GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 20_WHEN THE FOX PREACHES

{“When the fox preaches, look to your geese.

Old German proverb – Marlene Dietrich.}

{You would think sheer terror would be beyond a ghost. Try a day as one, and you’ll find out different.

Samuel Clemens here.

When we last left Roland, he was facing off against the one I wrote of as The Mysterious Stranger.

Back at the nexus between realities, the jazz club called Meilori’s, Roland had just succeeded in totally angering a being whose merest look could kill.

A being who is wearing a copy of Roland’s own body. Let Roland take it from here.}

Meilori’s interior became shimmering and wavy as the heat rising from the desert floor. The nexus had changed our surroundings. Dancers, swaying to the steps of a tango, swirled around us.

On a raised dais that wasn’t there before, a lean, angular Grace Jones was singing “Strange, I’ve Seen That Face Before” in soft muted tones.

Our audience was unchanged though. DayStar turned his back on me, walking to the front rank of his listeners, going from me to them, their eyes getting wider by the second. He kept on speaking.

Marlene shimmered on one side of me, Mark Twain on the other. She looked from me to DayStar. "Oh, no, Liebling! The Adversary of All Life."

I shook my head. "Maybe or maybe that’s just his press release. I think he’s really just his own worst enemy. Everything else is just a means to the end of destroying himself."

Mark Twain looked intensely at me. "Do you know what you are doing, Roland?"

"Me? Hell, I’m just making this up as I go along."

"It is a dangerous way to combat The Mysterious Stranger."

"It does have the advantage of making it hard for my enemies to predict what I will do, when I don’t even know that myself."

Marlene clutched my upper right arm so tightly it hurt. "No physical weapon can harm him."

I shook my head. "Not going to use physical weapons."

Mark Twain scoffed, "What are you going to use? Harsh language?"

I nodded. "In a manner of speaking."

"Experience life," said DayStar in my voice from my face to the puzzled customers,

"do what is in the natural order, and do not worry about outcome. What is outcome but ripples? And what are ripples but the flowing of natural order?"

Marlene muttered, "I have read better fortune cookies."

I sighed, "He’s putting his own slant to the Bhagavad Gita."

Mark Twain raised an eyebrow."You have read that?"

"I always try to prove the opposite of what I believe. It makes my mind the sharper for doing it."

DayStar gestured hypnotically and graceful in the air with an exact copy of my right hand.

"Recognize sorrow as of the essence. When there is mind, there is sorrow, so empty the mind. We cannot rid the world of sorrow, but we can choose to live in joy."

A frail jackel-headed woman called out, "How can we do that?"

DayStar turned to her. "You must kill your god. If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go."

I walked right up to him. "What a load of crap, DayStar."

There was a hush of sucked in breath as the crowd saw two of me in front of them. There was loud mutterings as they spotted Marlene and Mark on either side of me.

DayStar turned slowly and sneered with my lips. "Ah, Avalokiteshvara, I wondered when you would care to show up to protect your flock."

"Roland. Just Roland. And like I said before : what a load of crap."

"Crap to you but wisdom to them since it allows them to do as they please."

He smiled wide. "Did you know that the Avalokiteshvara is nearly always pictured flanked by two spirits called Taras, personifications of the tears of the Bodhisattva’s eyes?

Tara is Hindu for star, like the Sun and Moon that convinced that silly little French girl you were the Dagda as you twirled that useless saber."

He turned to the puzzled, uncomfortable crowd. "See? The rational mind exists in opposites. Love and hate. For you see, his sword is actually a benevolent instrument, clearing the way for growth."

"Another load of crap," I sighed.

I locked eyes with an exact duplicate of mine. "Hate is just nature’s way to make room for love, huh? Kill your god? And replace him with what? Rational thought?

I shook my head. “But then, you say the way to remove sorrow is to remove thought. But the only way to do that fully is death, right? That’s what kindergarten teachers call a circular argument, DayStar."

"Indeed? And what is your alternative, Just Roland?"

"Life."

"Rather simplistic, if I may say so."

I nodded to him, unnerved by seeing my own eyes looking back at me. "You pride yourself in being ultimate evil."

"Do I?"

"Among other things. But let’s take evil since you take such pride in it. Evil cannot create. It can only pervert what is."

"Like I perverted your precious Rafferty."

"Which my two friends and I have changed."

I watched the other me shrug his shoulders. "It will just give me another chance to be more creative."

I sucked in a breath and let it out slow. "Evil can pervert, but only life can create, so life is greater than evil."

"Is that what you say to console yourself in my darkness?"

I shook my head again. "Darkness can only blanket what is. But one spark will push back that blackness. So light is greater than the darkness."

"I could kill you right here, right now."

My mouth going dry, I nodded. "Yet, death can only kill what is and nothing more. But what if all life died? Then, death would be no more. Death needs life to exist. But life goes on without death. So life is greater than death."

"You speak as if you actually knew."

"Thanks to my two friends besides me I do."

I turned to the white-lipped crowd. "Death is but a doorway to yet more life. I know. Like you, I feared death until my two friends here entered my world. Then, I saw it for what it was. I saw what lies beyond what you think is real."

I locked eyes with each of them in turn. "So the mind is greater than sorrow, than fear, than death, for it lives beyond their reach if it so chooses."

DayStar, wearing my body, walked to within two feet of me. "Now, you die."

I pulled myself up tall, tightening my stomach against the coming pain. "And when you kill me, you'll prove me right in their eyes."

My own face glaring at me got uglier than I thought my face could get. "This is my punishment ... I will let you live to suffer what lies ahead."

His face became his own. “We will meet again. And when we do … there will be flames.”

And he was gone. But his cold laughter remained behind him.
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CHAPTER TWELVE : GHOSTS ARE JUST THE DEAD ON HOLIDAY (Also my entry in Donna's MILESTONE Blogfest)

(Check out Donna Hole's Milestone Blogfest http://donnahole.blogspot.com/2010/06/milestones-blogfest.html)

{"I have a rendezvous with Death,
At some disputed barricade ...."
- Alan Seeger.}

They glared at me. But Marlene's and Mark's little tricks with their bodies and pistols had made them leery of getting closer.

They started circling me slowly and clumsily. I went deep within myself, tapping into Marlene's spirit. I moved, yet not I, but her.

My steps became the graceful flow of Marlene's dancer body merged with the predator coiled readiness of the stunt-trained actress.

Rafferty whispered to her mother, "He moves just like the lions Papa told me about."

Gabrielle whispered back, "Kitten, evil usually wins unless good is very, very good."

Jussac laughed, "And this boy is not that good."

Marlene shimmered beside him, "The fear in thy eyes betrays thee, coward. Almost as much as thy clumsy feet."

Rafferty cried out, "Dogs, the Dagda has never been beaten. Never! Now, you'll get yours."

Their faces hardened, and my stomach tightened. I was using borrowed talent. How far would that take me? I had only fenced in the midst of a pitched battle with Marlene by my side.

Now, there was only one target. Me. No distractions. No room to bob and weave. Five of them against one of me. Really bad odds.

They closed in further on me. I circled as if in some lethal dance.

The five of them and I were moving slowly, fluidly to the step of music only I could hear. They were making the mistake Sun Tzu had warned about, letting your opponent guide your attack. You let him do that, you were handing him your head, both of them.

Marlene was dancing beside them, unnerving the killers. She laughed at their unease. She called out to me.

"Watch their eyes, Liebling. See that Jussac? He is the one that will start the attack, although the brutish one is the leader.

First, take out the leader, then, and only then, take out Jussac. The rest will be unnerved and without a head to direct them.

Their fear will slow their attacks, give you the time to be the boy scout you feel compelled to be. Take care, my love."

Mark Twain appeared beside me, a steel edge to his voice, "Leave it to the Valkyrie to focus on the flour and omit the leaven.

Their eyes are only one thing you must watch. The muscles in their necks, son ... where their ears join their heads. Both will tense when they are about to attack. The ears will seem to go slightly higher and to the back just before they lunge at you.

The left-handed Jussac, his neck will twitch on the left side before that happens. When his neck twitches, strike at that ox of a leader. He will not be expecting it. Then, turn will all your speed and face the treacherous stab at your back. It will be a low-line thrust. I have seen it in his mind. You can take them, son. You can because we will be with you."

It was plain that the taunting advice of my ghost friends wasn't mean to guide my actions but to unnerve my attackers. Time to add to it.

"There will come soft rains," I said quietly, though it cut across the stillness of this afternoon of death.

"What?," snarled the rat-faced Guard who stood slightly behind Jussac.

"And the smell of the ground, and swallows circling with their shimmering sound."

The heavy-set Guard who moved like a horse sneered, "A poet. I haven't killed a poet since last week."

I ignored him as I was speaking for Rafferty and the guards’ distraction. "Robins will wear their feathery fire, whistling their whims on a low fence wire."

The lean wolf of a Guard to my right was about to step atop a large tree root. Biting her lower lip from the strain, Marlene moved the root with a flick of her boot toe. Not finding support where he supposed it to be, he stumbled to the ground in an awkward sprawl.

Jussac snapped, "Bernajoux, you dolt! Even the lumbering Treville would have seen that root. Get up!"

As he hastily scrambled to his feet, Marlene pulled a vine around his neck and yanked. He yelped, struggling. Marlene kept adding vines around his neck. It took long moments as sweat beaded her brow and the man’s face darkened.

He cried out for help, but the others saw Marlene motion to them mockingly. They kept their distance. He finally strangled to death.

I kept on, "And not one will know of this fight, not one will care at last when it is done."

They glared at me as I fluidly moved with speed that came from the ghost of a dancer and a trained athlete, speed that they had no chance to equal with two left feet. Not that I cared.

They were killers, their eyes as dead as their souls, as their victims.

I finished, "Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, if Mankind perished utterly. And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, would scarcely know that we had gone."

I ended with a figure eight flourish of my borrowed sword.

Gabrielle called out, "He is playing with you, dogs. Run home to your master, Richelieu, if you would live. The Dagda is not known for his mercy."

Jussac growled, "I have never run from a fight before. I will not run now."

"Good," snapped Gabrielle, a pistol in each hand.

They were two from the stack of pistols Mark Twain had placed at her feet. She shot Jussac in the forehead. She fired again, and Rat Face clutched at his bullet-ruined throat.

The gray beard lunged for Gabrielle as she bent down to pick up two other pistols. I was too far away to help her. She was going to be too late. She wasn’t going to be able to reach the pistols in time. The afternoon sun struck fire from the Guardsman's long blade.

Mark Twain cried out, "No! I lost my little Susy. I lost my Olivia. And I could do nothing. Nothing! I will not stand by and see a child lose her mother! I won't!"

His hands grabbed the sword wrist of Grey Beard. His fingers flowed through the man’s skin. Mark Twain’s face went ill. Sweat beaded his forehead like drops on an iced mug.

And though he was no longer in Meilori's, no longer possessed of a body with substance,

still his grief and love for his lost wife and daughter was such that they scorned such a concept as impossible.

Laughed at it.

Mark Twain’s jaws bunched as if he were trying to crush stones with his teeth, and his face grimaced as if he were having a stroke.

Impossible suddenly did not exist for Mark Twain at that moment.

Only a hand that must not kill a mother and child existed for my friend.

He squeezed with fingers given the weight of love and loss and seized Grey Beard's sword wrist, bringing it up in a slashing movement across the Guardsman’s throat.

"That for daring to be filth!"

And one more attacker was dead on the bloody ground. The leader's eyes flicked to his fallen comrades on the grass and hanging dead from the tree branch.

"Rouen!," cried out Gabrielle to the man.

A loud explosion made me jump. His head snapped back, a round hole appearing between his eyes. I turned around. Gabrielle held one smoking pistol straight out.

"For Rafferty."

She fired again with the other pistol, dropping the remaining guardsman.

"For Peter," she husked.

I spun around. Ruoen was falling limp to the ground. The other guardsman slumped beside him, another round hole between his eyes. I sighed. All my efforts to avoid killing, and still, people had died. I looked at Gabrielle's tortured eyes. Not that they hadn't had it coming.

I looked at Rafferty's suddenly alarmed face. It had suddenly hit her what her mother had said.

"P-Papa's dead?"

Mark Twain slowly walked over to her. "There is no dead, Rafferty. See me? See the pretty Ice Queen? We're both dead."

She whispered, "But I can see you."

"We're ghosts, girl. Ghosts are just the dead on holiday, don't you know."

"Papa will come to see me?"

Marlene bent on her other side. "If you're a good little girl, he might. He just might."

"Oh, I'll be the best little girl there is!"

Tears filling Gabrielle's eyes, she mussed her daughter's wild hair. "We'll see how long that will last."

Treville, of the wounded foot, glared at me as I approached him.

"Do your worst, devil. I am not without resources."

"Yeah, name three."

He reached inside his tunic, and not wanting to gamble he was bluffing, I slashed his cheek deep and whispered, "Dancing Feet."

"Dancing where?," asked Marlene.

"Back to Paris and his master."

"Done. And I will add itching flesh to busy his fingers."

Treville suddenly stiffened and twisted about like a living puppet being yanked up and about the landscape.

He screamed at the pain of dancing on his shot foot. He yelled curses over his shoulder as he scratched as if fleas of fire were squirming under his skin.

"Nice touch," I winked at Marlene.

She hugged my arm. I almost felt it.

"You should see me with lovers."

Mark Twain coughed and patted Rafferty's head. "Some ghosts need to watch their tongues."

Marlene winked at me. "That's what all my lovers tell me."

Rafferty giggled. She might have been a little girl, but she was still French, after all.

Marlene looked at the sparkle in Rafferty’s eyes and turned her own wet ones to me. “Mission accomplished, Liebling.”
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Some of you have asked how Marlene gained her fencing skills. First, her step-father was a Prussian cavalry officer. Second, she was taught by Hollywood's greatest fencing master, Frederick Cavens, graduate of Belgium's Military Academy :

CHAPTER ELEVEN : THE HEART ASKS HEALING FIRST

{"Life is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked within the safe."
- Peter de Vries.}

As I walked through the heavy darkness, the air around me tingled, and I went stiff.

Mark Twain and Marlene Dietrich materialized on either side of me. “I thought you were back at Meilori’s?”

Marlene laughed sadly. “And had I not linked us earlier, we would, indeed, be trapped there.”

I nodded grimly. “They hadn’t planned on that either.”

Mark Twain frowned, “They who?”

I smiled bitterly. “Exactly.”

Mark looked past me to Marlene. “Can I give him a good swift kick now?”

I arched an eyebrow. “I thought as ghosts you couldn’t touch people.”

Marlene shook her spectral head. “It is impossible to touch flesh. But with great effort , we can touch inanimate objects. Now, Liebling, who are these mysterious others you talk about?”

I shook my own head. “I think I know the why but not the who.”

Mark sputtered, “That did it!”

And he hauled off and kicked me in the butt. I stiffened. I actually felt something.

Marlene smiled as if it hurt her. “Twain did not touch you, Liebchen, only the fabric of your jeans which jostled against your … ah skin.”

Mark grumbled, “I’d have kicked harder if I thought it would get you to that little gal faster, son. She’s not going to be helped by flapping gums.”

The trees were thinning. I slipped my way through the branches and into a small glade. I wasn't noticed. The six Guardsmen in scarlet tunics had other things on their minds.

The woman in a torn dress did, too. As did the struggling little girl. Her dress was still, more or less, whole. I went sick inside.

She was, indeed, the little girl within the older woman back at Meilori's. I smiled as if it were a raw wound. What Toya had meant for evil could possibly come to some good.

I had come back in time to the moment her whole world had been damaged beyond repair. I went colder. Not on my watch.

The mother screamed, "She's only a little girl!"

The tall Guardsman, who held her struggling daughter, leered, "Not for much longer, Gabrielle. I'll introduce her to the joys of womanhood."

"Mama!"

"Rafferty!," screamed the woman, who fought helplessly against the three men who held her, while caressing her body.

The other two Guardsmen started towards the mother, then studied their comrades already there, and finally strolled over to the poor struggling young girl. Less competition obviously. Hell had definitely come to France.

I walked slowly out into the open. "Now, I know why all of you have beards. You can't bear to look at yourselves in the mirror to shave."

It was as if I had spoken a magic spell and frozen them to the spot.

Rafferty, showing the spunk of her father, bit the hand of the Guard who held her and broke free. She broke the spell, and the Guard started after her. I raised her father's sword in my left hand and spoke loud.

"Not so fast there, Sparky."

Rafferty trembled and seemed to vibrate, filled with the need to run away and the need to run to her mother. The poc-scarred face of the Guard went hard. I smiled.

A lesser man would have had every opening in his body shrink to the size of a pepper seed. Ah, actually, I fully expected to be constipated for months ... if I survived, which didn't seem likely.

"Who the hell are you?," the child-molesting guard asked.

"Who do I have to be to stop cowards?"

Rafferty, her pale face going even whiter, whispered, "The Dagda. You are the Dagda."

I must have looked my question, for Gabrielle husked, "My husband was Irish, always filling her head with tales of the son of Elatha, married to both the Sun and Moon."

I winked at the girl, "Well, the ghost I'm with some consider to be both the Moon and the Sun."

Rafferty hushed, "You are courting a ghost?"

And with that, Marlene shimmered beside me. She still wore the Prussian cavalry uniform. She made a graceful bow. The little girl giggled.

The would-be child molester laughed, "I fear no ghost, fool. Did she teach you to fence?"

I raised the blade with my left hand in a fluid gesture that shocked me in its grace. "Actually, she did."

The short, burly man caressing Gabrielle's breast barked, "Enough prattle. Treville, shoot him!"

The child molester pulled his pistol. It was something Mark Twain had obviously been expecting. He reached down to grab the trigger of the pistol. Then, with a grimace of intense effort, Mark pulled that trigger.

The gun went off. The bullet slammed home into the pervert's foot. Squealing like a shot horse, he fell to the ground, clutching his red-smeared foot.

Gabrielle used their shock to break loose. She ran to Rafferty, the two of them hugging and crying silently. I walked forward, and threw her husband's sword to her. She caught it deftly. I smiled at her.

"The first one who comes at you, run him through."

Her blue eyes flashed under her blond hair. "I will."

Jussac grunted, "That still leaves five of us against one of you."

"I know. That makes you outnumbered. But I didn't force you to be shit-eating dogs. You chose that path yourselves."

Jussac snapped, "To Hell with this. Shoot him!"

As Jussac shouted, Marlene frowned, her fists clenching with effort. The saber flew from my hand and soared through the air to slash the cheeks of each of the five swordsmen. And my written curse took effect.

Their fingers became short, stubby thumbs. The pistols fell from their clumsy hands to the grass. Marlene staggered.

The saber came at me hilt over blade, and I barely caught it before it slashed my throat. Obviously, the strain had weakened her.

Mark busily collected the pistols, chuckling like an evil woodchuck. He walked briskly to Gabrielle and dumped them at her feet.

The remaining Guardsmen started for the woman but stumbled as they discovered they literally had two left feet. They pulled up short and stared disbelieving at their pistols then at their betraying feet.

"I hope you guys can keep better hold of your swords, or this will be no challenge at all."

Rafferty giggled, "He's funny."

Mark Twain winked at her. "That's what all the ghosts say about him."

Rafferty gasped, "Ghosts?"

Marlene smiled like a goddess. "Yes, even the Moon and the Sun say so."

Rafferty spun my way. "You are the Dagda!"

Jussac pulled his sword awkwardly, along with the others, and said, "And we are the best swordsmen in France."

"Were the best swordsmen in France. Now, I doubt if you can even keep a grip on those swords."

They snarled. And moving as one, they twirled their blades as if their fingers were not thumbs. Hell, they still were the five deadliest swordsmen in France. They smiled as they closed in on me.

Rafferty laughed as they cursed at their pigeon-toed gait. Jussac twirled his sword in an intricate pattern despite being all thumbs. I shook my head. No doubt about it. This was going to be weirdest sword fight in all of France.
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