MARK TWAIN_WEATHERFEST_THE WORST STORMS ARE IN THE HUMAN SOUL

Ghostly Samuel Clemens here, on behalf of Roland.

He gave his word to have an entry on whatever they call it …

oh, yes a weather blogfest of all things :

http://littlesliceofnothing.blogspot.com/2010/06/hey-look-its-one-of-them-things.html

The poetry of the earth is never dead, yet Nature is red in tooth and claw. Those two facts clash over and over again inside the human soul.

And to spotlight that fact I have chosen this snippet from Roland’s FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. (It's worth the ride if you choose to take it.)

It the first evening following Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans.

Samuel McCord and his best friend, the vampire priest, Renfield, are stepping out from McCord’s supernatural jazz club, Meilori’s, to view the carnage Nature has left in their beloved city :


Renfield stiffened as we walked out onto the submerged sidewalk. “Dear God, Sam, did you ever think we’d see our city like this?”

I looked at the battered club fronts, the boarded windows, the two-by-four’s driven like crude knives into the very mortar of the buildings, and the crumpled remains of people’s lives floating down the flooded streets.

It was eerie. The utter blackness of a once bright street. The deep quiet of a mortally wounded city.

I looked about at the shattered world around and within me. Withered leaves of my soul seemed to fall away from me in the dark breeze of this night.

Shadows flowed through my veins. The night and eternity mocked me. They seemed to whisper : “This is all your struggling achieves -- Life runs, falls, and spindles slowly into the abyss.”

Renfield and I were standing on the threshold of something that befell every person, every civilization, but with each at a different cost.

I moved through the moments but was far them. And as the night descended, it felt as if I were leaving home. I was swept up in a sense of the missed opportunity, the lost chance, the closed door.

In my mind, I heard Bette Midler singing “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.”

“Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.”

I sighed, “It’s like looking at the hell in the streets of London after the first Nazi bombing in ‘40. The sheer quiet that follows a whole city being gutted, that stillness that comes right before it screams.”

He bent down and picked up a floating child’s doll, its false hair soaked and hanging. Its glassy eyes reminded me of too many human corpses I had seen floating down this same street.

Renfield stroked the plastic cheek softly as if it had been the flesh of the girl who had lost her doll. Closing his eyes, he dropped the doll with a splash that sounded much too loud.

That splash said it all.

The world had always been dangerous and full of fear. It had only been the lights and the illusion of civilization that had kept it at bay. But the world was patient. It knew its time would come sooner or later.

And in the gamble called life, the House always wins. Renfield looked my way with eyes that clawed at me.

“But the Blitz came from Man. This .... This is from God.”

I just looked at him. From God? I bit back the words that first came to my lips. It was plain he was hurting inside. And I put up with such talk from Renfield. He was my friend. And he was a priest.

Priests were supposed to see life through the filter of faith. Still, I had lost faith in the unseen long ago. It had slowly faded like mist on a summer sea.

But there is a toll to such a thing. I looked around about us, trying to see it through my friend’s eyes of faith. I failed. Not a first for me.

Renfield’s head was down, though his eyes followed the floating body of the plastic doll as the currents pulled it under the black waters. “Do you think He finally has had enough of us, Sam? Enough of our cruelty, our madness?”

I rubbed gloved fingers across my face. Like I said, I was at a loss at whether the Great Mystery even existed or not, much less be able to give a true answer to that question.

But Renfield had his own doubts about God. He was my friend, and I wouldn't push him over that dark edge.

“Hell, Padre, I don’t know. Could be.”

I smiled bitterly. “You know the Lakota Sioux call God The Great Mystery.”

“You call Him that, too, as I recall.”

“Yeah, ‘cause what He’s up to most of the times is surely a great mystery to me.”

He studied me. “You’re not ---”

He waved a hand around us. “ --- mad at Him for all of this?”

Mad at someone who might only exist in empty prayers to equally empty darkness? I saw the anguish in my friend’s eyes. I chose my words carefully.

“Hell, Padre, we all chose to live in a city seven feet below sea level right by the coast, protected by levees built and maintained by a corrupt government. What did we think would happen?”

Renfield shook his head. “We all denied. It’s what humans do.”

His lips twisted. “Even those of us whose humanity is only a memory.”

I clamped a hand on his left shoulder. “You’re human where it counts.”

His face twitched as if his tongue tasted bad. “And where’s that?”

“Your soul, Renfield, your soul.”

“I lost that a long time ago, Sam.”

I might be at a loss about God, mind you. But I was sure about the soul, for I had seen its lack often enough in too many eyes. Just like I saw its solid presence within Renfield's.

“No, you didn’t. Like mine, your soul is a cocklebur. You can’t shake it no matter what you do.”

He smiled wearily. “I must have missed that verse in the Bible.”

“Gotta read the small print, Padre. Gotta read the small print.”
***

MARK TWAIN_KEYS TO SUCCESS_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude

{"There are keys to success in writing.

I did not learn them early.

I did not learn them all at once.

They came to me like the passing of a kidney stone --

with time and with pain."}

For Roland's sake, I am going to pass on a few of those keys. Not in any particular order -- just as they occur to me, much like I wrote my autobiography.


THE KEYS :

#1) Write without pay until someone pays you.

In other words, write because you love it, not for thoughts of wealth. Only a very few authors ever are able to leave their day job.

Do this and you will relax and write with confidence. The reader will sense this, and your novel will be more interesting to your reader.

Write only about what interests you. The reader will be infected with your enthusiasm and keep turning the pages.

#2) Don't say the old lady screamed.

Drag her out into the scene and have her caterwaul herself. Telling the reader that a grandmother was stabbed does not near involve him as showing her stabbed.

#3) Never say in writing what you couldn't comfortably say in conversation.

Be natural in your writing. It will add the feel of reality to your novel. Put an acorn of truth in each of your characters.

The lonely weariness of a single father will grab the heart of the reader. In the next chapter when he robs the bank, the reader will be on his side.

#4) Periods are not ugly --

so do not put them so far away from the start of your sentence. Make your sentences and paragraphs short. Do not make your writing blunt instruments of prose.

Rather, write with the ear, not the eye. Make every sentence sound good.

And for that you need a well-trained sense of word-rhythm. Train your ear by reading your pages aloud as you finish them.

#5) The more you explain it, the more I do not understand it.

Be clear. Clear writing comes from clear thinking. Know logic. Know the subjects your characters do. Know the law if your hero is a lawyer.

Make sure each sentence could only mean what you wished to express.

And Lord Almighty, use short, direct words. Do not IMPLEMENT promises. KEEP them.

Remember that readers cannot know your mind. Do not forget to tell them exactly what they need to know to understand you. Speaking English to a Frenchman will not get you very far. I know. I tried.

#6) Write as if you were dying --

Indeed, write as if your readers were dying.

And in a way, both you and they are. You just do not know your exact shelf life.

They don't have time for all those long, dreary paragraphs about Aunt Edna's digestion. What tale could you spin to a dying person that would not enrage by its shallow triviality?

That thought will prune many needless ramblings on your part.

And please no adjectives to tell the reader how to feel. Instead of telling us the thing is "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified.

You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please, will you do my job for me."

#7) Do not hoard.

Give each paragraph all the dynamite you possess. Do not save a "good bit" for later. If you do, the reader may become bored and wander off before your novel explodes.

Do not worry. More dynamite will occur to you -- if you give each scene all the wit and heart you have.

Those are seven keys to success in writing. There are more, of course.

But too many keys jangling inside your heads will make such a commotion that you won't be able to think straight, much less see where they apply to you and your novel.

Stroll by here tomorrow for the entry I made for Roland in the Weather blogfest (damnedest name I ever heard of.)

http://littlesliceofnothing.blogspot.com/2010/06/hey-look-its-one-of-them-things.html
****

WILLIAM FAULKNER_THE HEART IN CONFLICT WITH ITSELF_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude

I dropped in to chat with my young friend, Roland.

He was lying on his back, a sock, of all things, over his eyes.

He was being murdered by a migraine he groaned.

He asked if I would write to the young writer of today in his place.

I looked at the keyboard.

To write again. And to write of the art of prose.

I felt renewed.

But how to fill the vacuum of the blank monitor screen?

Vacuum. That was the key.

Despite the deluge from the media and this new technology, the internet,

today's young writer is oddly forced to function in a vacuum of the human race.


The irony of your main character is not that he or she is not tough enough or brave enough or deserving enough to be accepted into humanity.

No, there simply is no human race there.

Just a mass of frustrated urges, fears of terrorism, and nightmares of economic insecurity and rampant crime,

unredeemed by hope or education or self-awareness.

All your characters can do is buzz inside the upside-down tumbler of conventions and customs that have replaced humanity.

People all around us are being de-souled like stallions being gelded.

As a writer, your basest crime is to ignore the human soul.

I stroll unseen down the aisles of the bookstores of today's cities.

It seems to me that the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself ...

which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

In your imagination have no room for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart,

the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -

love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Until he does so, the writer labors under a curse.

He writes not of love but of lust,

of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.

His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars.

He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

He writes of the end of all that makes Man more than an animal.

I decline to accept the end of man. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,

but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart,

by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.

The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man,

it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

You writers out there reading this, you have a sacred duty.

Entertain, yes.

But touch the heart, the soul. Mankind needs you to do this. And deep down, you know you need to do this, too.
***

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."
***