A MEAL TO DIE FOR_BLOGFEAST ENTRY_CAPTAIN OUTRAGEOUS EXCERPT

{"I have the heart of a child.

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

- Robert Bloch (author of PSYCHO.)}

{Samuel Clemens, ghost, here.

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

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

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

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



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

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

She just chewed it.

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

The moon beams seemed to go right through her.

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

Strange gloves though. There were no fingers to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Look who's talking."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mere memories of malicious will."

"I'm so happy I asked."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice whispered, "Have you gone insane?"

"Depends on who you ask."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We are doomed," sobbed Alice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, they were gone.

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

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.
***

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER SEVENTEEN_ A WILD NIGHT

{“Dying is a wild night and a new road.”
- Emily Dickinson.

“Many are of the opinion that there is no difference between Man and the Jackass.

This, of course, wrongs the Jackass.”
- Mark Twain.}

{Ghostly Samuel Clemens here. Death has finally brought us upstairs to her second rendezvous with a soul.

She suddenly seemed burdened with her garments, so she had cast them from her, leaving me with mouth open and Marlene with eyes narrowed.

Roland looked as if he had been pole-axed. I leave the rest to him.} :

Death covered her essentials gracefully with her long, black wings, and her face became so icy it scared me.

She spoke, and the sounds of it were as if icicles had been given voice. Her eyes grew deep and full of rage.

"I have come to render the final payment due you for your lucrative property, Madame Levi."

Madame Levi was a tall, angular woman who looked like a female version of Scrooge. Her gray and white, no nonsense Victorian dress seemed so starched that I was surprised she could move in it.

But move she did. Backwards, with her shaking hand to her mouth.

"I - I run a perfectly legitimate --"

Death motioned slowly with a long forefinger, and the suddenly trembling woman was dragged against her will right up to us. "Y-You have no right --"

"Speak not to me of rights, daughter of Eve."

Death leaned forward and whispered in words of stone. "This night thy soul is required of thee."

Then, Death inhaled deeply. I jumped in fright and horror, for Death sucked in the body of Madame Levi as it was turned into smoky vapor.

The Landlord had just enough time to make a mewing whimper before she was totally inhaled by Death. She snorted in disgust.

Marlene looked paler than I had ever seen her. Even, Mark Twain for once had no words. I didn’t blame him.

"Her stench was worse than I expected," murmured Death.

"Maybe you should give up smoking,” Mark Twain muttered.

Now, dressed fully in the robes I had seen Bast wear, she looked down at me with eyes of steel. "Do you still think of me warmly, son of Man?"

I wet my lips. “I don’t cut pie wedges out of my friends. I accept them for who they are. All of them, not just part of them. You do what you have to do.

But I’ve seen you cry over it. That makes you special in my book.”

She breathed soft, snowflakes shimmering from her lips, and mussed my hair with fingers colder than the shivers down my spine.

"You still break my heart. Above you stands the Door of Nasah and the twilight of innocence, where deaths lurk like sleeping fears."

Mark Twain raised an eyebrow. “That’s fortune cookie for someone need us up there, right?”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she whispered one word. "Yes."

"T-Then, that's where I'm going," I said.

Her face became totally hidden by living shadows. "Your Night is falling. I am called elsewhere. And the last tangle of knots in your skein of days lies before you."

"Oh, is that all? For a second there, I thought I was in real trouble."

As she rose like a swam taking flight, I whispered, "Why could Madame Levi see us, and those other people couldn’t?"

"Because their Moment of Accounting, though close, has not yet come."

Her smile was as cold as my blood. "The cliche is wrong, Roland. You do see the bullet that claims you."

And with a start, I realized I was at the head of the last flight of steps without any memory of having climbed them. "What the?"

Death was back to wings and nothing else as she looked sternly down upon me.

"The most effective path to Hell is the gradual one, without signposts, without sudden turns."

She made a grand flourish with her right wing, as if tempting me to look at her naked body.

I reached out and squeezed Marlene’s hand. She squeezed back and smiled sadly.

"Behold, the Door of Nasah," murmured Death.

There in that fancy hallway of red carpet and lush amber wallpaper, covered with flying cupids, stood the Door of Nasah.

It was metal and seven feet tall if it was an inch. As I walked closer with Death studying me, I saw it was made of solid gold.

The thing had to be heavy. How did anybody open the damn thing?

The huge door, carved in the shape of a leering dragon's head, slowly swung open.

"Cue the spooky music," I whispered.

“If you would enter, you must do so now. And quickly!”

And so it was that I, sometimes called DreamSinger, walked through the Door of Nasah and into the final tangle of knots in my skein of days.
****

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER SIXTEEN_HELL IS WHERE THE HEART ISN'T

{“The question is this : Is Man an ape or an angel?

I, my lords, am on the side of the angels.”
- Benjamin Disraeli.}

{Samuel Clemens’ ghost here. Old Benjamin had a point. Better to be on the side of the angels – especially if it is the Angel of Death.

She had led us to a brothel of the damned where the killers using the group name “Jack the Ripper” were burning up what little was left of their souls.

She is leading us up the stairs to find a way back to Meilori’s, the supernatural jazz club and sanctuary for lost souls like Roland, the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, and myself.

But I’ll let Roland take the story from here.}:

Death tugged me gently to my feet with fingers so cold I flinched from the pain of them.

"Time is short, and we must make a small stop on the second floor before proceeding to the third."

She turned a sad eye to me. "Once long ago, farther back in time than even I can comprehend, the universe was small."

She put her thumb and forefinger together and looked haunted at me through the tiny space. "Very, very small. And everything made sense."

She sighed, "Then, it got very hot and very big very fast. And since that time, nothing has ever really made much sense to me."

"I don't understand," I said.

“What he said,” grumbled Mark Twain, though I noticed Marlene looked haunted.

Death lightly mussed my hair and blew away the flakes of ice that formed from her touch.

"Neither do the people who think they have all the answers, Roland. The universe is too vast to comprehend. Just ride the tide, do not try to drink it, or you will drown."

"In other words, things are going to really smell on the second floor, and you don't want us to throw up, is that it?," snorted Mark.

"The third floor will be even worse."

Marlene murmured, “Worse than this endless preamble?”

She eyed my friend coldly. "That depends on your definition of 'worse.'"

I sighed, "I don't define. I just care. As I care for Marlene, Mark, and … you."

She stroked my cheek with fingers that felt like cold knives. "You ... break my heart, Roland."

She sniffed back something wet and pushed me away. "What you will see on the second floor will not be pretty. It is the worst form of woman farming imaginable."

"Woman farming?"

Her face became icy rage. "Yes, turning women into serfs, no, worse than serfs, into slaves, into cattle, dependent on the proprietor for food and clothes and shelter.

They have no property of their own, not even their own bodies, which belong to the female fiends that run places such as this.

They are forced to fulfill the evil wishes of these 'landlords', who receive the majority of the income received for the selling of their dignity, their bodies."

She tugged me up the stairs as she walked with grace and precision. "No property, no rights, no will, no hope -- in short, not one attribute of independent life, save the right to suffer, to decay, while wretches more vile than they prosper at their expense.

These brutal tyrants demand everything from the poor girls whom they pervert and destroy, giving them but the bare necessities. And many times, not even that."

Mark smiled crooked, “Oh you mean treat them like the government treats us.”

A shrill voice cut through the gloom as we reached the second floor. "How dare you walk here naked? My God, th-those wings are real!"

I whipped my eyes to Death. Oh, jeez. She now wore wings and nothing else. I cringed, my heart sinking. I would bet cash money that it was a double-bonus sin to see Death naked.
*******

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER FIFTEEN_BROTHEL OF THE DAMNED

{“Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold :

Her skin was white as leprosy,

The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold.”

Coleridge – RHYME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.}

{Samuel Clemens - ghost, your guide here.

Trapped in Victorian London, we are being escorted by Death to a brothel where it is said the men who are Jack the Ripper are waiting for their next victim.

Me, the ghost of Marlene Dietrich and Roland – each of us is suspicious of Death’s offer to lead us back to the present and to the supernatural jazz club, Meilori’s.

Here is Roland’s account of it.}

We walked unnoticed onto the fog-choked sidewalk, packed with dozens of men and women, their faces weathered, wrinkled, and haunted.

I smelled alcohol on most of their breaths. So drunk, yet so plainly unhappy.

Death reached down, tapped the top of my head, and pointed to the dirty red, three story building in front of us.

An ornate but faded sign proclaimed it to be The Princess Alice. There was a hard-eyed redhead at the front door, calling out to each man that passed her.

"Mary Kelly," sighed Death, "where is that little girl of yesteryear?"

And then, without any warning at all, Death, Marlene, Mark, and I started to slide across the cobblestones, up the three steps to the door, and right on THROUGH the door as if it were no more than thin air. I started to shiver.

I looked over to my friends. They seemed unruffled. Apparently, Marlene and Mark as ghosts were used to this sort of travel.

But I wasn’t a ghost. It unnerved the hell out of me.

We slid right THROUGH the milling customers of the brothel as they made their way to and from the bar and the tables clustered all about.

We stopped at the base of the stairs leading up into the murky darkness and the sounds of coarse laughter, badly played pianos, and the squeaking springs of old, worn-out beds.

I turned to the customers. Were these men responsible for the terrible butchering of so many prostitutes? Their hard eyes certainly seemed up to the job.

The women who sat beside them or on their laps looked as if they would happily hand their “customers” the knives. I squinted at them through the gloom. Each table had only one candle … one very short candle.

Some were shorter than others. Some gave off so little light I found it hard to believe that flame could be so faint.

Mark Twain looked up at a somber Death. "What in blue blazes is wrong with this place? Can't they afford their gas bill? Damnation, you'd think this place would make enough money to buy new candles at least."

"Those are not candles, Clemens," Death murmured. "Rather they are the pathetic remains of the soul of each man that sits at the table."

I turned and looked in horror at the men, the flickering light of what little remained of their souls casting weird shadows across their faces. I started to shiver in spasms.

It was too much.

I started to breathe shallow and fast, not being able to take enough air into my lungs.

I started to make thin squeaky sounds deep in my chest. I pressed my hand to my heart which felt like an ice pick had suddenly been stabbed into it.

My fingers and lips felt numb. I was scared, yet felt outside of myself.

Things were beginning to grow dim. What was happening to me? And as soon as I asked myself, I knew.

I no longer thought all of this was some dream or nightmare. This was all real. As real as a rattler that springs up at you from the shadows. And it was all too much for me.

It had been the terrible death of the two year old girl that had been the last straw.

Now, these men burning up what little was left of their souls as cold-eyed women smiled, knowing what was happening and not giving a damn.

No, worse. They were glad of it. The wet squeaks got higher, faster. I leaned on the stained wall, fighting for a breath that wouldn't come.

Marlene took my arm and murmured, “Liebling, if you fall now, who will bring Papa’s killer to justice? You can push this horror to the back of your mind. You can.”

“I - I can?”

Marlene brushed her lips against mine. “I know because I did the same when I stumbled upon horror after horror at the front lines in World War II.”

“B - But you w-went on the front lines … d-despite the death sentence … on your head. Y-You’re a hero.”

Mark and Marlene said it together, “And so are you.”

I knew better.

Marlene leaned forward, kissing me with ghostly lips that had me re-breathing my own gasps. I smiled bitterly. She could have used a paper bag to do it. But this was much better.

Finally I could breathe again.

Maybe it was her kiss. Or perhaps Marlene’s and Mark’s faith in me did the trick. No matter. I could breathe on my own again.

I felt Death’s cold eyes on me.

How long would that breathing go on?
*********************

GHOST OF A CHANCE_CHAPTER FOURTEEN : MURDER AS A KINDNESS

{“Mark Twain again.

Tesla taught me how to use this bejiggered contraption to write these posts as they are called.

With the strangest look to his eyes, he told me, “Life is all memory,

except for this present moment that flits by you so quickly, you hardly notice it going.”

Have you ever searched for a lost item? Torn up the house doing it, like a dog digging up the yard for the bone he’s already chewed to nothing?

Then, there it is in front of you, shining as if lit with fires unseen to the normal eye.

Where did it come from? The Shadowlands.

The Shadowlands have their strange ways. Roland’s battered note pad turned up last night by his black magic box folks call a laptop of all things.

Though Roland had no time to write an account of what happened, here on these pages, in his own hand, is paragraph after paragraph of the details.

So I will post them as they happened to the three of us, Roland, the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, and my own spectral self.

In this post, Roland finds himself in a Victorian London alley on the run through time for the murder of the ghost of Ernest Hemingway …

none of us knew the scoundrel had only been poisoned and was still alive … if such can be said of a ghost.

The being calling herself Death has just forced the three of us to witness the gruesome killing of a two year old girl by a swarming, biting pack of hungry rats.

Death is leading us to a brothel from which we can return to Meilori’s, the supernatural jazz club and sanctuary of sorts.

Unfortunately, the band of killers who are slaughtering poor prostitutes, using the group name “Jack the Ripper,” stand between us and the doorway to safety.

Here is the account in Roland’s own words} :

Death turned to us, and her form was of the many-armed, bloody Kali. “I am not your enemy.”

Mark Twain grunted, “Try being on this side of your eyes and still saying that.”

Marlene said softly, “Why did you have to show us that baby’s death?”

“It was her fate drawing me. Remember, Magdalene, I am everywhere, allwheres simultaneously.”

Mark Twain arched an eyebrow. “Something like that could put off your digestion.”

Death turned slowly to him. “Some find your humor quaint. I am not one of them.”

She turned back to me. “I have taken you with me in this way to confound your enemies that have the limited sense to try to use me for their own ends.”

I forced my throat to work. “That child’s death was the price of our admittance back into Meilori’s?”

“Yes, Lakota. And no.”

“No?,” frowned Mark.

“There is one more death yet to come before I can take you to the Door of Nasah.”

Marlene’s fingers went to her mouth. “That is the door of the damned.”

Death was now in armor and a horned helmet as she nodded. “And it will take you three to Meilori’s. A most detestable part of that club. But it is the best that I can do.”

She gestured to Mark Twain, and her form now was that of Blind Justice. “Behold your ‘low-rent district,’ Clemens. London of this age is undoubtedly the largest and richest city the world has yet known. “

She spat and her spittle sank smoking into the cobblestones. “Here in its underbelly, there are 90,000 full-time prostitutes, 7,000 brothels, and the highest rate of syphilis in Europe.

Here, in Whitechapel, little girls of ten or less can be bought like slaves for thirty guineas a head.

And elite bordellos owned by DayStar send 'respectable' gentlemen fancy brochures advertising 'pretty young lads with pink bottoms ripe for a birching.'"

Marlene’s eyes became haunted. “How like my Heimat Berlin in the ‘20’s. There doesn’t need to be a Hell later on. It’s already here.”

Death mussed her hair gently, but frost layered it just the same. "In such a place as this, murder might be viewed as a kindness."

Death laid a soft hand on my shoulder which went numb at the coldness of her touch. "We are there."
***

CHAPTER THIRTEEN : TO DRINK FROM THE NILE RUNNING

{"Smooth the descent and easy the way;

The Gates of Hell stand open night and day;

But to return and view the blissful skies,

In this task grievous labor lies."

- Vergil : AENEID.}

Gabrielle turned from her daughter to me. “You speak French oddly.”

“That I speak it at all is a surprise to me.”

Her eyes flicked to Marlene and Mark Twain and became worried again. “What brings you here, Stranger.”

I sighed. Now, that her enemies were dealt with, suddenly I was a stranger.

“Stranger enemies. I think they wanted me separated from my friends here.”

Her eyebrow arched. “Why would they want that.”

“I think they want me dead.”

Gabrielle’s eyes hollowed and went to her husband’s sword at her feet. “Enemies usually do.”

Marlene frowned. “I still cannot fathom who would want you dead, Liebling.”

Mark Twain gnawed his lips. “If we could stumble onto why, Valkyrie, it might just tell us who.”

I rubbed my face wearily. “Or who murdered the ghost of Hemingway and pinned it on me.”

Like the whisper of useless regret, words of ice came from my pocket. "I am Death. I will not be the tool of an echo! Take out this box."

The birds stopped singing in the branches. The cool breeze wisped to nothing. Shadows filled the verdant glade. I nodded to Rafferty and her mother.

"Go into the cottage."

Rafferty pouted, "But --"

"Now!," urged both Marlene and Mark Twain.

Eyes gone hollow and deep, Gabrielle took Rafferty in a rush to the small cottage that reminded me somehow of Snow White. Death murmured from the dry-ice chill of the rune-etched box I held in my burning fingers :

"Now the play is near over,
The closing curtains are drawing nigh,
Shadows of death
Steal across the sky."

I placed the box on the grass, the blades crisping burnt and dead in a growing circle around it. A billowing black fog swirled from the opening lid.

"Step in, ghosts and mortal. All entrances back to Meilori’s are blocked except the path I take."

I managed to get my voice to work. “But your path is the one of death.”

Mark Twain shrugged. "The scalded child fears cold water. We aren’t children anymore, son."

Marlene smiled faintly at me. "Our fears make us traitors to our better selves."

"And wise dogs drink from the Nile running," I muttered, thinking of unseen dangers, and walked with my two friends into the welcoming embrace of the dark mists.

Death spoke softly, “Roland, how much do you know of Victorian London?”

“Not very –“

And in the middle of the sentence, the world changed around me. Just like that, no pop, no trumpet blast, no anything on Death's part.

Reality just flickered like a dying light bulb, then grew bright as a whole different setting billowed before my eyes.

Thick fog boiled around me, and somehow it felt unclean.

The cold, damp street smelled of unwashed flesh and decaying garbage. The cold drizzle made all my old scars throb and my joints ache.

Death, Mark Twain, Marlene, and I were standing in the middle of a dark maze of ooze-slick alleys, pubs, opium dens, and brothels.

Brooding, hungry men brushed right past us without even looking our way. I had a feeling that Death had made us invisible.

" --- much," I said, my voice trailing away.

“Behold the low-rent district,” grumbled Mark Twain.

"Welcome to Whitechapel, Clemens," sighed Death. "As you can see, this little clot of diseased humanity is packed to the suffocation point with the dregs of Cockney, Jewish, and Irish society."

Mark grumbled, “First, France. Now, Victorian London. Roland, there’s a pattern here if we can but ferret it out.”

The black fog took on form.

Death in black, form-snug robes and hood. Her upper lip curled. "Ferret? You must mean the high-class "toffs" out for a weekend of slumming."

She touched my shoulder, and I winced from the intense cold of her fingers.

"Here, down this alley. It is a shortcut to the intersection of Wentworth and Commercial."

"What's there?," I whispered as I slipped on a puddle of something I didn't want to look at too closely.

Death's shadowed face became a study in ice. "The Princess Alice."

"A princess here?"

"Not a princess but a pub.”

Marlene, showing she time-traveled more than once, sneered, “ A brothel is more like it."

"Weird name for a place like that," I said.

Death hissed, "Not so strange. DayStar named it to please Rev. Dodgson."

I went cold at the name of the worst character in all my novels, but the other name confused me. "Rev. Dodgson? You mean L-Lewis Carroll?"

Death murmured so angry that I shivered, "Yes, though you might know him better as Jack the Ripper."

"What? Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper?"

"One of them," murmured Marlene with her lips twisted in disgust.

"One of them? Do you mean to say there was more than one?"

Death laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Tonight, The Princess Alice’s every customer will have killed as the Ripper."

Marlene cried out as she looked over my shoulder. She started to rush forward. Mark Twain saw what she was heading for and joined her, alarm on his face.

Death, now in a black toga, held up her hand. Both Marlene and Mark were held as if caught in an invisible vise.

I turned and pulled up short. A two year old girl was clutching a stale crust of bread in one hand and pawing off a pack of lunging, biting rats with the other.

The little girl was losing the fight. I started forward, but Death stopped me with an icy palm.

"It is her time, Lakota."

She hustled me on, though I lunged forward to help in some way.

She wrapped two arms of steel around me and literally dragged me down the alley. I glared up at her. There were tears in the one eye of ice that I could see through the shadows.

"Why, Death? Why won’t you let me help her?"

"If you save her life, she will suffer even worse in the years to come. This death will open the door to a kinder, gentler plane of existence. Spare her, and hers will be a path of darkness that leads but to DayStar."

Mark Twain snapped, “Who’s this DayStar you keep talking about?”

“You know him as the Dark Stranger.”

“Oh, Hell.”

“Exactly,” nodded Death.

Marlene struggled against her invisible bonds. " I do not see this other plane of existence you babble about. All I see is a baby being torn apart by rats. Let me help the little girl!”

Death sighed, and sparkles of stardust trailed from her lips.

"Children do not last long in the East End of London. Cease your struggling, Magdalene, she is already gone from this plane of existence."

Marlene husked, “What need of a future Hell when Man makes his own here on earth?”

Marlene, Mark, and I exchanged glances. We had made a mistake trusting Death. Now, what to do? Hell, what could we do …

… against Death?
*********************