year: the demon realized something was amiss, and he followed Ellie to the Wellhouse, where his memories had been kept and stored. He successfully manipulated Ellie in getting rid of the echo of Rendell’s mother, who guarded the memories, then he knocked the girl out and put all his memories back in his head, regaining full conscience of who he was and of what he had to do: he had to open the Black Door again and allow as many of his brothers and sisters as he could to access this new, wonderful world ripen for conquest.
Dodge knew that the other Tamers would have soon come to face him, and that all of them wielded a different magic key to defend themselves: taking countermeasures, he used the Gender Key to become a woman, so when the shy Mark Cho came to him wielding the Shadow Key he found a beautiful, naked girl waiting for him. Dodge used Cho’s distraction to kill him, and left for the Black Door, dragging along Duncan Locke, Rendell’s little brother, to make him the first host for the newcomers… but not before devising a failsafe: he removed part of his personality with the Head Key and put it, along with the Echo Key, in a jar, that a shadow hid in Ellie’s house. Down in the Drowning Cave, Dodge faced the Tamers of the Tempest, demanding the Omega Key to open the Black Door, but they of course resisted: during the fight, he killed Kim Topher with the shadows, and then used the Head Key to remove all of Erin Voss‘ memories and personality, reducing her to a drooling human vegetable. At the end, however, Ellie surprised him reaching him through the secret ladder, she used the Owl Key to take the Shadow Key away from him, and let Rendell use his Hercules Key to make part of the cave collapse over Dodge, killing him. His failsafe, however, worked perfectly: it broke out of the jar, and entered Ellie’s mind, controlling her from within and luring her to the Wellhouse, where she summoned Dodge’s echo, his spirit back from the dead. Trying to convince Ellie to find the Everywhere Key to allow him to leave the Wellhouse, that was otherwise his inescapable prison, Dodge killed her loathed mother, Candice, avenging her for decades of abuses, and tried to talk her into helping him, but she escaped, ashamed of what she had done. Dodge spent years inside the well, and during this time he thought again about his goal: if he brought all his siblings to Earth, this new world would have become like the other one, a hellish wasteland in which he would have had to fight constantly for predominance over the others; if he only brought a few of them, though, he could form a family to control as the head, and he could use the Head Key on humans to make them slaves; he would also lure some other demons to the Black Door without providing a host, so that they died on the spot turning into Whispering Iron, and use their corpses to build more magic keys to strengthen his dominion. What he needed to accomplish all that was a weak mind susceptible to his influence, someone who would have helped him believing to be helping himself… someone like Sam Lesser, a disturbed student of the now adult Rendell Locke…
Netflix Adaptation
- Main article: Dodge
Dodge appears in the Netflix adaptation, played by Laysla de Oliveira.
Gallery
