A MEAL TO DIE FOR_BLOGFEAST ENTRY_CAPTAIN OUTRAGEOUS EXCERPT

{"I have the heart of a child.

I keep it in a jar on the top shelf."

- Robert Bloch (author of PSYCHO.)}

{Samuel Clemens, ghost, here.

I'm honoring Roland's entering Angela McCallister's BLOGFEAST :

http://jadedlovejunkie.blogspot.com/2010/08/starving-for-blogfeast.html

It is from his YA urban fantasy, CAPTAIN OUTRAGEOUS. The setting is New Orleans just prior to Hurricane Katrina.

We find the Yankee street orphan, Victor Standish, having just saved his life from the Victorian ghoul, Alice, by promising to lead her to a meal of fat, juicy drug dealers.}



The night mists curled all around the two of us. I looked up at the full moon that seemed to be warning me with hollow eyes.

It would have made a great scene in a horror movie except there was no director to yell "Cut!" Besides I didn't think Alice cut her food.

She just chewed it.

Like the creepy fog, she flowed silent beside me. Yeah, no walking for her. She glided beside me without stepping once.

The moon beams seemed to go right through her.

She looked like a goth Alice in Wonderland with her long black Victorian dress, high topped shoes, and black silk gloves that went up past her elbows.

Strange gloves though. There were no fingers to them.

Alice saw where I was looking and spoke in a cultured British accent, "The better to lick my fingers clean after I'm done ... eating."

She was trying to scare me. Doing a hell of a job, mind you, but she was trying too hard. I had to stop this path of words 'cause it was leading to nowhere I wanted to go.

"You have to be careful, Alice. It's not safe out here for a young girl like you."

She pulled up straight and still. "You do know what I am, do you not?"

"Sure. You're beautiful. And that's dangerous on these streets."

She looked at me as if every one of my teeth had fallen out and hit the sidewalk to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy."

Her eyes became slits. "What did you call me?"

"Oh, c'mon. North is North even if it's a dangerous North. So you're a ghoul. Nobody's perfect. But you're also beautiful in an ethereal, haunted way. And on these streets, beauty's a curse."

She cocked her head at me, her long blonde hair becoming a living waterfall. "You speak strangely."

"Look who's talking."

Alice's too-blue eyes studied me. "You talk like an adult."

"Yeah, well that comes from spending most of my time with adults."

I made a face. "No, that's wrong. I spend most of time running from them."

I rubbed the back of my neck. "I guess it comes from me spending all the time I can in a library, reading Homer, Conan Doyle, and Burroughs."

I smiled crooked. "They let you stay in the library as long as you're quiet. And I can stay quiet with the best of them."

Alice's lips twitched. "Not so I notice."

Her eerie blue eyes widened. "Oh, my! Not them. Not now."

I forced myself to slowly turn around, and my heart sank like the Titanic. "Oh, jeez. What is it with the French Quarter? Is this whole place haunted? Who are these things?"

Alice's answer was a hoarse whisper, "Les Bonne Dames."

"All right, maybe I should have asked what are they?"

"Mere memories of malicious will."

"I'm so happy I asked."

Dressed all in white like brides on their wedding days, the ghostly women wore a strange perfume that tickled my nose in all the wrong ways.

They looked at me with angry, hungry eyes, drawing their white shawls about their opening mouths to cover their needled teeth. I remembered something old Suze had told me :

Snatching those shawls would give a thief brave enough to do so power over them. Yeah, like I was going to do something way stupid like that.

Alice glided in front of me and spoke firm. "He is mine."

An odd trilling, not sound, not light, rippled from their mouths, and Alice shook her blonde head. "If I choose to play with my food, it is my concern. Not yours."

The trilling got ugly, and I stepped around Alice. "Well, bring it on, ladies!"

I jerked my thumbs towards my chest. "I'm Victor Standish, and I've fought bullies all my life. You're just better dressed than most."

Alice whispered, "Have you gone insane?"

"Depends on who you ask."

I turned back to them. "Ladies, you just think you're bad. Me, I've fought bad ... like the Amal. You know, those living, hungry shadows."

I pointed past them. "The ones right behind you."

They turned. No more trilling. They screamed. I went stiff.

Shadows, so black they looked like sin given life, oozed from the all the corners of the alley around us. Oh, shit.

I had been bluffing, hoping they would turn and give Alice and me time to split.

It was Les Bonne Dames that split, leaving Alice and me to face the circling shadows, whose forms you could make out in glimpses of slowly moving insect-like legs and clutching sharp pincers.

"We are doomed," sobbed Alice.

I smiled wide. "No way! We're saved. These creeps only eat those who despair."

"I am a ghoul, idiot! I despair each moment of every day."

I saw the Amal slowly close in on us. I ignored them. I jerked a thumb at me, then a forefinger at her.

"Not anymore, Alice. We're a team now. Trust me, we're gonna set the French Quarter on its ear. When folks talk about 'Alice and Victor,' there're gonna be smiles."

A blonde eyebrow arched. "Oh, all right, there'll be lots of fear first. But then, there'll be smiles and sounds of laughter when they start to talk of all the crazy, wild stunts we've pulled."

Alice looked deep into my eyes. "Y-You really mean that, do you not?"

"I'm Victor Standish, and I don't lie."

Alice slowly smiled, her blue eyes sparkling wet, and she spoke softly, "Alice ... and Victor."

Those eyes blinked back tears. "Alone no more."

She wheeled to the suddenly still Amal. "Wretched spirits! Tonight you do not feed on me. Tonight I feed on you."

Alice grew misty, her arms reaching out and drawing back to her chest. The Amal screamed hoarse and were slowly sucked into a laughing Alice like dirty dishwater swirling down into a gurgling drain.

Then, they were gone.

She turned smiling to me. I managed a smile back. Yep, no doubt about it. At first there was going to be lots of fear.
***

SECRETS OF SEVEN GHOSTS_PART I

I have often warned friends not to casually play with the Ouija board. Do not knock on any door that you do not know what is on the other side.


Ouija is a combination of two words: "oui" and "ja" which mean "yes" in French and German respectively. And do you really want to say "yes" to something like the picture on yesterday's post?


So saying that, there I was sitting in the dark, about to write this article on the wisdom of posting excerpts from your writing and thinking about that very picture from yesterday's post ... when I heard a deep, thunderous voice :


"Oinops pontos."


I looked up and sighed. I just had to write a horror post yesterday, didn't I? There in his worn toga, battered sandals, and walking staff stood Homer.


"Wine dark sea?," I asked. "And that means exactly what?"


"It is what I have crossed to please your Valkyrie."


"Marlene?"


"Yes, she knows you have been worried that you have spoken too much of your epic. And she wanted me to counsel you."


"And 'wine dark sea' is it?"


He whacked me on the shin with his staff. "I have little patience."


Rubbing my smarting shin, I grumbled, "So I noticed."


"Then notice this as well. The measure of a story is not the teller but the listener."


I tucked my legs under my chair and said, "This must be a lesson 'cause my understanding of it lessens and lessens the more you speak."


He spun his staff and thumped me on the head. "OW!"


"Tell your story. Listen to the audience. Learn insights you would never do otherwise. That is my wisdom."


He smiled, and it didn't reach his white-filmed eyes. "Denied sight, I saw truth in the criticisms of others. Try and have as much vision as this blind man."


And with that, he disappeared. I sighed. I thought a moment, then I smiled.


"Well, that wasn't so bad." {You should never say things like that -- even if you're not in a horror movie.}


Gyspy, my cat, hissed and ducked under my chair. A trilling like the moaning of melting ice wraiths filled the darkness. A blur of gold swirled to my left. A ghost throne solidified next to me.

In black robes in whose fabrics swirled suns and comets sat another frequent guest : Merlin. Tall, guant, he possessed a face not even in the same galaxy with human.


"Hello, Emrys," I said, using his childhood name.


The face underneath the domed hat kept changing : child, werebeast, old man, crystaline facets of diamond. I felt like I was watching Bush delivering a speech.


"Your Faerie Queen can be most persuasive," he whispered, the tones of his voice changing from crone, to crow, to child.


"She asked you to come, too?"


"Yes. To tell you the magic of words."

His smile was colder than the shivers they gave me. "The magic of words increases with the speaking of them. The more you tell your tale aloud, the more strength it will have, the more lyrical and fluid will become the words."

He jabbed at me with a long, bony finger. "Speak your story, child of the Lakota. Speak it often and listen to the cadance of your prose, sculpting it into magic. Listen, mold, sculpt. Then say them aloud again, letting the music of them roll from your tongue. Speak them to all you can. When you see their eyes light up with your words, you will know you have sown magic in them."


His own words were still lingering in the darkness when he disappeared. Two cloven hoove marks were burned into the carpet where his feet had been. Gypsy hissed at the smoking reminders of his visit, then scurried to investigate the wonders that lay hidden underneath my bed.


I didn't blame her. I wanted to join her in fact. The throne blurred to the sound of a tinny trumpet. Laughter sounded all around me. I groaned. Not him. Please, not him tonight.

A high desk suddenly replaced the missing throne. A smoldering cigar thrust into my face. Fake eyebrows shot up and down.


"Say the secret word, and I'll tell you why I came."


Groucho Marx.

I sighed. I'd have to count my books after he left. A voracious reader, Groucho always "borrowed" one of my leather-bound classics to while away whatever afterlife he ambled through.


"Marlene?"


"The very same songbird. And the legs on that bird would make Col. Sanders a very happy man."


His eyebrows did the rhumba on his forehead. "In fact, those legs have made many a Colonel a happy man. And Major and General and Major-General and ...."


"I won't have you joke about her morals while she's not present to give her side of ..."


"Morals? Not present? I have you know she was a whiz at giving in to her morals when she was present."


A shimmering glow swirled behind him. I made a cutting motion against my throat with the fingers of my left hand, but Groucho kept on.


"Why the look? Not following me? I tell you a child of five could understand this."


He cupped a hand around his mouth, "Someone fetch a child of five!"


As a white satin gowned woman appeared behind Groucho, I groaned. He smiled, totally oblivious to his danger. I saw the long, sharp dagger in an elegant right hand.


He chuckled, "If you see the divine diva, quote me as saying I was mis-quoted."


His eyes went to mine. His face paled. His cigar drooped. His throat felt the dagger across it. "She's right behind me, isn't she?"


I nodded sadly, and he looked up into the icy face of Marlene Dietrich. "Marry me, and I'll never look at another horse."


Her eyes became slits, and he winked at me. "Either she's dead, or my watch's stopped."


Marlene spoke in a velvet whisper, holding the dagger close to his neck. "Another word, and I will make you the headless coarse man."


"Egads, woman. You wanted me to speak words to your ...."



The dagger pressed harder against his throat, "... my very good friend here."


"Words about his concern for his idea being stolen, about his art, buffoon."


"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know."


She slashed long and hard, tearing Groucho's still talking head from his body. "Oh, sure, be that way about it. I mean, I've heard about some of the things you did to get a-head in Hollywood, but ...."


I saw Marlene's eyes and shouted, "Groucho, if not for you, then for me, will you please shut up!"


"Oh, well since you asked so nice. Oh, and about your worry for someone stealing
your joke -"


"Story," Marlene and I both said at once.


"Whatever. No one can tell your joke like you, boy-o. Your little twists, your little asides. And in telling it over and over, you get a better sense of what works and what doesn't. So don't worry about someone stealing your joke, kid. Only you can tell it your way."


"Thanks, Groucho. I never thought about it like that."


Marlene smiled at me. I would have been more charmed if she weren't holding Groucho's eyebrow-lifting head at the same time. "And remember, Liebling, great stories have great scenes."


She winked slyly at me. "If it detracts from the flow of the story it is not a great scene. It is ... how do they say it now? Yes, it is a speed-bump."


Groucho muttered, "I need my own body under me right now. Then, could I have your body under me?"


She began to walk into the darkness, taking Groucho's head but leaving his body. "I have always said, Julian, that you are a no-body. And now, I prove it."


She disappeared as Groucho squawked, and I called out after her, "Oh, come on, Marlene."


"For you, Liebling," her words whispered right into my ear, and Groucho's body disappeared.


I leaned back in my chair and let out a long sigh. Gypsy stuck her head out, checking if the coast was clear. Suddenly, her eyes narrowed, and she hissed, ducking back under my bed again.

A plush leather chair was next to mine. Cigar smoke tickled my nose. The deep aroma of an expensive cigar. A stout figure appeared in the chair. My goosebumps began to skate along my shivers.

Not him, too?

Ever have one of those nights?

End of Part One
*******************
And here are some of Groucho's better moments :