GHOST OF A CHANCE 40_THINGS CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE

Today is a somber day for those of us with Lakota blood :

The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota was on this day in 1890,

the U. S. 7th Calvary gunning down hundreds of unarmed Lakota Indian warriors and their families.

As framed in Dee Brown’s influential, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the massacre represented not only the culmination of the Indian Wars

but the mindset which began to form with the arrival of Columbus.

His last chapter described the Wounded Knee killings, his last paragraph describing the transport of the fifty-one wounded Indian survivors to shelter in a nearby Episcopal mission:

It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church,

those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters.

Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.



{Turquoise Woman back again. I will not comment on the irony of the above. You two-leggeds carry your own destruction within you. But I last left DreamSinger and his companions in Hell, fighting a losing battle in the inferno.

But things can always get worse ...

especially in Hell.}

The horn of Epona flashed up, blocking a downward sweep of a sword from a frothing bull-man. The unicorn staggered back a step at the impact.


I darted out with my borrowed sword, hooking the back hooves of the minotaur, sending it sprawling.

Crazy Horse, true to his word to protect Gypsy, spun, leapt in a graceful twirl, and blocked three separate blows from a man-bull, a black-scaled demon, and an evil frog-like creature whose name I was just as happy not to be familiar with. In fact, I would have been even happier not to be familiar with the disgusting thing at all.

A throaty voice shrieked above us : "Enough."


I looked up as the Sphinx of Thebes husked, "The Turquoise Woman."


Dressed in a clinging, moon-white buckskin dress, her alabastor arms held up high, Estanatlehi sailed gracefully down the endless depths of the rumbling hellsky.

Her living lightning hair flowed up as she slid down the inflamed face of Hell itself. The Lakota warriors respectfully hid their eyes from the length of supple leg revealed by her flight.

Long, long ago legends say that one warrior had allowed lust to fill his chest at the sight of her. Turquoise eyes had flashed. And only a pile of bleached, gleaming bones had remained of that unwise warrior.

She landed gracefully beside me, clucking her tongue at me. "DreamSinger, you risk the lives of my Spirit Warriors on pawns."

She gathered Gypsy up in her supple arms. "Come, noble cat."

The Turquoise Woman looked at my Lakota friends and last upon the Sphinx. "You all have earned passage to that Land That Knows No Shadows."

She flicked cold, unreadable turquoise eyes to me. "And you. You go to fight your true enemy : DayStar!"

Hell blurred around me. I was no longer on the plains of Hell. I was inside a burning church. The flames were spreading from where I stood as if my very touch were deadly to this place.

I was facing a stained glass window of Lucifer raising his fist to the closed gate to Heaven. Below it was a bronze plaque : FIRST CHURCH OF DAYSTAR.

Yeah, even in Hell, things could always get worse.
***