GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 34_TO FALL INTO DARKNESS

{"I could a tale unfold whose lightest

word

Would harrow up thy soul."

-Shakespeare : HAMLET I. v.}



{Ghost of Samuel Clemens : I should have gone with Roland.

I followed. But too late. Too late.

His charred journal tells us Roland saved Epona, the last unicorn,

only to see her race off deeper into Hell.

Are all our strivings merely empty boxing with the wind?

DayStar was mocking Roland when we last left him ....}



Behind me, DayStar chuckled, "All know the way to Hell but none know the way out."

I kept watching Epona until she blinked out of sight over the smoldering horizon, and I kept on watching for a moment more as I called back over my shoulder.

"I'm considering the source of those words."

"As you yourself once told me : the best lie is sandwiched between two truths."

I turned around and smiled sad. "You just challenge me to figure out what's the lie and what's the truth, is that it?"

He studied me like a scientist would a glass slide under a miscroscope. "That would be telling. And the scant amusement you afford me is watching you stumble over the truth right in front of you."

"Well, just so long as I have a purpose in life."

Something disturbing flickered deep within his eyes, then died before I could catch what it was as he murmured, "Oh, yes, primate, you have a purpose."

"Cue the spooky music," I muttered and turned to walk to my left, but his hand settled firm on my shoulder.

"You insist on scattering myths about you."

He glanced to his left. My eyes followed his. I stiffened. Epona. Or really an after-image of her, rearing and pawing at the darkness with her hooves. I shivered at the joy in her eyes.

I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. "I have a friend to get out of Hell."

The shadows masked all but his gray eyes, and even they seemed to be full of darkness. "In the hour you will die."

"Staying alive's not part of the job."

He cocked a brow. "Winning by dying?"

"Been done before."

He smiled like a satisfied wolf. "Your own personal Alamo, is it?"

"There are worse fates."

"You have a most peculiar code."

"Look who's talking."

"I have no code."

"Non servium."

"Oh, that. In that case, welcome to the club."

"Well, considering where I am it would seem to fit."

DayStar's face was suddenly hidden by shadow as if he did not want me to see it. "You have never fit, never conformed. It is why you will soon die."

"Probably so."

"But you will not relent, will not surrender."

"Probably not."

"In that case ...."

His eyes flared with actual flames, as his right hand gestured like a sword, "Go to Hell!"

Blackness swallowed me as I felt myself lifted off my feet and hurled down, down, down. I tumbled head over heels in billowing clouds of darkness and mist.

Faintly from above, I heard DayStar's bitter words, "The true pain, DreamSinger, is not the fall but the surviving it."
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 32_HELL IS YOURSELF

{"Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another."

- Tennessee Williams.}

{Samuel Clemens, here, I look at Roland's charred journal,

its pages turning with a life of their own. We last left my friend at the breached wall of Hell.

To enter is to die.

Just past the wall, Epona, a unicorn, is being sliced to ribbons by a ghoul,

whose legs work like a frog's, and whose arms flail with razors.

Roland has just ordered the ghoul to leave the unicorn alone ...}



Epona lolled her head to me. "N-No, you must not. To enter is to --"

The ghoul raised the bloody razor up high. "Time to scream."

"Great Mystey," I whispered, " not for me, but for someone who called out for mercy. Let me cross over."

The foot-long razor swept down. Sucking in a breath, I leapt through the opening and blocked the ghoul's slashing attack with Marlene's saber. Sparks flew as the razor met the black metal of the sword.

The ghoul cursed me in some forgotten language. She twirled frog-like and thrust at me with blinding speed. She was good.

But I still had the agility of Gypsy, my cat. I twisted at the hips, evading her attack.

I threw the black sand into the creature'e eyes. "Here's Hell in your eyes!"

Her eyes burst into flames.

Blinded, the ghoul flailed screaming past me through the opening.

And then she exploded.

Just simply exploded. Or not so simply.

The sound had been odd, a distant popping as if she were some small firecracker going off, not a large body going up in a cloud of foul-smelling smoke.

I hurled up my arms to protect my face and stiffened, expecting to be splattered with blood and gore. Nothing. I shook my head.

I wrinkled my lips at the stench. Her body had been as empty as her soul had been.

There were other creatures twitching, slithering, and crabbing towards the unicorn.

But the ghoul's exploding had made them stop for the moment. I bent down with complaining knees next to the bleeding unicorn.

Epona lolled her slashed head with torn tendons, her eyes straining to glimpse something of what lay beyond.

But from her position, she could see nothing. She whimpered.

"They cut me, cut me. Laughing, laughing. Let me get so close, so close. But never making it. Never."

Her eyes tore into me. "I black out, dream such terrible, terrible dreams.

Then, I awaken whole once more. And it begins all over again. A-All over again."

Her head slumped towards the cold cobblestones, but I caught it before she could hurt herself.

"I to want to run ... run so far from here until the memories are left far, far behind."

I saw the creatures start towards me again and heard the unicorn as she rasped, "I want to run ... run fast as I can.

Let the wind wrap its cold fingers through my mane again. I want to run, run so far from here

until at long last I feel the grass under my hooves one last time. One last time."

The scattered torturers began to giggle as they grew closer. "D-Don't let them get me again. P-Please. Please!"

I looked down in despair at the unicorn, blood welling like tears along the gashes in her white satin flesh. I cocked my head.

I began to write on the saber in Epona's blood.

I looked back up to the darkness above me and whispered, "She only wanted to run. She only needed a gentle light to lead her through the darkness."

My throat closed, but I forced the words out. "Lead her to where there is no pain. No pain."

Her eyes looked at the blade with weary eyes for a long moment. I felt her muscles quiver beneath my fingers. Epona raised wet eyes to me.

"Will it hurt?"

"No. No, it won't hurt."

"No more bad dreams?"

I nodded and each word felt like a raw wound. "No more bad dreams."

I plunged the saber deep into Epona's heart. She screamed shrill.

The world around us went nova. Epona stiffened. And the encroaching torturers squealed gut-deep and wet.

A wave of sensation both ice-cold and warm knifed through me. I felt the unicorn scramble to her hooves in a thrust of sudden strength.

I crabbed back and fell on my butt. I braced myself with one hand and held Marlene's vibrating saber in the other.

My vision cleared. My mouth dropped.

Epona was rearing on her hind legs. Her healed hind legs.

The words I had written on the saber in her blood were burning with strange fires. "This sword now heals."
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 28_ALONE IN HELL

***

Elliot Grace had the most clever celebration for hitting 100 followers. I even made it into the post, along with a cast of dozens of fellow bloggers.

Check it out :

http://elliot-grace.blogspot.com/

***

{"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call;

no way out,

just the upstairs window to look out of

while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it."

- Tennessee Williams.}

{Only I, Samuel Clemens, ghost, am left "alive" to tell the tale.

Roland's strange journal tells what happened after he walked through the cursed Door of Nasah to save McCord,

a fictional character he had breathed to life, from the death in Hell he had written for the man.

Typing these words that I read in Roland's journal, I have come to realize that there are more kinds of Hell than one . Let Roland's words carry on from here ...}



Chicken Little was wrong. The sky wasn't falling. It was on fire.


The sky was midnight black. The clouds were rolling tumbleweeds of flame that howled and crackled with the fury of the seething inferno at their hearts.


If it hadn't been for the illumination of their passing overhead, I wouldn't have been able to see the black sands upon which I stood, hunched over from the buffeting of the hurricane-like winds.


I was on a small rise in an endless horizon of black, steaming sand. There were round humps scattered randomly on the floor of Hell.

In my novel I had called this place "Kol Basar," ancient Hebrew for "the end of all flesh." I had left it for the reader to decide if it were truly hell or not.

I saw all this in a flash. Flames burst from the sands upon which I stood. The other sands merely steamed. I leapt and hit the sands in a roll.

No good. Wherever I hit the sands, they burst into flames. Damn. It seemed my body ignited the sands. The fedora tumbled from my head and flared into a tiny explosion of flame.

Bogey's trenchcoat. It didn't burn.

I bounded to my feet, more flames shooting up from where I now stood. I threw down Marlene's saber and fumbled off the trenchcoat in wild fear, flinging it onto the sands in front of me.

No flames.

Snatching up the saber, I jumped on the trenchcoat. No flames shot from beneath my feet or the trenchcoat. I gushed a huge sigh of relief.

I beat out the flames on my jeans with protesting, seared hands. I straightened slowly. Safe. For the moment.

Then, I saw something impossible.

I saw Gypsy, my cat.

She was off to my left, all wavering like some desert mirage.

I started to call out to her, but a split in the very fabric of reality zippered in front of her before I could.

She bounded through the portal. I looked beyond it and into the world past it. I stiffened.

The ghost of Ernest Hemingway.

He was in my apartment -- and very not dead, for a ghost, that is. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his jaw.

The ghost of Raymond Chandler was standing over him, a blackjack in his right hand. Gypsy leapt to my bed. The portal suddenly closed.

And in that moment, I heard Gypsy howl as if she had been gutted. What the? What had just happened?

{Samuel Clemens here. To find out what Gypsy had been doing in Hell and why she was wailing go to these two posts :

1.) http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/07/gypsys-tale-you-call-this-safe.html

2.) http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/08/chandler-hereghost-of-chance-overtureno.html }

I started to go towards where the portal had been. I placed a foot on black, steaming sand -- and froze in sudden fear of my stupidity.

No flames. I frowned.

My bent notepad jutted painfully into me from my pocket. What had I written? That I would become as tough, as strong, and as fast as whatever I met here.

The mother of Gypsy and daughter of Bast, Mesmer, had told me Gypsy was no ordinary cat. I made a face. I tapped an unburnt foot on the sands of Hell.

Not ordinary? You think?

A horse's scream of utter pain pierced the strange night from behind me. I turned.

I had expected to see another endless horizon of smoldering black sand. Not for the first time, I had been wrong.


A city.


A strange walled city, appearing like something older than Troy, more cursed than Sodom.


Odd runes were etched large in the cracked marble of its towering walls.

Looking at it sent icy prickles just under my scalp as if I remembered it from those nightmares I had flung from memory upon awakening.


I shivered.


A terrible shrill wailing pierced through the howl of the hellstorm. I looked up.


Huge flying boulders, aflame with electric blue energies, angled towards the sands beyond me from up high in the midnight sky.

I ducked instinctively, then laughed at myself. It was obvious they were going to miss me.


But not by much. Their impact staggered me from the reflected force of the strikes. Hell certainly wasn't turning out to be boring.


I made a face. Not that I had expected it to be. Truth in advertising and all.


The horse screamed again. It had come from within that strange city. I picked up Bogey's trenchcoat and hurriedly put it on.


Another wail of agony from the horse. I bent and picked up a steaming fistful of black hellsand with my left hand.

I twirled Marlene's saber in anger. Somebody was going to do some regretting besides me for a change.


I headed to the cracked marble walls of Hell.
***