GHOST IN THE NIGHT_prelude to GHOST OF A CHANCE

Before GHOST OF A CHANCE ...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0097Z99YM

there was a ghost in the night.

It was that moment between waking and dream. I was sitting on my apartment terrace. The night spoke to me in its velvet silence.

Owl happily was not speaking my name. He perched on the cypress branch opposite me, studying me as I was admiring him.

Brother raccoon scurried in the bushes below, carrying some prize in his front right paw.

My cat, Gypsy, twitched her tail on the window sill, the mysteries of ages whispering in her half-closed, green eyes.

My own eyes were heavy. Too many miles driven. Too few hours slept.

I put the period to the last sentence of my blog post about Marlene Dietrich with the troops in the front lines during WWII :

**
One afternoon after VE Day, she was walking through a little French village. All around her was rubble, and she couldn't understand why -- all the buildings along the street were still standing with curtains blowing frilly and snapping clean-crisp in their windows.

Then, she looked through one of the windows to see that there was nothing behind it. The fronts of the buildings were still standing, but everything behind them had been destroyed. There wasn't a single living person past the false fronts of those caricature buildings.

Only one lone doll lay forlorn in the rubbled middle of nothing.

With her face cupped in trembling hands, she stood in front of that window, weeping silently, refusing to be comforted ...

"... for there is no comfort for the dead," she whispered.

***
Beside me a husky voice intoned, "Keine Komfort für die Toten."

I went cold and still, sliding my eyes as far to the right as they could go without moving my head. My mouth became salt.

Marlene Dietrich.

In a frilly black night wrap and not much else.

She was perched over the top of a wavering, insubstantial leather chair like a cougar ready to strike.

"You write so beautifully of me. Why?"

"Y-You were brave, selfless -- entertaining the troops on the front lines with a death sentence from Hitler on your head."

I cleared my fear-thick throat. "People have forgotten that."

She reached out and stroked my cheek with chill fingers of mist.

"It is not important for the world to remember me -- only that I did not forget myself when I was needed."

"And words like that are why I write of you."

Marlene fluffed my hair with ghost fingers. It tickled.

"Do you know what they call you in the ShadowLands, liebling?"

"N-No."

"Sänger von Träumen -- DreamSinger."

"I - I don't understand."

Her ice blue eyes hollowed. "One day you will."

In ghost whispers, she murmured, "Death and love."

"What?"

"I thought I knew them, liebchen. I was so sure. I died. Then, I saw life with new eyes."

She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly sparkling. "See you in your dreams, liebling."

And like a cloud robbing me of sunlight, Marlene was gone. I was alone. Well, not quite.

Gypsy was in my lap, yawning. It takes a lot to shake up the granddaughter of Bast.
***
GHOST OF A CHANCE is #41 on AMAZON'S 100 Best Selling Angel Novels. LIKE it on its Amazon's page for Marlene, will you?
***

DEATH and MADNESS

{"Men of broader intellect know
that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal."

- H. P. Lovecraft.}


Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this : my imagination was too stunted,

my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life,

and that our vain presence on this terraqueous globe is itself

the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.


Then, what brings me to Roland's blog?


I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens, Raymond Chandler, Will Rogers, and Ernest Hemingway (all heavily armed) made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful,

for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, ghost."
***
So I am here. Why did I come? I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates

into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the

fragmentary impressions of wonder which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve the
illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

As to how I write a story - there is no one way. The following set of rules might be deduced from my average procedure :

1.) Prepare a chronological order of events.

2.) Prepare the narrative order of those events if you are beginning in the middle or the end.

3.) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically.

4.) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties, and convincingness of transitions.

5.) One last note : Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion.

Imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail

which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion
of the strange reality of the unreal.

Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning

apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.

**And so now I ask you again :

Did you pick your genre, or did it pick you?

Why has this genre captured you?

Do you have a blueprint you follow when you write your story or novel? Let me know. The remnant of humanity still clinging to me is interested.

And remember :

"Pleasure is wonder —

the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral;

the past in the present; the infinite in the finite;

these are to me the springs of delight and beauty."
***
Now, Clemens would have me insert this photo to keep a pledge to Laila Knight. Since, I, in my own way, am an old world gentleman. Here it is :

***

MARK TWAIN, ghost_HOW I FIRST MET MARLENE DIETRICH

{“I have heard it said that truth is mighty and will prevail.

There is nothing wrong with this … except that it ain’t so.”
Mark Twain.}

Samuel Clemens here. His ghost really. I can’t rightly call myself the ghost of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was my pen-name. And isn’t a pen-name a ghost of sorts? Whoever heard of a ghost of a ghost?

I decided to spell poor Roland from going into that dang-blamed oven of an apartment. Now, let's see if I remember how to use this blamed contraption called a laptop, of all things!

In this terrible heat, I look at these teeny tiny keys then, like some misty rose, I see the face of my brother, Henry,

whose seared hand I held as he died from those terrible burns from that steamboat explosion.

The damnable explosion that I had dreamt in detail a whole month earlier.

It was then I realized that life was more than I had supposed.

No, I realized that the night when I first met Roland and Marlene Dietrich in my nightmare at the age of twelve …

in the Shadowlands. For you see, time is fluid and strange in that dark place.

Shadowlands you ask. You’ve seen them, too. Yes, you have.

That flicker of movement out of the corner of your eye. You turn cat-quick to catch it clear, saying it couldn’t possibly be what you thought.

And it wasn’t. It was worse. Worse than you could possibly imagine.

The Shadowlands are not Dreamtime, though they are connected, usually by the bridge of nightmare.

Roland’s mother could walk them, as could her Lakota grandmother. But only Roland is called a Name in them :

DreamSinger.

He who sings to life dreams … and nightmares.

It was in a nightmare that I first met Roland. I was alive then, for the dead do not dream. I was twelve years old and caught up in the hunt. I was not hunting. I was being hunted … by the spirits of my vengeful and dead sister and brother.

What to write of those times? They burn in me, and they keep me up at night. But now they can never be said. Besides, they would require a library and a pen warmed up in Hell.

As with most dreams, I will start this one in the middle :


It was night. It was Missouri. But not Hannibal.

It was the almost invisible village of Florida. It was a scrawny pup of a place. Only two streets, each but a hundred yards long. The rest of the pathways would be paved with tough black mud in winter, rain or thick dust in summer. I had been born there.

The skies were blood. The clouds rolling billows of fire.

Those sermons my mother had dragged me to were surely making an impression on my nightmare. I almost expected the chariot with the struggling figure of Elijah to come streaking across such a night’s sky.

The rumble of summer thunder echoed overhead. A wolf’s howl pierced the shadows with its mournful wail.

I tried to bolster my wavering courage. “N-Now, Sammy, that there’s just an hungry old wolf. That ain’t no omen of death. No, it surely --”

An unseen owl hooted. “Oh, Lord! I didn’t mean no harm to Bennie. I surely didn’t.”

And then behind me, I heard a deep voice like a happy stream. “These woods sure are a little scary, huh?”

I whipped about. And that was the first time I saw Roland. Lord, his eyes. The memory of them haunts me still.

They seemed to have seen all the pain in the world and felt most of it personal and close-up. Dressed in a strange black shirt I later learned was called “T,” jeans, and boots, he winked at me.

I winked back. “Little? Why these woods are humongous scary.”

And I relaxed just like that. He was a friend. I could just tell. And with the foolish trust of a twelve year old, I stuck out my hand. “Name’s Sammy. What’s yours?”

“Why, it's Roland. Good to meet you, Sammy. Are those spooks over there friends of yours?”

“S-Spooks?”

I whipped around so fast I left my smile in the air behind my head. And there they were : my dead sister and brother.

Their wispy figures of black mist flowed to my right. I felt my face go tight. They were apparitions from the spirit world.

No, not the spirit world you might be thinking of, but the spirit world each of us carries deep within the dark of our souls, the prison for our mistakes and those regrets they give birth to.

They were giggling, a hungry, soulless sound, and I made my throat work,

“Benjamin. Margaret. You leave me be.”

“What he said,” laughed Roland.

I turned to him. Why in tarnation was he laughing? Couldn’t he see they was about to make a meal of me?

He pulled out a battered pad of paper from his jeans pocket and looked over to me.
“There is power in words, Sammy.” (And that sentence of his changed my whole life. Although at the time, I did not realize their impact.)

Margaret and Benjamin both bent in unnatural ways as they turned and glided towards Roland, but only my sister spoke, revealing tiny, needled teeth. “Lakota, you have no hold on us.”

Roland just chuckled, bending towards me so that I could see what he was writing :

“And Margaret and Benjamin were caught up in the winds of forgiveness never to bother Sammy ever again.”

A keening moan hollowed from my right. I looked to where my sister and brother had been. They were gone. I turned to Roland like I had been whalloped in the head by a mule’s hooves.

“H-How did you do that?”

“I think it has something to do with my Lakota blood.”

“What blood?”

“Lakota Sioux Indian.”

“You’re an Injun medicine man?”

“Sort of. What I write sometimes comes to pass in dreams.”

“Only sometimes? Then, why was you laughing just now?”

“I always laugh when I’m scared spitless.”

“Now, you tell me!”

I edged closer to him. “You mean you could write anything down there and it might happen right now?”

He nodded. “Oh, sure. I could write : the most beautiful woman in the world flows out of the night mist and falls in love with Roland. But I won’t.”

“Why in tarnation not?”

“Being selfish with your gifts always turns out bad somehow.”

“Really?,” husked a woman from out of the fog that flowed in billows to our left.

We both jumped a foot up in the air, and the most beautiful apparition of beauty I had ever seen glided up to us. A long gown of gleaming satin, as alabaster as the moon’s face, clung to her so that even the twelve year old boy I was started to come to attention in certain places.

“I – I didn’t write anything down,” stammered Roland.

“What a strange dream this is,” she smiled, sending tingles all through me.

She looked down at the shaking page in Roland’s hand and lightly tapped them. “Does this mean you see me as the most beautiful woman in the world? I, who you have never before seen?”

And Roland said, “All men have seen you in the lonely corner of their hearts. Only a very few are lucky enough to ever meet you – even in dreams.”

Years later, when we were both ghosts, Marlene Dietrich confided in me that was the very moment she fell in love with Roland. But right then, her eyes just got deeper. Then, she faded away with the night mist.

I looked up at him. “Does this sort of stuff happen to you a lot?”

He smiled a sad, crooked grin . “All the time.”

And that is the face which comes to me whenever I think of Roland. It comes to me now that in my heart, he is my brother, Henry, given back to me.
***

FALLEN IS THE NAME I CHOSE_SO LET ME FALL

The most memorable heroes or heroines you have ever met were archetypes.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that these archetypes were the result of a collective unconscious.

This collective unconscious was not directly knowable and is a product of the shared experiences of our ancestors.

If we can tap into the collective unconscious with our heroine, then we will stir the hearts of our readers on the unconscious level, insuring that all important reader identification.

Fallen, the heroine in this blog of late is the archetype, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" :

“... darkness yet in light, To live a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but O yet more miserable! My self, my Sepulcher.”

John Milton {“Samson Agonistes.”}



LET ME FALL

"Let me fall,

Let me climb,

There is a moment when fear

And dream must collide."



I am the last of my race. I am Tuatha de Danann. And, no, human, that does not mean elf, or fae, or damned. I take that last back. I am damned.


"Someone I am

Is waiting for courage,

The one I want,

The one I will become,

Will catch me."


I have no memories of my youth. Youth. The word is a mockery to me.

Though I look a young woman, I have lived centuries which I do remember. I remember when the sphinx had a nose,

when the pyramids were caressed by shimmering limestone,

and when courage and honor were not hollow words.

Yes, that long ago do I remember.


"Let me fall,

If I fall,

Though the phoenix

May or may not rise."


Then how do I even know I am Tuatha de Danann? The knowledge sings to me from the depths of my spirit in the night.


Its melody mocks with teasing glimpses of a time long gone, yet unborn.


"I will dance so freely,

Holding on to no one;

You can hold me only

If you, too, will fall

Away from all your

Useless fears and chains."


How do I know I am Sidhe? It is the face which mocks me from the mirror.

High cheekbones which seem intent on bursting up and out of flesh which shimmers as if coated with stardust.

A living waterfall of honey-wheat hair, looking more like a lion's mane than any other earthly term I could use.

Large, slanted fae eyes, chilling even me with their lack of warmth or mercy.


"So let me fall,

If I must fall,

There is no reason

To miss this one chance

This perfect moment;

Just let me fall."


But enough about me. What do you think about me? On second thought, do not tell me.

What care I what humans think of me? But I lie. I do care. At least about what one human thinks of me.


Roland Yeomans. DreamSinger. He is Lakota fairy tale come to life. He is the shaman who sings dreams to life. And he will tell me my beginnings or die.



"So let me fall,

If I must fall,

I won't heed your warnings;

I won't hear them."



My mind is churning with images humans could not comprehend as I sway up the steps of the Art Nouveau house,

that is just one of the doorways into Roland’s psyche.

Just its name alone is punishment to think, much less speak : Jugendstilhaus in der Ainmillerstrabe.

Once it had been the home of the infamous Countess Franziska zu Reventlow,

her erotic lifestyle and cosmic nonsense had inspired and broken the hearts of an entire generation in Munich.

Now it has to settle for being the most elite restaurant in the city.

No knocking on the door. This restaurant is much too elite for that. Only a rare electronic key will work … a key based on the silicon ingrams of Roland’s own brain.

I have mine in my longer than human fingers. Roland had sung this establishment into being along with most of Munich back when he used the pen name, The Brothers Grimm.

I slide the key through the black slot whose color matches my short-skirted version of a S.S. uniform.

True, I am some seventy years out of date. But what is seventy years to a Tuatha de Danann?

A mere hiccup in time.

I remember Wagner trying to teach me German ... among other things. I go cold inside. I remember too much, feel too little.

I enjoy the glares of the pompous patrons as I roll my hips to the back table reserved for DreamSinger alone.

The maitre d' nearly breaks his neck getting to me, but I am already seated, making sure my short skirt is hiked up suitably indecent to induce doomed desire.

He stands trembling over me as I take out my copy of The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul by old Ludwig Klages from my skirt pocket.

I am almost through with his nonsense. Seeing how close he can come to the truth, while stumbling right past it always makes me chuckle.

The maitre d' isn't close to chuckling. "Fraulein, you simply cannot wear that uniform in here!"

"Sure I can. What is the matter? Afraid those power brokers to our right will find out your grandfather wore this uniform for real?"

He spins around so fast he leaves an after-image. Roland clears his throat across the table from me.

“He cannot help his past.”

I study this strange man. His eyes. Damn, his eyes. They look as if they have seen all the pain in the world … and have felt most of it.

“I’m tired of this dancing, DreamSinger. Who am I?”

Roland looks truly surprised. “I thought you knew. You are La Belle Dame sans Merci .”

"Is that my name or my nature?"

"Both."

I sit back in my chair. I had been right, after all. I am damned.

***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 43_I ALWAYS COLLECT MY DEBTS

Still sprawled on Meilori's carpet with Marlene half-reclining on me,

I leaned on my left shoulder to look at the monster I had only read about.

To say that the years had not been kind would have been an understatement.

He was sitting at a glowing table, pointing a luger at Marlene. Beside him sat Eva Braun. She was still beautiful ...

in a clammy, undead sort of way.

She was almost wearing a low-cut red evening gown of flimsy silk. Its neckline plunged so that her breasts were almost slipping out as she leaned forward on the glowing table at me. But believe it or not, I wasn't looking at her breasts.

Ah, alright, maybe a little. But it were her pale blue eyes that bothered me. They made the Cheshire Cat's look sane. She leaned even more forward so that any second I was sure one of us was going to get embarrassed.

And I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be her.

But it was Hitler that shook me. He pointed the luger at me as I took the fallen dagger in my right hand. I smiled crooked. What with the Eva's breasts, that made three dangerous weapons pointed at me.

Hitler looked more withered corpse than anything human.
But what was terrifying were the vibrating cables running from the metal pump on his back to his twitching neck.

They were clear so that I could see the red, bubbling liquid pumping into his neck. I watched in horrified fascination as his neck muscles spasmed as the red liquid turned green as it went from the right side of his neck to the left.

That explained why he was still alive. The chandelier's lights striking fire from Eva's long sharp canines explained her long existence.

He sneered at me. "It was never about you, Amerikaner."

The luger shifted to point at Marlene's head. "I put a death sentence on your head, traitor. And I always collect my debts."

He smiled wide. "I had to lure you here to Meilori's where you could die the final death."

He croaked that damn laugh of his. "I found that just a few drops of the liquid in my pump paralyzes ghosts. From there, it was just a matter of having Strasser bait you with those Havana cigars, treated with my liquid, to have this Amerikaner fool framed for Hemingway's 'murder.'"

Eva giggled, "His only refuge would be here ... where you could be killed, traitor."

Marlene spat on the carpet. "Dreck!"

Eva husked, "You are the filth, whore. My love offered you the world to make films for Mother Germany. And you pranced naked before the American troops."

Marlene smiled impishly. "Only for the most fortunate of their generals, Hündin."

Hitler growled, "I think I shall gut-shoot you, Dirne."

He nodded to Death, calmly watching all of us. "See, traitor? Death knows she will soon be needed."

As Hitler had been insulting Marlene, I had pulled up the scortched edge of my T-shirt and plowed a long gash along my side. Blood dribbled out. I was just finishing the fourth word when Hitler turned the luger to me.

"You have written your last, swine."

I edged back to let Marlene see what I had written : "Hemingway appears behind Hitler."

And no sooner had she read the words with wide eyes, Hemingway shimmered right behind the zombie.

"Fuck you, Hitler!"

He took hold of the twin cables from the pump, ripping them from Hitler's neck. He squealed in agony, writhing to the floor. As he fell, great gouts of the putrid liquid splashed onto Eva. She managed a gargled start of a scream before withering away into smoldering corpse.

She fell still beside the moaning mummy Hitler was becoming. Death flowed to them both. "I, too, always collect my debts, ghouls."

She swept her long black cloak around them both and was gone as if she and they had never been there.

Marlene scrambled to her feet as I followed her. "P-Papa? You are alive!"

He nodded as he picked up the luger. "Have been for most of this."

Marlene's face screwed up in sheer fury. "What?"

I said, "Marlene, he saved our lives."

Hemingway pointed the luger right at my heart. "Her life. Not yours."

I heard a heavy thump behind me and an angry yowling. A flash of white and scratched hands blurred by me. Mark Twain slammed a cut-up fist hard into Hemingway's bearded jaw. The man reeled backwards to slam into the carpeted floor and lay still.

Mark Twain chuckled like an evil woodchuck. "I've wanted to do that for years."

He started to turn to me, then whipped about to kick Hemingway's unconscious body. "And damnation, there was nothing wrong with the end of HUCK FINN, you blowhard!"

Marlene sputtered in laughter, "Clemens, what happened to your poor hands?"

He grunted, "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

I whipped around. Gypsy's cat carrier was behind me. She sat glaring at Mark Twain. A massive shiny padlock secured the carrier door.

I turned to Mark. "You padlocked Gypsy in there?"

He laughed, showing me the scratched backs of his hands. "Ain't that the blessed truth!"

Marlene hugged us both. But she kissed me.

A caustic cough sounded to my right. Toya, the manager of Meilori's, who had tried to kill me twice. She was holding a thick package.

"Did you really think you had gotten away scott-free? McCord wants to see you up front."
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 39_WHEN THE STARS DROWN IN DARKNESS

{I am the Turquoise Woman.

Each life ends.

Whether it ends in whimpering

or in courage depends upon the soul facing that end.

It is, in fact, the only true epitaph your kind leaves.

DreamSinger, whom you know as Roland,

has entered the realm some call Hell to rescue Samuel McCord, whom he breathed into life with his words.

Now, riding Epona, the last unicorn, with Death behind him and Lakota Spirit Warriors beside him,

DreamSinger faces what seems to be the end. Let the words from his strange journal take it from here ....}



A distant roar sounded from all around us. Oh, crap.

Bristling along the horizon encircling us, hundreds of lost souls, creatures, and demons charged to replace their slain brothers.

I twisted around towards Death to see if she would scream again.

She sadly shook her head. "We near my Avatar and Samuel. I dare not scream again."

My heart went sick and cold as a familiar voice, DayStar's, laughed to my far right. "Do you know what the third white meat is? Cat!"

I saw only his hands appear out of thin air. They held Gypsy, my cat, her eyes wild with fear.

DayStar's hands hurled her directly in the path of the charging monstrosities of Hell.

She yowled, and I could have sworn it sounded like my name.

I tugged on Epona's mane to head for Gyspy. Death placed a bitter cold hand on my shoulder.

"We cannot turn. My Avatar and Samuel are close."

"Fine!," I snapped. "Have a great trip."

With a grunt of pain, I flipped my leg over Epona's head, scratching it on her razored tusk. I slipped off and hit the ground in a run towards Gypsy.

Sitting Bull yelled after me. "She is just a cat."

"Wrong! She's MY cat."

A minotaur lunged for me. I slashed across his eyes with Marlene's saber that healed. The manbull bleated shrilly.

"I - I was blind. Now, I see."

It shot up startled into the flaming hellsky. Suddenly Death was beside me. She was floating.

"If you insist," she husked and snatched Marlene's saber from my hand.

"Marlene will soon need this."

And Death was gone. Just like that. And I was weaponless ... except for harsh language.

A heavy weight hit me in the back as claws gouged into me. I huffed. Another creature slashed me across the chest. I reeled sideways and shouted in pain.

I grabbed its arm, pulled back on its wrist, slamming the flat of my palm against its elbow as hard as I could. A sword dropped to the ground.

I bent and snatched it up. I looked for Gypsy.

I spotted her. She was moving so fast it was hard to follow.

Sparks flew from her claws as she bounded across the broad chest of a stone golum. She leapt to the werewolf in front of her, ruining its eyes with those same claws.

Never in one spot long, she sped between legs, up furry chests, across massive backs. She yowled in defiance, heading straight for me.

Something big and furry lunged at me. I slashed. It grunted but kept on coming. A razored tusk sprouted from its chest.

Epona reared beside me. "I leave no friend behind."

Gypsy screamed in pain.

I looked to the sound. She was bleeding, holding up her left front leg.

Suddenly, a blur of lightning appeared next to her. Crazy Horse, human-size now, blocked a talon with his hatchet and drove his knife into a scaled chest.

He looked at me with a crooked grin and spoke in Lakota, "If I die for a cat, I will never forgive you."

I realized the other six Sioux Spirit warriors were fighting all around me. Human-size and without lightning bolts, they were having trouble standing their ground.

Gall scowled to my left. "You would die for a cat?"

I bent next to Gypsy, who nuzzled her head against my palm, and said, "I would die for family."

He nodded. "That I understand."

Gypsy growled low, glaring up at the hellsky. I followed her line of sight. Oh, crap.

A sphinx. An honest-to-Cleopatra Sphinx.

Gypsy rose, holding up her injured leg and baring her teeth.

The Sphinx rumbled, "Later, granddaughter of Bast. Your death is mine. I will slay all who would take that from me."

Epona reared, thumped a charging troll in the throat with her two front hooves, and whinnied, "Whatever. Fight now. Threaten later."

In answer, the Sphinx chomped off the troll's head and spat it back out. "Tasted worse than it looked."

I made a face. It had looked pretty bad.

A giant bull-man, wearing human skulls for shoulder decorations, tried to cleave Red Butte in two with a war-ax, only to have it wrested from his grip by the warrior.

Red Butte twirled it and brought it down in a huge blow which split the BullMan's head in two.

Muttering low and harsh, the five Lakota who remained unarmed quickly picked up fallen weapons,

from swords to hatchets to axes as Crazy Horse kneeled next to Gypsy and whispered, "They feed on you only after I am slain."

Slashing at his attackers with hatchet and knife, Sitting Bull yelled at us.
"Form a circle!"

Epona looked a question at me, and I answered it, "The Power of the World always works in circles. All life tries to be round. The sky is round."

I looked up to the fires sweeping across the skies. "Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing -- and always come back again to where they were.

The life of all Two-Leggeds is a circle from childhood to childhood."

I glared at the nearing Darklings, hate raw in their screaming throats. "And so it is in everything where Power moves."

Epona and Sitting Bull yelled as one. "Form a circle!"

And then the Darklings were upon us.

Borrowed shields and short swords, Epona's pounding hooves, Sphinx claws, Lakota ax and hatchets, my own flashing sword --

all were blurs as they met a wave of slashing claws, tearing fangs, and hissing weapons. The sounds of metal grating upon metal, screams, grunts, and curses were all about our small band.

I saw nothing clear, only a flurry of dark bodies leaping at me.

I heard the wet thud of blades sinking into flesh, the whimper of wounded Darklings sinking to the ground.

Clear up my arm, I felt the numbing impact of sword-blocked swords and lunging talons.

Out of the corner of an eye, I saw Burnt Thigh go down with a bloody wound to the side yet stagger back up to his unsteady feet.

But despite the pounding of steel upon steel, the rending of flesh by fang, I and my new friends stood our ground, stood it, and smiled grimly to one another.

And to this day, still do the Lakota sing of this battle over their campfires,

though the dark weighs heavy upon their spirits and the whispers of doubt and fear mock them.

It is a song of courage against despair, of light raging against the coming of night.

And when wounded Time draws her final, faltering breath,

when the moon herself has become blood, and the gasping stars slowly strangle on the darkness,

even then will the Lakota stop in the midst of their Death Song, stand tall, and look to one another and remember --

-- remember when one small, defiant band of noble spirits fought, not for glory, not for land, nor for power -- but for one small life and the bond that one brave heart feels for another.
***
Read the passage that begins "And to this day ..." with the first minute of the following music. I wrote those words to this very tune :

GHOST OF MARK TWAIN HERE_OF LAST RITES AND FIRST MEETINGS {GHOST OF A CHANCE prelude}

{“I have heard it said that truth is mighty and will prevail.

There is nothing wrong with this … except that it ain’t so.”

Mark Twain.}

Samuel Clemens here. His ghost really.

I can’t rightly call myself the ghost of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was my pen-name. And isn’t a pen-name a ghost of sorts? Whoever heard of a ghost of a ghost?

Well, it is near the end of this old bruised year, so I expect it's time to bring you the last few chapters of GHOST OF A CHANCE.

You folks out there think you've been hearing from Roland ...

and you have.

Except it's just ain't houses that sometimes become haunted. It's anything that has become close to the departed like ...

this here contraption ... this laptop.

You've been hearing from Roland right enough ...

I can't seem to put it into words ... like writing it would be make it doubly so.

I can still see Roland’s face … so horribly burned.

And then over his poor face, like some mist, I see the face of my brother, Henry, whose seared hand I held as he died from those terrible burns from that steamboat explosion.

The damnable explosion that I had dreamt in detail a whole month earlier.

It was then I realized that life was more than I had supposed.

No, I realized that the night when I first met Roland and Marlene Dietrich in my nightmare at the age of twelve … in the Shadowlands.

For you see, time is fluid and strange in that dark place.

Shadowlands you ask. You’ve seen them, too. Yes, you have.

That flicker of movement out of the corner of your eye. You turn cat-quick to catch it clear, saying it couldn’t possibly be what you thought.

And it wasn’t. It was worse. Worse than you could possibly imagine.

The Shadowlands are not Dreamtime, though they are connected, usually by the bridge of nightmare.

Roland’s mother could walk them, as could her Lakota grandmother. But only Roland is called a Name in them :

DreamSinger.

He who sings to life dreams … and nightmares.


It was in a nightmare that I first met Roland. I was alive then, for the dead do not dream. I was twelve years old and caught up in the hunt.

I was not hunting. I was being hunted … by the spirits of my vengeful and dead sister and brother.

What to write of those times? They burn in me, and they keep me restless at night.

But now they can never be said. Besides, they would require a library and a pen warmed up in Hell.

As with most dreams, I will start this one in the middle :

It was night. It was Missouri. But not Hannibal.

It was the almost invisible village of Florida.

It was a scrawny pup of a place. Only two streets, each but a hundred yards long. The rest of the pathways would be paved with tough black mud in winter, rain or thick dust in summer. I had been born there.

The skies were blood. The clouds rolling billows of fire.

Those sermons my mother had dragged me to were surely making an impression on my nightmare. I almost expected the chariot with the struggling figure of Elijah to come streaking across such a night’s sky.

The rumble of summer thunder echoed overhead. A wolf’s howl pierced the shadows with its mournful wail.

I tried to bolster my wavering courage. “N-Now, Sammy, that there’s just an hungry old wolf. That ain’t no omen of death. No, it surely --”

An unseen owl hooted. “Oh, Lord! I didn’t mean no harm to Bennie. I surely didn’t.”

And then behind me, I heard a deep voice like a happy, flowing river. “These woods sure are a little scary, huh?”

I whipped about. And that was the first time I saw Roland. Lord, his eyes. The memory of them haunts me still.

They seemed to have seen all the pain in the world and felt most of it personal and close-up. Dressed in a strange black shirt I later learned was called “T,” jeans, and boots, he winked at me.

I winked back. “Little? Why these woods are humongous scary.”

And I relaxed just like that. He was a friend. I could just tell. And with the foolish trust of a twelve year old, I stuck out my hand. “Name’s Sammy. What’s yours?”

“Roland. Good to meet you, Sammy. Are those spooks over there friends of yours?”

“S-Spooks?”

I whipped around so fast I left my smile in the air behind my head. And there they were : my dead sister and brother.

Their wispy figures of black mist flowed to my right. I felt my face go tight. They were apparitions from the spirit world.

No, not the spirit world you might be thinking of, but the spirit world each of us carries deep within the dark of our souls, the prison for our mistakes and those regrets they give birth to.

They were giggling, a hungry, soulless sound, and I made my throat work,

“Benjamin. Margaret. You leave me be.”

“What he said,” laughed Roland.

I turned to him. Why in tarnation was he laughing? Couldn’t he see they was about to make a meal of me?

He pulled out a battered pad of paper from his jeans pocket and looked over to me.

“There is power in words, Sammy.” (And that sentence of his changed my whole life. Although at the time, I did not realize their impact.)

Margaret and Benjamin both bent in unnatural ways as they turned and glided towards Roland, but only my sister spoke, revealing tiny, needled teeth.

“Lakota, you have no hold on us.”

Roland just chuckled, bending towards me so that I could see what he was writing :

“And Margaret and Benjamin were caught up in the winds of forgiveness never to bother Sammy ever again.”

A keening moan hollowed from my right. I looked to where my sister and brother had been. They were gone. I turned to Roland like I had been whalloped in the head by a mule’s hooves.

“H-How did you do that?”

“I think it has something to do with my Lakota blood.”

“What blood?”

“Lakota Sioux Indian.”

“You’re an Injun medicine man?”

“Sort of. What I write sometimes comes to pass in dreams.”

“Only sometimes? Then, why was you laughing just now?”

“I always laugh when I’m scared spitless.”

“Now, you tell me!”

I edged closer to him. “You mean you could write anything down there and it might happen right now?”

He nodded. “Oh, sure. I could write : the most beautiful woman in the world flows out of the night mist and falls in love with Roland. But I won’t.”

“Why in tarnation not?”

“Being selfish with your gifts always turns out bad somehow.”

“Really?,” husked a woman from out of the fog that flowed in billows to our left.

We both jumped a foot up in the air, and the most beautiful apparition of beauty I had ever seen glided up to us.

A long gown of gleaming satin, as alabaster as the moon’s face, clung to her so that even the twelve year old boy I was started to come to attention in certain places.

“I – I didn’t write anything down,” stammered Roland.

“What a strange dream this is,” she smiled, sending tingles all through me.

She looked down at the shaking page in Roland’s hand and lightly tapped them.

“Does this mean you see me as the most beautiful woman in the world? I, whom you have never before seen?”

And Roland said, “All men have seen you before -- in the lonely corner of their hearts. Only a very few are lucky enough to ever meet you – even in dreams.”

Years later, when we were both ghosts, Marlene Dietrich confided in me that was the very moment she fell in love with Roland. But right then, her eyes just got deeper. Then, she faded away with the night mist.

I looked up at him. “Does this sort of stuff happen to you a lot?”

He smiled a sad, crooked grin . “All the time.”

And that is the face I will try to remember. It comes to me now that in my heart, he was my brother, Henry, given back to me.

Roland, I miss you.
***

LOVECRAFT HERE_A HALLOWEEN NIGHT TALE

"West of reason the hills rise wild,

and there are valleys with deep woods that no ax has ever cut or ever will."

- H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft here. Or rather his ghost.

It is Samhain, the Three Spirit Night, and I have chosen to write an article for DreamSinger.

Or rather should I say I was chosen and accepted?

Ah, you say. The ghost of H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, he will tell us if what he wrote was true.

Short-sighted mortals. I dare not say. I can not say.

I will but put forth this :

my imagination was too stunted,
my words too feeble to paint what lies beyond.

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer one,

and that our vain presence on this transitory globe is itself
the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Then, what brings me to Roland's apartment in these midnight hours?

I was wandering Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders,
where many have passed but none returned,

where walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,

and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.

Abruptly, the ghosts of Samuel Clemens and Marlene Dietrich, both heavily armed, (one with wit, the other with her icy beauty)

made their cautious way to me.

And well they should have been careful, for I am no longer altogether ... human.

I watched them from the shadows with some amusement. They stepped warily around shards of marble that thrust up from the misty ground.

The shards gave the illusion of ancient bones of some grotesque corpse protruding from an ill-made grave.

The ruins projected a diseased aura as if the very stones were cursed.

Clemens approached me. "You can roll around in your horrors like they were catnip for all I care, Lovecraft. But you owe Roland."

"Indeed I do. What would you suggest?"

"Write a piece for his ... computer newspaper."

"How quaint. On what exactly, Clemens?"

"Why the blue blazes you chose to write what you did."

"It chose me, Clemens."

"Then, write that. And try to remember what it meant to be human while you're doing it."

I fought down the gibbering darkness. "You are lucky I owe DreamSinger, Clemens."

So I am here.

Why did I come?

I came because of my lost childhood :

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth;

For when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts,

and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

But some of us awake in the night

with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens,

of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas,

of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone,

and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests;

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates
into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

Enough of me. I ask : Did your genre pick you?

I know mine did.

My reason for writing stories

is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly the
fragmentary impressions of wonder

which are conveyed to me by certain
ideas and images encountered in art and literature.

I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -

one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being

to achieve the illusion

of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations

of time, space, and natural law which forever
imprison us

and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces
beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.

These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion,

and the one which best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,

so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law
or cosmic alienage or "outsideness"

without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

And fear for Roland.

And if by chance you pray, pray for him,

for what both the Druid priests and the Louisiana shamans

had chanted to their kindred idols

was something very like this:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ...

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

In 2012, the cosmic conjunctions allign.

And dread Cthulhu rises,

rises from the dark swamp called Contraband --

the swamp but miles from Roland's dwelling.

I hear the portents even now in the blackness of Roland's apartment.

The moon is dark, and the spirits dance in the night;

there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse

foretold in no books of men or of earth's myths.

I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,

and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

So should you have breath left over from your prayers for Roland --

sing a canticle for me.
***

GHOST IN THE NIGHT_my entry in Quinn's BOO FEST

http://seeingdreamingwriting.blogspot.com/2010/10/its-boo-fest.html

It was that moment between waking and dream. I was sitting on my apartment terrace. The night spoke to me in its velvet silence.

Owl happily was not speaking my name. He perched on the cypress branch opposite me, studying me as I was admiring him.

Brother raccoon scurried in the bushes below, carrying some prize in his front right paw.

My cat, Gypsy, twitched her tail on the window sill, the mysteries of ages whispering in her half-closed, green eyes.

My own eyes were heavy. Too many miles driven. Too few hours slept.

I put the period to the last sentence of my blog post about Marlene Dietrich with the troops in the front lines during WWII :


** One afternoon after VE Day, she was walking through a little French village. All around her was rubble, and she couldn't understand why -- all the buildings along the street were still standing with curtains blowing frilly and snapping clean-crisp in their windows.

Then, she looked through one of the windows to see that there was nothing behind it. The fronts of the buildings were still standing, but everything behind them had been destroyed. There wasn't a single living person past the false fronts of those caricature buildings.

Only one lone doll lay forlorn in the rubbled middle of nothing.

With her face cupped in trembling hands, she stood in front of that window, weeping silently, refusing to be comforted ...

"... for there is no comfort for the dead," she whispered. **


Beside me a husky voice intoned, "Keine Komfort für die Toten."

I went cold and still, sliding my eyes as far to the right as they could go without moving my head. My mouth became salt.

Marlene Dietrich.

In a frilly black night wrap and not much else.

She was perched over the top of a wavering, insubstantial leather chair like a cougar ready to strike.

"You write so beautifully of me. Why?"

"Y-You were brave, selfless -- entertaining the troops on the front lines with a death sentence from Hitler on your head."

I cleared my fear-thick throat. "People have forgotten that."

She reached out and stroked my cheek with chill fingers.

"It is not important for the world to remember me -- only that I did not forget myself when I was needed."

"And words like that are why I write of you."

Marlene fluffed my hair with ghost fingers. It tickled.

"Do you know what they call you in the ShadowLands, liebling?"

"N-No."

"Sänger von Träumen -- DreamSinger."

"I - I don't understand."

Her ice blue eyes hollowed. "One day you will."

In ghost whispers, she murmured, "Death and love."

"What?"

"I thought I knew them, liebchen. I was so sure. I died. Then, I saw life with new eyes."

She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly sparkling. "See you in your dreams, liebling."

And like a cloud robbing me of sunlight, Marlene was gone. I was alone. Well, not quite.

Gypsy was in my lap, yawning. It takes a lot to shake up the granddaughter of Bast.
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 39_WHEN THE STARS DROWN IN DARKNESS

{I am the Turquoise Woman.

Each life ends.

Whether it ends in whimpering

or in courage depends upon the soul facing that end.

It is, in fact, the only true epitaph your kind leaves.

DreamSinger has entered the realm some call Hell to rescue Samuel McCord, whom he breathed into life.

Now, riding Epona, the last unicorn, with Death behind him and Lakota Spirit Warriors beside him,

DreamSinger faces what seems to be the end. Let the words from his strange journal take it from here ....}



A distant roar sounded from all around us. Oh, crap.

Bristling along the horizon encircling us, hundreds of lost souls, creatures, and demons charged to replace their slain brothers.

I twisted around towards Death to see if she would scream again.

She sadly shook her head. "We near my Avatar and Samuel. I dare not scream again."

My heart went sick and cold as a familiar voice, DayStar's, laughed to my far right. "Do you know what the third white meat is? Cat!"

I saw only his hands appear out of thin air. They held Gypsy, my cat, her eyes wild with fear.

DayStar's hands hurled her directly in the path of the charging monstrosities of Hell.

She yowled, and I could have sworn it came out, "Roland!"

I tugged on Epona's mane to head for Gyspy. Death placed a bitter cold hand on my shoulder.

"We cannot turn. My Avatar and Samuel are close."

"Fine!," I snapped. "Have a great trip."

With a grunt of pain, I flipped my leg over Epona's head, scratching it on her razored tusk. I slipped off and hit the ground in a run towards Gypsy.

Sitting Bull yelled after me. "She is just a cat."

"Wrong! She's MY cat."

A minotaur lunged for me. I slashed across his eyes. It bleated shrilly.

"I - I was blind. Now, I see."

It shot up startled into the flaming hellsky. Suddenly Death was beside me. She was floating.

"If you insist," she husked and snatched Marlene's saber from my hand.

"Marlene will soon need this."

And Death was gone. Just like that. And I was weaponless ... except for harsh language.

A heavy weight hit me in the back as claws gouged into me. I huffed. Another creature slashed me across the chest. I reeled sideways and shouted in pain.

I grabbed its arm, pulled back on its wrist, slamming the flat of my palm against its elbow as hard as I could. A sword dropped to the ground.

I bent and snatched it up. I looked for Gypsy.

I spotted her. She was moving so fast it was hard to follow.

Sparks flew from her claws as she bounded across the broad chest of a stone golum. She leapt to the werewolf in front of her, ruining its eyes with those same claws.

Never in one spot long, she sped between legs, up furry chests, across massive backs. She yowled in defiance, heading straight for me.

Something big and furry lunged at me. I slashed. It grunted but kept on coming. A razored tusk sprouted from its chest.

Epona reared beside me. "I leave no friend behind."

Gypsy screamed in pain.

I looked to the sound. She was bleeding, holding up her left front leg.

Suddenly, a blur of lightning appeared next to her. Crazy Horse, human-size now, blocked a talon with his hatchet and drove his knife into a scaled chest.

He looked at me with a crooked grin and spoke in Lakota, "If I die for a cat, I will never forgive you."

I realized the other six Sioux Spirit warriors were fighting all around me. Human-size and without lightning bolts, they were having trouble standing their ground.

Gall scowled to my left. "You would die for a cat?"

I bent next to Gypsy, who nuzzled her head against my palm, and said, "I would die for family."

He nodded. "That I understand."

Gypsy growled low, glaring up at the hellsky. I followed her line of sight. Oh, crap.

A sphinx. An honest-to-Cleopatra Sphinx.

{See : http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/07/gypsys-tale-you-call-this-safe.html }

Gypsy rose, holding up her injured leg and baring her teeth.

The Sphinx rumbled, "Later, granddaughter of Bast. Your death is mine. I will slay all who would take that from me."

Epona reared, thumped a charging troll in the throat with her two front hooves, and whinnied, "Whatever. Fight now. Threaten later."

In answer, the Sphinx chomped off the troll's head and spat it back out. "Tasted worse than it looked."

I made a face. It had looked pretty bad.

A giant bull-man, wearing human skulls for shoulder decorations, tried to cleave Red Butte in two with a war-ax, only to have it wrested from his grip by the warrior.

Red Butte twirled it and brought it down in a huge blow which split the BullMan's head in two.

Muttering low and harsh, the five Lakota who remained unarmed quickly picked up fallen weapons,

from swords to hatchets to axes as Crazy Horse kneeled next to Gypsy and whispered, "They feed on you only after I am slain."

Slashing at his attackers with hatchet and knife, Sitting Bull yelled at us.
"Form a circle!"

Epona looked a question at me, and I answered it, "The Power of the World always works in circles. All life tries to be round. The sky is round."

I looked up to the fires sweeping across the skies. "Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing -- and always come back again to where they were.

The life of all Two-Leggeds is a circle from childhood to childhood."

I glared at the nearing Darklings, hate raw in their screaming throats. "And so it is in everything where Power moves."

Epona and Sitting Bull yelled as one. "Form a circle!"

And then the Darklings were upon us.

Borrowed shields and short swords, Epona's pounding hooves, Sphinx claws, Lakota ax and hatchets, my own flashing sword --

all were blurs as they met a wave of slashing claws, tearing fangs, and hissing weapons. The sounds of metal grating upon metal, screams, grunts, and curses were all about our small band.

I saw nothing clear, only a flurry of dark bodies leaping at me.

I heard the wet thud of blades sinking into flesh, the whimper of wounded Darklings sinking to the ground.

Clear up my arm, I felt the numbing impact of sword-blocked swords and lunging talons.

Out of the corner of an eye, I saw Burnt Thigh go down with a bloody wound to the side yet stagger back up to his unsteady feet.

But despite the pounding of steel upon steel, the rending of flesh by fang, I and my new friends stood our ground, stood it, and smiled grimly to one another.

And to this day, still do the Lakota sing of this battle over their campfires,

though the dark weighs heavy upon their spirits and the whispers of doubt and fear mock them.

It is a song of courage against despair, of light raging against the coming of night.

And when wounded Time draws her final, faltering breath,

when the moon herself has become blood, and the gasping stars slowly strangle on the darkness,

even then will the Lakota stop in the midst of their Death Song, stand tall, and look to one another and remember --

-- remember when one small, defiant band of noble spirits fought, not for glory, not for land, nor for power -- but for one small life and the bond that one brave heart feels for another.
***
Read the passage that begins "And to this day ..." with the first minute of the following music. I wrote those words to this very tune :

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 38_LAST RIDE OF LITTLE LAKOTA

{I am the Turquoise Woman.

You may call me Gaia if you wish.

If you are lucky, I will not answer.

I do not like to be disturbed.

Of late, I have been reading Roland's journal,

detailing his adventures in the fictional world he brought to life with his,

unknown to him, Lakota ability to speak and write worlds into being :

hence his name in the Shadowlands -- DreamSinger.

When we last left him, Death had saved him as she rode Epona, the last unicorn.

The ride is near to bursting the poor creature's heart. As strange creatures of myth attack them from the skies of Hell, DreamSinger speaks his borrowed strength, speed, and endurance into Epona to save her life :

An act that Lakota warriors would call "Icicupi," self-sacrifice.

And since DreamSinger has chosen to die like a Lakota warrior of old, Death determines he will have company on his ride through Hell.

Let DreamSinger's journal take it from there ...}



Death cried behind me, "So you would die like a Lakota warrior? So be it! You will have company on your ride through Hell, DreamSinger."

Like a Lakota warrior flinging his arms to the rising sun of his last day, Death thrust her open arms to the angry, boiling skies filled with giant demons.

She cried in an eerie wail I had never heard before in tones like winter given voice, "By Oak, Ash, and Thorn, I call out to thee, spirits of those who have fallen long since. The last Lakota rides through Hell.

He rides to his death for the sake of a friend. Will you let him ride alone?"

I shook my head. "No, Death, don't. Don't!"

But Death ignored me as was her custom and kept on, " --- Hear me! I am the child of the Great Mystery who breathed me to life long before thou wast even shaped in the belly of Creation.

Hear me and come, Honored Warriors! Wilt thou have he who praised thee fall to those who art not fit to step on thy shadows?

Come. Fight this one last, great battle, one that wilt be sung of for generations to come. I promise thee not that thou wilt survive, only that thou wilt never be forgotten. Come!"

And they came.

A short sentence that does no justice to the scalp-tingling awe and majesty of it.

Even the Klage-Weib pulled up short in their attack, hovering uncertain in the hell sky. From the four directions came the rumbling thunder of enormous hoofbeats.

Strange, black clouds slowly filled the horizon from never-ending to never-ending. The darkness billowed, then formed into seven mighty horses that were thrice the size of the Klage-Weib.

Horses of that Void which waits for each spirit that falls upon the field of battle.

Long spouts of living flame snorted from their flaring nostrils. Their streaking manes rippled in the frigid wind of their passing.

And with each snap of their sleek necks, eerie thunder rumbled in warning of death to come.

Their wild eyes were windows into that terrible furnace which sparked the birth of all the fiery stars who even to this day still sing of the glory of their awakening.

And atop their backs were the seven spirits of the Lakota warriors who had heard Death's cry in their soul-slumber. Heard and heeded.

Pizi, Tatanka Iyotake, Inkpa Duta, Tasunke Witko, Jiji, Sicangu, and Makhpiya-Luta -- or as the White Man legends sing of them : Gall, Sitting Bull, Red Butte, Crazy Horse, Light Hair, Burnt Thigh, and Red Cloud.

Gall, who had gotten his name, when as a famished orphan, he had eaten the gall of an animal slain by a neighbor, whooped and reached back into a strange quiver worn on his back.

His twin braids flying back from the storm winds, he veered his ChaosHorse from that of Sitting Bull, who glared at him. Once Sitting Bull's military chief, Gall had parted ways with his mentor over things no White Man may know.

Nearly as tall as Gall and almost as handsome, Crazy Horse already had the weapon Gall was reaching back for : a sizzling lightning bolt. Laughing and bold, he kneed his ChaosHorse straight down to the gigantic German banshees. The others started to join him.

But Sitting Bull raised a hand. "No, Tasunke Witko is drawing them out for us."

Red Cloud nodded his long, lined face. "Yes, but let us flank them at the same time."

Sitting Bull frowned but held the words that his expression said burned to burst through his tight lips. Red Cloud had proven his mettle by leading a winning campaign against the combined might of the Pawnees, Crows, Utes, and the Shoshones.

Whooping loud to draw the attention of the gigantic Death-Cryers, Red Cloud, the lone Thunderbird feather jutting straight up from behind his head, bent low, placing his lips next to his fearsome mount's right ear.

The two shot straight for the Klage-Weib, who parted in two groups to meet the two racing Lakota warriors. Crazy Horse and Red Cloud.

Faster even than the lightning bolts in the warriors' hands, the ChaosHorses of the five Lakota remaining shot around the enormous flying DeathHeralds. The Klage-Weib realized almost immediately that they were being flanked and ambushed -- but still too late.

All seven Lakota warriors let fly with their sizzling lightning bolts. The thunder of the fiery spears hitting bone and undead flesh was deafening. When the boiling clouds of vaporized flesh and cloth had thinned, not one Klage-Weib remained. Whether the explosion of seven lightning bolts had destroyed all of them or whether the survivors had fled was unclear.

Sitting Bull yelled, "To DreamSinger's side!"

I smiled grim. Company always made the journey better.

As fast as thought, the seven Lakota Spirit Warriors thundered beside me. Epona looked to me and whinnied, "This will be the ride of a lifetime."

I nodded grimly. The last ride of Little Lakota.
***
This version of CREEK MARY'S BLOOD by NIGHTWISH starts with a new minute and a half intro by John Two-Hawks. If you would know what Elu looks like, study his face.

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 37_DEATH FROM ABOVE

{Turquoise Woman again. The rippling tides of Man's affairs are tedious to me.

You struggle to no avail. In the end, you all die. But your words are fascinating.

I have been reading DreamSinger's strange journal. In a vain effort to rescue my adopted son, Samuel McCord,

from the Hell to which he had written him, DreamSinger has traveled there himself. Once there,

though he has given himself the gift of absorbing the speed, strength, and toughness of all he met, he was soon surrounded by doomed, angry souls.

Death, astride the fading unicorn, Epona, has saved him for the moment with her fatal scream. Let DreamSinger's journal take us from there ...}


I said low, "That was ... impressive."

"Hush! Attack is coming from the skies."

I looked up, and my jaw dropped. She wasn't joking. Attack was putting it mild.

I was being flanked from above. From the West came a flying swirl of seven strange women, their short white hair fluttering in the wind of their soaring.

Brilliant green dresses parted as they flew, showing long alabaster legs. Their gray cloaks flapped violently like fabric wings.

Red eyes flashed as they spotted us. They erupted in a terrible wailing that seemed to me like an ear-piercing combination of a goose's screech, a wolf's mournful howl, and the utter hopelessness of an abandoned child's cry.

As they swept down from above, the leader stiffened and waved back her sisters. "No! This one hast healed a unicorn. We are the Mna' Sige. We do not war on such a one as this. Come, sisters!"

The Mna' Sige closest to the leader pointed with a long, scragly finger to the East. "It is too late. We must stay to sing his Death Song. Look hence, the Klage-Weib."

I turned towards where the apparition pointed. Even Epona gasped in horror. My scalp prickled.

When I'd used up all my fingers and toes, I stopped counting the Klage-Weib. But their numbers were the least of my worries; the worst of them was the creatures' size.

Three stories high and the width of two Mac trucks, they seemed to blot out the flame-boiling skies. The Klage-Weib wore rotted grave clothes with hair the color of sin and moon-white skulls for faces.

Epona stumbled and nearly fell. She was past her limits. Her over-taxed heart was going to burst.

Death whispered in my ear, "It is no coincidence I chose her to ride."

"No!," I cried.

I placed my palm on her quivering flesh and spoke as a storyteller of Lakota myth, "And so to spare Epona's life, he poured all his borrowed speed, strength, and endurance into his friend."

A drain seemed to open within me, leeching me of most of my strength. Epona surged forward with a gasp of pure joy and relief.

Death murmured in my ear, "Icicupi {'sacrifice' in Lakota.} If you choose to live like a Lakota warrior, then you will die like one."
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER 36_AND I BEHELD A PALE HORSE

{The Lakota call me the Turquoise Woman, lover of few things man-made. You may call me Gaia if it makes you feel more comfortable.

Man's words I value.

I have been reading the journal of Roland sometimes called Little Lakota from his mother's blood. Other times he is called DreamSinger.

When I last left these pages, Roland had followed my adopted son, Samuel McCord, into the Kol Basar -- that realm some call Hell.

DreamSinger's words become reality as often our thoughts do on our own paths. He feels responsible for writing a novel where Samuel rushes into Hell to rescue the kidnapped Rind, the Angel of Death.

Surrounded by doomed souls, he has heard the pounding of heavy hooves from behind him. He turns and beholds a pale horse.

Let his words take us from there ...}



I turned to behold a pale horse.

It was Epona,

the unicorn I had saved in the outer courts of Hell. She was covered in sweat and panting.

And riding her was Death, reaching down for me.

"Up here, Little Lakota!"

She caught me and swung me up in front of her. Epona gasped, "I leave no friend behind."

Her repeating my words about Sam McCord hit me hard, blurring my eyes with hot tears.

A frothing minotaur rushed up at me. I slashed down with Marlene Dietrich's saber which healed. It bellowed in surprise not pain.

It blinked beady eyes in wonderment. It shimmered in bright electric lights and shot up into the dark skies.

Death drily snorted, "You have just sent another startled gate-crasher to Heaven. I do believe you're making both Hell and Heaven quite upset with you."

Epona weaved like a living streak of lightning between our attackers, and I yelled to Death over my shoulder. "What are you doing here?"

"I am where you have sent me, DreamSinger. I must join my kidnapped avatar to complete your classic fantasy."

"Classic? I don't even have an agent yet."

"Silly mortal, I exist allwheres, all times simultaneously. FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE is a classic. Do not argue with Death."

A howling werewolf charged us, and Death snapped, "Enough of this!"

She shoved me down close to Epona's sweat-wet neck.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her rear back her black- hooded head and scream. I stiffened from its bone-numbing impact.

A terrible shivering pain wracked my body, but I heard nothing but a muted "waaa-OOMPH!"

I saw strange energy shimmering and ghostly, its color the pale green of a new corpse, explode in an ever-widening circle out from Death in its center. It slammed into the screaming creatures, mowing them down like tall cedars felled by the impact of a huge meteor.

They flew up and back like leaves tossed by the coming of a frigid storm front. I swallowed hard.

Never underestimate Death. Ask Sodom and the firstborn of Egypt what she is capable of.

The shockwave of her death-scream swept out from us in ever-larger ripples of first corpse-green then spectral electric-blue.

As far as I could see out in the dim light of the Kol Basar there was nothing but a horizon of smoking corpses. I straightened in awe. I made my throat work.

"That was ... impressive."

"Hush! Attack is coming from the skies."
***

CRITICISM IS A MIDNIGHT DAWN_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude

{"It's an odd truth :

reality is a slippery thing."

- DreamSinger.}

We often expect one thing and get quite another.

We awaken to a dark moment, expecting death and get life instead.

Sometimes "Easter Morning" dawns in the midst of our darkest night.

Don't sigh. You haven't stumbled upon a finite man pompously spouting delusions about the infinite.


I'm actually writing about the art of writing.

And like any art, it requires practice and diligence and correct technique.

I'm writing about something painful all we writers must learn to handle correctly : criticism. Ouch. It hurts.


We all receive it. None of us is perfect. Well, there was that one.

But we crucified him.


I've received criticism. I'll probably receive it about this post.

But there is an Easter spin to the criticism we all receive : there is life after the grave.


But only if you take the right path.

I know from experience that when you get rejected, all becomes dark for a moment that seems to stretch for infinity. And when all is darkness, it's easy to get turned around.


In my first incarnation of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, Samuel McCord was a man of strong faith.

A very noted, respected agent was impressed enough with my partial to request my complete manuscript. He was kind and giving enough to explain why he rejected it.

Bottom line : I had pushed away a large segment of the reading audience who didn't believe.

And no publisher, especially in these harsh economic times, wants to buy a novel that will do that.


And after the initial "ouch," I thought about the wisdom of his words.

He was right.

I remembered a novel, reading and enjoying it immensely, only to cringe when he superficialized and mocked people of faith.

They were Moslems, by the way.

I respect people of all faiths. I laid the book down and never bought another by that author. I realized the respected agent had a point. He wasn't respected for nothing.


I didn't want to hurt or push any reader away.

How could I tell my story without doing it?

I heard the voice of my best friend, Sandra, sigh, "Just tell them the story, Roland. Don't tell them what to make of it. Leave it to them to decide : like you do with me."


Sandra is an agnostic. She is my best friend. People marvel at the friendship of two people who believe so differently, including her husband, who is a proud atheist.

If you watch the very first Gregory Peck movie, THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM, you will find the answer.

I saw that movie as a young boy late, late at night on one of those programs that show dusty old movies, among my friends who made up the League of Five.

It helped shape my view on how to be a man of God. And yes, I look just like a young Gregory Peck.

Not fooling you, huh? Rats.

But thinking on what Sandra might say to me, dawn rose in my darkness. I would focus on those subjects, those questions we all have. An enthusiasm fired me.

I would present those things, showing the amiable bickering of two old undead friends :

one who didn't believe but longed for a better universe where a loving God did indeed exist

and the other a vampire priest who did believe ... most of the time.

I wouldn't clearly show which view, if either, was correct.

I mean, in an infinite world, how could any finite mind hold all the answers? I would leave it to the reader to decide.

We all hurt. We all question the hungry darkness within, the threatening darkness without. We all seek for the light.

I re-wrote FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE for all of us. And I pray that the Great Mystery grant you enough light for the next step on your path.
***

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."
***